(MENAFN-A Art News)
To quote curator and writer Ryan Wong,“There is a deep resistance in the art world to accepting race and racial order as a reality.” As Micl tt (unintentionally) points out: in this day and age, we so fervently avoid stereotypes, circumventing issues of race, gender, sexuality, etc. altogether, that we often end up sounding more ridicul and offensive.
While it is certainly important and ideal to treat everyone equally regardless of their racial identity, in reality, this does not always pan out, namely within the cultural heritage. How does the racial identity of an artist affect how they produce artwork, and how it is viewed by the masses?
Artist Kerry James Marshall disses black artists' desire to be called simply“artists” without having to insert a qualifying racial identifier into their titles. Cultural identity is defined both by the search and creation of definitions of its own members and by the perceptions and propaganda of others and, more specifically, those in power.
Both before and after the Civil War, African Americans were depicted by mainstream visual culture as caricatures, both as an attempt by the white mainstream to define what it didn't understand, and to keep from elevating the sta of African-American culture. This took an obvi form in the“mammy” archetype, as well as artwork relegating African-Americans to subservient roles, such as entertainer,ok, caretaker, and servant.
Kerry James Marshall
During the Harlem Renaince, a cultural movement in the 1920s and 1930s characterized by an explosion in African-American literature, ic, and art, there existed a heavy fo on renceptualizing African-American identity representation. Writer and philosopher Alain Locke (1855-1954) euraged artists of the early 20th century to celebrate their race by representing African-American subjects, and looking to African traditions in order to iltrate a sense of cultural pride and interest.
This racial and cultural dialogue has not ended.ntemporary artists still diss andnfront issues of race and art. Kerry James Marshallnfronts marginalized black history by re-appropriating historical African images to be more heroic within in his own work, and by emphasizing skinlor.
Detail of Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the ky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994
Anotherntemporary artist, Kara Walker, primarilyes figurative and narrative silhouettes cut from paper toment on race relations in America past and present. All of her figural cut outs, regardless of race, are rendered only in black paper, therefore not allowing the viewer to differentiate between ethnicity based on skin tone.
Instead, these racial variations can only be identified through stereotypical facial features that Walker emphasizes on purpose (ie: obscenely large lips on African-American figures).
This is meant to make you ufortable and question your own stereotypical notions about different races.
Some artists choose tonfront race as directly as possible in their identity art, even making the audience question their own identities. Adrian Piper's fam 1988 video installation piece entitledrnered shows Piper, a light-skinned African-American, speaking to her audience directly about her blackness, and how her acknowledgment of her race may make the audience feel. Not only that, but she disses the notion that a majority of white people statistically have black ancestry, and how being presented with that information makes the audience feel. She implicates everyone, black and white, as part of the problem and part of the solution.
This post is meant to give an overview of ideas related to racial identity within art. Obvily these ideas only represent a select few points of view within a broad and beautiful artistic culture.