Satirical paintings illuminate social context

On April 1^st, I visited the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History to visit their Brown Gallery. From February to the end of this month, the gallery’s exhibit is “The Magical Real-ism of Amy Sherald.” Before visiting the gallery, I had read a brief synopsis of the exhibit on the Stone Center’s website. I knew that Sherald painted her figures’ skin tones in shades of gray to remove color from their characteristics, but I did not know much else about the exhibit—other than knowledge of magical realism from my Spanish classes. And when I visited the gallery I chose not to read the pamphlet about the exhibit until after I explored it myself so that I could compare my analysis and emotions to that of the curator and the artist.

All of Sherald’s paintings in the gallery are portraits—all with one subject with the exception of one painting. My first impression of her paintings was her beautiful use of color. Despite the gray-ish skins tones (some of which lent themselves more to brown than I thought they would), the clothing that her subjects wore often included beautiful bright colors. In addition, her backgrounds used color amazingly well; they looked kind of splotchy throughout with shimmering details in beautiful hues. The backgrounds were probably the parts of the paintings I was most interested in terms of art technique. My brother is an abstract painter and Sherald’s background techniques reminded me of parts of his work.

As I went through the gallery reading the titles of the paintings and looking into the eyes of Sherald’s subjects, of whom two of the women she painted you could not see their eyes, I began to get a kind of circus feeling from the exhibit. There were two paintings of women that included bars in their backgrounds that solidified this circus-feeling to me. This was especially true for the piece entitled “Maybe if I wore a Mask,” where a woman in a corseted dress is wearing a tiger masking and reaching for a bar. Pieces like this one made me ponder the relationship between the titles and the paintings—many were ironic and I sensed a deeper meaning than their surface value.

I loved the clothing in each of the portraits, but my favorite painting, “Puppet Master,” was not because of the clothes the subject wore, but rather the puppet he held. In his hands was a large whale puppet—not the first animal that comes to mind when one thinks of hand puppets. I connected with this piece because of the whale puppet. When I was really young I had a tiny whale stuffed animal that I could stick my thumb into his mouth and use him like a puppet. I remember being 3 or 4 years old and swimming in my aunt’s pool in Massachusetts with my tiny whale stuck to my thumb—adventuring with my playmate. This painting recalled all of these memories to me.

After I left the gallery, I sat down by the big glass windows at the Stone Center and read the informational pamphlet about the exhibit. Interestingly enough, the curator mentions the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, of whom I’ve read many of his works and used this knowledge in my interpretation of the title of Sherald’s exhibit. The circus theme was also mentioned, so the evocation of that theme was a success. The curator wrote one phrase that really stuck with in regard to the exhibit: “Sherald takes pleasure in demonstrating her skills as a realist painter. That said, she uses realist painting to question reality in painting.” This felt very true and described the paintings along with their ironic titles.

Also from the pamphlet, it was interesting to read Sherald’s biography and learn more about her treatment of race in her paintings—discarding skin tone yet include facial characteristics that make the ethnicity of her subjects clear. Her work is autobiographical in some ways, as is clear in the painting of the exhibit entitled “They Call Me Redbone but I’d Rather Be Strawberry Shortcake,” which shows a young girl of African, European and Native American descent and brings up the question of lighter vs. darker skin. Beyond this, Sherald’s work manifests into a commentary on “social context with a satirical twist,” which illuminates her title selections. A good example of this is her painting of two men in beautiful white and blue suits who look to be of African descent holding two light pink cotton candy sticks entitled “We Ain’t No Cotton Picking Negroes.”

Take a look for yourself before April  22.

Identity Struggles

On March 22, I attended a lecture given by Helene Cooper, a J-school alumna who is currently the White House correspondent for the New York Times. Interestingly enough, this is not a position she sought after but actually one her employers pushed her into after she served as the diplomatic correspondent. Cooper is an award-winning journalist who wrote for the Wall Street Journal for a number of years before going to work at the Times. A native of Liberia, Cooper moved to the United States when she was 14 years old—first to Tennessee and then to North Carolina—as her family fled the coup in her homeland, which after hearing her descriptions of it, I would liken Liberia’s experiences to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

This lecture was the story of Cooper’s struggles after coming to the U.S. as she grappled with her African identity, something she ultimately severed as she cut out her memories and links to Liberia to avoid the pain they ignited. Cooper also delved into her childhood in Liberia to provide the context for her book, The House at Sugar Beach. Her book is the story of her search for her childhood best friend and how she came to accept Liberia back into her life and history. 

It was incredibly interesting to listen to Cooper explain what her life in Liberia was like before the coup. She described herself as a princess with a silver spoon in her mouth who couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping alone—so her wealthy family put out an ad for a playmate. This playmate position was filled by Eunice, whose mother thought she would have a better life with Cooper’s family. Though the two didn’t get along at first, both had “bush men terrors” and winded up sleeping together. After Cooper’s family left Liberia, she tried to erase this past relationship as Eunice was left behind. Cooper described the process of writing her book as metaphor for picking away at one’s scabs. I understand why Cooper did this in some aspects, though I can’t imagine what it must be like to watch one’s uncle be executed and then flee one’s home, but at the same time I do not claim to understand how she was able to forego her identity so entirely.

