WE HAVE TO CONFRONT OURSELVES.

DO WE LIKE WHAT WE SEE IN THE

MIRROR? AND, ACCORDING TO

OUR LIGHT, ACCORDING TO OUR

UNDERSTANDING, ACCORDING

TO OUR COURAGE, WE WILL HAVE

TO SAY YEA OR NAY – AND RISE!

MAYA ANGELOU AMERICAN WRITER & CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST (1928-2014)

1 PAUL ROBESON GALLERIES

MAIN GALLERY, EXPRESS NEWARK

THIS PUBLICATION IS DEDICATED TO POLIXENI PAPAPETROU, A GREAT FRIEND AND ARTIST. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY – NEWARK

FEBRUARY 19 – DECEMBER 20, 2018

2 3 MIRROR MIRROR: HOW DO WE SEE THROUGH OUR BIGOTRIES MIRROR MIRROR by Chancellor Nancy Cantor and Senior Vice Chancellor Peter Englot by Dorothy Santos 6 47 I SEE YOU INDUSTRIAL PORTRAITURE, MEMORY, AND POWER by Express Newark Co-Directors Victor Davson and Anne Englot by Jay Stanely 9 49 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FEMINIST PORTRAITURE: TWO SIDES OF THE MIRROR by Director and Chief Curator Anonda Bell by Anne Swartz 13 51 PAST NOW FOREVER THE MANY AMBITIONS OF PORTRAITURE by Director and Chief Curator Anonda Bell by Jorge Daniel Veneciano 14 55 A PORTRAIT OF THE POSTFEMINIST PERFECT MOTHER THE REFLECTION OF A GENDERLESS SPIRIT by Susan Bright by Carla Christopher Waid 35 57 A REFLECTIVE PORTRAIT OF SHORT STATURE List of Artists by Amanda Cachia 63 43 Artist Pages RACE AND REPRESENTATION 64 by Nell Painter 45 Contents of the Exhibition 133 Sponsors and Copyright 138

Manuel Acevedo, Lawman’s Cigarette Break from the series The Wards of Newark 1982-87, 1986, gelatin silver print

4 5 MIRROR MIRROR: HOW DO WE SEE THIS IS WHERE ART, AS THE THE AS ART, WHERE IS THIS THROUGH OUR BIGOTRIES? THIS IS WHERE ART, AS THE

Nancy Cantor, Chancellor of Rutgers University Newark, and AND OURSELVES ON MIRROR Peter Englot, Senior Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff to Chancellor MIRROR ON OURSELVES AND THE WORLD, ENTERS THE THE ENTERS WORLD, THE THE WORLD, ENTERS THE here could not be a moment that more urgently calls champion this new, more nuanced narrative of unity? T“for looking in a mirror—actually, in many mirrors—not Moreover, how can we each come to see others as who STARK, PROVIDE TO PICTURE only at ourselves, but at others, many others, even as we “they really are, and thus who we too can be? invariably look with all our hibernating bigotries aroused, as PICTURE TO PROVIDE STARK, Rupert Nacoste poetically labels the lenses that cloud our This is where art, as the mirror on ourselves and the world, views and threaten to distance us from each other.1 This is a enters the picture to provide stark, truthful, loving, humorous, HUMOROUS, LOVING, TRUTHFUL, moment for really looking in mirrors, for both moral (think the and tragic reflections. Because we live in a splintered human events of August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia) and landscape, we need spaces (dare we call them “safe” TRUTHFUL, LOVING, HUMOROUS, more pragmatic reasons (think about the diversity explosion spaces?) in which we can bring to the surface for shared documented by demographer William Frey, which will turn examination what hibernates within us, destroying the clarity REFLECTIONS. TRAGIC AND this country into a majority nonwhite one by mid-century,2 of our view of humanity and obscuring its faces of possibility. and all the babies who now defy all-too-persistent categories We need voices, even those dismissed by some as merely AND TRAGIC REFLECTIONS. of divided identity). Think about bathroom laws, travel bans, “politically correct,” that grab our attention and shake us from and more. We could play with, enjoy, and expand upon our complacency, demanding that we center questions of racism richly fluid, intersectional social identity map if we were to and sexism, xenophobia and heteronormativity, inequality look in the many mirrors around us—and yet we persist in and disenfranchisement, and that we confront fears of caving to simple, reductionist dividing lines. These only displacement that breed bitter conflict. These necessary serve to intensify what Charles Tilly has called “durable questions are too often buried in the course of our more inequalities,”3 building upon centuries of subjugation of regular “work” even as they relentlessly tear the social fabric indigenous peoples and the long tail of the legacy of of our universities, communities, nation, and world. how we can use such spaces to amplify challenging, hauntingly like our own, as well as to those we must work slavery. This all-too-facile national racist narrative is now desperately needed voices in times like these. Art can be hard to parse or even imagine inhabiting. This challenge, expanded by a resurgence of religious nationalism, We need spaces and voices that question whether we are disruptive, compelling us to see others not as we expect after all, is what living in a diverse democracy is all about. given contemporary color by the equation of Islam with truly a land of opportunity and e pluribus unum—whether them to be, but as they might want to be seen. The Although this work can feel difficult and long, especially now, extremism and immigration more generally with the loss “we can tolerate when “one out of many” doesn’t look like breathtakingly diverse visual languages of the works it is the only way in which to forge more just and equitable of an “American” (white, Christian) identity, as Robert Jones Barbie and Ken holding hands. Such spaces and voices included in this exhibition call us to listen empathetically communities together. sums our current hysteria.4 “must have authenticity, must be grounded, embedded, and to voices that speak in familiar tones, telling us tales organically grown out of both history and culture. They must Though we urgently need to forge some kind of unity by occur within communities: not sheltered by the ivory tower Footnotes truly looking in those mirrors that we have refused to see but rather connecting that world, our world, to a social and honestly—mirrors of the real past, the evolving present, and physical geography beyond ourselves. 1. Rupert Nacoste, Taking on Diversity: How We Can Move from Anxiety to 3. Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, Respect (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2015), 160. 1998). the possible future—today’s unity will have to come without 2. William Frey, “The ‘Diversity Explosion’ is America’s Twenty-first-Century 4. Robert P. Jones, “The Collapse of American Identity,” The Times, the common refrain of a “melting-pot America,” and absent The Paul Robeson Galleries at Express Newark—indeed, Baby Boom,” in Our Compelling Interests: The Value of Diversity for May 2, 2017. calls for assimilation to whiteness, a dominant faith, culture, Express Newark itself—were created with precisely these Democracy and a Prosperous Society, eds. Nancy Cantor and Earl Lewis 5. Eboo Patel, “Religious Diversity and the American Promise,” in Our 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 16–35. language, or sexuality. Who will be the change-makers to aims in mind. Mirror, Mirror exemplifies this mission, showing Compelling Interests vol. 3, eds. Nancy Cantor and Earl Lewis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

6 7 I SEE YOU

Victor Davson and Anne Englot, co-directors, Express Newark

irror Mirror is the first major exhibition of contemporary lived experiences and knowing each other’s authentic selves. Mart presented by the Paul Robeson Galleries at This is perhaps why the arts function so well as a mirror: Express Newark. This signal moment prompts two questions: training both eye and mind forces the visual artist to perceive What is the role of a contemporary art gallery in Express beyond cultural constructs. The creative act predisposes the Newark, a third-space collaboration between Rutgers artist to be open to new experiences and to empathize with University–Newark and the larger Newark arts community? that which is perceived as “other.” Often, such alterity is And, what does it mean to have a portraiture exhibition in embodied in the work itself. a space of engaged scholarship and social practice? And so, what does it mean to have a portraiture exhibition in Express Newark is a site for engagement between the such a space of engaged scholarship? Mirror Mirror curator diverse communities of Newark and faculty, staff, and Anonda Bell casts a generous and expansive net, gathering students at Rutgers University–Newark. Newark is artists who approach portraiture from diverse perspectives. characterized as a black and brown city (52 percent black “I see you” is a colloquialism that has come to mean “I and 36 percent Latino) and Rutgers University–Newark understand what you are saying,” and “I know where you are is perennially cited as having the most diverse student coming from.” Morrison finds this empathetic capacity in the population in the nation: a rich demographic that forecasts Africans portrayed in Camara Laye’s book The Radiance of the future of the . the King. The ability to see is contrasted with the worldview of the “other” in Laye’s story: a colonializing, white European. It is therefore critical that the work of the Paul Robeson Laye’s narrative is significant for Morrison because it flips the Galleries responds to the enriching and, in the words of familiar script that paints people of color as “other.” For Toni Morrison, “destabilizing pressures and forces of the Newark viewers, it may be easy to identify with Laye’s insight: transglobal,”1 diasporic histories relevant to Newark’s current in our city, white people are in fact the minority, the “other,” collective cultural moment. This moment raises questions and yet maintain a disproportionate amount of power and about the notion of race itself—about America’s continuous control. Morrison holds a mirror up in order to reflect that preoccupation with and fetishizing of skin color, and the flipping the usual script is profoundly important in this cultural implications of this collective obsession on who does and and political moment. We hope that Mirror Mirror raises the does not participate in full citizenship. consciousness of all its viewers and fosters a more mindful and nuanced way in which to see our own humanity in others. In creating a portrait, artist and subject typically collaborate to construct an image. The artist’s interior landscape or “theory,” On behalf of Express Newark we would like to thank our as Einstein termed it, is brought to bear on the image of the funders for their commitment to the city of Newark. We sitter. Mirror Mirror seeks to expand our theories so we can are proudly sponsored by Prudential Financial, the PSEG better see the “other.” However, embracing one another goes Foundation, Bank of America, Panasonic, the Kresge Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, America is Black installation at the Paul Robeson Galleries, 2018, wheat paste installation, dimension variable beyond visual literacy, image, and text to encompass shared Foundation, and L+M Development Partners.

1. Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) 109.

8 9 SOME WILL NOT RECOGNIZE THE

TRUTHFULNESS OF MY MIRROR.

LET THEM REMEMBER THAT I AM

NOT HERE TO REFLECT THE SURFACE

(THIS CAN BE DONE BY A PHOTOGRAPHIC

PLATE), BUT I MUST PENETRATE

INSIDE. MY MIRROR PROBES DOWN

TO THE HEART. I WRITE WORDS ON THE

FOREHEAD AND ROUND THE CORNERS

OF THE MOUTH, MY HUMAN FACES

ARE TRUER THAN REAL ONES.

PAUL KLEE E.V. Day, Mummified Barbie (DAY-0115), 2007, yellow beeswax, twine, Barbie doll, glitter GERMAN ARTIST (1879-1940)

10 11 SOME WILL NOT RECOGNIZE THE THE RECOGNIZE NOT WILL SOME ACKNOWLEDGMENTS MIRROR. MY OF TRUTHFULNESS

AM I THAT REMEMBER THEM LET

SURFACE THE REFLECT TO HERE NOT

(THIS CAN BE DONE BY A PHOTOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHIC A BY DONE BE CAN (THIS 25,000-year-old small fragment head made from ivory Choi, Bryant Lebron, Jacqueline Mabey, Kristen Owens, and A is thought to be the oldest portrait. While it is known as Joseph Sabatino. Thanks to Archana Kushe of Chiaroscura PENETRATE MUST I BUT PLATE), the Venus of Brassempouy, the face is actually androgynous, Design Studio for her elegant exhibition design. Thanks to and its original use remains a mystery. Since that time, James Wawrzewski of Ludow6 for his inventive catalog portraits have appeared on currency, stamps, medals, and of design. Keary Rosen, Founding Director of Form Studio at DOWN PROBES MIRROR MY INSIDE. course artworks. A consistent and unwavering impulse to Express Newark, has been an invaluable help with represent oneself, or to create a likeness of someone else, production of exhibition elements. Thanks also to our TO THE HEART. I WRITE WORDS ON THE THE ON WORDS WRITE I HEART. THE TO has prompted artists to continue to explore innovative ways lenders: Bank of America Art Collection, The Brodsky Center to do just that. I would like to thank the artists in this for Innovative Editions, , Laura & Larry exhibition for making work which challenges, delights, Gerber, Cavin-Morris Gallery, Jarvis Dooney Galerie, Murray FOREHEAD AND ROUND THE CORNERS CORNERS THE ROUND AND FOREHEAD repulses, and enthralls: Manuel Acevedo, Zoë Charlton, Guy, Hosfelt Gallery, Steven Kasher Gallery, Ryan Lee Paolo Cirio, , Kevin Darmanie, E.V. Day, Gallery, Carolina Nitsch, P.P.O.W Gallery, Michael Reid Leah DeVun, Nona Faustine, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Anne- Gallery, and Julie Saul Gallery. FACES HUMAN MY MOUTH, THE OF Karin Furunes, Phyllis Galembo, , William Kentridge, Riva Lehrer, Ani Liu, Jessamyn Lovell, Hyphen- At times such as these, financial support is particularly Labs (Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Ece Tankal & Ashley precious and scarce, and a number of organizations and ARE TRUER THAN REAL ONES. REAL THAN TRUER ARE Baccus), Peggie Miller, Anna Ogier-Bloomer, Polixeni individuals have provided this for the Paul Robeson Papapetrou, Patricia Piccinini, Wendy Red Star, Faith Galleries. Within the university, particular recognition has to Ringgold, Kevin Blythe Sampson, María Verónica San Martín, be given to Express Newark, the Rutgers University - Newark Dread Scott , Leo Selvaggio, Laura Splan, Beat Streuli, Arne Chancellors Office, the Robeson Campus Center, and the Svenson, Shoshanna Weinberger, Deborah Willis and Martha Cultural Programming Committee. Our programs also . Their work, combined with catalog contributions receive significant support from the Geraldine R. Dodge from Susan Bright, Amanda Cachia, Nancy Cantor, Victor Foundation and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/ Davson, Anne Englot, Peter Englot, , Nell Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Painter, Dorothy Santos, Jay Stanley, Jorge Daniel Endowment for the Arts. Veneciano, Carla Christopher Waid, and Anne Swartz enhance our understanding of the complexities of the Thank you to these individuals and organizations— without subject, with each writer coming from a unique perspective. your support there would quite literally be no exhibition.

