Conjur Woman
Romare Bearden was an African-American artist born in 1911. Generally associated with the American Modernist movement, Bearden began primarily using the medium of collage in the 1960s. At the same time as he began to work with collage, a highly atypical medium for the time period, the figure of the conjur woman was an important figure in his work. The conjur woman was an important figure in southern African-American communities, like those where Bearden grew up. She served as a figure of both fear and comfort, knowledge and healing. Bearden's collages allowed the viewer, like the magical conjur woman, to see the world through different eyes. He felt that his art was a way of healing western society, which he felt, due largely to racism, was gravely ill. Like the conjur woman, Bearden's collages reflect both the pain and brokenness of society, while simultaneously offering a chance at a healing that could bring either pain or comfort.
In art from white/European traditions, the fragmentation of the female form represents the subject's pain and objectification. The fragmentation, through showing disconnected breasts, hips, lips, etc., is representative of some (often) violent sexualization of her body, filtered through the male gaze. Bearden's Conjur Woman intentionally subverts this by creating a human form that is so fragmented that it cannot be sexualized, or assigned the stigma so often forced upon black women's bodies. Instead, her fragmentation represents her power and supernatural healing abilities. It becomes representative of the mysticism and power that the Conjur Woman holds in her community. The most fully formed part of the body of the conjur woman is her face. The rest of her body is composed of a mix of thick, block-like shapes (her torso and lower half) and other shapes and colors, surrounded by shades of lush green and red. The ambiguity of the shapes of her body and face are more mysterious and anthropomorphic than sexualized through any violent or painful fragmentation. The snake coiled around her arm, especially, exudes both the danger and healing power of the conjur woman.
Looking into methods of pain treatment in the African-American communities where the conjur woman is noted to be from, one can see many examples of plants having supposed healing powers. One such treatment, called Capsaicin Cream is noted to help with joint and muscle pain, it being made of crushed hot chili peppers. It turns out that there is some truth to the healing powers of such a solution and a number of tests have been done by the National Institute of Health to show this. The way Capsaicin Cream works is that it creates the "defunctionalization" of nociceptor fibers, which are responsible for passing along pain signals to the free nerve endings, nociceptors, which perceive pain in the body. Capsaicin cream inhibits this by causing the temporary loss of a membrane potential, which are electrical currents that allow for transmission signals and therefore the ability to feel pain.