Mixed Race Studies

The Bi-Racial Artist Using White-Passing Characters to Talk About Blackness

Sleek
2018-06-07

Harriet Shepherd, Junior Editor

Drive-By, Side-Eye, 2016 © Genevieve Gaignard, courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

Genevieve Gaignard uses American stereotypes and comfortable settings to confront uncomfortable issues surrounding race and identity.

American artist Genevieve Gaignard is a homebody. Not in the sense that she’s confined to the couch every Friday night, but rather that she’s infatuated with domestic spaces. “I’ve always had this fascination with what people surround themselves with in their homes,” she tells SLEEK. It’s a theme that’s been a constant in her work since she threw in the towel at cookery school and headed down a fine art path. From the panoramic interiors she lensed for her Yale application, to the carefully curated domestic installations that made up her solo show, Smell the Roses, at the Californian African American Museum earlier this year, to the household-centric creations currently on display at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London — home is where Gaignard’s heart is.

Though she’s what you’d call a multidisciplinary artist, it’s Gaignard’s photography that’s earned her such widespread attention. Known for turning the lens on herself, Gaignard’s Cindy Sherman-esque self-portraits occupy a complex realm where class, race and gender intersect, seeing the artist assume caricatured roles that toy with her own bi-racial identity and the way that blackness and whiteness is perceived. And the home, more often than not, provides the comfortable backdrop for Gaignard’s more uncomfortable subject matter…

Read the entire article here.

Growing, Faltering, Changing, Growing: Lessons From Kay WalkingStick

The New York Times
2018-06-07

Holland Cotter, Co-chief Art Critic

Kay WalkingStick’s “New Mexico Desert,” 2011, in which bands of Navajo patterning float across scrub land and mesas as if surveying and protecting them. National Museum of the American Indian

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — An artist’s career retrospective, if shaped with care, is more than a look at a life of labor. It’s also a record of contingent lives, cultural changes and a political passage in time. This is true of “Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist,” an era-spanning survey of this 83-year-old painter at the Montclair Art Museum here. Yet what powers the chronologically arranged show, first and last, is the personal: the sense it gives of one worker growing, changing, faltering, then growing and changing more.

Born in 1935 in Syracuse, Ms. WalkingStick was the child of a biracial marriage: “Syracuse Girl Weds Cherokee Indian” was the headline on the report of her parents’ wedding in the local newspaper. As it turned out, she saw little of her father over the years, though her mother, Scottish-Irish by descent, made a point of instilling pride in her daughter’s Native American heritage.

Ms. WalkingStick studied painting in college, and as a young wife and mother in suburban New Jersey in the 1960s, she continued to paint, keeping a close eye on what was happening in Manhattan. Among the earliest pieces in the show, from 1971, are two crisp, Pop-ish silhouette images in bright colors of female nudes. The artist herself was the model, and feminism — or at least the loosened-up spirit of it — a spur…

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Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction

Cambridge University Press
April 2018
400 pages
233 x 165 x 43 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107177628
Paperback ISBN: 9781316630662
eBook ISBN: 9781316835890

Editors:

Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews offer the first systematic, book-length survey of humanities and social science scholarship on the exciting field of Afro-Latin American studies. Organized by topic, these essays synthesize and present the current state of knowledge on a broad variety of topics, including Afro-Latin American music, religions, literature, art history, political thought, social movements, legal history, environmental history, and ideologies of racial inclusion. This volume connects the region’s long history of slavery to the major political, social, cultural, and economic developments of the last two centuries. Written by leading scholars in each of those topics, the volume provides an introduction to the field of Afro-Latin American studies that is not available from any other source and reflects the disciplinary and thematic richness of this emerging field.

• Presents systematic and synthetic overviews of recent scholarship on topics of major importance in the field of Afro-Latin American studies, for example Afro-Latin American religions, Afro-Latin American political movements, and Afro-Latin American music
• Covers a broad range of topics, embracing most of the humanities and social sciences
• Serves as the authoritative introduction for Afro-Latin American history, covering the period from 1500 to the present

Table of Contents

• 1. Afro-Latin American studies: an introduction Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews
• Part I. Inequalities:
  • 2. The slave trade to Latin America: a historiographical assessment Roquinaldo Ferreira and Tatiana Seijas
  • 3. Inequality: race, class, gender George Reid Andrews
  • 4. Afro-indigenous interactions, relations, and comparisons Peter Wade
  • 5. Law, silence, and racialized inequalities in the history of Afro-Brazil Brodwyn Fischer, Keila Grinberg and Hebe Mattos
• Part II. Politics:
  • 6. Currents in Afro-Latin American political and social thought Frank Guridy and Juliet Hooker
  • 7. Rethinking black mobilization in Latin America Tianna Paschel
  • 8. ‘Racial democracy’ and racial inclusion: hemispheric histories Paulina Alberto and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
• Part III. Culture:
  • 9. Literary liberties: the authority of Afrodescendant authors Doris Sommer
  • 10. Afro-Latin American art Alejandro de la Fuente
  • 11. A century and a half of scholarship on Afro-Latin American music Robin Moore
  • 12. Afro-Latin American religions Stephan Palmié and Paul Christopher Johnson
  • 13. Environment, space and place: cultural geographies of colonial Afro-Latin America Karl Offen
• Part IV. Transnational Spaces:
  • 14. Transnational frames of Afro-Latin experience: evolving spaces and means of connection, 1600–2000 Lara Putnam
  • 15. Afro-Latinos: speaking through silences and rethinking the geographies of blackness Jennifer A. Jones