I would like to thank the gallery staff as without their efforts Anonda Bell this exhibition would not have been possible: Caren King Director & Chief Curator

KLEE PAUL GERMAN ARTIST (1879-1940) ARTIST GERMAN

12 13 PAST NOW FOREVER

Anonda Bell

History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely In this exhibition, though, the motives for creating portraits are Wendy Red Star, Indian Woman (untitled) from the something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even far more diverse—not simply the impulse of a child, nor the series Grandmothers (I Come As One But I Stand principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of lionization of a wealthy patron—and the matter of both artist Unknown, Venus of Brassempouy, Anne-Karin Furunes, Of Faces X (Portraits As Ten Thousand), 2016, mirror, digital images circa. 22,000 B.C., ivory, 1 1/3” x ¾” x 7/8”, of Archive Pictures) (detail), sourced from the Richard Throssel papers history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are and subject’s agency is of utmost importance. Many of these Collection of the Musée d’Archéology, 2016, acrylic on canvas, perforated at the American Heritage Center, University of unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history portraits are created from a boldly subjective point of view, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France Wyoming and printed on photo tex is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be and an inherent empathy stems from this genesis. Diversity otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames emerges when portraiture is democratized, intentionally of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. servicing and representing everyone rather than an elite need to forensically document a specimen was of less this inhumane project was to create a master race of people —James Baldwin (1924-1987)1 few. In our age of shared data, visibility of a varied array interest to artists who instead wanted to create portraits that without “criminals,” “Jews,” and “gypsies,” all of whom feature of individuals has become commonplace. With this comes reflected ideas about the self and unique lived experiences. in these archival photographs. People were documented the possibility of greater awareness, leading to increased not to remember, but to forget—a mechanism of intentional understanding, and ultimately, hopefully, compassion. However, in the very early stages of photography, portraits obliteration. Furunes’s portraiture process imbues the sitter s we read in the words of American writer and activist played a pivotal role in social agendas that were much with a dignity that they were denied in life, and at the same AJames Baldwin, the forces that govern our lives are not A mirror is a reflective surface, but the image it shows is less inclusive, and documentation of “types” of people time acknowledges that her subject will forever remain always visible on the surface. In fact, much of life unfolds as reversed: automatic distortion is part of the mechanical was instrumental in the maintenance of hegemonic systems anonymous. Of Faces X (Portraits of Archive Pictures)(2016) a conflation of predetermined historic, genetic, geographic, process. The inaccuracy is blatant and obvious. The that served few at the expense of many. is a monumental of an unknown young boy. His and social conditions, modified by an unpredictable mix of metaphor of going through a looking glass indicates a beseeching seeks the attention of the viewer. His individual tenacity, chance, and opportunity. If we work voluntary journey to an unknown place of intrigue, not PAST expression is one of despair, his fate confirmed by the fact under the premise that art has the ability to be both passive unlike the experiences of this exhibition’s viewers. The Eugenics is a quasi-scientific practice related to “improving” that he does not embody Scandinavian physical ideals. (reflecting the current state of things) and active (having an works included reference the known world, but their any given human population through selective breeding. The Furunes’s technique of hand-perforating the canvas makes impact on the world at large), an examination of artists and creators have shifted the emphasis away from dominant intention is to encourage reproduction in types of people who it impossible for viewers to fix their gaze on the portrait, which their inspirations will tell us much about how our society forces to reveal new perspectives. Mirrors only became are considered favorable, while simultaneously diminishing is as much absent as present. Here, Furunes reintroduces functions. A portrait is one of the most enduring and commonplace recently, in the nineteenth century, due to the reproduction of “undesirable” types. Coined by English just one of thousands of forgotten boys, drawing attention essential art forms, having a constant presence throughout scientific discoveries relating to the application of chemicals mathematician and scientist Francis Galton in 1883, eugenics to the very human cost of eugenics. art history from all parts of the world. In its most abbreviated to glass. Prior to this, their high cost made them accessible gained wide popularity in the wake of Charles Darwin’s form, it is a depiction of a person—usually a face, only to the wealthy. Many people lived without knowing writings on the concept of evolution, and the possibility of Anthropologists were also early and keen adopters of photo occasionally a torso, sometimes more of the body—or what they actually looked like—something that is almost creating a new and superior species. In subsequent decades technology. Images provided them a means by which to even a symbolic presentation of an aspect of an individual’s incomprehensible in our current age in which, on average, and across multiple continents, institutes sprang up dedicated convey information with all the implied “truthfulness” of character. One of the first impulses a child has is to crudely more than ninety-three million selfies are made each day, to the study and implementation of eugenic principles. In the history of the photograph. Their aim to document and construct a basic portrait of themselves with only lines and and excessive taking of selfies is a recognized medical 1922, one such venue, the State Institute for Racial Biology, classify people “discovered” in global exploration led to a circle. In the grander historical and social scheme of art, condition.2 Around the same time, the discovery and was established at a Swedish university and subsequently many portraits, capturing and colonizing the “other” through portraiture has been utilized in service of those who are development of photography allowed more people to produced an archive of photographs of its subjects. Artist visual classification systems. Wendy Red Star, a Native wealthy and powerful: only a select few have been in a document themselves, their families, and their communities. Anne-Karin Furunes came across these images in 2005, American artist of Crow descent, deals with this history in position to be immortalized in this way. In this scenario, Carte de visite (photographic cards) were de rigueur, and and was both horrified and intrigued by their existence. In a her work, commenting, “As a brown person, as a brown artists have acted merely as facilitators of others’ desires, these portraits facilitated a form of aspirational realism bleak period of Swedish history, from 1935 until about 1975, artist, your work is political.”3 In two pieces from her series and the resulting commissioned representations record in the Victorian parlors of the 1850s. The growth of approximately 63,000 people were involuntarily sterilized, Grandmothers (I Come As One But I Stand As Ten Thousand), the subject in the most flattering light. photography, with its purported supreme objectivity, their genes efficiently removed from the pool. The goal of Red Star forms a distant collaboration between herself made room for portraiture to exist in other ways. The

14 15 insightfully observed, “I wake up each morning in a within this six-acre site, that the geographic hub of [the White House] that was built by slaves”.6 Her this country’s financial center literally rests on the bodies of proclamation of this simple fact triggered widespread the enslaved. consideration of the ways in which many of this country’s formal governing institutions exist on contested territory. In 1815, around two hundred years before Faustine’s defiant Did the process of constructing the supposedly democratic actions, and after a short, miserable lifetime in which she United States occur through activities that contravene not was treated as a specimen of both scientific and cultural only the ideals on which this country is formed, but in many intrigue, Sarah Baartman died. Of Khoisan heritage and cases fundamental, universal human rights? In her series born in Southwestern Africa, while technically not enslaved, White Shoes, Faustine takes her viewer on a bleak and twenty-year-old Baartman was taken to England by two men nuanced journey through American history, a lesser-known who were the first in a series to quite literally treat her like path revealing truths many have sought to hide. In Over My an animal. Known pejoratively as the “Venus of Hottentot,” Dead Body (2016), the artist ascends the stairs of a prominent Baartman did not find respite even in death: her brain, neoclassical government building, Tweed Courthouse, in skeleton, and genitalia, as well as a plaster cast of her body, Tournachon, Adrien, Astonishment (Electro– Lower Manhattan, nude except for a pair of white high- were displayed in a natural history museum until forced Physiologie, Figure 64) from Mechanics of Human heeled shoes. In Faustine’s left hand, she holds a pair of repatriation to South Africa in 2002. Artists Zoë Charlton and Physiognomy by Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne, 1862, Albumen silver print Laura Splan, Manifest (Blink Twice), 2015, Nona Faustine, Over My Dead Body from the series shackles, a metal device commonly used to hold prisoners’ Shoshanna Weinberger pay homage to Baartman, creating from glass negative, Image: 29.8 x 22.3 cm (11 3/4 x laser sintered polyamide nylon White Shoes, 2013, digital chromogenic print and slaves’ wrists or ankles together, rendering the wearer works that expose the ubiquitous and degrading levels of 8 3/4 in.), Mount: 40.1 x 28.5 cm (15 13/16 x 11 1/4 in.) powerless. The image gives its viewer the impression of sexism and racism that impacted Baartman’s life. Weinberger defiance—we imagine that, having removed her shackles, does so through hyper-exaggeration, unapologetically and twentieth-century photographer Richard Throssel— external appearance provides clues about their Faustine is returning to the courthouse to demand essentializing the female body to show the construction an imagined correspondence stretched over generations temperament. This type of research has existed since accountability. Tweed Courthouse is rapturously described of the Venus character by reducing personhood and and lives that did not intersect. Around 1911, Throssel ancient times, but rose to prominence in the Victorian era on a historic register as “one of the city’s grandest and most individuality to a set of body parts and sexualized gestures. commenced an ambitious project to take photos of the Crow alongside the rise of eugenics. Laura Splan engages this important civic monuments.”7 It is named after the corrupt For those who sought entertainment and scientific tribe. Being of Cree descent, he was trusted and adopted as old pseudo-science in conjunction with new technology in politician William “Boss” Tweed, who was widely known for advancement at the expense of Baartman’s humanity, this part of the community, providing him with a rare access to the series Manifest. Described by the artist as “data driven ruthless syphoning of government funds to enhance his own series of racialized traits was all she could ever be. Genitalia the daily lives of his subjects. Red Star sees in Throssel’s ,” each form reflects an emotion enacted by lifestyle. What is less well known is that this structure, the allusions abound in Weinberger’s images, reflecting the work “glimpses of [his subjects’] personalities, and a real Splan; the resulting sculptures represent captured adjacent city hall, and many other buildings in the precinct still-pervasive obsession with the supposedly rampant feeling of kinship” that inspired her to appropriate his photos expressions ranging from smiling to frowning. Unlike the are built on slave burial grounds. It is estimated that there sexuality located in all female, and especially black, bodies. into her own work. Juxtaposing his portraits against mirrored forced participation of subjects in eugenic and physiognomic could potentially be ten- to twenty-thousand bodies buried Charlton uses a different strategy, forcing the viewer to backgrounds, Red Star invites the viewer into the frame; we scientific experiments, Splan’s participation in this project literally cannot be near these works without being implicated was entirely self-determined: sculptures representing in the image. Unlike peer photographers such as Edward S. “furrow,” “double blink,” and “swallow” were created Curtis, Throssel did not see tribespeople as noble savages.4 under conditions established by the artist. As is typical of Through his lens we have respectful depictions of powerful much of Splan’s oeuvre, the work hovers in a liminal zone women in a matriarchal society. Red Star, by extension, between science and art. Unlike Duchenne de Boulogne’s invites us into her contemporary world, providing us photographs, Splan’s work references science and art with opportune moments to see the history of her people through elegant, calmly beautiful objects rather than through her eyes. with the tortured distortion of an unwilling participant.

