Mixed Race Studies

Playwright Adrienne Dawes imagines an dystopian future — with humor

Austin American-Statesman
Austin, Texas
2016-01-16

Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, Arts Critic

Adrienne Dawes (Laura Skelding)

Adrienne Dawes donned denim recently when she stopped by Salvage Vanguard Theater for a rehearsal of her latest play to debut at the indie East Austin venue.

“Denim Doves” opens this weekend.

The play has been several years in development, but that the dystopian future world Dawes and her collaborators imagined is populated with people wearing all denim — well, that detail was decided on from the beginning…

…Dawes, a native Austinite, spent three years training and performing with Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe after college in New York. Under her “Heckle Her” production company, Dawes devises sketch comedy shows like the upcoming “Love Me Tindr,” a musical spoof of the online dating app, which opens Valentine’s Day weekend in Salvage Vanguard’s studio theater.

Dawes’ trenchant and intense drama “Am I White”, which played at Salvage Vanguard in October 2014, netted the David Mark Cohen New Play Award from the Austin Critics Table Awards.

A sharp and gutsy look at racial identity, “Am I White” is based on the real-life story of convicted felon Leo Felton, a white supremacist who hid his own biracial identity while plotting to bomb public sites.

Lauded by local critics, “Am I White” is currently being considered for production by theater companies around the country.

Dawes, who is herself of mixed race, spent years working on “Am I White,” and an early workshop version attracted the attention of the incarcerated Felton, who emailed Dawes from prison. Though Dawes exchanged a few emails with Felton during the development of “Am I White,” she declined to continue communication with him after the play’s premiere.

“The play is my creation, not his story,” she says with finality…

Read the entire article here.

National Museum of the American Indian Presents Unprecedented Retrospective “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist”

Newsdesk: Newsroom of the Smithsonian
2015-10-29

SI-423A-2015

For nearly five decades, Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee, b. 1935) has charted an artistic career that is not bound by singular definition. While her early work with Native themes celebrate heroic American Indian leaders with stately, abstract compositions and her more recent heroically scaled paintings recast American landscapes as Native places, WalkingStick’s artistic persona originates from roots in the New York art world of the 1960s and 1970s and her immersion in considerations of abstraction, minimalism and feminist art. “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist” is the first major retrospective of WalkingStick’s work, including more than 75 works that trace her dynamic career from the 1970s to the present.

The exhibition will be on view from Nov. 7 through Sept. 18, 2016, in the National Museum of the American Indian’s third-floor gallery. The American Federation of the Arts will tour the exhibition to the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio (Feb. 9, 2017–May 7, 2017), Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, N.J. (Feb. 3, 2018–June 17, 2018) and two additional venues in 2017. “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist” is co-curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo), associate curator, and David Penney, associate director for museum scholarship. It features both well-known works, such as WalkingStick’s “Chief Joseph” series and hallmark diptychs, as well as never-before-seen works, richly illustrated sketchbooks from the artist’s personal collection and a gallery film featuring the artist discussing her work and process. A press preview will be held Monday, Nov. 2.

“For her entire career, Kay WalkingStick has been rewriting the narrative about Native peoples through her artwork, which has defied categorization,” said Kevin Gover (Pawnee), director of the National Museum of the American Indian. “These seeming contradictions and complexity are part of being an American Indian today, and what makes her an American artist. Our nation itself is built upon diversity of culture and expression. WalkingStick’s background and art reflect this same richness and diversity.”…

Read the entire press release here.

Photographing Multiracial Families In Scotland: Celebrating mothers, daughters and diversity through portraits

Medium for Pixel Magazine
2015-12-17

Interview by Emily von Hoffmann and Polarr

Image courtesy of Kim Simpson.

Portrait photographer Kim Simpson began her Exottish project after her daughter, who is of mixed heritage, experienced a series of racial insults in her primary school in Scotland.

Kim says she hopes her portraits — which feature families with some “visual differences” between their members — will encourage viewers to revisit their engrained ideas of what it looks like to be Scottish.

For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with Kim about the work and her experience as a parent in a multiracial family.