The Life-Giving Art of Adrian Piper

Shondaland
2018-04-20

Rebecca Carroll, Editor of Special Projects
WNYC New York Public Radio, New York, New York

GETTY IMAGES/PHOTO BY SUZANNE KREITER/THE BOSTON GLOBE

I went to college at a small, private liberal arts school in rural Massachusetts on a full financial scholarship. There I navigated two sets of friends: my black friends, and my white friends. The school was, of course, predominantly white, but the students of color created a strong and robust community. For the first couple of years, though, still legit messed up by being adopted by a white family and raised in an all-white town, I placed an inordinate amount of value on proximity to white folks. So I went ahead and kept up with them Saab-driving, co-op shift-having, jazz-loving white friends, who largely performed their wokeness and ignored or exotified my blackness. Enter: the conceptual artist Adrian Piper, who pretty much gave me my life…

Read the entire article here.

Jesmyn Ward: ‘Black girls are silenced, misunderstood and underestimated’

The Guardian
2018-05-11

Lisa Allardice, Editor
Guardian Review

Jesmyn Ward: ‘I fought from the very beginning.’ Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The author of Sing, Unburied, Sing, had a tough childhood in Mississippi, survived Hurricane Katrina, and became the first woman to win two US national book awards for fiction

If Jesmyn Ward’s fiction tends towards the epic, that is maybe because her life has been marked by monumental events. “I fought from the very beginning”, she says. Born prematurely at just 26 weeks, she was badly attacked by her father’s pit bull as a small child, her younger brother was killed at 19, and, along with several generations of her family, she sheltered from Hurricane Katrina in a truck. Yet today she is the first woman to win the US national book award for fiction twice, hailed by a leading reviewer as “one of the most powerfully poetic writers in the country”. And on the morning we meet, it has just been announced that she has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing…

Ward’s subject is what it means to be poor and black in America’s rural south, where “life is a hurricane”. Modern Mississippi, she says, “means addiction, ground-in generational poverty, living very closely with the legacy of slavery, of Jim Crow, of lynching and of intractable racism”. In her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), she felt she “protected” her characters from these brutal realities, because she knew and cared about them too much: “So I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn’t spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it would be dishonest to spare my characters in that way.”…

Read the entire interview here.

Museum buys 1882 painting by African-American artist who worked in Victoria

The Times Colonist
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
2018-04-24

Louise Dickson

Giant’s Castle Mountain: A.L. Fortune Farm, Enderby B.C. Oct. 6, 1882, painted by Grafton Tyler Brown while he was living in Victoria. Photograph By via Royal B.C. Museum

The Royal B.C. Museum has purchased an major landscape painting by 19th-century African-American artist Grafton Tyler Brown.

The painting — Giant’s Castle Mountain: A.L. Fortune Farm, Enderby B.C. Oct. 6, 1882 — is considered by University of Victoria history professor John Lutz to be the most important of Brown’s B.C. paintings. The painting, bought for $44,000 from Uno Langmann Fine Art Ltd. in March, shows Alexander Leslie Fortune’s farmstead on the edge of a forest. The agrarian foreground is dwarfed by a looming mountain.

The Royal B.C. Museum holds the greatest number and most significant of Brown’s Canadian works. Giant’s Castle Mountain is considered to be a work of artistic and historical significance to British Columbians. It was painted in Victoria after Brown visited the southern Interior…

Read the entire article here.

Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California

Pasadena Museum of California Art
490 East Union Street
Pasadena, California 91101
(626) 568-3665
2018-04-04

2018-06-17 through 2018-10-07

Bridget R. Cooks, Curator; Associate Professor of Art History and African American Studies
University of California, Irvine

Grafton Tyler Brown, Grand Canyon and Falls, 1887. Oil on canvas. 30 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art. Photo ©John Wilson White Studio

Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California is organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art and curated by Bridget R. Cooks Ph.D.. The exhibition is supported by the PMCA Board of Directors, PMCA Ambassador Circle, and the California Visionary Fund.

Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918) was a painter, graphic designer, and lithographer in the 19th century. A talented artist and entrepreneur, Brown was the only documented African American in his field in the western United States at the time.

Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Brown learned about lithography while working for a printer in Philadelphia at the age of fourteen. The gold and silver mining boom in the 1800s encouraged him to venture West to establish a business and home. In 1865, Brown founded his first lithography business in San Francisco, where he served the emerging business communities in the area, designing stock certificates for a wide variety of companies ranging from ice to mining corporations, as well as admission tickets, maps, sheet music, advertisements, and billheads…

Read the entire article here.

The Evolution of Jurnee Smollett-Bell

Shondaland
2018-05-04

Rebecca Carroll

Jurnee Smollett-Bell GETTY/BRIANNA ELLIS-MITCHELL

I’m always in serious awe of really skilled child actors, because contrary to what a lot of folks likely think, it’s not just about playing make-believe. Sure, there is an element of pretending, but even that, I think, is a really courageous thing to do as a kid — to go deeply into your imagination, and stay there for hours upon hours. What if you forget who you really are? And, of course, a lot of child actors, especially those who find success, do end up forgetting who they really are. But one instance of a child actor who legit held it down as a young talent and then grew up to be straight fire: Jurnee Smollett-Bell.

Most striking of Smollett-Bell’s childhood cinematic oeuvre, to my mind, is her star turn in Kasi Lemmon’s gorgeous beyond belief breakout independent film “Eve’s Bayou,” which the late Roger Ebert named the best film of 1997. The story takes place over the course of a thick, blistering summer in rural Louisiana, and Smollett-Bell gives a searingly vivid performance as 10-year-old Eve Baptiste, whose daddy (Samuel Jackson), even though he’s a doctor, is no-count as hell, and the rest of her Creole family is kind of a hot mess, too. There’s a lot that can be said about the film on it’s own according — including Lemmons’ fierce command as a first-time filmmaker, the fine and brittle performance by Lynn Whitfield (Queen) as Eve’s mother, the sinewy depth of the cinematography, and set production, and just all the glistening, damaged, and glorious black skin in every single scene. But it’s Smollett-Bell, in her little denim overalls and mile-high Eve attitude that has stayed with me all these years.

Smollett-Bell, who comes from an entire constellation of stars — her brother Jussie is on a little show called “Empire,” and there’s also brothers Jojo, Jocqui, and Jake, and sister Jazz — grew up in New York City, where she and her siblings all began acting very young. All six siblings starred in the short-lived ABC sitcom “On Our Own.” They’ve remained close and recently published a cookbook together called “The Family Table.” The sitcom led to a handful of film roles for Smollett-Bell, among them “Eve’s Bayou,” also “Beautiful Joe” with Sharon Stone, and later, “The Great Debaters” with Forest Whittaker and Denzel Washington (who also directed). Smollett-Bell went on to work consistently in television, appearing as a series regular on “Friday Night Lights,” “The Defenders,” “True Blood” and the black folk family favorite, “Underground” (hootie hoo!), which earned her two Outstanding Actress nominations from the NAACP Image Awards…

Read the entire article here.

The Myth of Brazil’s Racial Democracy

aperture
2018-04-18

Amelia Rina
Brooklyn, New York

Jonathas de Andrade, Eu, mestiço, 2017–18 Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

In a new exhibition, Jonathas de Andrade confronts his country’s complicated past and present.

“Brazil is renowned in the world for its racial democracy,” begins anthropologist Charles Wagley in the 1952 study Race and Class in Rural Brazil. Produced by Columbia University and UNESCO, the text describes ethnographic studies performed by Wagley and his colleagues in four regions of Brazil. In each region, men and women from what they determined to be the four major racial groups—caboclo (indigenous and Afro-Brazilian), preto (Afro-Brazilian), mulato (Afro-Brazilian and white European), and branco (white European)—were shown photographs of other Brazilians from these categories and then asked to assign them different traits, such as most/least attractive, best/worst worker, most/least honest, most/least wealthy, et cetera. This binary restriction was one of the study’s major flaws that first intrigued Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, and inspired his recent project, Eu, mestiço, currently on view at Alexander and Bonin…

Read the entire review here.

Bedside Books: How Half-Breed by Maria Campbell connected musician Nick Ferrio to his grandmother

CBC Radio
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
2018-04-16

Musician Nick Ferrio examines Maria Campbell’s autobiography, Half-Breed, and its depiction of race issues in Canada. (Jeff Bierk/Goodread Biography)

Musician Nick Ferrio is based in Peterborough, Ont., but his roots are in Saskatchewan. He recently read Maria Campbell’s memoir Half-Breed and its account of an Indigenous woman’s encounters with racism, and the book resonated with him, thanks to his own Cree ancestry.

Ferrio’s album Soothsayer also mixes several influences to create a personal style and sound.

Mapping internal conflict

“I think every Canadian should read Half-Breed. It’s an incredible story of a mixed woman whose ancestry is part Cree. She explains the racism she faced in Canada. It resonated with me as my paternal grandmother is Cree. Because of the Indian Act, her family was forced to leave the reserve. When she moved to Toronto, she had internal racism. She was ashamed of her identity. She passed as white, so she blended into white culture in Toronto. That’s a dark thing.”..

Listen to the story here. Read the story here.