In 1855, French neurophysiologist Guillaume Benjamin Nona Faustine, like Splan, uses her own body as a tool for Amand Duchenne de Boulogne published one of the creative expression. Working with an awareness of what first scientific texts illustrated with photographs, which took it means to be black and female in a culture specifically as its subject the physiology of human emotion.5 In the engineered to support white men, Faustine makes no photographs of facial expressions, Duchenne de Boulogne apologies for literally inserting herself into the front and sought to make visible the connection between internal center of spaces that have historically excluded or states and their external expressions. As part of his process, oppressed bodies like hers. Faustine understands race he attached electrodes to multiple parts of his subjects’ as a social construct rather than as skin pigmentation; she faces and used electrical currents to stimulate various uses her body as a medium in her work to show its shifting muscle groups. His research is located within broader significations in historical and culturally important spaces. Zoë Charlton, Be Sarah, 2011, still from single-channel projection Shoshanna Weinberger, Addendum (detail), 2017, ink and gouache on paper studies of physiognomy, which proposes that a person’s In 2016, then-first lady of the United States

16 17 Eurocentric, but eternally youthful, with flawless, pale skin, In 1940, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark devised straight hair, symmetrical features, and an exceptionally thin a simple study to examine the psychological effects of frame). Martha Wilson addresses this in her work I Make Up segregation on African-American children. Colloquially the Image of My Perfection / I Make Up the Image of My known as the “Doll Test,” the study asked children to make Deformity (2007), in which she creates and documents two a series of selections to identify dolls they believed to be versions of her face, one beautiful, the other not. Wilson is more beautiful. Dolls with white skin were usually preferred, interested in the conceptual distortion that occurs when we and children equated the dolls that were “pretty” with being can never actually see ourselves as others do. Women are “good,” while “” dolls were considered “bad.” The Clarks subconsciously trained from birth to focus on a myriad of drew conclusions about the negative influence of this on perceived imperfections. Markets rely on continuous the development of self-esteem for black children. They consumption of “cures” for such benign conditions as large determined that, by the age of three years old, children pores, dull hair, and under-eye circles. Industries are geared understood that they did not match generally accepted to tap into and exploit fears about appearance, creating and widely perpetuated ideas of “goodness,” paving the consumers. Makeup is a multibillion-dollar industry in the way for a lifetime of feeling inferior. United States. The power and wealth of this industry is used to strategically populate our collective consciousness Hyphen-labs is an artist collective that directly addresses E.V. Day, Mummified Barbie (DAY-0115) (detail), 2010, Martha Wilson, I Make Up the Image of My Deborah Willis, Carrie at the Euro Salon (detail), with images most conducive to expediting unnecessary such internalized and institutionalized forms of racism Barbie doll, beeswax, twine, silver glitter Perfection / I Make Up the Image of My Deformity 2010, digital chromogenic print retail expenditures. through their NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (NSAF) (detail) from the portfolio Femfolio, 2007, digital print on Somerset Enhanced Velvet paper NeuroCosmetology lab. With backgrounds in engineering, Deborah Willis locates her work Carrie at the Euro Salon biology, and architecture, core members Carmen Aguilar y (2010) in a place geared for transformation. We see the artist Wedge, Ashley Baccus, and Ece Tankal design products, embody the Hottentot character onstage. Through Barbie doll, an ageless girl who is, in fact, almost seventy seated in a salon chair, inspecting herself both real and speculative, and create inclusive virtual-reality Charlton’s work we gain some understanding of the extreme years old. In 1959, Barbie was first produced as a light- in a hand mirror. She is deliberately styled to look like Zora experiences. Concerned with the paucity of positive debasement and humiliation of being made to perform. skinned, slim, blonde doll whose feet were permanently Neale Hurston, a renowned writer and anthropologist who representations of women with black and brown skin, We experience the audience’s simultaneous indifference distorted to conform to high-heeled shoes. Over the lived in Eatonville and used the town as her muse for a Hyphen-Labs imagines a quirky, sci-fi inspired virtual reality. and fascination as we appear naked and exposed before decades, and with calculated precision, she has undergone lifetime of writing. Eatonville was one of the first self- Participants experience a future world in which dominant them. Charlton’s work is about both looking and being: such various evolutions, expanding her interests, wardrobe, governing all-black municipalities in the United States. paradigms have shifted and expanded to include a shift in subjectivity may be eye-opening for viewers who country of origin, and career. What remains constant through Both Weems and Willis are invested in “creating a space a greater array of desirable ways of existing. Hyphen-Labs’ had never considered what it was like, “Being Sarah.” these transformations is her unattainable body proportions, in which black women are looking back.”8 Unlike historical sharp-witted aesthetics stem from lived experiences as and, accordingly, any indication that Barbie might represent representations of black women, most of which were women of color. The products in their salon imagine drawing Notions of beauty and attractiveness are both personally an actually existing person. In her work, Day wraps, produced under an unequal power dynamic between on technology to optimize brain capacity, or to deflect a and culturally defined. Sometimes, underlying assumptions enshrouds, deforms, and disfigures Barbie’s eternally subject and artist, the creation of this image was consensual, malicious gaze by donning an über-cool reflective visor. and the pretexts on which they are based are so embedded unobtainable frame. Research has shown a more a collaboration between friends and peers. Willis’s Not all the products are charming: some deal with the into the prevailing culture that they deceptively appear to widespread backlash against such oppressive perfectionism; photograph vibrates with reflections and distortions as grim reality of the present day. For example, an earring reflect a naturally occurring order. In the United States, ideas gleeful destruction of once-beloved Barbie dolls—by images embedded within images bounce through space is embedded with a hidden camera to be activated by the about beauty have been heavily influenced by European means including anything from decapitation to pulverization and across mirrored surfaces. Through the eye of the wearer during hostile police encounters. Occasional culture, and specifically an underlying ideal (that parallels in a blender—is now a recognized stage of adolescent photographer, we are present in the salon. Notions of truth collaborator Adam Harvey offers his Hyperface scarf for other societal norms) favoring certain races of people over development. The underlying impulses of such a are artfully challenged through the simultaneous, and sale in the salon: the garment is printed with 1,200 pixelated others. A cursory review of portraits in venerable institutions disfigurement can be interpreted two ways: optimistically, sometimes contradictory, perspectives afforded by this faces that initially read as an abstract pattern, but, in reality, in the United States and Europe reveals what characteristics killing Barbie could signify the child’s progression to more complex composition. It is an apt metaphor for how our are strategically designed to confuse facial-recognition are considered beautiful and desirable—judgments that diverse ideas about beauty. Less optimistically, the mutilation identities are constructed within our own minds and in software. The scarf serves as a form of camouflage, have been cemented by careful acquisitions in prestigious, of this cultural symbol of femininity evidences a profound society at large. Willis was inspired by the idea of “reflection protecting its wearer from ever-present surveillance. visible collections. That which does not meet these criteria and pervasive . and looking for not only self-approval, but also the idea of simply does not exist on the formal cultural record. Only women embracing their own beauty.” As a black woman Social media giant Facebook undoubtedly has the largest in recent times have some museums attempted to redress NOW who spent many of her younger years at salons like this, collection of photographic portraits to ever exist. The this imbalance, deliberately seeking out representations The schism between an imagined/desired face and one’s Willis shares her own history with Weems and the viewer. company has built increasingly sophisticated facial- of people who are not white and privileged. actual appearance can be a source of much discontent. She presents the informal, women-centric community that recognition software, drawing on its ever-expanding Popular culture bombards us with artificially enhanced and flourishes within such venues. Despite the affirmative database of portraits voluntarily gifted by its users. This With tongue planted firmly in cheek, E.V. Day has created an impossible, seductive images. This widely broadcasted aspects of the photograph, restrictive beauty norms remain: database is invaluable; as social media becomes even more open-ended series of sculptural works she calls Mummified version of beauty is defined with such a narrow scope that the name of the store suggests aspirational ideals relating commonplace, it will serve as a longitudinal study providing Barbies. The character at the core of these works is the it reflects the reality of nearly no one (one must not only be to European ideas of what is “beautiful.” evidence about how faces age. Applications of this software

18 19 work Obscurity (2016). The artist created a website mimicking In 2003, such tensions escalated into a horrific hate crime mug-shot sites, but instead of recognizable images, the in the city of Newark, New Jersey. Fifteen-year-old Sakia faces are obfuscated and data is scrambled. Of this work, Gunn was returning home from an evening with friends in he states, “When data is technically indestructible, Manhattan. While she waited for a bus, she was accosted obfuscation might be the .” Cirio’s website acts by a group of men who propositioned her. Refusing their as a decoy, moving traffic away from opportunistic sites to advances, Gunn revealed that she was a lesbian. Within a dead end where the blurred portraits identify no one at all. moments, one of the men stabbed Gunn; she died of a knife wound inflicted by a man who was apparently so deeply Speaking freely is a constitutional right in the United States. offended by her sexual orientation—and its exclusion of his The right to speak up often stems from a desire to live in a desire—that he felt the need to inflict grievous bodily harm. better world, to focus attention on inequities, and to propose It was within this troubling environment that self-identified inclusive alternatives. By virtue of making ideas visible, butch lesbian Peggie Miller courageously created the project artists fulfill an activist agenda and assume the mantle of New Millennium Butch. Within our society, there are very few being agents for change. With a heightened sensitivity to places in which what Miller calls “aggressive females” are the mechanisms of society, ideas for work can sourced visible or celebrated in any way. Violence against women from daily difficulties. For example, simply walking down who choose not to enact stereotypical versions of femininity

Leo Selvaggio, URME Surveillance: Demipanoptiversal installation Jessamyn Lovell, Stake Out (detail) from the series the street may bring to the fore unacceptable behaviors is common. Discrimination on such grounds is permissible in view at Paul Robeson Galleries, 2018, lightstands, sandbags, Dear Erin Hart, 2013, archival inkjet print that need to be collectively addressed. Tatyana Fazlalizadeh many parts of the country, a reality that became increasingly convex security mirrors, URME Surveillance Prosthetic created an open-ended series of commercially printed obvious during the battle for same-sex marriage. The New posters that she puts up in public areas, called Stop Telling Millennium Butch community is constituted of more than vary, from the seemingly harmless (tagging people in online Interestingly, at the same time the artist was compelled Women To Smile (2012–present). Fazlalizadeh is interested twenty butch women of color. To bring attention to her snapshots) to crime prevention (assessing the criminal to prove to law enforcement that she was not the criminal, in defiance rather than compliance, knowing a true smile peers, Miller has organized fashion shows, photo shoots, potential that some believe might be revealed in a face). she was developing an involuntary empathy for her subject. comes from a place of happiness, not an instruction to and events, and regularly supports artists, designers, and As with all technology, the algorithms used are not neutral Both she and Hart had come from lower socioeconomic perform. Such a demand is antagonistic, disrespectfully singing groups. Miller understands that from increased or transparent. Programs are mainly developed using data backgrounds, with family situations that were less than relegating the female to a submissive position wherein she visibility comes the potential to educate, and attempts to sets of white faces as the default, and have been criticized for ideal. The resulting artwork is a deliberately haphazard affair exists to validate and conform to the intentions of a male expand public recognition of gender as a spectrum of their fallibility in recognizing different ethnicities.9 In response, consisting of surreptitious photographs taken at odd angles, catcaller or harasser. This demand is but one of a number of possibilities rather than a binary concept. artist Leo Selvaggio created a “Personal Surveillance Identity identity cards with mismatched names and portraits, and, actions that create a hostile public environment for women— Prosthetic URME,” users of which can choose to elude finally, a letter written to Hart by the artist. This document an environment of external tensions which constantly In a moment of unexpected realization at ’s recognition. Selvaggio’s strategy affords users freedom from remains unopened. It is a sign of the ambivalence the artist reinforce women’s objectification as sexualized beings, Mutter Museum, while peering at glass jars of late-term surveillance by proffering someone else’s identity rather than feels toward the woman who stole her identity, and a rarely under the framework of their own desire or agency. human fetuses, artist Riva Lehrer thought, “I have never their own. Every time you walk down the street in a major US passive attempt to directly address Hart should she ever city, you are captured from multiple angles by all kinds of encounter Lovell’s homage to her actions. cameras. In 2014, an estimated four billion hours of this type of footage was shot each week. For only $200, anyone can The word “mug” comes from an English slang word for purchase a highly realistic, three-dimensional photo-printed the face. “Mug shots” have come to refer to the practice mask of Selvaggio’s face from the artist’s website. How the of capturing the faces of people who have been arrested. user chooses to act when they “become Leo” is up to them: These images are readily available online, and considered whether charitable, upstanding, or illegal. to be part of the public sphere. Techno-opportunists swoop in on these portraits, and a number of websites house While Selvaggio’s surrogate portrait artwork is entirely databases of mug shots with names, photos, and details of voluntary, instances of identity theft continue to rise. Artist arrests. A disclaimer on one such site states that included Jessamyn Lovell experienced this when her wallet was mug shots are “not evidence that an actual crime has been stolen in 2009. The perpetrator, a woman named Erin Hart, committed.”10 Regardless, inclusion on such a website can assumed Lovell’s identity to engage in low-level illicit have an extremely negative impact on an individual’s life. activities. Lovell became aware of these actions only when This form of cyber trail can haunt a person’s future attempts she was accused of crimes she did not commit. In order to look for work, find housing, and build a life. The only to identify the perpetrator, she hired a private investigator way to delete such a record is to pay to have the portrait to gather data. Together, they followed and documented removed, which can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars Paolo Cirio, Mugshots.com N.1 (detail) from the series Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Stop Telling Women To Smile (detail), 2018, Hart on the day she was released from prison; this process depending on how widely the image has been disseminated. Obscurity, 2016, archival inkjet print wheat paste installation, dimension variable formed the basis of Lovell’s work Dear Erin Hart, (2011). Paolo Cirio took this injustice as the starting point for his