At UNC, Cooper became involved in journalism and wrote op-ed pieces for the DTH. She threw herself completely into becoming a Tarheel in order to push aside her Liberian identity. After her first column was published, a piece about apartheid in South Africa, she made sure the DTH labeled her as being from Greensboro rather than Liberia. During this time, her mother returned to Liberia and her sister and father were getting ready to do the same because of financial difficulties. On the night that Cooper’s sister and father left, she went out with friends at Carolina and didn’t even say goodbye—a rash decision she regretted later that night.

Cooper chose to stay in the U.S. and pursue a career in journalism. The ultimate moment that changed her life, after years of covering various countries’ problems and continuing to ignore Liberia’s, happened during her coverage of the Iraq War. She was injured when her Humvee was ran over by a tank—her body was stuck inside and as she lay there waiting to be saved her thoughts returned to Liberia. She thought, “This isn’t right. I can’t die here. If my death is going to be in a way then it should be in my own country’s war.” It was very touching to listen to her account, though she prefaced it with the fact that it may sound clichéd. 

After she was saved in Iraq, Cooper decided it was time to search for Eunice and to reconnect with Liberia. Her book is about that search and its discoveries.

As I listened to Cooper speak, my mind continually returned to our discussion of ethnicity as exotic and the question that many mixed people face of “Who am I?” Though Cooper is of Liberian descent, her mixed background provided the same type of scenario in her youth and later into her life. She questioned her ability to be both an American and an African, ultimately choosing an American identity above all else for the majority of her life. She felt much distanced from Liberia after coming to the U.S., which was clear at many points in her lecture. She mentioned learning about Eunice giving birth out of wedlock back in Liberia while she was studying at Carolina—something that revealed the huge gap between the two of them, both in their lives and their futures. “Life had split again” is a phrase she used to describe her difficulties conjoining her two identities. I hope that the scabs she picked off writing the book have healed, and I am looking forward to reading it myself. Cooper did admit to the audience that Eunice is alive and well…

The lecture was followed by an interesting q&a session that focused greatly on current political questions about Africa and stories that go underrepresented in today’s media.

Preference for Arab Muslims compared to Other People

I just took the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for Arab-Muslim perceptions. The IAT is an experimental method used to measure the strength of automatic association between mental representations of objects in memory. As stated on Harvard's website where the test is located, "It is well-known that people don't always 'speak their minds,' and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds.' Understanding such divergence is important to scientific psychology.  If you're interested in testing your own conscious-unconscious divergences, take the quiz here.

I chose to take the test concerning Arabs/Muslims because the book we read focusing on this ethnic group in diversity class, "How Does it Feel to be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America," caught my attention the most out of any reading we've done thus far. The test began by asking some basic questions about whether or not I judge Arab Muslims, how I would rate my preference for Arab Muslims vs. other people, etc. Then it provided me with a list of terms for four categories: Good, Bad, Arab-Muslim, and Other People. The good and bad categories were mainly emotion words, such as happy and angry respectively, and the people categories consisted of Arab-Muslim names vs. other names. Then I went through a series of quick identifications where I had to categorize the words into their respective categories. It started out easy with Good vs. Bad and Arab-Muslim vs. Other People, but then required a bit more brain power as these respective categories were criss-crossed, into Good and Arab-Muslim vs. Bad and Other People for an example.

As I was doing these categorizations as quickly as I could, I noticed that I got a few more of the Other People selections wrong in comparison to Arab-Muslim. However, as I had never taken an IAT before I went in not knowing the consequences of my actions; I just tried to concentrate and get them all right in order to avoid the little red "x" that occurs when you miss one. It's in my nature to try and get as many things right as possible, and that's how I approached this test. I could even tell my hands were sweating a little because I was nervous about getting them all right.

My result from the test was a bit surprising to me, it said that I had a preference for Arab Muslims compared to other people. This was not a bias that I was aware of. When I was reading the names of "Other People" that belonged in that category, I noticed that they were still mainly names that I associated in my head with the label "ethnic names" like Takuyo and Ernesto, rather than popular Anglo names like Robert. But that was really my only observation and these results make me wonder if there was something about those names in particular that made me biased against "other people." The results also made me reconsider my attitudes toward Arab Muslims in search of the root behind this test result.

I think that the main reason I show preference for Arab Muslims is because my main, and pretty much only, contact with persons of that ethnicity has been through my friend Omar. I met Omar through a mutual friend three years ago. He is a Palestinian Muslim attending NCSU who I immediately clicked with. He is incredibly intelligent, hardworking, and ambitious. He majored in aeronautical engineering and I would always get heated feelings when he told me stories about how his nationality prevented him from seizing the opportunities that were due to him because of his hard work and diligence. I have lost touch with Omar during the past year, but I still think of him fondly along with his Arab friends that I met. I think the only fault I ever associated with Omar was that of smoking--which is just something I don't like--but I never considered him in too negative of a light when he would smoke hookah. I think that I associated it with his cultural background rather than as a pointless habit.

Interestingly enough, I think that Omar's strengths and kindness are most likely what led to my IAT results. It's amazing how one person can impact your mental conceptions for an entire group of people, but when I was taking the test he popped into my head and I thought hard about getting the categorizations right because I hoped my results would not show a preference toward "other people." If they had, I would have not only felt that I had let Omar down in some way, but also that I unjustly judged a group of people. As it turns out, I may need to do further investigation into my perceptions of "other people."

Defining Race: What does it mean to me?

My feelings about the word "race" in six words:

Indistinct separations for cultural hegemonic purposes.