Emily von Hoffmann: “Girls and Their Mothers” is one part of the larger Exottish project. What does “Girls and Their Mothers” entail? Who are these women?

Kim Simpson: “Girls and Their Mothers” is a collection of portraits of mixed race girls, of all ages, with their mothers — 48 portraits featuring 16 different families in a mix of individual and group portraits.

Instead of questioning their ancestry or scrutinizing their appearance, I chose to photograph girls and women of mixed heritage and their mothers with an intent to question social perception. These images display their relationships, linking these girls and their mothers together while at the same time respecting their disparity…

Image courtesy of Kim Simpson.

…EvH: What sort of national dialogue, or vocabulary even, around race and appearance exists in Scotland? Is it discussed in school, for instance? I’m interested in thinking about this in comparison to the current Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., and the greater mainstream attention to identity issues of multiracial individuals.

KS: Black Lives Matter is extremely relevant in Scotland, especially at the moment. We have had an awful tragedy that saw the senseless end of Sheku Bayoh’s life at the hands of police officers as he was suffocated during an arrest in Fife, Scotland. Justice has not been served in this instance and it echoes all the hallmarks of what has been going on across the water with concerns of interactions between police officers and members of the black community…

Read entire the interview here.

Maud Sulter

The Herald
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
2008-03-21

Artist and writer; Born September 19, 1960; Died February 27, 2008. MAUD Sulter, who has died after a long illness aged 47, was an extraordinarily gifted visual artist, writer, playwright and cultural historian.

She was born in Glasgow, of Scots and Ghanaian descent: in her poem Circa 1930, she pointed out that these two cultures “are not as disparate as they might/at first seem. Clan-based societies/With long memories and global diasporas”. The exploration of the continuing presence of Africa in Europe was one of her principal themes, explored through her art in a variety of media: text, photography, sound and performance.

She was active in feminist communities in London in the early 1980s, and while working with a women’s education group programmed Check It, a groundbreaking two-week show at the Drill Hall showcasing black women’s creativity…

…As well as her academic writing, she published several collections of poetry: As a Blackwoman (1985), which won the Vera Bell Prize for poetry that year; Zabat (1989); and Sekhmet (Dumfries & Galloway Council, 2005); and a play about Jerry Rawlings, Service to Empire (2002). “I often address issues of lost and disputed territories, both psychological and physical,” she wrote in 1994. “The central body of my poetic work is unequivocally the love poetry which is addressed to both genders.” Sekhmet begins with a roll-call of love and gratitude to friends, lovers, family across the world, to medics, and to the ancestors, “who walked beside me when I needed them most and carried me forward when the terrain was too rough but never absolve me of the responsibility for my own life and identity”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Staceyann Chin Worries About Money, and Selling Out

The New York Times
2016-01-14

Laura Collins-Hughes

The day she traded in her little two-door convertible for a crossover S.U.V. — “a mom car,” she calls it — the performance poet Staceyann Chin went home and cried. It wasn’t enough that pregnancy had forever altered her body. Now, as she saw it, motherhood was taking away her sex appeal, too.

“But those are the ways it changes your life,” said Ms. Chin, 43, who has a curly, deep-red mohawk, a Jamaican lilt to her speech and, at her throat, a pair of silver necklaces, one of which is emblazoned with a single word: BadAss.

“And then you meet a whole bunch of other people who think moms are sexy,” she added cheerfully over dinner on Lafayette Street before a performance of her latest solo show, “MotherStruck!,” at the Culture Project. “Very strange, but true. They’re everywhere.”

The play tells the story of Ms. Chin’s determined quest to have a child in the face of considerable obstacles, such as being a cash-strapped, single, lesbian artist-activist with paltry health insurance. (In vitro fertilization? Definitely not included.) When at last she does get pregnant, it’s a victory, but a fragile one. At 14 weeks, she begins to bleed. And bleed…

Read the entire article here.