20 21 seen what I looked like on the day I was born.” A particular levels in the general population. Artist Dread Scott states, fetus on view showed early signs of bulging in its spinal “My art is part of forging a radically different world”—a world cord; Lehrer has lived a lifetime with spina bifida. Lack of in which such racialized incarceration would no longer exist. visibility at all stages of life for people whose bodies do Scott’s work Wanted (2014) takes the form of a street art not conform to standards of “normalcy” inspired Lehrer to project. Working with collaborator Kevin Blythe Sampson, commit her artistic practice to redressing this imbalance. the artist created a series of posters that depict youths Lehrer’s work represents “exquisite” bodies that have “wanted” not by authorities “dead or alive,” as the cruel historically been labeled “disabled” within a society of colloquialism states, but decidedly alive and safe by their prevalent ableism. In a climate of ubiquitous prejudice in family and friends. The mass incarceration of youth has a favor of able-bodied people, those whose bodies deviate profoundly negative long-term impact on both individual are relegated to invisibility. A survey of popular cultural lives and entire communities. Deprived of traditional representations reveals few artworks or images that educations and with marks on their permanent records, reference disabled bodies. In existing contemporary formerly incarcerated individuals are limited from access representations, disabled bodies are most often defined to future opportunities. At the height of their social by what they are not. In her many portraits of herself and development, they are forced to navigate an environment others who are redefining disability culture from within, more focused on disciplinary punishment and survival than Lehrer exhibits a profound sensitivity to her subjects. Each real reform and redemption. Scott’s posters imagine a better Dread Scott, Wanted, 2014, community based Kevin Blythe Sampson, Beulah’s Ball Gown work is the result of her sustained commitment to shedding world in which routine criminalization of certain types of project: offset prints, performance, video, website, (detail), 1997, mixed media inkjet prints, forums, community participants light on the reality of living with a disability. Her portraits young people is nonexistent, and instead communities and are unflinching, proud, and poised, often revealing intimate families can support, love, and enjoy the company of those details about people who have historically been hidden. who are currently behind bars. Through this work, Scott femininity. Her female characters are defiantly transgressive, examines and makes visible the prejudices openly assertively sexual, and unencumbered by social norms In 1865, the first illustrated wanted poster was disseminated concealed within the United States justice system. about how they are “supposed” to act. in an attempt to capture the assassins of President Abraham Lincoln. To this day, the FBI continues to issue illustrated The city of Newark is frequently defined in the national Unknown, Wanted Poster for the Assassination Like Ganesh, Kevin Darmanie explores the multiplicity of his of President Abraham Lincoln, Commissioned by wanted posters in their efforts to arrest and incarcerate media by crimes committed within the area. On July 28, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, 1865, cultural background though the lens of a character called criminals. The United States has only four and a half percent 1967, the cover of Life magazine featured a distressing 19”x 10”, Collection of Houghton Library, “Kedar,” who exudes confidence as he strides through life, Harvard University, United States of the world’s total population, but holds twenty-two percent image of a twelve-year-old boy, Joe Bass Jr., lying wounded belligerently relishing in the freedom afforded when you of the world’s prisoners. More than half of the country’s in the streets with the headline “Shooting War In The type of explicit, crime-focused coverage of the city has don’t care about what others think. Through the graphic incarcerated population consists of people who are brown, Streets—Newark: the Predictable Insurrection.” Bass was an continued to dominate the mainstream media. People who novel format, the viewer is witness to both internal and black, or Latino, in a remarkable disparity with demographic unintended target, and fortunately survived. However, this live in the city are demarcated by their proximity to crime, external states of being, able to literally read Kedar’s mind. and are subsequently dehumanized by this focus. During Few black or brown superheroes appear in the comic books his teenage years, Manuel Acevedo, growing up in a city available to Darmanie, who was born in the Caribbean and he describes as being on “the imminent edge of disaster,” moved to the US at the age of fourteen, or any other decided to create a photo essay of his lived experience. immigrant child. Finding one’s place in a new country Through his camera lens, the viewer enters into previously depends to some extent on looking at others to learn from hidden worlds. Acevedo’s intrepid traversing of the city led the ways they negotiated new terrain. Popular culture, and him to encounters with people from all walks of life. The so-called lowbrow forms, provide inroads to ideas and resulting images are humane, thrilling, and spontaneous information. Kedar is not only the superhero the artist wishes glimpses into the lives of real people, rather than he might have had, but a role model for others who see stereotyped crime scenes. Darmanie’s work and recognize themselves in it.

Storytelling can be a magical journey into the places we Oral traditions exist around the world, and are common want to exist. Creating characters provides an artist the means by which knowledge, art, myths, and cultural ideas ability to conjure alternative worlds where the rules of the are exchanged over generations. Because of the dominance lived world no longer apply. Born in the United States to of written history in Western countries, oral traditions often immigrant , Chitra Ganesh draws on her familial exist outside the mainstream, and are not registered heritage in India to explore ideas of female empowerment seriously in academic and canonical history books. and sexuality. She is interested in “the gaps in official history, Sometimes, stories and histories are shared when people Peggie Miller, Little J from the series New Millennium Riva Lehrer, 66 Degrees (detail), 2016, the open fields where history and myth meet.” In her work, gather, united by a common task, such as quilt-making. Faith Butch (detail), 2009, archival inkjet print acrylic on wood panel she addresses and reverses stereotypes of passive Ringgold Listen to the Trees (1997) documents such a history,

22 23 touching on both cultural and family traditions, issues of race our negative pasts. Kentridge frequently uses himself as a and gender, as well as travels in Europe and West Africa. character in his own work. Much of his practice is based on Ringgold’s grandmother was a slave who created quilts for portraits of himself or others, and his work can be read as a her white master; the artist’s mother was a fashion designer series of ritual actions within newly drawn worlds, in which who taught her to sew and imbued her with a sensitivity to poetic dramatizations of political and historical events unfold. textiles. Ringgold embraced these materials and techniques, incorporating them into her formal art practice by radically Kevin Blythe Sampson similarly draws on his immediate putting quilted borders around her . The environment not only as his subject, but as the sheer juxtaposition between taut canvas and whimsical cloth is substance of his work. Based in the Ironbound section of an apt metaphor for tensions between high and low, art Newark, his experience as an African American man anchors and craft, male and female. Ringgold’s practice challenges his work, which explores the multifaceted complexities of these prevailing schisms, which grant value and visibility identity. Beulah’s Ball Gown (1997) is an autobiographical, to some traditions while relegating others to the periphery, speculative self-portrait created after the death of Sampson’s and makes subversive use of materials with no formal wife. The name “Beulah” appears in American spirituals, recognition in Western art history. derived from a Hebrew word meaning “bride” or “married.” This figure is an embodiment of both male and female

South African artist William Kentridge shares common traits, manifesting Sampson’s responsibility to his children Faith Ringgold, Listen to the Trees (detail), 2012-2014, archival digital William Kentridge, Scribe 3, 2011, photogravure, drypoint, and burnishing ground with Ringgold: early exposure to the inequities of the to become both a mother and father figure.Beulah’s Ball inkjet, silkscreen, woodcut, and acrylic on Habotai silk prevailing political system inspired him to create work which Gown is made with materials found in Sampson’s immediate collapses existent boundaries between artistic disciplines. environment, which are subsumed into the ’s work records a traditional ritual performance, Gelede, which In these images, mothers stare directly into the camera, their Trained in both the visual and performing arts, Kentridge form with a democratic abandon, disregarding systems of has close connections to Yoruba culture. The nurturing spirit bodies partially concealed with the apparatus for nursing. uses his privileged background as part of a wealthy white classification and valuation. Traditional materials such as is not always a single entity, but encompasses all female One clutches nursing pads to prevent unwelcome spillage; family to speak against the inequalities that have benefited plaster, metal, and paint jostle with chicken bones, ancestors, instantiating a prayer to a life force that protects another poses in an undergarment with apertures specifically him. His most famous works are hand-drawn animations jewelry, and discarded toys. The sculpture is ultimately a crops, ensures fecundity and health, and maintains peace. designed to expose the nursing breast. Neither woman is created simply through a process of drawing and erasure, life-affirming celebration of creative potential. For over thirty years, Galembo has traveled around the imbued with a rosy glow. Instead, they look fed-up, tired, with scenes expanding and collapsing upon palimpsests of globe to document such masquerades. Through the and resigned to their immediate task. Neither looks happy— the images that came before. His process is an apt metaphor Phyllis Galembo takes her photographs in Benin, West masquerade, costumed people transcend the mortal world, more likely, they are exhausted and, in the moment, weary for the historical procession of life: circumstances of the past Africa, enacting an homage to maternal forces with mystical taking on hybrid identities that are both human and spirit. of their procreative destiny. Ogier-Bloomer’s photography inevitably impact the present day, despite all efforts to erase costumes made by the people who wear them. Galembo’s Their apparel is made with materials readily found, combined invites the viewer into her bathroom, in which all bodily fluids in ingenious and fantastical ways. The masquerade’s magic are transacted simultaneously. Her blunt vision is the reality occurs when the costumes are worn and the celebration of many mothers: a private moment alone to urinate is commences. Sometimes, figures embody multiple forces impossible when the universes of both mother and child in one, with children and animals incorporated into their revolve around the latter’s immediate needs. costumes. The costumes frequently serve educational means with moral messages such as, “You can’t buy David Antonio Cruz pays homage to his mother using the wisdom at the market,” and activist slogans on potentially instantly identifiable portrait of mother and child inPuerto life-threatening matters such as AIDS. The spirits performed Rican Pieta (2014). His composition echoes the Christian in these masquerades are always ones that nurture and narrative of Mary cradling the limp body of her dead son care for the welfare of others. Jesus, most famously rendered in Michelangelo’s iconic 1499 sculpture which today resides in the Vatican. As in Motherhood, as in the Gelede, is traditionally depicted as Michelangelo’s work, Cruz’s painting plays with various the ultimate creative act, and representations emphasize forms of weight, both physical and psychological: Cruz the beauty and majesty of maternity. Artists Leah DeVun considers the physical strain of an elderly woman partially and Anna Ogier-Bloomer seek to dispel the romanticized supporting the sheer heft of her son as he reclines on and harmful aspects of such myths, replacing these with a chaise, as well as the psychological weight that comes urgent and unsentimental images of motherhood in real-time. with the duty of caring for a vulnerable creature, utterly DeVun’s work focuses on the mechanics of breastfeeding. dependent on their mother for months—indeed, years—

Manuel Acevedo, Three Girls in Church Chitra Ganesh, Untitled from the portfolio Delicate Kevin Darmanie, Kedar: An Alien In Babylon (detail), Believed to be a natural process that all mothers should be of their early life. Cruz’s sensual strokes of paint play with from the series The Wards of Newark 1982-87 Line: Corpse She Was Holding (detail), 2010, monotype 2008, ink and ashcan on paper able to do, breastfeeding can instead become an act of skin tones that are deliberately harmonized to indicate (detail), 1986, gelatin silver prints and three-run silkscreen on Stonehenge paper frustration when the process does not evolve gracefully. shared sentiment between mother and offspring. His

24 25 overwhelming array of sparse portraits drawn from basic or the Garden of Eden, which threatens to protect, suffocate, records; it is literally impossible to grasp the magnitude of the or expel its inhabitants at any time. This layering of textures event from a single viewpoint. The artist brings the atrocities also acts as a form of vibrating camouflage. An intentional to a relatable level by including the names of disappeared degree of ambiguity exists between subject and individuals. Through this act, she hopes to keep awareness background, the photograph simultaneously depicting of the period alive, maintaining pressure on the people who and hiding the young women. were involved to facilitate in locating the missing. FOREVER Like portraiture, nature morte (dead nature, or, as it is Each human body is like a garden, a unique environment commonly known, still life), has been a popular genre of in which multitudes of microorganisms are born, reproduce, expression from the times of ancient Greece and Rome. Still and die. Rough estimates report that there may be as many, life has persisted in part due to its malleability as a subject, or even more, nonhuman cells as human ones on each always existing on two levels—one didactic and the other person. The combination of bacteria that exist in each symbolic. Many paintings made prior to the eighteenth individual body, called the microbiome, is as unique as century in the Netherlands are seductively beautiful; viewers a fingerprint. With this in mind, artist Ani Liu presents her continue to admire the artists’ technical dexterity in using “smelfies,” an ongoing series of artworks comprised of Phyllis Galembo, You Can’t Buy Wisdom at the Leah DeVun, Jennifer from the series Anna Ogier-Bloomer, Nursing and peeing, oil paint to create luminous surfaces through which light bacteria cultivated from various parts of her body and titled Market Benin (detail), 2006, Ilfochrome print In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (detail), Cincinnati, Ohio (detail), 2015, pigment inkjet print pulsates. In these works, flowers and food appear as Microbial We (2017-2018). Each specimen in her presentation 2016, archival inkjet print being beyond real, rendered with a heighted luster and has a unique olfactory presence. As we speculate a future compositional density that could not exist in reality. Polixeni of virtual reality facilitated by all manner of innovative subjects’ clothes, too, have a unified palette, but reference malleability of their existence.” The photo has an unreal Papapetrou’s works can be read within this tradition. Created technologies, Liu frames for us a reality rooted in the cultural differences that exist between the generations. air to it, its subject being both quasi-photorealistic and by the artist as she lives with terminal cancer, this series of common substances of which we are made. Her idea comes His mother’s clothing harks back to traditional garb of the obviously made by hand. Through the series of photos in photographs represent what she imagines will be her last from an understanding of the potency of smell. In a culture Caribbean, while his jeans and shirt locate him firmly in the Unspeaking Likeness (2005-2006), some of the anonymous works. Despite this mortal context, the photos abound with and time period in which body odor is generally reviled, Western culture of the United States. His pose is one of victims of crimes have been identified. Although this process optimism. They feature young women at the cusp of maturity modified, or banished, Liu harkens to earlier times in which careful abandon, with exposed flesh paying homage to may seem grim, it facilitates closure, allowing families to in deliberately constructed scenes of lush texture and bathing and hygiene rituals were starkly different, and the Michelangelo’s unrelenting and appreciative portrayals of grieve the loss of their loved ones. hyper-coloration; they scream rampant fecundity. Like naturally occurring smell of a human was not necessarily the male body. His mother has a somewhat stern expression Flemish still-life paintings, the women and flowers are considered offensive. French military leader Napoléon on her face, reflecting an inner consternation, as she was Fine red strings trickle from the base of a sculptural book both blooming and decaying before our eyes. Papapetrou Bonaparte was said to have requested that his wife not convinced about all aspects of the portrait. Collaboration created by artist María Verónica San Martín, running in a demands that her viewer be conscious of the artifice, Joséphine not bathe when he was returning from travels, 11 is a dynamic process; the negotiation between Cruz and his random pattern like rivulets of blood. From 1973 to 1990, creating a compressed garden space not unlike a womb as he lusted for her smell. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall mother is evident in the work’s outcome. more than 3,500 people were disappeared in Chile under the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet—these The seemingly gleeful smile of the sitter in a large black-and- political murders were only part of the endemic, systemic white photograph by is in stark contrast to the impetus for human rights violations perpetuated by Pinochet’s the sculpture upon which the portrait is based. The subject government. To this day, the victims’ whereabouts are of Svenson’s image is unknown to both viewer and artist. unknown: they are referred to simply as “the disappeared.” His likeness was commissioned by a law-enforcement It is believed that they were kidnapped, tortured, and killed, agency to solve a crime of which he was the victim. This their bodies hidden in undisclosed gravesites. Family speculative portrait was created by a sculptor who drew members who attempted to find their relatives were told upon the evidence left behind, as well as his artistic instinct by officials, “That person is not here, do not insist.”The forms and experience. Svenson traveled to a number of places of torture enacted on victims ranged from psychological in the United States and Mexico to take photos of these techniques to sexual abuse and waterboarding. Anyone forensic portraits. Forensics is an area of expertise residing thought to have left-wing politics, or to otherwise be an at the intersection of art and science. When grappling with “enemy of the state,” lived in fear. San Martín’s book both such ambiguous and sensitive subject matter, Svenson marks and holds accountable those in power. In Their approached the work as if his sitter were alive, focusing Memory. Human Rights Violations in Chile, 1973–1990 (2012) on the sculptures’ eyes. The artist stated, “My point of focus is a protest book following in the steps of the resistance to was the eyes; I left the rest of the face to fall out of focus the government begun by family members who survived. David Antonio Cruz, Puerto Rican Pieta Arne Svenson, Unspeaking Likeness #3 María Verónica San Martín, In Their Memory. so as to better speak to the anonymity of the victim and the The structure of the book presents the viewer with an (detail), 2006, oil on canvas (detail), 2005, silver gelatin print Human Rights Violation in Chile. 1973-1990 (detail), 2012, screen print on paper and ink

