Mixed Race Studies

60 Ways of Looking at a Black Woman

The New York Times
2005-01-23

Edward Lewine

Ellen Gallagher dabbed a swirl of gray watercolor onto the delicate pencil drawing she had just sketched of a furry hamster. Late December sunlight radiated through the windows at Two Palms Press, the SoHo printmaking studio where she has spent the last 18 months preparing a work comprising 60 collage prints. Titled “DeLuxe,” it is the subject of its own show at the Whitney Museum, opening this week.

Weeks remained until “DeLuxe” had to be delivered, and the mood in the lower Broadway loft was intense. One artist glued toy eyeballs onto a collage; another placed wig shapes made of plasticine clay onto a different collage; while a master printer was in a darkroom reproducing pages from black magazines like Ebony, Sepia and Our World that dated from the 1930’s through the 1970’s.

Reserved in manner, with a sonorous voice and a girlish laugh, Ms. Gallagher seemed relaxed despite her looming deadline and pleased to see the first copy of “DeLuxe” nearing completion. (The set of 60 collages will be printed 20 times in a numbered edition.)

“I love this moment,” she said. “It is sort of delicious. You have come through the agonizing part, when you are trying to articulate what you want to say but can’t. You have made your ideas visible.”

Until recently, Ms. Gallagher, 39, had charted a quiet if successful course as an artist, mostly as a painter whose work plays with ideas about race. In the past year, however, her career has gained momentum. Major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art have bought paintings; and the technical virtuosity of “DeLuxe,” the subject of her first solo show in a New York museum, is generating buzz…

…Many curators praise Ms. Gallagher for her ability to discuss race without being pompous and for the way she balances ideas with technique. “She’s masterful at creating tension between form and content,” said Elizabeth Smith, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which bought a Gallagher painting last year.

Not all agree. Ms. Gallagher has been faulted for what some critics see as a certain facile quality. Writing in The New York Times about Ms. Gallagher’s winter 2004 show at the Gagosian Gallery, Ken Johnson called her paintings and collages “visually catchy” but “too obvious.”

Ms. Gallagher said she draws such criticism because her material makes people uncomfortable. “Somehow in America black artists aren’t allowed to use banal images of blackness,” she said. “On the other hand, the idea of something black and inscrutable is also very disturbing.”…

…Ms. Gallagher was raised in Providence, R.I. Her mother was white, her father black. Her father, a professional boxer, was rarely around, she said, and died in 1998.

Growing up, Ms. Gallagher said, she learned to navigate the worlds of her mother’s blue-collar, Irish family, her father’s family of recent immigrants from the Cape Verde Islands and the homes of her friends, many of them African Americans…

Read the entire article here.

“Double Natural”

Yale University
Department of African American Studies
81 Wall St., Gordon Parks Room 201
2013-01-24, 11:45-13:15 EST (Local Time)

Ellen Gallagher, Hayden Visiting Artist
Yale University Art Gallery

Ellen Gallagher breaks the boundaries of traditional art by using materials and found images in unexpected ways. Her work often looks at how African Americans have been represented and stereotyped. She also explores her own identity and experience as an American woman of African and Irish descent. In DeLuxe (2004-2005), Gallagher experimented with printmaking by using materials including Plasticine and glitter to transform old advertisements for beauty products targeted at African Americans into a work of art.

Co-sponsored by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Dept. of African American Studies.

MFA Thesis Choreographies

Davis Life Magazine
Davis, California
2013-02-28

UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance is proud to present MFA Thesis Choreographies: “Ligilo” by Jarrell Iu-Hui Chua, in collaboration with Bobby August Jr., travels through the worlds of memories, dreams and present realities to investigate touch and its effects on relationships; “Transmutation” by Christine Germain, in collaboration with Andrea del Moral and Deirdre Morris, examines questions of personal identity and shifts in identity. MFA Thesis Choreographies opens at Mondavi Center’s Vanderhoef Studio Theatre on Thursday, Feb. 21 and runs through Sunday, March 3.

The title of Jarrell Iu-Hui Chua’s work “Ligilo” means “link” in Esperanto, a language that represents the choreographer’s ethnic sensitivities. She and collaborator Bobby August Jr. are both “hapa,” a term that Chua lovingly uses to describe their half-Asian heritage. Their hapa experiences of prejudice growing up in America are a core element in the choreography as is personal trauma from which Chua is recovering.

