Mixed Race Studies

Artist Explodes Racial Stereotypes In Shape-Shifting Photographs

The Huffington Post
2016-10-20

Priscilla Frank, Arts & Culture Writer

Shulamit Nazarian

“My experience as a person of color is different than others’. I have something to say.”

Artist Genevieve Gaignard grew up in the town of Orange, Massachusetts. Her mother was white, her father black ― one of the first black men to live in the small town. “I was always really aware that we were different,” Gaignard explained in an interview with The Huffington Post.

While Gaignard was well aware of her biracial identity, most of her classmates and neighborhood acquaintances simply saw her as the pale-skinned, redheaded child she was. They assumed, in other words, like the majority of Orange citizens, that Gaignard was white. “I passed along with everyone else,” she said. “I blended in.”

As a kid, Gaignard spent a lot of time in her room. “I was shy, quiet, in my own little world,” she recalled. She would listen to the radio, make collages and plaster magazine cutouts on her wall. She’d also obsessively look into the lives of celebrities like Mariah Carey and Alicia Keys, women who also were both black and white. She studied how they defined themselves, the spaces they occupied and the ways they existed in the world. “I would think, ‘Oh, they get to be black,’ or, ‘They’re kind of passing as white,’” Gaignard said. “I would search for images of their parents, trying to get clues. It’s interesting how media or the industry often decides where someone will fit in.”

“Basic Cable” Shulamit Nazarian

With no outside force to define her, Gaignard was left, like so many young people, feeling undefined. “It was this not knowing how to identify,” she expressed. “Not feeling black enough, not feeling white enough, that was the struggle.”…

Read the entire article here.

A young playwright’s quest to ask difficult questions about race, class and gender

The Los Angeles Times
2016-12-02

Margaret Gray

Leah Nanako Winkler’s new play “Kentucky” is a comedy about a Japanese American woman raised in the South. Like her protagonist Hiro, Winkler is half-Japanese and grew up in Kentucky. Like Hiro, she left  for New York and didn’t return for years. And like Hiro, Winkler found her sister’s embrace of evangelical Christianity puzzling and alarming.

“It was like she’d joined a cult,” recalls Winkler, who clarifies that she wasn’t entirely like the Hiro of her play.

“I didn’t actually try to stop my sister’s wedding,” she says with a laugh.

Speaking from the dressing room at East West Players’ theater in downtown L.A., where the West Coast premiere of “Kentucky” runs through Dec. 11, Winkler says the new work is “circumstantially autobiographical.”…

…Born in Japan, Winkler spent some of her childhood there before moving to Kentucky. She won’t say how old she was at the time. “I don’t like to answer that question because there’s a lot of judgment placed on that,” she says. “There’s a big difference if I say 2 or if I say 12. People like to peg you on how Japanese or how American you are, when you’re mixed race.”

She will say that she was old enough to experience “a double identity crisis.”

“In Japan I was a child model because of my Western looks,” she says. “I was considered gaijin, which means foreigner. But in America I was the girl from Japan.”…

Read the entire article here.

A Picture of Her ‘Kentucky’ Home

The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2016-11-27

Mikey Hirano Culross

Leah Nanako Winkler was born in Japan, raised in Lexington, Kentucky, and now lives in New York City.

Leah Nanako Winkler arrived more than flustered, bounding into a dressing room at East West Players after having endured what should have been a 20-minute trek from Universal City to Little Tokyo.

Ms. Winkler, meet the 101.

The evening’s performance of her new play, “Kentucky,” was barely 90 minutes from curtain, and Winkler had plenty of tasks beforehand, including a quick chat with The Rafu.

Now a hard-studying MFA student in Brooklyn, Winkler has composed an honest look at family, with all its glory as well as warts, drawing on her experiences growing up in Lexington, Kentucky.

Her play follows Hiro, a woman on the verge of big-city career success whose homecoming is driven by the desire to dissuade her born-again sister from entering into a marriage that Hiro finds unsavory. Dealing with her family’s southern leanings, her own misgivings and a talking cat, Hiro’s mission is derailed into a completely unplanned direction.

“For me it was important to see a mixed-race family on stage and not seen through rose-colored glasses, that they have their faults, that they’re not perfect,” Winkler explained…

Read the entire article here.

Hapa Capsulizes Painful Moments from 2016 Asian America in Less than 90 Seconds

AsAmNews
2016-11-27

Louis Chan, AsAmNews National Correspondent

A popular new video out less than a week freezes in time moments in 2016 that highlight the racism and the persistent whitewashing the Asian American community faced throughout the year.

The short A-woke is from multiracial filmmaker Teja Arboleda who grew up in Japan and now lives near Boston.

Arboleda utilizes the trendy mannequin challenge technique of employing actors who pose frozen like mennequins to depict memorable, and in this film, painful scenes from the past…

Read the entire article here.