26 27 triggered by a familiar facial composition. Streuli sees hegemony. Power has stemmed from religious or political beauty in our commonalities. His work is a democratic, even affiliations, as well as the accumulation of wealth, often utopian attempt to document everyone—the antithesis of a channeled in strategic manners. This exhibition attempts power portrait. The artist’s underlying egalitarian impulse to dispel such an idea of a single truth—an idea only ever encourages viewers to welcome the singularity of each maintained to bolster hegemonic powers—revealing instead human face. Even identical twins, sprung from the same a plurality of interrelated truths based on a diverse array of zygote, differ in appearance due to the epigenetic effects interests and motivations. of experience. This fleeting glimpse of a sea of faces reminds us of the fleeting nature of life, the daily and This exhibition is not intended to be encyclopedic. Indeed, inescapable passing of time. there are many other ways it could have manifested that would have been equally valid. It provides meditative “You are limited only by your imagination,” says Techno, moments for musing on the influence of a portrait—what is speaking of our possible futures. Techno is one of the revealed or concealed, whose needs are being served, and characters created by, and featured in, Hyphen-Lab’s whose have been ignored. Portraits of and by people who Neurospeculative AfroFeminism (2017). In many ways, her have largely been excluded from the art historical tradition diagnosis is true: we have the potential to transcend many allows them to become part of the record, resisting a historic Polixeni Papapetrou, Blinded (detail), Ani Liu, Microbial We (detail), 2017-2018, micro- Patricia Piccinini, The Osculating Curve (detail), circumstances if only our wills are strong enough. However, invisibility. We are in a state of flux. People living in the actual 2016, pigment ink print organisms from the artist’s mouth and the mouths of 2016, silicone, fiberglass, human hair the processes of acknowledging the past, atoning for world are responsible for creating the virtual world of the those in close contact to her, agar, nutrient solution mistakes, and consciously deciding how to create more future. Robots already abound in the environments where equitable futures do not happen automatically, or easily. we live, work, and play. In the process of transiting from one in 1989, the East German Police, the Stasi, were accused of an autobiographical element. Her earlier work focused on Each artist included in this exhibition has created a portrait way of being to another, it is important that we understand scent-profiling dissidents. They would do so by collecting understanding human cells, as her mother fought cancer that acts as a portal into another world, or a specific vision the that accompanies us on our journey. We have the secretions of a person being interrogated, which would during the artist’s childhood. When starting her own family, of this world formed by its creator’s lived experiences. consciously subsumed some of this information, while other then be stored in sealed canisters. This trapped the unique Piccinini moved her attention to concepts of motherhood. The artworks in this exhibition highlight why portraits are knowledge may be silently sequestered in the recesses of scent signature of an individual for future reference; K9 When looking at her work The Osculating Curve (2016), important for the past, present, and future. Historically, our minds, providing subliminal motivations for action. As patrols were enlisted to locate people.12 Liu returns her the viewer is immediately struck by this slyly deceptive power in Western society has been concentrated in the James Baldwin noted, both conscious and hidden histories viewer to a reality that many attempt to obliterate through sculpture’s proximity to reality. It has an equivocal beauty: hands of a select few, won and maintained through force are equally potent, and to have a fairer future we need to socially sanctioned and sometimes compulsive hygiene the hair is so human, and the skin texture so lifelike, that we and oppression. The powerful have, for the most part, been understand the past. The human bodies we exist in now rituals. She also brings to the fore the idea of bio-data as can almost perceive blood pulsing in subcutaneous arteries. a homogenous bunch: physically similar, with overlapping might eventually be replaced totally, or in part, by robotic a method of cataloging and classifying humans. Liu The creature is at the same time grotesque, a compellingly interests, and a strong mutual desire to maintain their versions, powered by artificial forms of intelligence. encourages viewers to question how this data is collected, repulsive approximation of a pregnant woman. It abounds stored, and used. At the moment, legal systems in most with glistening orifices that, when considered within the countries lag far behind scientific actuality. This manifests in framework of , could be considered to meld unchecked data collection, storage, and usage. The social specific apertures designed for intake of food with those impact is yet to be fully understood, but should fill us with a that perform the extrusion of babies. The work is a carefully measured balance of hopefulness and trepidation. proposition: as humans have increasing control over their progeny, intervening at the earliest stages of reproduction, Given this mix of awesome potential futures facilitated what are the potential outcomes? The artist compels her by leaps of scientific discovery, it seems inevitable that viewer to question precisely who might be charged with humans must adjust to an environment that is both “natural” the responsibility of “natural selection” if this process itself and constructed. The popular notion of nature is a romantic evolves to incorporate human intention. one—a form of reality based in the sheer stuff of the planet, and orchestrated by some kind of grand design as the There is an elegance to the anonymity of subjects as they backdrop for all life, and not conceived of, disturbed, or cascade before us in Beat Streuli’s work Pallasades 05-01-01 constructed by humans. Patricia Piccinini has devoted her (2001). The viewer is transfixed by hundreds of anonymous career to an examination of this concept, tracking in her faces captured in this forty-five-minute projection, which artwork the ebb and flow of ideas about nature inspired examines our daily experiences of portraiture. Walking by science, and specifically how such ideas impact people. through a crowded environment, faces pass before us, Beat Streuli, Pallasades 05-01-01, 2001, video, 45 minutes Hyphen-Labs, NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism Like many artists included in this exhibition, her work has quickly assessed by the brain to see if recognition is (detail of Hyperface Scarf by Adam Harvey), 2017, virtual reality installation

28 29 Dictatorial in temperament, Russian President Vladamir Putin identifying white men than anyone else.15 Ours is a prime has stated that whoever masters artificial intelligence will be moment in which growing awareness could potentially “the ruler of the world.”13 His ideal future would be one in lead to rectification of past inequities and indifferences. which the status quo is maintained, and the systematic By understanding the failures of our past, we can create inequities of the present would be reproduced in future a future that embraces our plurality. Portraiture can play governments. We already see glimpses of biases being an important role in this, allowing a growing awareness of grandfathered into the portraits of the future. Facial diversity to lead to empathy. We can shift the focus toward recognition software is known to discriminate, more readily a future that has a place for everyone.

Footnotes

1. From “White Man’s Guilt,” originally published in Ebony, August 1965. 8. Carrie Mae Weems in Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot”, ed. Deborah Willis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 89. 2. Bindu Shajan Perappadan, “Taking Too Many Selfies a Medical Condition, Say Doctors,” the Hindu, December 12, 2017. http://www.thehindu.com/ 9. S teve Lohr, “Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You’re a White Guy,” the news/cities/Delhi/taking-too-many-selfies-a-medical-condition-say-doctors/ New York Times, February 9, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/ article22207348.ece technology/facial-recognition-race-artificial-intelligence.html

3. Abaki Beck, “Decolonizing Photography: A Conversation with Wendy Red 10. Ex cerpt from https://mugshots.com: “DISCLAIMER NOTICE: ALL ARE Star,” Aperture, December 14, 2016. https://aperture.org/blog/wendy-red-star/ PRESUMED INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY IN A COURT OF LAW. PUBLISHED MUGSHOTS AND/OR ARREST RECORDS ARE PREVIOUSLY 4. Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952) was a photographer and ethnologist who PUBLISHED PUBLIC RECORDS OF: AN ARREST, AN INDICTMENT, A worked in the United States and is known for his photographs of Native REGISTRATION, THE DEPRIVATION OF LIBERTY OR A DETENTION. THE American peoples, which he often manipulated, altered, and staged MUGSHOTS AND/OR ARREST RECORDS PUBLISHED ON MUGSHOTS. to achieve an ethnographic simulation of native tribes appearing as if COM ARE IN NO WAY AN INDICATION OF GUILT AND THEY ARE NOT untouched by colonialism. EVIDENCE THAT AN ACTUAL CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED. ARREST DOES NOT IMPLY GUILT, AND CRIMINAL CHARGES ARE MERELY 5. In the textbook De l’electrisation localisée et de son application à la ACCUSATIONS. A DEFENDANT IS PRESUMED INNOCENT UNLESS physiologie, à la pathologie et à la thérapeutique (Treatise on Localized PROVEN GUILTY AND CONVICTED. FOR LATEST CASE STATUS, Electrization, and its Applications to Pathology and Therapeutics). This CONTACT THE OFFICIAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY WHICH book, which was heavily illustrated with photographs supporting Duchenne ORIGINALLY RELEASED THE INFORMATION” (uppercase letter according de Boulogne’s research, had a significant impact on Charles Darwin’s to source). thinking on evolution. 12. K unio Francis Tanabe, “Scent of a Woman,” the Washington Post, August 6.  A t the Democratic National Convention in 2016 Michelle Obama stated, 8, 2004. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/ “That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage books/2004/08/08/scent-of-a-woman/4ed84d94-2a83-4114-b847- tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the 9bdb4a10521e/?utm_term=.4ea1f01a1e02 shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every 12. K ate Hairsine, “The Stasi Had a Giant Smell Register of Dissidents,” morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two Deutsche Welle, May 23, 2007. http://p.dw.com/p/AigX beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.” 13. Charlie Campbell, “Baidu’s Run,” Time Magazine, January 29, 2018, 44.

7. Cited in the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission 1984 designation decision. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcas/html/about/man_tweed.shtml

30 31 32 A PORTRAIT OF THE POSTFEMINIST PERFECT MOTHER

Susan Bright

The Good Mother has been cemented into our society choice, and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover through television, movies, and most recently, via the paradigm; a resurgence in denial of natural sexual difference; Internet, where social networking sites like Facebook, a marked sexualization of culture; and an emphasis on Pinterest, Twitter, and the explosion of “mommy blogs” consumerism and the commodification of difference.5 feed us images and ideas of perfection at a faster rate Taking two characteristics here—the makeover paradigm than ever before. and increased focus on individualism, choice, and —Avital Norman Nathman1 empowerment—I propose that by using motherhood as a “makeover” to a new identity, Snooki uses her maternal #blessed identity as a contradictory site of control. She publically he culture of idealized celebrity and vernacular presents a postfeminist version of maternal agency and Tmotherhood erases powerful feelings of ambivalence embodiment by claiming the image of perfected motherhood that characterize the experience of motherhood. Extending as a choice rather than a visual response to established beyond established patriarchal ideas and the institution of ideas of femininity and maternity that are largely regressive, being a “good mother,” our current culture now envisages conservative, and dictated by patriarchal ideals. the perfect one. Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels have noted “a new set of ideals, norms, and practices, most The Celebrity Mom frequently and powerfully presented in the media, that seem In The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and on the surface to celebrate motherhood but which in reality How It Has Undermined Women, Douglas and Michaels promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond your chart the history of the “celebrity mom” phenomenon as reach,”2 and Jacqueline Rose draws attention to the we understand it today. Whereas once maternal status was “perfectly turned out middle-class, mainly white mothers, hidden by the famous,6 the new and highly visible concept with their perfect jobs, perfect husbands and marriages, of celebrity motherhood has its roots in the explosion of whose permanent glow of self-satisfaction is intended celebrity culture in the 1980s combined with conservative to make all women who don’t conform to that image … values placed on the family unit, which dominated Reagan- feel like total failures.”3 era politics in the United States. Its recent rapid increase in prominence has a lot to do with the Internet: the huge To draw out the tensions and impossibilities inherent in expansion of celebrity sites and the fact that celebrities draw contemporary ideas of maternal perfection, I will analyze large amounts of traffic and therefore advertising potential. recent Instagram selfies by Nicole “Snooki” LaValle (née Limited in representational approach, the celebrity mother Polizzi)4 through the framework of postfeminist sensibilities repertoire is normative.7 It can be easily categorized into as defined by Rosalind Gill. Gill identifies different themes, generic lists of activities including: the sexy nude pregnant or notions, which make up a distinct postfeminist sensibility: portrait; the post-birth snap-back-into-shape fitness