Emanating from these painful themes, “Ligilo” portrays anger and violence as two performers, Chua and August Jr., physically connect and disconnect. Most emphatically, the piece explores the positive dimensions of human touch in erotic love, humor, tenderness and other aspects of humanity and healing. The spiritual touch of bathing a loved one conveys hope and tranquility. This is both the heart of “Ligilo” and the basis of its foreign title as Esperanto (literally meaning “one who hopes”) was intended to foster peace among peoples of differing cultures…

Read the entire article here.

One Drop of Love: Debut Performance

Arena Theater
California State University, Los Angeles
5151 State University Drive [Directions] [Map]
Los Angeles, California 90032
Saturday, 2013-03-09, 20:00 PST (Local Time)

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator
Jillian Pagan, Director

One Drop of Love is a solo show by Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni that journeys from Jamaica to Washington, D.C., Cambridge, Michigan, and East and West Africa from 1790 to the present to explore how ‘race’ affects our most intimate relationships.

For more information, click here.

The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White

University of Iowa Press
April 2013
144 pages
5 ¾ x 9 ¼
Paper ISBN: 1-60938-160-2; 978-1-60938-160-8

Aisha Sabatini Sloan

In these intertwined essays on art, music, and identity, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, the daughter of African American and Italian American parents, examines the experience of her mixed-race identity. Embracing the far-ranging stimuli of her media-obsessed upbringing, she grasps at news clippings, visual fragments, and lyrics from past and present in order to weave together a world of sense.

Art in all forms guides the author toward understanding concepts like blackness, jazz, mortality, riots, space, time, self, and other without falling prey to the myth that all things must exist within a system of binaries. Recalling her awkward attempts at coolness during her childhood, Sabatini Sloan evokes Thelonious Monk’s stage persona as a metaphor for blackness. Through the conceptual art of Adrian Piper, the author is able to understand what is so quietly menacing about the sharp, clean lines of an art gallery where she works as an assistant. The result is a compelling meditation on identity and representation.

Mixed feelings

NOW.
2012-06-30

NOW is the online source for news, features, analysis and much more, covering Lebanon, the Lebanese diaspora and the Middle East.

“The people photographed are so beautiful they make you feel like having mixed race babies,” said Kevork Baboyan, one of many attendees at Wednesday’s opening of the photography exhibition, Mixed Feelings.

Over the years, racism has slowly but steadily started to raise eyebrows in Lebanon, a country that is infamous for abusing migrant domestic workers and discriminating against refugees and other groups of society. Rarely, however, has anyone addressed racism between Lebanese until Lebanese-Nigerian activist Nisreen Kaj sought – in collaboration with Beirut-based Polish photographer Marta Bogdanska — to explore the concepts of race and identity.

“Living in Beirut as a black Lebanese has [clearly highlighted] the hierarchy of skin color and ethnicity in the country,” Kaj told NOW Extra. “This reality has gotten under my skin, which is only a figure of speech, for it is in fact about the surface, about the skin, about the way we perceive identity, race, and ethnicity.”

Opening at Hamra’s Dar al-Musawwir, the launch combined images and interviews of some 30 Lebanese from African and Asian descent and was produced in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Middle East Office…

…When asked whether racism was more prevalent in Lebanon as compared to other Arab nations, Khoury said it was “particularly [widespread] here, but this is exhibit is a start.”

“They see my car keys and can’t believe I own a car… so [people at the supermarket] follow me to see whether or not it’s actually possible,” said Khoury’s mother laughingly, recounting the incident with equal humor and frustration…

Read the entire article here.

World Premier of Christmas in Hanoi

East West Players
120 Judge John Aiso Street
Los Angeles, California 90012
2013-02-07 through 2013-03-10

Tim Dang, Producing Artistict Director
Eddie Borey, Playwright
Jeff Liu, Director

East West Players Presents Christmas in Hanoi

A mixed-race family returns to Vietnam for the first time since the war. One year after the death of their strong-willed mother, siblings Winnie and Lou travel with their Irish Catholic father and Vietnamese grandfather to re-connect with their roots. Whether they embrace that past or reject it, they are haunted by their own family’s ghosts and by the phantoms of Vietnam’s long history.

Christmas in Hanoi is the Winner of the East West Players Face of the Future Playwriting Competition.

Featuring: Joseph Daugherty, Elyse Dinh, Michael Krawic, Elizabeth Liang, and Long Nguyen.

In association with Multiracial Americans of Southern California and Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association.

For more information, click here.

