CHRONOLOGICAL PROJECTS # 1 - 8
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CHRONOLOGICAL PROJECTS # 1 - 8 |
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White Anti-Racist Studies, 2008-2009 ongoing My sister and I found a 19th century receipt for a slave among old family papers in 2007, just after our father died. The chill of that moment led to dealing in my work with black/white relations from a white anti-racist perspective. I pulled together articles, books and websites to read over a year. Some of the books included White Women, Race Matters by Ruth Frankenberg; The Ways of White Folks, Stories by Langston Hughes; Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means To Be White, edited by David R. Roediger; White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training by Judith H. Katz; White Privilege: Essential Readings On The Other Side of Racism edited by Paula S. Rothenberg; White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness by Maurice Berger, and anything I could get by George Lipsitz. Online there’s a lot; one site included “Essential Characteristics of White People” which led to a series of drawings. A residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, near Lynchburg, VA, led to looking for race-related objects in antique stores; and a commission from Williams College to develop a “conversation project” for an event which focused on race led to lots of conversations with students, faculty and staff of color about race in general, and a bit about whiteness in specific. (This process resulted in Face, the paper napkin project of 2009.) After months of drawings—sometimes using only text, other times with goofy figures and text—it all felt inadequate. Race relations and racism are very different experiences for different generations of white people: teenagers and twenty-somethings tell me there is no awareness of race among their age group; middle-aged people say yes, they grew up with racism, the pain is still there, but they have moved on; older people of both races indicate they are still there, lodged in many of the same opinions held in the 40s and 50s. So this makes for a difficult path in trying to do this work---who is the audience? who is the “speaker”, the voice who ejects this work? For younger viewers, the subject seems old-fashioned; for those of us who lived through the civil rights struggles, it needs to be addressed from a new era. Artists of color have addressed these issues much more than white artists have. We have been the perpetrators, after all. I felt it had to begin with an apology. So I have an undeveloped sketch of a yard sign, a simple black and white text: One side says: We Are White People. The other side says: We Deeply Apologize For What Our People Did To Yours. Stated so vaguely, it now addresses, all non-whites. The word, Did, isn’t a responsible word yet. So this needs to become sharper, more pointed. This is one example of why I consider all this work “studies”. |
BEST WHITE GIRL, detail BLACK AND WHITE SLURS (2008; 5’ h x 2‘ w x 3“d; screening, thread, paper, ink, thread): There is a website called The Racial Slur Database, “Helping Make the World a Better Place,” (http://www.rsdb.org/), and from this I extracted all the epithets for white people and for black people. BLACK AND WHITE SLURS, detail BLACKS AND WHITES (2008; size variable; painted cloth flowers and stems/leaves): Flowers are natural; fake flowers are not natural; painted fake flowers are less natural, not even vaguely resembling the fake flowers; black and white fake flowers taken apart and placed into groups, flowers here, stems and leaves there, seem to be a study of sorts—are they in opposition to one another? Is one the more beautiful while the other does the real work to produce the first? Are both parts that are interdependent? In the context of work about ‘race’, the same questions that may relate to botany may relate to essentialist questions about black people and white people. BLACKS AND WHITES, detail THROW ROCKS(2008; 6’long x 4”h x 12”d; polyester screening, thread, rocks): Thinking of racial violence, I thought of a basic weapon—the rock—as a visual for the concept of hate. EASY: Yard Sign (18” x 24”; metal with acrylic paint; hardware): I’m experimenting with various formats for making images with text in a public arena; this used to be a “For Sale” sign (left at our town dump), so am playing with the framework of that format here. DRAWINGS: All are 5x7”, ink on paper; series of drawings built from reflections on readings concerning anti-racist whiteness and racial relations in US FACE: 30,000 paper napkins, ten different designs consisting of 20 questions; napkin 6.6”h x 4”w; paper and ink; 2008. Commissioned for an event designed to addressed a race bias event at Williams College, the questions for this project evolved through conversations with students, faculty and staff of color at the College. The napkins were distributed through dining halls and lounge areas in academic and administrative buildings. The goal was to foster conversation between people sharing coffee or a meal. WHITE TRAITS Yard Sign: (2009; 18”w x 12”h; Coroplast, acrylic paint, steel): This yard sign, as well as a number of drawings, put forth “Components of White Culture” as described in Katz, J. (1985). The sociopolitical nature of counseling. The Counseling Psychologist, 13, 615-624. Taken from Sue, D., & Sue, S. (1990). Counseling the culturally different: Theory and practice. New York: John Wiley. The simplicity, absoluteness, and stereotypical homogenization of white people may help to make it apparent to whites the prejudicial judgments whites often have of non-whites. |