Guerrilla Girls, Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get femininity as bodily property; the shift from objectification transformation; cute outings with children; loving husbands Into Music Videos, 2014, paper poster, 12x26” to subjectification; the emphasis on self-surveillance, (and marked a lack of nannies); and going back to work Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy guerrillagirls.com monitoring, and discipline; a focus on individualism, within weeks—the latter putting huge moral pressure on the GUERRILLA GIRLS

33 34 35 feminist ideals. Indeed, as Diane Negra claims, “Childbearing bouncer in the background. The and mothering have emerged as one of the key social mother figure is strong, working, practices of postfeminist culture.”9 assertive, and empowered, and, most crucially, childless. She SNOOKI presents her fitness routines, her Snooki is an American reality television star whose body’s appearance, and her desire appearance in the MTV series Jersey Shore (2009–12) to be strong as her choices: ways cemented her celebrity status as one of the eight of both pleasing and being herself. housemates “on holiday” in a variety of locations including It could be argued that she is the New Jersey Shore. She was well known for her drunken presenting herself as a woman and loud behavior, and continued to have prime-time with maternal agency: independent, television slots after the series finished, including a -off financially secure, and public (and with housemate Jennifer Farley in the series Snooki and vocal) about her mothering. She JWoww (2012–15). Snooki continues to regularly appear on could be considered an example television talk shows and in competitions such as Dancing of what Andrea O’Reilly identifies with the Stars. as “empowered mothering,” the goal of which is “to reclaim this power for Snooki’s maternal status is central to her identity and is mothers; to imagine and implement explored relentlessly on social media. Selfies are expressed a mode of mothering that mitigates (and duplicated) across a range of social networking and the many ways that patriarchal photo-sharing sites including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, motherhood, both discursively and and Instagram. Her description of herself on Instagram is as materially, regulates and restrains follows: “Nicole ‘Snooki’ Polizzi. My friends call me Nic. Fit, mothers and their mothering. In Proud Mom & Wife. Zombie Slayer. www.thesnookishop. contrast to the patriarchal institution com.”10 She perfectly demonstrates that “the feminist of motherhood, an empowered

Fig. 1: Annie Leibovitz, Vanity Fair cover, August 1991 dilemmas of housewife versus career woman … have been practice of mothering is one replaced by a narrative of renaissance women who juggle modelled upon maternal agency.”14 idea that mothering is in itself not a socially or economically thriving careers … with motherhood.”11 significant activity. The rise of social networking and Snooki’s empowerment, however, has photo-sharing sites marks a profound difference in the way #myeverything been achieved only through control contemporary imaging of celebrity motherhood is made and Both of Snooki’s pregnancies were frequently photographed of her body with hours and hours of understood compared with the imaging of the 1980s and and posted on her Instagram feed, and her children feature time in the gym and extensive dieting 1990s, which was carefully styled, edited, disseminated, on her social media profiles regularly, as can be seen in (both of which are also meticulously (Top) Fig. 2: @snookinic, posted October 2014 and selectively consumed with engagement from agents, “Selfies with my beautiful little man,” and “First mirror selfie (Bottom) Fig. 3: @snookinic, posted October 2014 recorded on her Instagram feed). publicists, PR companies, and paparazzi. An example is for my little mama,” both taken in October 2014 (figs. 2 Rosalind Gill argues that postfeminist Annie Leibovitz’s famous photograph of American actress and 3). Regular use of the hashtag #myeverything often She regularly promotes food and clothing brands through culture presents women (and especially mothers) as active, Demi Moore on the front cover of Vanity Fair in August accompanies selfies taken with her two children.12 Her her account and has over nine million followers on entrepreneurial subjects: a shift from passive objectification 1991, which was captioned “More Demi Moore” (fig. 1). selfies are regular, consistent, and highly orchestrated. They Instagram.13 A selfie taken in January 2015 (fig. 4) has to modes that emphasize women’s agency, power, and This image’s shock tactics acted as a catalyst for a new are taken at various points throughout the day to represent the following gloss: “Almost 4 months post-partum and pleasure. This position corresponds with my own thinking on kind of visibility of the pregnant body in both celebrity the most quotidian of moments (hair cuts, trips to Starbucks, so happy with my results. I still have loose skin and stretch as articulated in the example of Snooki, where and vernacular imaging.8 working out in the gym, and hanging out with her children). marks on my belly, but it’s all worth it for my beautiful babies. postfeminist sensibilities are the opposite of maternal agency, The different aspects of her professional life—as a self- Staying fit during pregnancy was the best thing I could ever despite appearing to represent its manifestation. Snooki’s Similarly glossing over lived maternal experience, the narrow proclaimed craft designer of objects which are sold on Etsy do. Now it’s time to build that muscle for summer 15! [biceps selfies are presented as freely chosen, as if she were an parameters of today’s image-sharing sites such as Instagram under the username nicolescraftroom; fashion designer for graphic] big thanks to my trainer for kicking my body back autonomous agent; her ongoing control and vigilance of her create new strictures for women, and can be used as an her own line, Snookilove, which she sells online at www. into shape @anthonymichaelfit.” The image shows Snooki body is seen as a fun and healthy pastime, with no external example of how this particular element of visual culture is thesnookishop.com; promoter of young musicians; author flexing a bicep in the mirror. She is dressed in a cropped top pressures to conform to a regulatory ideology. This anti-feminist while giving the impression of incorporating and reality television star—are all rigorously documented. to emphasize her flat belly with her daughter’s empty presentation of supposed maternal agency, however, does

36 37 selfhood is gained. Again, this Me, me, me implies motherhood as natural, right, As Gill has identified, “notions correct, and central to femininity, but of choice, of ‘being oneself,’ and denies both the labor of mothering ‘pleasing oneself,’ are central to and the labor of getting her body to postfeminist sensibilities that suffuse look as it does. The central contemporary Western media contradiction here is that the “after” culture. They resonate powerfully picture can also be figured as being with the emphasis upon pre-pregnancy. Snooki strives to be a empowerment.”21 Snooki presents mother with a pre-pregnancy body. herself as an autonomous agent. Her selfies are not a place where the However, the narrative presented in ambiguities and complexities of her Instagram selfies is not, in fact, motherhood become visible, but are naturally given or easily achieved, sites on which binaries are replicated but arbitrary, artificial, and contingent. and reified: “childless” is equated She is, as David Shields suggests, with “” and “self-indulgent,” “not interested in [her]self per se … Fig. 4: @snookinic, posted January 2015 whereas “mother” is both “fulfilled” [but] interested in [her]self as a and “selfless.” theme carrier, as host.”22 She not account for why there is so much pressure for a mother to presents herself as a brand or a return to her pre-child body; nor, indeed, does it acknowledge This makeover is expanded upon in Snooki’s literary life product—an assertion eloquently that pressure at all, although Snooki suffered online abuse narrative, Baby Bumps: From Party Girl to Proud Mama, and illustrated by Shields again when he about her figure when she appeared on Jersey Shore. It all the Messy Milestones Along the Way. In the introduction writes more generally about social seems disingenuous not to acknowledge this situation, and to her book, Snooki adopts the tell-all tone of brutal honesty, networking: “Facebook and Myspace as a result these representations simply avoid interesting writing, “In my fantasies of becoming a mom, I blipped over are crude personal essay machines and important questions about the relationship between the pregnancy part. Good call. Those nine months turned … millions of little advertisements representation and subjectivity, the difficult but crucial me into a slobbering bitch from HELL. I wanted to crawl in for the self.”23 Snooki’s success as questions about how socially constructed, mass-mediated a hole. The ‘kill me now’ queasiness was one amongst a a brand partially hinges on followers ideas of beauty are internalized and reproduced in our o dozen miseries, all of which I’m going to describe in florid, buying into (literally and figuratively) wn bodies.15 fetid detail in this book. Better brace yourself for some the “reality” of her selfies. It is serious disgustingness. You might have to read with one evident, however, that Snooki uses Before and After hand over your eyes and the other holding your nose. her empowered postfeminist position According to Gill, the makeover paradigm constitutes Pregnancy is not for the faint of heart or bowels. It’s a to make choices that are problematic, postfeminist media culture broadly and self-reinvention leaky, oozing, gassy mess. If anyone tells you different, normative, and restricting for (Top) Fig. 5: @snookinic posted July 2, 2015 (guided by experts) is the implicit message across many she’s sugar coating like a candy factory.”17 (Bottom) Fig. 6: @snookinic, posted July 2, 2015 women. Seen through the lens media platforms. While it is a key factor in postfeminist culture of Gill’s postfeminist sensibilities, generally, it is especially apparent on television. Snooki’s While Snooki’s story may appear to share similarities with book.18 Tellingly, Snooki claims: “I want to be with Lorenzo motherhood has become a position of performance and most significant makeover is the overarching identity shift other maternal life narratives in her desire to “tell the truth,” and do everything for him. In order to be present and in pressure. Snooki’s demonstrations of autonomy and self- from being a “party girl” to being a mother. This can be she does so without a hint of maternal ambivalence. The the moment with him 97 percent of the time, I need my 3 improvement, far from empowered, are a visual response to acutely seen in two #tbt posts (a common hashtag and focus on her body and her use of humor skims over any percent of Me time.”19 In addition, any anxieties she has over an ideal largely promoted through the apparatuses of media acronym for posting an old photograph on a Thursday on real emotional discomfort she experienced when becoming losing her “old” life are centered on her concerns of what and celebrity, which function as branches of larger ideologies photo-sharing sites, “tbt” is short for “Throwback Thursday”). a mother. She does not critique or criticize patriarchal others will think of her. She herself claims not to miss her that actively stifle the possibility for a more expansive feminist These two pictures (figs. 5 and 6) were posted on Instagram systems—in fact, she relishes them, as can be seen old self, saying, “That girl was gone (and by ‘gone,’ I don’t movement in regard to motherhood. as before-and-after photographs.16 With the use of the in descriptions of her engagement ring and her new mean wasted),”20 with the implication that the makeover to before-and-after strategy, Snooki suggests that there was marital home. The criticisms that O’Reilley applies to the motherhood is much more satisfying. something lacking in her “old” life. Through transformation to “motherhood memoir” as a genre born from a new ideology Susan Bright is a curator and writer. She currently lives in motherhood and getting “back in shape,” a greater sense of of “intensive mothering” are played out throughout the Paris and is completing her PhD in Curatorial Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

38 39 Footnotes THESE ARE OUR STORIES, OUR LIVES AND 1. The Good Mother Myth: Redefining Motherhood to Fit Reality, ed. Avital 11. Jessica Ringrose and Valerie Walkerdine, “Regulating the Abject,” Feminist Norman Nathman (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2013), xiv. Media Studies 8, no. 3 (2008): 227–46.

2. Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization 12. Prompted by negative and abusive comments on photos of her children, WE WILL NOT BE ERASED OR SILENCED. of Motherhood and how it has Undermined Women (New York: Free Press, Snooki announced on February 10, 2015 that she would no longer post 2004), 4. pictures of them: “Unfortunately I will not be posting any more pictures of my children on Instagram. Too many inappropriate and disgusting 3. Jacqueline Rose, “Mothers,” London Review of Books 36, no. 12 (June 19, comments that do not need to be said about my babies. I also don’t need 2014), 21. strangers telling what to do with my kids, like potty training. Sorry to the fans that appreciate my kids pics, but I’m not dealing with that.” This stance 4. Nicole Polizzi, born in 1987, was married on November 29, 2014 to Jionni was maintained for only a few weeks before her children appeared on LaValle, who she first met on the reality television showIs She Really Going her Instagram feed again; the previous post was removed. The hashtag Out with Him? (MTV), and then again on Jersey Shore (MTV). #myeverything has not been used since.

5. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” 13. As of February 5, 2016 European Journal of Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 147–66. 14. Twenty-First Century Motherhood: Experience, Identity, Policy, Agency, ed. 6. For an analysis of the ways in which maternity was previously hidden by Andrea O’Reilly (New York: Press, 2010), 14. celebrities, see Sandra Matthews and Laura Wexler’s Pregnant Pictures (New York: Routledge, 2000). 15. Gill, 156.