Color Lines: Racial Passing in America

BackStory with the American History Guys (A program of the Virginia Foundation of the Humanities)
Charlottesville, Virginia
2016-01-15

M. H. Kimball portrait of Isaac White and Rosina Downs, two New Orleans slave children, c. 1863. (Library of Congress).

On this episode of BackStory, the Guys will consider how and why Americans throughout the centuries have crossed the lines of racial identity, and find out what the history of passing has to say about race, identity, and privilege in America. We’ll look at stories of African-Americans who passed as white to escape slavery or Jim Crow and find out how the “one-drop rule” enabled one blonde-haired, blue-eyed American to live a double life without ever arousing suspicion. We’ll also explore the story of an African-American musician who pioneered a genre of exotic music with a bejeweled turban and an invented biography, and examine the hidden costs of crossing over.

Guests Include:

• Carol Wilson, Washington College
• Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University
• Martha Sandweiss, Princeton University
• Johanna Lanner-Cusin, high school history teacher
• Eva Garroutte, Boston College
• Allyson Hobbs, Stanford University
• Vasanth Subramanian, business consultant
• R. J. Smith, former senior editor, Los Angeles Magazine
• Adrienne Hernandez, great niece of Korla Pandit
• Maya Hernandez, great niece of Korla Pandit

Segments

• The Spark of Recognition
  • Historian Carol Wilson tells the story of a New Orleans slave named Sally Miller, who sued for her freedom after a German woman became convinced that Sally was really a long-lost German girl named Salomé Müller.
• Double Image
  • Historian Martha Sandweiss explains how the one-drop rule enabled a blue-eyed, blonde-haired geologist named Clarence King to lead a second life as a Black Pullman porter, without ever drawing suspicion.
• “Code-Switching”
  • Listener Johanna Lanner-Cusin, who identifies as black, talks about people’s assumptions about her race, not having experiences similar to darker African Americans, and “qualifying her blackness.”
• Blood Brothers
  • Historian Annette Gordon-Reed illustrates the fluidity of race with the stories of two sons of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, one of whom passed into white society while the other lived his life as an African-American.
• High Stakes
  • Sociologist Eva Garroutte tells the story of Sylvester Long, a multiracial man who rose to silent film stardom in the 1920s after adopting the persona of an “authentic” Native American—until it all came crashing down.
• Passing In, Passing Out
  • Brian Balogh talks with historian Allyson Hobbs about an enormous but overlooked cost of racial passing: leaving one’s family, community, and heritage behind.
• “Guess Your Ethnicity”
  • Listener Vasanth Subramanian wishes society allowed him to choose his identity. He talks in detail about the prejudices children of immigrants face.
• Drawing the Line
  • The Guys explain how American slavery practices created racial boundaries, and, at the same time, complicated them.
• Playing Indian
  • Producer Nina Earnest explores the boundary between passing and performance with the story of John Roland Redd, an African-American organist who donned a bejeweled turban and rewrote his life story to become “Godfather of Exotica” Korla Pandit.

CORRECTION: This show includes a story about Sylvester Long, a man of mixed descent who styled himself as a pure-blooded Native American named Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance. We refer to him as a movie star who published a famous autobiography. In fact, Long Lance published his autobiography first—the popularity of the book catapulted him into movie stardom.

Listen to the podcast (01:05:14) here. Download the podcast here.

Phoebe Boswell: The Matter of Memory

Africanah.org: Arena for Contemporary African, African-American and Caribbean Art
Amsterdam, Kingdom of the Netherlands
2015-02-05

Yvette Greslé, Art Historian/Writer

Edited by Rob Perrée

Phoebe Boswell. ‘The Matter of Memory’, 2013-14. Installation view at Carroll/Fletcher [detail]. Courtesy the artist and Carroll/Fletcher.

I settle into an armchair and am surprised by voices audible from a mechanism buried in the fabric. I hear the voice of the artist, Phoebe Boswell, but also simultaneously, the voice of another. I discover that the chair on the right hand side (as I face the screen) transmits the voice of Boswell’s mother; and the other that of her father. Each parent narrates their memories of life in Kenya, where both were born, raised and married. As they narrate, their child (the artist) repeats their words. This device of multiple, simultaneous narration, does not obscure the speech of each. When the father pauses, the daughter pauses, when the mother sings, the daughter sings. This is a work of memory, a deliberate, staged act of remembering, but it is also a work of familial intimacy. The daughter appears to cherish the memories of the parents, repeating them so as not to forget. This gesture is poignant, it resists erasure and forgetting, and anticipates the inevitability of loss.

