Abstract

In the summer of 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z released the video for their song “APESHIT,” filmed almost entirely in the galleries of the Museé du Louvre in Paris, France. In this paper, the authors analyze the “APESHIT” music video through the lenses of Black Feminist Thought and post-critical museology and offer implications for the art museum education field, then posit “APESHIT” as a form of autobiographical performative museum pedagogy, as a critical “mining” of the dominant curatorial narratives inscribed in the galleries, and as an intervention intent on countering the erasure of Black women’s bodies in art museums. The authors identify three distinct ways in which Beyoncé and a troupe of professional mostly Black female dancers perform the museum to disrupt long standing, colonialist notions of power. We conclude by suggesting that “APESHIT” is a corrective to the “e-race-sure” of Black women’s bodies in art museums.