7. Similar charges of homogeneity have been leveled at the mothers in the 16. There is very little scholarship on the “before and after” photograph. A blogging community. See May Friedman and Shana Calixte’s Mothering notable exception is Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers’s Before-and- and Blogging: The Radical Art of the MommyBlog (Bradford: Demeter, After Photography: Histories and Contexts (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 2009). 17. Nicole Polizzi, Baby Bumps: From Party Girl to Proud Mama, and All the 8. For more on the shift in representations of the pregnant body, see Sandra Messy Milestones Along the Way (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2013), 9. Matthews and Laura Wexler’s Pregnant Pictures (New York: Routledge, 2000); Imogen Tyler’s essay “Skin-tight: celebrity, pregnancy and 18. See O’Reilly’s chapter “The Motherhood Memoir and the ‘New Momism’: subjectivity,” in Thinking Through the Skin, eds. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Biting the Hand That Feeds You” in From the Personal to the Political: Stacey (London: Routledge, 2001), 69–83; Douglas and Michaels, The Toward a New Theory of Maternal Narrative, eds. O’Reilly and Silvia Mommy Myth; Clare Hanson, A Cultural History of Pregnancy: Pregnancy, Caporale Bizzini (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2009) Medicine, and Culture 1750 - 2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); 238–48. and Imogen Tyler’s essay “Pregnant Beauty: Maternal Femininities Under Neoliberalism” in New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and 19. Polizzi 161 Subjectivity, eds. Gill and Christina Scharff (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 21–36. 20. Ibid

9. Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants? Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in 21. Gill 154 Postfeminism (New York: Routledge, 2009); this claim was first articulated in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and Politics of Popular Culture, eds. 22. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage Books, Negra and Yvonne Tasker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 2011), 160.

10. This regularly, but was accurate as of May 26, 2016. Snooki 23. Ibid, 92. oscillates between using her married name and her given name.

JANET MOCK AMERICAN TRANS ACTIVIST & WRITER (1983-)

40 41 THESE ARE OUR STORIES, OUR LIVES AND AND LIVES OUR STORIES, OUR ARE THESE A REFLECTIVE PORTRAIT WE WILL NOT BE ERASED OR SILENCED. OR ERASED BE NOT WILL WE OF SHORT STATURE

Amanda Cachia

hen I was eleven or twelve years old, my naked organization that provides information and support to people Wbody was put on display for the gaze of a white, male and families with children of short stature. The year before, doctor. He wanted to inspect it for its irregular shape and in 2006, I attended my first LPA convention, where I met size. I was a curiosity because I was born with a rare form hundreds of short-statured people from across the United of dwarfism called brachyolmia. Conditions of my dwarfism States and the world. I was inspired by how these people include: a stature of four feet, three inches; faster bone went about their daily lives, achieving success and degeneration than what is considered normal; spinal recognition in a variety of careers and lifestyles. This was the stenosis; and scoliosis. While I’ve never had any surgeries first time I’d come literally face-to-face with other people of because of my dwarfism, I have dealt with the social and short stature. By taking this important step, I was able to find cultural stigmas attached to having a body that is considered likeminded people who shared the same challenges that atypical and startlingly noticeable in the public eye. I often I faced. Now, I could turn to new friends who understood negotiate the challenges of staring, occasional comments me in a way no others could—friends I could lean on through and questions, and living in a world that has been challenging times. Most importantly, I could achieve a level architecturally designed for the “average” six-foot tall man.1 of self- of and comfort with my identity as a dwarf.

The doctor hadn’t quite figured out my rare form of dwarfism I wanted to contribute on a deeper level to the LPA’s vision yet, when I was eleven or twelve, and so on that day I was and objectives, so I became the DAC chair, and remained asked to go behind a curtain and take off my clothes in his in this role until 2015. As chair of the DAC, I organized small office. My parents sat at his desk, looking worried. I vividly exhibitions of artwork by amateur artists ranging in age recall standing behind the curtain after having removed all from children and teenagers to adults; these exhibitions the garments from my body, feeling mortified. I didn’t want to were mounted in hotels that hosted annual LPA conventions. go out there, in front of my parents and him. He summoned The exhibitions provided spaces where little people artists me to come out, though, so I slowly stepped out from behind could showcase their talents and take pride in their identities. the curtain. I remember the simultaneous sensations of my In the summer of 2007, I curated one of these exhibitions in cheeks burning and the cold wooden floorboards gripping Seattle. Eighteen people from various walks of life participated. my feet. I was onstage, exposed to the medical gaze. He It was wonderful. For me, the best part was engaging with stared. My parents looked at me, but I couldn’t look back an eight-year old girl named Arianna, who submitted a at them. I could tell they felt bad. Embarrassed for me. I self-portrait: a line drawing of a smiling girl, printed with pink can’t remember what the doctor said, but after a few minutes and green ink. It was titled Happy To Be Me. I was so taken I was asked to go back and change into my clothes. by the print that I bought it. I was impressed with Arianna’s level of self-acceptance and assertiveness, so clearly MOCK JANET In 2007, I became chair of the Dwarf Artists Coalition (DAC) expressed in her art. In this simple print, an inscription of her for the Little People of America (LPA). This is a nonprofit body, she had creatively and proudly poured out her identity. AMERICAN TRANS ACTIVIST & WRITER (1983-) WRITER & ACTIVIST TRANS AMERICAN 1. This blueprint for urban design goes back to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man, to be discussed in more detail in the thesis.

42 43 RACE AND REPRESENTATION HE FELT HE KNEW WHAT WAS WAS WHAT KNEW HE FELT HE

HE FELT HE KNEW WHAT WAS Nell Painter COULD AND “NORMAL” “NORMAL” AND COULD DETECT MY SO-CALLED SO-CALLED MY DETECT DETECT MY SO-CALLED COURSE OF “ABNORMALITY.” scene from my MFA thesis essay: I am walking through struggle, as well as the beauty of everyday black people. “ABNORMALITY.” OF COURSE Athe galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New Here was a wide range of black people engaged in a wide York looking for a scene depicting the mythical judgment of range of activities, some revolutionary, many uplifting. DISEMPOWERED FELT I Paris, a topic that fascinated me at the time. Passing through gallery after gallery, painting after painting, I feel surrounded During this time, the aphorism “black is beautiful” became I FELT DISEMPOWERED by rich white people. literally true. Even today, many viewers prefer black art to be uplifting, whether to provide a counterweight to negative AND VULNERABLE. VULNERABLE. AND I know you’re not supposed to see fine art as white people. stereotypes or as positive imagery within a racialized, violent Fine art is not supposed to be raced. It can be categorized by popular culture. In terms of race representation, black art still AND VULNERABLE. style, or geographical origin, or time period, but not by race. has a lot of work to do: black artists are expected to address Only depictions of black people are characterized by race. American racism as if it were their personal responsibility to analyze and defeat it, and are treated as if blackness is their The topic of race and representation in American culture is only fitting subject matter. supposed to recount the history of images of black people. Due to work by scholars like Deborah Willis and Richard Many black artists relish this mission of racial redress, Powell, this history—and the exiling of black imagery from feeling that it is their task as citizens to take on issues of the public sphere—has been thoughtfully analyzed. Until the representation and racism. Others embrace the mission as 1960s, actual black people appeared only rarely in American an inroad into an art market that fetishizes blackness as a print culture. When they did appear, their images were subject. Still others disregard it, making art according to their individual inclinations, whether toward satire, abstraction, I tell these stories because they have shaped the person I feelings opposite of mine. Arianna was completely predominantly abusive: stereotypes of piccaninnies and or otherwise. It was in this way that, in the late twentieth am today. Feeling denied of my privacy—literally stripped of empowered through her art. Her image was one of self- mammies, bucks cavorting with watermelons, all happily century, Robert Colescott inserted himself into Western art any dignity in the doctor’s office—I told myself I never acceptance, without any trace that she felt the influence of serving white folks. Other photographs, circulated as history. During the time of Abstract Expressionism, Norman wanted to be put in that position again. It took me a long notions like “midget” or “freak.” She had control over how postcards, showed lynching victims surrounded by Lewis painted abstractly. Their emergence from the shadows time to get to a place where I could make that my reality. For her body looked, and projected an image to others that skylarking white people. has taken decades. a while, I just didn’t like my body. Societal images of bodies emanated confidence and radiance. Looking at her drawing, had a powerful impact on me. When I was only a few years I was glad that Arianna’s body wasn’t put under the same This hurtful imagery incited a powerful response from Time has wrought changes in the way black artists have older than Arianna, I felt the doctor’s gaze on my naked scrutiny that mine was when I was close to her age. anti-racist artists and viewers who, during the civil rights worked and been received. With its abundance of images body emanate medical authority and privilege. He felt he era of the 1960s and ’70s, held stereotypes up for inspection and the relative empowerment of people of color in knew what was “normal” and could detect my so-called Amanda Cachia is an independent curator and critic from and counterposed photographs of real black families, American society, the twenty-first century has broadened “abnormality.” Of course I felt disempowered and vulnerable. Sydney, Australia. She is currently Assistant Professor of soldiers, and heroes, as in 1974’s The Black Book. Artists the range of images that reach a wide audience. Black artists But another little girl, in a different context, was able to have Art History at Moreno Valley College. such as Elizabeth Catlett, Betye Saar, Emory Douglas, and Barkley Hendricks made images showing civil-rights have embraced this relative freedom. Michael Ray Charles,

44 45 Trenton Day Hancock, and, most famously, Kara Walker Not all is easy in the race-representation field, though: rework stereotypes by repeating and ridiculing them in order non-black artists depicting black subject matter can run afoul MIRROR MIRROR to defang them. Stanley Whitney, Julie Mehretu, and David of public opinion. Public opinion on such cases is divided, Bradford work abstractly. Alongside them, thousands of as in the instance of Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), a black artists continue to make uplifting art that readily finds painting depicting Emmett Till featured in the 2016 Whitney Dorothy R. Santos a market. Today, the representation of race is no longer the Biennial. On these matters, there is no unanimity among sole purview of black artists. artists or audiences, but instead, a healthy disarray.

Nell Painter is the Emerita Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University and an artist based in Newark, New Jersey.

ortraiture used to be only for the wealthy and the upper entities that continue to give the viewer information for an Pechelon of society. It was an indication of their affluence indeterminate but limited amount of time: they are subject and status. Over time, portraiture has become a way of to disintegration and changes in color, form, and shape. presenting the body—specific types of bodies, to be precise. This particular type of portraiture questions the assumption With the advent of each new technology, humans practice that a portrait is static. Like an actual human being, it is a sort of relentless self-reflexivity, making technologies and marked by an indeterminate but inevitable finality. hardware that enable us to take “selfies” and to filter, literally Considering the microbiome as medium, then, allows us and figuratively, ourselves into alternate times, spaces, and to shift our understanding of portraiture as traditional and even dimensions. In particular, women, women of color, merely meant to be looked at into something active and and queer people of color have used portraiture as a way worth the curious gaze. of substantiating and prioritizing their existence, more for themselves than for anyone else. As a social, historical, and cultural document, portraiture contextualizes the narratives, stories, and accounts of Portraiture enables the artist to show what might otherwise human history that are not easily told through images alone, be invisible. Scientists—microbiologists, for instance—make even in our image-laden digital age. While the birth and visible what we cannot readily and plainly see. At the atomic death of a human body has a temporality beyond our and molecular level, our cells offer an exciting way to see control, once a portrait is made (whether in the likeness our own bodies. While we may like to think that portraiture of a human being or subject or not), it becomes immortal. is a mirror or reflection, it also contextualizes and points It persists and exists as a record of time, place, and to the position from which the subject has been placed. humanity. The moments we neglect in our daily lives while Is portraiture a form of fragmentation, a type of augmented in transit, at work, or simply sustaining ourselves, artists use reality that allows us to know someone’s life, their as material to reflect our very nature back to us. understanding of themselves and the world? How does our body’s cellular makeup or microbiome inform our Oftentimes, what goes unseen and unheard of is precisely external appearance? what will paint the most accurate portrait of our contemporary moment. In microbial portraits, we are given yet another way From cultures on a petri dish to DNA phenotyping, scientific of looking at ourselves and each other. From them, we learn methodologies have long served as a medium and fertile the necessity of sustaining conversations about what we see, ground to showcase radical new forms of portraiture. This and how conceptions of selfhood can run the gamut of inverted gaze looks beyond representation and figuration expression and representation. The materiality of these to something more fundamental to human existence: our microbial works shows that figuration is no longer the cells, blood, and biological makeup. Such portraits are living dominant form in portraiture. Whether we see something

Shoshanna Weinberger, She Runs With a Crooked Smile, 2017, ink and collage on paper

46 47 made in our likeness or something utterly foreign to us, artists between, we learn and gain a sense of ourselves in relation working in new modes of portraiture show a facet of humanity to each other. INDUSTRIAL PORTRAITURE, meant to be queer or “strange” (as in Sara Ahmed’s “stranging”), challenging current definitions of selfhood. Dorothy R. Santos is a writer, editor, curator, and educator. MEMORY, AND POWER Portraiture can be both sublime and hideous. From these She is a doctoral candidate in Film and Digital Media at polar opposite ends of the spectrum, and everywhere in the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Jay Stanley

or much of human history, most people have had neither attached to portraits. With automatic facial recognition Fthe money to buy nor the skills to produce portraits of technologies, however, subjects’ identities can increasingly themselves or those they wanted to remember. Portraiture be attached to even the most fleeting public photos. has been reserved for the wealthy, the powerful, and the mythical—from ancient Greek images of leaders, gods, Where once subjects were painstakingly recreated in oil and heroes to Renaissance and Reformation paintings paintings intended to remember, idealize, and honor, their commissioned by royals and nobles. It was only through the faces are now digitally measured, dissected, and reduced to invention of photography that portraiture was democratized, expressionless numerical “templates” that are meaningless allowing ordinary people to remember and honor other to the human brain. When you sit for a passport photo, you ordinary people—think of World War II GIs carrying are not allowed to smile because doing so reduces the photographs of their sweethearts back at home. accuracy of face recognition algorithms. Portraits now constitute their subjects in much the same way that kings Because of this, the subtleties that once marked the art once did. of portraiture—lighting, position, expression, costume, idealization—have also been swept away by a new, Like the photo in a GI’s locket, surveillance cameras ruthlessly industrial, functional, and bureaucratic production equipped with facial recognition technology serve the of portraits. Such portraits have come to serve not just function of memory—not the sentimental memory of an memory and honor, but also power. Mug shots are collected individual, but the unfeeling memory of large bureaucratic and FBI Most Wanted posters printed. In the United States, machines. Facial recognition software companies brag about Departments of Motor Vehicles relentlessly capture the the many potential uses of their technology, such as faces of nearly every adult in their state. Portraits are taken “instantaneous threat alerts,” geofencing, and the ability to for school, gym, and work ID cards, as well as for passports. “instantly enroll mugshots from the field.” They also tout a

Beat Streuli, Pallasades 05-01-01 (detail), 2001, video Photographs have become another cog in the machinery feature called “VIP recognition.” A few years ago, British of government and corporate bureaucracies. Airways announced a program under which the airline would find photographs of business-class passengers online, Automated, industrial photography spills beyond the cold combining the images with other data from the customer’s rooms of government buildings into the wider outdoors. history with the airline so that flight attendants could treat Cameras are attached to the sides of buildings, affixed to customers according to the value they hold for the company. stoplights and streetlights, wired to the chests of police officers, installed on the hoods of their cars. The subjects of The airline wanted to cure what has been called “enterprise photographs taken by these cameras can’t be sat down in a amnesia”: the fact that large organizations often retain no chair, their documents scrutinized, and their identities carefully memory of previous interactions with particular individuals.