Still Too Good, Too Bad or Invisible

The New York Times
2013-02-15

Nelson George

A black slave is torn apart by dogs as a crowd of white overseers savors the sight and a black bounty hunter watches passively behind shades. A black father makes his little girl crack open a crab with her bare hands then flex her tiny muscles like a pint-size N.F.L. linebacker. A black pilot snorts a line of cocaine after a night of debauchery and, just a few minutes before liftoff, knocks back several miniature bottles of alcohol. A black woman tells President Lincoln that God will guide him as he pushes legislation that will end slavery but not dent notions of white supremacy.

The four films noted here are contenders for a slew of major Oscars: “Django Unchained,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Flight” and “Lincoln.” In the year America gave its first black president a second term, some of Hollywood’s most celebrated films, all by white directors, dealt with black-white race relations or revolved around black characters, which is rare. For the first time in recent memory race is central to several Oscar conversations. But the black characters’ humanity is hit or miss. These films raise the age-old question of whether white filmmakers are ready to grant black characters agency in their own screen lives.

Looking at these Oscar-nominated films, we should ask: Are black characters given a real back story and real-world motivations? Are they agents of their own destiny or just foils for white characters? Are they too noble to be real? Are they too ghetto to be flesh and blood? Do any of these characters point to a way forward…

…A more sophisticated standard for judging a character’s merits has emerged as the most obvious stereotypes have, for the most part, faded and as filmmakers, for better and sometimes worse, have attempted to normalize the black image. In the age of Obama, when a black man is the protagonist in our national narrative, are Hollywood’s fictional characters allowed the same agency in the stories built around them? That’s a fair question to ask of these Oscar contenders…

Read the entire article here.

“Faces In Between”: A 3MW Collective Exhibition [Review]

Jenney Donkey
2013-02-12

Jennifer McKinley

At an event, a party, a gathering or any place where I meet new people, I am invariably asked the Question: Where are you from?
 
“Toronto,” I answer. This is not the response they are looking for and I know it.
 
“No, but where is your family from?”
 
“My parents were born in Toronto and so were my grandparents. All about ten minutes away from where I currently live actually.”
 
Their frustration mounts.
 
“No, but what’s your background? This is Canada. Everybody comes from somewhere.”
 
I respond differently each time I’m asked. Sometimes I give the précis answer, sometimes I make them guess and sometimes I flat out refuse to answer.
 
When people are not satisfied when I say I’m Canadian, I find myself scrambling to answer the question in terms of what will make my observer comfortable. I cling to a mixed identity that is ancestrally correct (though incomplete due to family secrets) but doesn’t quite fit with how I see myself.
 
I identify as Canadian.
 
My background is Irish, Italian, English, Black, possibly Scottish and possibly more.
 
In many ways, it is Toronto, the city of my ancestors, that informs my history and identity rather than some distant country that a person I never met came from.
 
Yet, the question persists…

…Because I am so often questioned and analyzed, I was naturally drawn to “Faces In Between”, an art exhibition by 3MW Collective showing at Daniels Spectrum in the Artscape Lounge. 3MW Collective seeks to create a progressive discussion about mixed race identity. 3MW is comprised of three mixed-race identified artists Rema Tavares, Ilene Sova and Jordan Clarke….

Read the entire article here.

The New Southern-Latino Table: Recipes That Bring Together the Bold and Beloved Flavors of Latin America and the American South

University of North Carolina Press
September 2011
320 pages
7.625 x 8.375, 20 color illus., bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3494-7

Sandra A. Gutierrez

In this splendid cookbook, bicultural cook Sandra Gutierrez blends ingredients, traditions, and culinary techniques, creatively marrying the diverse and delicious cuisines of more than twenty Latin American countries with the beloved food of the American South.

 The New Southern-Latino Table features 150 original and delightfully tasty recipes that combine the best of both culinary cultures. 

Gutierrez, who has taught thousands of people how to cook, highlights the surprising affinities between the foodways of the Latin and Southern regions—including a wide variety of ethnic roots in each tradition and many shared basic ingredients—while embracing their flavorful contrasts and fascinating histories.

These lively dishes—including Jalapeño Deviled Eggs, Cocktail Chiles Rellenos with Latin Pimiento Cheese, Two-Corn Summer Salad, Latin Fried Chicken with Smoky Ketchup, Macaroni con Queso, and Chile Chocolate Brownies—promise to spark the imaginations and the meals of home cooks, seasoned or novice, and of food lovers everywhere. Along with delectable appetizers, salads, entrées, side dishes, and desserts, Gutierrez also provides a handy glossary, a section on how to navigate a Latin tienda, and a guide to ingredient sources. The New Southern-Latino Table brings to your home innovative, vibrant dishes that meld Latin American and Southern palates.