Dust Jackets For The Niggerati

In eight quasi-connected stories, Susan Vreeland delivers a fictional lesson on aesthetics. Set amidst human sorrow and historic chaos, the narrative follows an imagined Vermeer painting from the present day through 330 years of its provenance--beginning with its willful destruction in the 1990s and concluding with its inspired creation in the 1660s:

Postmodern American artist’s Cindy Sherman and Kara Walker critique and question grand narratives of gender, race and class through their work and art practice. Cindy Sherman, born 1954, is well renowned for her conceptual portraits of female characters and personas that question the representation of women, gender identity and the true (or untrue) nature of photography (Hattenstone 2011). Kara Walker, born 1969, is known for her black silhouettes that dance across gallery walls and most recently her sugar sphinx, A Subtlety, address America’s racist slavery past (Berry 2003). These practitioners differ in their practical application of different mediums, Sherman constructs characters and scenes of stereotypical female personas in her photographs where she operates as the actress, director, wardrobe assistant, set designer and cameraman (Machester 2001). Simone Hatenstone, writer for The Guardian, states “She 's a Hitchcock heroine, a busty Monroe, an abuse victim, a terrified centrefold, a corpse, a Caravaggio, a Botticelli, a mutilated hermaphrodite sex doll, a man in a balaclava, a surgically-enhanced Hamptons type, a cowgirl, a desperate clown, and we 've barely started.” (Hattenstone 2011).Whereas, Walker creates paper silhouettes that are installed into a gallery space, as writer Ian Berry describes,

In order to answer this question one would have to consider whether art should speak of an individual or community, ethnicity, race, gender, age, or what we see of each other. Furthermore and more specific to “Art Is”, does life lie most in the streets they inhabit? What about their performance style, or what they do in their personal lives, like how they chose to to live? Or is it possible that this is simply just a parade? For O’Grady it was all of this and more, but only she provides the frames.

Kara Walker is an African American artist who gained popularity by manipulating scale of her art work to focus on social issues surrounding gender, race and black history of our era. Artist utilize scale to manipulate the dimensions of the artwork depict the relative size of objects. Kara Walker uses large scale technique to deliver the viewers the significance of the story behind the artwork piece. She creates pieces in order to tell story or make statement about the violence, race, or black history rather than aiming for perfection. Kara Walker will become the leading voice for race and racism that will launch her popularity in the art world.

In the reading, “The Immigrant Enclave: Theory and Empirical Examples,” Alejandro Portes and Robert D. Manning primarily discusses the process that immigrants go through as they go about adapting and integrating into their new society. As the reading states, often when immigrants migrate to new societies, it is either for economic reasons as a means of achieving a better life for themselves or that of seeking political asylum as political refugees. A real world example of an immigrant enclave today is that of the thousands of Syrian refugees who emigrated to the United States and other countries in an effort to flee the Syrian civil war. During the midst of the Syrian crisis, many Syrian refugees sought

The cool-toned beauty within each her figure and landscape is continually at odds with the sense danger looming within the scenes. Hank Willis Thomas, a conceptual artist, works with photography to explore the themes of history, identity, and pop culture. On display at the time of my visit was Kara Walker’s “Salvation” and Hank Willis Thomas’s “And I Can’t Run.” Their respective works are in a Black Box exhibition that provided a dark, chilling atmosphere emphasizing the complexity of race relations within the two pieces. These are conceptual representations of slavery that offer insight into psychological warfare that is slavery and race relations in America. These images also depict the physical threat, or suggestion of a threat, associated with

Richard Hunt is a sculptor whose work largely draws on abstraction, crafting organic shapes with industrial materials. His approach to his art is one that is based on compulsion, as he combines various curvilinear and angular forms to form an ambiguous hybrid that captures the African American experience. By crafting an unconventional layering of different shapes, Hunt is able to create a conceptual piece that is open to interpretation. Similarly, Betye Saar aims to promote thought-provoking reflection. By carefully utilizing racial stereotypes into her artistic vision, Saar is able to manipulate racist devices into a more positive message. Her exaggeration of certain caricatures of African American life served as a new symbol for

On Tuesday, after the viewing of Katherine Liontas-Warren’s art collection, I received a phone call from my father, my great-aunt Lucille had passed away. It was in this frame of reference that I reflected on the exhibit of her work. Besides providing me with a means to contextualize my grief, her collection also conveys the means to explore the nature of storytelling and how it is a didactic tool. Her collection revolved around three main themes: the dripping vases, watercolor landscapes, and surreal colored pencil drawings.

