Mixed Race Studies

Black History Month – #IMIRISH Exhibition Launch

London Irish Center
50-52 Camden Square
London, United Kingdom, NW1 9XB
2016-10-06 through 2016-10-31, 19:00 BST (Local Time)

#Iamirish a Photography Exhibition launching a series of workshops and debates linking those of mixed race heritage to their Irish family ancestry.

The Exhibition will be opened by Dan Mulhall, Ireland ’s Ambassador to the UK.

This project will map the roots, lives and experiences of mixed race Irish people creating intimate portraits which challenge perceptions of what it looks like to be Irish and open up people’s minds to the wonderful diversity of the Irish people.

Launching the project in October to coincide with Black History Month, in the centenary year of Irish Independence, is a unique and powerful opportunity to weave these celebrations of Black and Irish heritage together and put diversity in full focus.

2016 marks the centenary of the Republic of Ireland, an opportunity to remember the country’s history and the heritage and traditions of its people. This project embraces that spirit to celebrate the voices and the lives of independent, Irish people everywhere who happen to be mixed race. Drawing strong lines between the portraits and their family crests, we seek to dispel the idea that if you are from a non-white community, you are automatically an immigrant.

‘For mixed race Irish people in reality our ancestry, our roots, our blood are Irish and we are proud of it.’

For more information, click here.

Damien Shen: On the Fabric of the Ngarrindjeri Body

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia
400 Worrell Drive
Peter Jefferson Place
Charlottesville, Virginia 22911
September 2016

Damien Shen

The only museum in the United States dedicated to the exhibition and study of Australian Aboriginal Art

September 9 – December 18, 2016

On the Fabric of the Ngarrindjeri Body is an exhibition of drawings, prints and photographs by artist Damien Shen (Ngarrindjeri, Chinese). Shen began unearthing stories of his Aboriginal ancestry after the death of his grandmother. While researching historical records, he discovered that the skeletal remains of more than 500 Ngarrindjeri people had been stolen by an Australian coroner and sent to a scientist in Scotland for the purpose of comparative anatomy. Shen has drawn portraits of both men, along with that of Boorborrowie, a Ngarriindjeri man whose remains were later repatriated to Australia. Through these works, Shen exposes this buried history and questions the acclaim given to men of science.

Believing that the removal and scientific analysis of human remains divorces the body from its spirit, Shen uses his art practice to “reintroduce the spirit.” The exhibition takes its title from an etching in which Shen has superimposed customary Ngarrindjeri body paint designs onto a figure drawn in the style of 16th century European anatomical drawings. In drawing these designs, which are also shown in the photographs of Shen being painted for the first time, the artist celebrates the unity of the spirit and body in Ngarrindjeri culture…

For more information, click here.

Profile: Damien Shen

The Adelaide Review
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
2014-09-08

Jane Llewellyn

Damien Shen

While Damien Shen was on a two-week trip exploring Australia’s major galleries, it occurred to him that art is about telling stories.

“Creating art is not just about technical ability, it’s about the story and it’s also about how you express the story… if you can pull all those things together you can reach the next level,” Shen explains.

To reach the next level, Shen is looking at his own story and drawing on it in his work. As he nears 40 years of age, Shen is approaching his practice with a newfound maturity that wasn’t available to him before.

“It’s been such a rapid progression,” he says.

“It was almost meant to happen this late. If it happened any earlier I would have been too immature.”…

…In the midst of the course, Shen’s Aboriginal grandmother passed away and he started considering his family history – he is Chinese/Aboriginal – and decided he wanted to document it. From there things happened quickly for Shen. He started drawing again, held his first exhibition (Drawing on the Heroes Who Shape Us at the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Artspace Gallery), and won the NAIDOC South Australian Artist of the Year award…

Read the entire article here.

Luck O’ the Irish: Black Artists from the Emerald Isle

SoulTrain.com
2016-03-17

Rhonda Nicole, Managing Editor

U2 graced us with one of the greatest songs in the history of music, “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and spammed everyone’s Apple devices with an album many never asked for (2014’s Songs of Innocence). Sinéad O’Connor teased as she sang “I Want Your (Hands On Me),” teared up as she crooned “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and tore up a photo of the pope. The Cranberries begged to let it “Linger,” while Hozier pleaded “Take Me to Church” (interestingly, O’Connor did as well, although it was a completely different song). Scan any pop or rock radio station, and you’re bound to hear a tune or two from Irish musical acts. The Corrs, The Frames, Enya, and countless others have dominated the American musical landscape for decades, becoming as essential a part of popular music experience as your standard issue garage band-turned Grammy darling.