The armchairs, with their audio, are titled ‘When I Hear My Own Voice, I Can Hear Kenya’ (2013/14). These sound-objects are an important component in what is an immense spatial installation occupying the whole of the basement level of the Carroll/Fletcher Gallery. Titled ‘The Matter of Memory’ the work encompasses sound, looped projections, animations, objects, and drawings. It embodies the existence of multiple, simultaneous narratives functioning strategically to oppose assumptions about the world in which we live. Deeply sedimented racial prejudices that still hold the world in their thrall are potently countered and resisted. Boswell’s ‘The Matter of Memory’ draws attention to the continued critical significance of human subjectivity, and memory-work, as a counterpoint to the tyranny of singular, overarching narratives…

…Narratives of multiple-heritage and displacement are ones that many twenty-first century subjects, emerging out of historical conditions of travel and migration, can relate to. Boswell’s British-born, Kenyan father, is a fourth generation Kenyan settler and her mother is Kikuyu Kenyan. Visual significations of colonial settler life into which the artist’s father was born, and the Kikuyu Kenyan heritage of her mother is present throughout the installation. The story of this family is one wound up in migration: Boswell who moved to London in 2000, was born in Kenya but grew up in the Middle-East. She now lives and works in London having studied painting at the Slade School of Art and 2D Character Animation at Central St Martins. ‘The Matter of Memory’ invites us into the most intimate spaces of Boswell’s family history. It speaks about the presence of love despite the borders dreamed up by the historical obsession with racial difference. But this work is certainly no idealistic account of the transcendent capacities of love in conditions of trauma and social and political violence. Kenya inhabits the memories and the emotional life of mother, father and daughter who negotiate belonging, displacement, and ideas of ‘Home’….

Read the entire article here.

Musician Chi-chi Nwanoku discussing her life and work on Talking Africa

BlackRook Media
2015-05-12

Musician Chi-chi Nwanoku has been discussing her life and work on Talking Africa. Chi-Chi is a passionate advocate of music and particularly the double bass. She is a Principal Double Bass and founder member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Endymion Ensemble. Born in London of Nigerian and Irish parents, Chi-Chi is also a Professor at Royal Academy of Music, a broadcaster, writer and mentor.

Meet Team One Drop: Dr. Chandra Crudup

Fanshen Cox
2016-01-12

Meet One Drop of Love’s Production Manager, Dr. Chandra Crudup. She makes sure all technical aspects of the show are in place and lends lots of other support to Fanshen when we travel. She also often calls the show and hosts our Q&A talkbacks. She has her PhD in Social Work and is an experienced actor, choreographer and theatre producer. She’s also on the Boards of Mixed Roots Stories and MAViN. We are so grateful to have her on the team!

One Drop of Love is a multimedia one-woman show exploring the intersections of race, class, gender, justice and LOVE.

For more information, click here.

Why I’m Over The White-Washing Of ‘The Bachelor’ Every Season

Elite Daily
2016-01-05

KiMi Robinson
Los Angeles, California

I just cyber-stalked my ex and his new flings — except I never dated the guy, nor will I ever have that opportunity.

In other words, I went through all 28 contestant’s profiles from the upcoming season of “The Bachelor” to judge who I think will be the best fit for our Colorado sweetheart, Ben Higgins.

No matter how much I pride myself on being an independent, educated woman, I’m also a slave to this cruel franchise…

…Don’t get me wrong; I’m just as obsessed with the latter two couples as the next person, but I’m starting to get tired of the predictability of it all.

As a mixed-race child of Japanese and Caucasian parents, I’m eager to see things spiced up in the “Bachelor” franchise. In other words, when am I going to get to see an interracial couple?…

Read the entire article here.