Genevieve Gaignard tackles race, class and identity at the California African American Museum

The Los Angeles Times
2016-11-17

Deborah Vankin, Contact Reporter

Genevieve Gaignard’s identity-bending “Extra Value (After Venus)” (2016). (Genevieve Gaignard / Shulamit Nazarian)

Growing up in the working-class mill town of Orange, Mass., Genevieve Gaignard wrestled with her identity. She was the fair-skinned daughter of a black father and white mother. She was the proverbial middle child. She struggled with body issues. Often, she says, she felt misunderstood, if not invisible.

Now 35 and living in Los Angeles, Gaignard has a strong sense of herself and her place in the world as a multidisciplinary artist. In “Smell the Roses,” the artist’s first museum show in Los Angeles, Gaignard tackles the big issues of race, class and, especially, identity.

The exhibition at the California African American Museum includes photography, video and assemblage works, but the nine large photographs, all richly colored performative self-portraits, are standouts. Like the artist Carrie Mae Weems, Gaignard uses the medium to explore the contemporary African American experience; like Cindy Sherman, she dons wigs and heavy makeup to create female caricatures that humorously embody societal stereotypes. The women she portrays are both anonymous and familiar — individuals steeped in aesthetics from pop culture, drag queen hyper-femininity, the working class, ’70s chic à la Netflix’s “The Get Down,” TV news and street fashion, among other influences…

Read the entire article here.

19 Black UK Actresses Who Are Killing The Game Across The Pond

Essence
2016-11-17

Sydney Scott

There’s tons of talent coming out of the UK, with many actresses crossing the pond and appearing in some of our favorite television shows and movies. There are too many talented actresses to name, but we had to share some of our favorites with you. From well-known names and recognizable faces to those just bursting onto the scene, here are 19 of our favorite UK actresses…

Read the entire article here.

Black U.K. beauty magazine accidentally put a white model on its cover. Apologies followed.

The Washington Post
2016-11-22

Travis M. Andrews, Staff Writer

Emily Bador is a white woman. She is not, therefore, a black woman. Normally, that wouldn’t be news worth reporting, mostly because it isn’t news.

But her race came into play recently due to the new cover of Blackhair magazine, a British glossy that bills itself as “an international bi-monthly magazine for the style conscious black woman. Packed with 100’s of hair inspirations, fashion, lifestyle and celebrity interviews, we are one of the leading publications for women of colour in Europe.”

The magazine, which generally if not always features black or mixed-race models, used her photograph for the cover of its December/January issue. The editors have admitted they didn’t know she was white…

…According to Blackhair’s editor, Keysha Davis, who wrote a note on the magazine’s Facebook page, the publication runs photographs they receive from PR companies and salons. They specifically request that these photographs be of black or mixed-race women…

Read the entire article here.

White Model Apologizes After Her Photo Shows Up On Blackhair Magazine

The Huffington Post
2016-11-21

Zeba Blay

“I’m very sorry this cover was taken away from a black woman,” she wrote.

Blackhair magazine had some explaining to do after mistakenly featuring a white model rocking afro-textured hair on the cover of its latest issue. The publication, known for offering hair tips and tricks for black and mixed-race women, was called out by a white model Emily Bador who says an old modeling photo of her was used without her permission for the December/January issue of the mag.

In an Instagram post published on Sunday, Bador shared a photo of the cover, writing in a caption that she “deeply and sincerely” apologized for the picture. Bador explained to her over 64,000 followers that the image had been taken three or four years ago when she was around 15 years old, before she had learned about the concept of cultural appropriation and the stigma many black women receive for wearing their hair in its natural state…

Read the entire article here.

2 Tone legend Pauline Black to get honorary degree from Coventry University

The Coventry Telegraph
2016-11-21

Catherine Lillington

Pauline Black

“It’s really important women don’t reach the menopause and go away and knit”

Ska and 2 Tone legend Pauline Black is being honoured by Coventry University for her support of the city’s music scene.

The lead singer of The Selecter will get an honorary degree following a career that has seen her create platinum-selling albums and an award-winning autobiography.

She will be among 6,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students receiving their degrees, 45 years after she moved to Coventry to study at Lanchester Polytechnic…

Pauline Black performing at The Tic Toc Club in Coventry in July 1981

Read the entire article here.

The New American Face

The Atlantic
2016-11-21

James Hamblin, Senior Editor

The least and most attractive male faces, based on statistical models.

Leaders are stoking human tendencies toward tribalism—but this instinct can be overcome more easily than once thought.

Since the election of Donald Trump, President Barack Obama has shifted into a prophylactic stance. He is warning that the world is complex, not a simple collection of binaries where things are either completely fantastic or the absolute worst.

Obama sees, rather, an ecosystem, a global community where borders are increasingly illusory, where prosperity for one economy means prosperity for others. Still this is a difficult concept to impart even to competitive students or coworkers, much less a population of seven billion. Recounting how he explained the election outcome to his daughters, Obama said in The New Yorker this week, “This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy.”

If biology is messy, neurobiology is a dumpster filled with smaller dumpsters, all ablaze. We are competitive by nature, as a matter of survival, and this tendency is easily goaded into hate…

Read the entire article here.