Whereas other European countries have gifted us with a rather diverse cadre of acts of color—British artists like Omar Lye-Fook, Corinne Bailey Rae, Lianne La Havas, Estelle, and Brand New Heavies; Ben l’Oncle Soul, Les Nubians, and Corneille from France; and Belgium’s Zap Mama, Jean-Louis Daulne, and Technotronic’s Ya Kid K (by way of the Democratic Republic of Congo), Ireland, not all that surprisingly, hasn’t produced nearly as many. According to the 2006 Irish census, just around 1% of the country’s population self-identified as black. Still, black actors, athletes, writers, and politicians have made an impact on Irish culture, be they Irish-born or immigrants from various parts of Africa and the Caribbean. And black Irish musicians, though perhaps not as readily recognizable here in the U.S., are equally as notable as their British and French counterparts…

Read the entire article here.

When Black Is Brown: The African Diaspora in Mexico

The Museum of African American Art
Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza
Macy’s 3rd Floor
4005 Crenshaw Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90008
2016-06-05 through 2016-09-18
Opening Reception: 2016-06-05, 14:00-17:00 PDT (Local Time)

WHERE BLACK IS BROWN: The African Diaspora In Mexico opens Sunday, June 5, 2016, with a public reception from 2:00 to 5:00 pm at The Museum of African American Art. The opening will feature a drumming procession of African and Azteca dancers and musicians, a dramatic performance, and a talk and tour by the exhibit’s curator, Dr. Toni-Mokjaetji Humber, Professor Emeritus, Ethnic and Women’s Studies Department, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

WHERE BLACK IS BROWN is an innovative, multidimensional project that includes photographs, artifacts, and installations that document the African presence in Mexico from the Ancient Olmecs — Mother Culture of the Americas — through the colonial enslavement period, to contemporary Mexico. In addition to the visual components, Dr. Humber has incorporated educational programs and activities to compliment the exhibit. She will conduct middle and high school tours of the exhibit with activities for students to better understand the culture and historical contributions of African Mexicans.

“Recognition of an African root in the Mexican heritage, both ancient and modern, has been rendered invisible in the ideological consciousness of what it means to be Mexican,” Dr. Humber states. “This research will present a face of Mexico that has been hidden, denied, and disparaged, yet one that is vital to Mexican history and culture.”

The exhibit is designed to further the understanding of African influence and contributions in the Americas and to foster greater understanding among African American, Chicano/Latino, and Indigenous communities about their historical connections and their intermingled sangre (blood) that has produced beautiful and dynamic peoples of the Americas.

For more information, click here.

Local Author Dmae Roberts

Another Read Through
3932 N Mississippi Avenue
Portland, Oregon 97227
2016-09-01, 19:00-20:00 PDT (Local Time)

Dmae Roberts will read from her book and give a preview of a larger conversation that will be coming soon with the Oregon Humanities Conversation Project. The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family traces four decades of what it means to be a mixed-race adult who sometimes called herself “Secret Asian Woman.” With her personal essays written over a ten-year period, Dmae Roberts journeys through biracial identity, Taiwan, sci-fi, and the trials of her interracial Taiwanese and Oklahoman family amid love, loss and letting go of past regrets and grief. Roberts has been chosen by Oregon Humanities to be a Conversation Project leader with the topic: What Are You? Mixed-Race and Interracial Families in Oregon’s Past and Future. This reading and conversation will draw on her personal experiences and historical research on the mixed-race experience in Oregon.

Dmae will give a preview of her Oregon Humanities Conversation Project topic and feature a reading from her book The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family with an interractive talk: “What Are You?” A Mixed-Race Reading & Conversation.”

For more information, click here.

IN THE WHITE FRAME : An interview with mixed-race dancers Angel Langley & Jasmmine Ramgotra

Multiracial Asian Families: thinking about race, families, children, and the intersection of mixed ID/Asian
2016-08-30

Sharon H. Chang

STRANGE COUPLING is an annual juried exhibition of collaborations between University of Washington (UW) student artists and local professional artists. Over a decade old, the School of Art + Art History + Design program aims to connect campus and community through teamwork and direct engagement. This year I was entirely captivated by one of twelve projects, a performance piece entitled In The White Frame by mixed-race student dancers Angel Langley and Jasmmine Ramgotra with local sound artist/composer/teacher Byron Au Yong. The piece is a stunning work of art and innovative look at the experience of multiraciality within our white dominant culture.