The violent markings of the photo album and its images, however, produce an equally powerful message that jars the memory as it disrupts and distorts the photographic chronicle of her life and that of her family and friends. The result is a complex visual experience that addresses the use of images in producing knowledge and making history.

Such was the case when I interviewed people and couldn't understand their dialect” (66). A place El-Hassan expected to find answers about her identity that she has long been deprived from due to exile were not there. The exile took her chance away of finding her identity and the return to Palestine many years later was not going to give her back her identity. The return to Palestine ends up giving a person more questions than answers such as what are they going to Palestine as, “A visitor? A refugee? A citizen? A guest?” (Barghouti 11). Barghouti felt the same way about his return; he realizes “that the stranger can never go back to what he was. Even if he returns” (4). He became so desperate for people to know him to prove his identity (66), that he came to the realization that he has become “anonymous” (Barghouti 151). Exile has caused him to have no identity. Having to return to place one was exiled from is even more painful than not returning at all because the realization of what actually happened sinks in. El-Hassan uses a quote by Mohammed Darwish, “The road to home is prettier than the actual arrival” (67). There is such an expectation and dream of finding that identity when returning, but those dreams are crushed by

Clark’s work does not reside in the spatial understanding of an object, it would now be accomplished in temporality, and an experience in which the art object would lose is object-ness and become a force affected by the world, distorting one’s subjective and object-based realities. Yet the work could still exist as an object, independent from the experience and those who approached it could remain merely viewers of the object. This understanding led Clark to avoid “fetishization” of the work as it resides in an institution and the work became focused on an event: an action that transforms the work.

Viewing autobiographical images is often a relational experience. Within contemporary art, autobiographical work opens up the possibility of creating new kinds of relationships between people of different backgrounds. It can operate both as a representation transference of lived experience and as an apparatus for experiential, relational viewing. When viewers encounter work that deals with the autobiography of the artist, they engage cognitive and affective processes that often involve identification and memory. In this practice of relational viewing, the artist’s work functions as a powerful catalyst for memory, whereby viewers draw upon their own life stories to connect with the work. Consequently, the viewer not only perceives the image in the present, but projects it back the artist’s and their memory, body and being. Contemporary artists Rebecca Belmore and Nan Goldin explore their own memories and past experience through their portrayal of the body. Their use of body language is quite deliberate at creating subtle tension between the viewer and the work that evokes this aforementioned relational viewing. Belomore’s “Firnge” (2007/08) a photographic transparency in a light box draws on not only the memories of her past, but the aboriginal culture and people she attempts to represent. Goldin also represents a wider group then herself, the New York Bohemians.

Walker’s art is therefore an entirely new genre with this Brechtian lens, serving as a form of epic art rather than simply epic theatre or political art. Through the objectification and therefore alienation of her subjects with regards to the audience, Walker appears to be inciting a drive towards activity, be it a simple acknowledgment of her themes or the creation of a spark for activism. Through the historically

Photographs capture time and create meaning. Mark Klett’s “Under the Dark Cloth”, is a simple, yet compelling piece of art which captures his experience in Monument Valley, Arizona on May 27th, 1989. The perspective of the photograph is strategic in allowing the viewers to see from Klett’s point of view. This angle places the viewer in the first person, connecting them directly to the image. Images of landscapes are often engrossing, Klett’s piece does this on two planes.

Having the displaced as individual who are considered ineligible for citizenship, Refugees would have the capacity to set up feasible jobs by creating interpersonal organization with the host communities thus having their own particular transnational associations.Transnational systems provide advantage to recently arrived refugees by interfacing them with individuals who can enable them to get by in antagonistic urban conditions. Family, town, neighborhood, and ethnic connections amongst urban areas and nations and associating urban communities with camps and home districts, furnish displaced people with data, nourishment, and asylum(Fábos and Kibreab, 2007).