What is this beautiful young woman looking at? Like in The Lady and the Unicorn tapestry, she seems to both stand out from and blend into the lush floral background, resembling a curtain or a canopy of vegetation. Is it an extraordinary animal approaching, a living being, a ghost? Her closed lips won’t answer, but perhaps her skin will—covered in tattoos or rather in paintings, just as green as the surrounding jungle, like a form of camouflage. This woman, both majestic and elusive, beautiful and mysterious, is typical of those painted by Kelly Sinnapah Mary (born in 1981) in her studio in Guadeloupe, where she lives and creates, drawing inspiration from the island’s traditions and poets. Titled Bye Bye Blackbird, after the 1920s jazz standard performed by Josephine Baker, this composition pays her a unique and powerful tribute. On the young woman’s skin, different avatars of Josephine are depicted: on her forehead, adorned with feathers, she is the queen of the music halls; on her chest, the dancer who fully embraced the representation of Blackness and Africa, even in its most caricatured colonial form. On her left shoulder, wrapped in a trench coat, she is the spy and resistance fighter; on her right shoulder, the mother, founder of the Rainbow Tribe. And in the center, there’s Chiquita, her cheetah, who wears the pearl necklace so well… “The skin as a space of resistance,” says the artist, who, with this striking work, delivers a portrait full of grace and mystery—a woman inhabited by the history of another, which perhaps makes her even more beautiful and strong.