Performed Friday June 10 at Seattle’s King Street Station, In the White Frame is a 20-minute structured improvisation that utilizes movement, materials, sound and space. The audience — who does not sit — is invited to participate but also come and go at will. “We wanted to create something that was structured and improvisational,” said Jasmmine, “And we had an intention to do it about identity.”

Over coffee with me at Columbia City Bakery in Seattle, Angel and Jasmmine sit down to tell more about creating this beautiful piece. They recall at their first meeting with Byron months ago talking about the prevalence of racial dichotomies in society right now. “We knew we wanted to do [something] about our own experience,” reflects Jasmmine. At the same time the three artists had discussed how art is often presented in white-framed gallery spaces. That was when Angel had an epiphany. She had been reading Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children In a Post-Racial World and learning about Joe R. Feagin’s theory of the white racial frame for the first time. “I remember giving [the book] to Jasmmine like you need to read this chapter on white framing cause this is what we’re doing,” says Angel. But also “what does that mean being our identities in a high art space, a white-framed gallery?” Jasmmine can’t hide her enthusiasm, “I was like oh my god that makes so much sense.”

To give form to their improvisation they brainstormed a wordlist with Byron. “Ideas of what mixed race peoples are,” explained Angel, “like superhuman, mixed.” Mutt was one of them says Jasmmine “because someone called me that before and I was like wow. Really?” The dancers nod to themselves about such contradictions. Mixed race identity is supposed to be fluid so fluidity was also on their wordlist. But the reality is that being multiracial is often a polarized, painful experience via other peoples perceptions. The truth of this dichotomy compelled them to add stuck to their list too. “Like more ugly or more beautiful,” Angel gives another example. “Just this idea you’re either a superhuman, or you’re a piece of shit.”…

Read the entire interview here.

The changing faces of Singapore: Mixed race families

Population.sg
2016-08-23

Karen Tee

This little red dot may be tiny, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in diversity. As a society traditionally made up of people of different cultures and backgrounds, coexistence and intermixing is a common theme in our daily experience – be it in the food we eat, or even how we speak.

And according to the numbers, this is also a growing trend in our marriages and families. Around 20 per cent of marriages in Singapore in 2014 were inter-ethnic, in other words, between individuals of different races. This is up from 13 per cent a decade ago.

Experts say this trend is unsurprising, given Singapore’s increasingly well-travelled population and changing social norms.

“The world is a smaller place. And what would have been totally unusual two generations ago is far more acceptable in this day and age,” Anita Fam, a Families for Life council member, told TODAY.

Meet three mixed race Singaporean families, and hear their stories of when different cultures and traditions meet, and how they celebrate their diverse backgrounds….

Read the entire article here.

The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism

The William and Mary Quarterly
Volume 73, Number 3, July 2016, 3rd series
pages 427-466

Rebecca Earle, Professor
School of Comparative American Studies
University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

A new model for thinking about the socioracial categories depicted in casta paintings (remarkable eighteenth-century Spanish American images representing the outcome of “racial mixing”) takes seriously both their fluidity and their genealogical character. Approaching classification, and casta paintings, from this direction clarifies the underlying epistemologies that structured colonial society and helps connect the paintings more explicitly to the debates about human difference that captivated Enlightenment thinkers. Ultimately, however, these paintings were produced and collected in the hundreds not simply because they visualized Atlantic debates about classification and human difference but because these visualizations were interesting and pleasant to contemplate. They agreeably roused the pleasures of the imagination via their taxonomic as well as their narrative power. Linking casta paintings to the importance accorded to pleasure in both the scientific and the colonial imagination helps explain their fascination, which derived from their ability to condense the complex interconnections of classification, colonialism, and sexuality into appealing images.

Michaela Angela Davis Strips Down For The “What’s Underneath Project,” Talks Racism, Insecurities

Madame Noire
2016-08-22

Brande Victorian, Managing Editor

Michaela Angela Davis has long been everything and then some to us, and our opinion of the writer, culture critique, and activist has only skyrocketed after watching her strip down for StyleLikeU’s highly regarded “What’s Underneath Project.”…

…And we’re thankful for that. Here are the highlights from Davis’ interview:

On assumptions people make about her because of how she looks

“The first, sort of obvious assumption is that I’m mixed race– like one parent is white, one parent is Black — and it’s not so. Both of my parents are light-skinned and Black. Both of my parents are products of what I call the great horror story of America and the great love story of America. In order to survive, often families would marry other light-skinned Blacks to stay alive…

Read the entire article here.