Mixed Race Studies

Double Take: The Art of Amalgam and stereo*type*

The Incluseum: Museums and Social Inclusion
2014-04-23

Aletheia Wittman, co-founder

In this post The Incluseum highlights the new work of some of Seattle’s industrious artist…

Two recent exhibits have disrupted the reliability of the first impression.  The artwork prompts a second, longer, deeper look.

Right now at Gallery4Culture (until Friday) you can visit Dave Kennedy’s Amalgam and experience a body of work that playfully and concisely draws attention to this process of destabilizing first impressions/assumptions. Large format photographs appear to be still lifes of immediately recognizable food items. With a closer gaze, the precise and deliberate sculpting of different types of edible organic matter to create a cohesive whole comes into focus.

The video work in Amalgam offers Kennedy’s take on the nature of his many layered and multiracial identity. A reminder that people, as well as art, can be stereotyped, labeled and generalized about – acts that are challenged by how Kennedy chooses to represent aspects of himself within his work; how he navigates through space, time and memory…

Read the entire article here.

Including Museums in Critical Mixed Race Studies

the incluseum: museums and social inclusion
2012-11-27

Chieko Phillips, Curatorial Assistant
Northwest African American Museum, Seattle, Washington

In 2009, when I first learned of a museum exhibit called IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas and two other exhibits that carried messages about multiraciality, I had mixed feelings (pun intended). How could any museum present messages about mixed identity; something that is so fluid and personal to me?  On a less emotional level, since the 2000 U.S. census, the first to allow people to mark more than one racial category, mixed race identity is officially recognized by the government and increasingly visible on a national scale.  Therefore, the representation of the history and experience of those who identify as mixed race has become more frequent in American pop culture.

While many scholars,students, and activists are still working to understand the implications of multiraciality for the racial structures of the United States, museums are already presenting narratives about mixed race and placing these narratives in the context of American citizenship. Are they doing it right? Is anyone doing it right? What is right? I have been exploring these questions for the past 3 years and believe the answers are currently indeterminate but full of potential…

Read the entire article here.