48 49 In the corporate world, curing such amnesia is seen as lives, but are also a prominent means of self-expression and important step in providing better customer service. It is also outlets for creativity. The selfie has become one of our most FEMINIST PORTRAITURE: used to manipulate customers, squeeze maximum profits common everyday means of self-expression: people take out of them, and rate their “riskiness” for security purposes. them to show they’re dining at fancy restaurants, sitting in TWO SIDES OF THE MIRROR Deployed widely, facial recognition software could give the good seats at the theatre, meeting a celebrity. Even as government a memory of every street you’ve ever walked, photography is used to build infrastructures of bureaucratic biked, or driven down. For the state, the “enterprise” of memory and control, we turn to it, like Renaissance patrons Anne Swartz “enterprise amnesia” is society as a whole. before us, to achieve and convey social status.

But even as technology shifts portraiture from being Jay Stanley is senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, primarily an art to an instrument of power, it also creates new Privacy, and Technology Project, where he researches, outlets for portraits to serve social functions. Social media writes and speaks about technology-related privacy and profile images serve not only as key identifiers in our social civil liberties issues and their future.

ortraits exist in a magical realm. Pre-industrial cultures Feminists have pressed back, not willing to relent and Pcommonly believe that allowing one’s image to be accept this status quo. rendered would remove one’s soul. Children avoid stepping on shadows because they take them to be extensions of the The feminist artist showcases her relationships in all their bodies that cast them. Most of us, when passing a mirror, can’t messiness as a way of asserting her reality and existence. help but steal a glimpse of our reflection. This phenomenon Tracey Emin did this when she displayed My Bed (1998) at applies particularly to women. “How do I look?” is practically the Tate Gallery, complete with all the mess left over after a female anthem, even if it’s said only to oneself. a lost weekend with a lover.

Managing the reply, feminists have the double burden of Another artist, Hannah Wilke, photographs her post- desiring both the ideal and the real. Of course we all want to mastectomy mother in close-cropped, large-scale images be beautiful, but we also regard the category with suspicion. without flinching. Years later, she treats her own image the Anyway, an easier goal is to be authentic. “Be yourself,” as same thing way as she struggles with breast cancer. Oscar Wilde supposedly declared, “everyone else is already taken.” And so a feminist portrait must balance the domains Yet another artist revolts against the tangled emotions of of the magical, ideal, and real. growing up in a complicated childhood home with beloved, beautiful, drug-addicted mother who maintained difficult We are mesmerized by Photoshopped bodies, and mock romantic attachments. ’s paintings, them only in their most extreme forms. In portraits of women sculpture, photography, and videos focus on images of past and present, we accept visualizations of distortion to beautiful women like her mother at the height of her 1970s, the degree at which a woman’s physique makes almost no Diana Ross, Mahogany-style glamour and power. sense. Nearly endless apologetic conversations center around what constitutes the beauty ideal. To reveal the equivalence oppression exerts upon bodies, another artist connects disabled human bodies with those Despite this, representations of imperfect, disfigured, or of sideshow “freaks” and abused animals, whose bodies subservient woman embarrass and taunt us, beginning are used for human labor or in factory production for food. William Kentridge, Scribe 1, 2011, photogravure, drypoint, and burnishing conversations along the lines of: “Who would want to see Sunaura Taylor, an American artist with a disability who uses a portrait of a woman when she’s anxious, bored, indecisive, a wheelchair, paints self-portraits and creates mixed-media defensive, shy, depressed, nauseous, sick?” We are work in this way. acculturated to see certain kinds of images and have subsequently responded out of habit to embrace with Wielding data to create a portrait of a people, the artist desire—in often-discriminatory practices—certain reflections shows how the population of the Latino community in Los and conventions in portraiture. Angeles is changing. Mexican-American artist Linda Vallejo’s

50 51 two-dimensional, minimalist presentations analyze the Mirror, mirror, on the wall, how is feminist portraiture fair to EVERY PORTRAIT THAT IS PAINTED complexities of population expansion using a minimalist all? By wrestling with the very double consciousness that grid with brown dots to create visual patterns. social awareness gives the modern woman. Rather than pure presence, feminist portraiture sees complexities—both WITH FEELING IS A PORTRAIT OF A feminist portrait depicts an experiential circumstance the desire to look good and the need to do right by one’s rather than an individual sitter. It is always inherently a inner truths. tableau or narrative. These robust conditions shape its THE ARTIST, NOT OF THE SITTER. existence. Anne Swartz is a Professor of Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her latest project is developing a book on the home in contemporary . THE SITTER IS MERELY THE ACCIDENT,

THE OCCASION. IT IS NOT HE WHO

IS REVEALED BY THE PAINTER; IT IS

RATHER THE PAINTER WHO, ON THE

COLORED CANVAS, REVEALS HIMSELF.

Peggie Miller, Peggie Miller from the series New Millennium Butch, 2009, archival inkjet print

OSCAR WILDE IRISH WRITER (1854-1900)

52 53 PAINTED IS THAT PORTRAIT EVERY THE MANY AMBITIONS OF PORTRAIT A IS FEELING WITH OF PORTRAITURE

SITTER. THE OF NOT ARTIST, THE Jorge Daniel Veneciano

ACCIDENT, THE MERELY IS SITTER THE

WHO HE NOT IS IT OCCASION. THE

IS REVEALED BY THE PAINTER; IT IS IS IT PAINTER; THE BY REVEALED IS ortraiture isn’t what it used to be, if it ever was. Once As Function Pdiscernible as a tradition—paintings and drawings of Dispersed as an array of ambitions, portraits become less RATHER THE PAINTER WHO, ON THE THE ON WHO, PAINTER THE RATHER the visages of wealthy patrons, such as the Medici—now, definable as a genre (e.g. head shots) and more operable portraiture is dispersed into many practices, and for ends as performance or function in soliciting their desired effects well beyond the honorific of facial rendering. Its dispersal (impressions, feelings). Some functions are social; they COLORED CANVAS, REVEALS HIMSELF. REVEALS CANVAS, COLORED raises a question: What do portraits want anymore? establish what portraits do in the world, such as identifying people (as in a driver’s license) and thus permitting those Today, portraits routinely step back to take a wider view of identified to do things in society (drive a car, marry). their subjects. They may describe in gestural sweeps, impart impressions, engender celebrations, or stoke affections. As Consequence Portraits convey these and other ambitions in addition to what Other functions are consequential rather than intentional; convention tells us about portraiture. We may claim, therefore, that is, it’s up to us to read into portraits the consequences that portraits also speak rhetorically in codes of ambition. of their performance in society. We may read them, for They want to do more than simply depict: they want to affect example, as cartes de visite. Instead of announcing the sitter us. And we, as good visual readers, complete the affection. to a select social group, though, they function in relation to the world at large, to life itself—as calling cards announcing As Love one’s existence, instantiations of self via socially tendered In the film noir classicLaura , police detective McPherson artifacts. Call it an existential reading. Though no dictionary (Dana Andrews) falls in love with the painted image of defines portraiture this way, we do so already when we read a woman, Laura (Gene Tierney), whose murder he’s in portraits not only the details they inscribe legibly but also investigating. Laura’s portrait and fate arouse his sympathies. the codes of ambition they prescribe rhetorically: know me, He hovers around the painting repeatedly as he thinks about love me, think of me. We satisfy a portrait’s thirst for meaning the case. The painting becomes an object of power, a fetish, and affection. to which McPherson succumbs. Portraits can captivate us, hold us spellbound, seduce us, make us fall in love. They trigger As Character desires in us, whether the portraitist intended them to or not. In recalling the origins of his novel The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James wrote in the book’s preface: “Trying to recover As Paradox here the germ of my idea, I see that it must have consisted Just as Laura’s portrait comes to possess the psyche of not at any conceit of a ‘plot’ […] but altogether in the the detective, our own pocket portraits in our wallets, purses, sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a and smart phones come to wield a similar force over our particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual WILDE OSCAR thoughts. They arouse our sympathies. We surrender elements of a ‘subject’ were to need to be superadded.” IRISH WRITER (1854-1900) WRITER IRISH ourselves to the forces of their charms. Ironically, we For James, the idea of a character came first, to which he are in their possession as much they are in ours. “superadded” a narrative plot. Literature here provides us

54 55 with a model for reading visual portraits: details of character temporal status, the halting of aging. Paradoxically, Gray ground the stories we can tell about the rendered subject. himself assumes the role of the portrait by preserving his THE REFLECTION OF look in time: in not aging. He becomes a walking portrait As Fiction and Fictive with the power to cheat life and death. This, we may read, A GENDERLESS SPIRIT Inspired by James, we can imagine that all visual portraits is the secret ambition of all portraits: to walk the earth in its assume something of a literary conceit. If they are to function unceasing flow of time, brandishing the image and story as portraits, they must convey a modicum of characterological of a subject whose visage is suspended in the calm amber Carla Christopher Waid information. These details prompt us to tell stories—which, we of immortality. To retain youth in the face of passing time, shall note, results in two narratological effects: One, we, as to cheat death itself. viewers of portraits, enjoy consuming narratives about people’s lives, as we do in reading fiction. Two, portraits are As Paradox Again composed, put together, made up—they are fictive. This is the Cheating death may be a latent ambition of the sitter in mermaid,” purrs the lean and elegant artist, draping What we have in common is that none of us, from early age, very aspect of portraiture that artists enjoy as creators. If it posing for a portrait. Yet for the viewer, a portrait can signal “A their body across furniture like a tipsy Tallulah were able to look into the glittering worlds of social media, seems that portraiture crosses literary and visual genres quite the opposite: a token or reminder of death. Even a carte de Bankhead even at eight o’clock in the morning. Saturday-morning cartoons, or shiny-page picture books and naturally, it is because we do so as consumers and producers visite, as marker of presence, becomes a memento mori. see ourselves. From the time of preschool art-project bodies of portraits, as their readers and scribes. Registering existence matters only because nonexistence “A space alien, the kind with skin like gunmetal and Mylar constructed of triangles and rectangles, circle-shaped heads awaits us all. Celebrations of life via portraiture matter but satin-smooth and wrinkle-free for eternity,” their legs and stick-straight arms, we needed rounder shapes, bolder As Epic Narrative because the stillness of death is final. Every portrait crossed with the studied elegance of a Southern belle. colors, and more fantastic realities: ones that had the Chuck Close has written about reading and composing necessarily pictures what will be no longer—and, more imaginative capacity to hold us. When asked to draw portraits and their relationship to literature: “Sometimes I so, what immediately is no longer. “A dolphin,” intoned with a slight smile, knowing and a touch ourselves, we chose beings or objects that possessed relate to my friends who are writers,” he noted, “more than thin, pulled just a bit tighter than genuine happiness. “That’s mutability, mystery, and magical powers of transformation. to my friends who are painters, because the time that I As Nostalgia what I drew over and over instead of drawing myself.” When presented with mirrors, we looked away. spend is the kind of time that a novelist might spend. A In this way, portraits function as machines of nostalgia. In long-term commitment. […] So part of what I try to do is put rendering subjects in a particular place and time, portraits We are gathered here, created beings, works of art. Born For me, the days in which mirrors were cursed objects are long these increments [of work] together in a way a wordsmith distance themselves from actual sitters, whose circumstances in bodies that felt wrong from the first fit, living in identities gone. At one time, I saw myself as a vampire, a creature of the might be involved in building out of words. Sentences change unhaltingly and irrevocably—people simply cease to created rather than handed to us in a pink or blue package. shadows only able to see myself clearly in my own mind. I had become paragraphs, become pages, become chapters, exist as pictured. We are teal or turquoise, fuchsia and scarlet, and all of us no reflection, nowhere to look where my own image would be become a book.” nonbinary. The technical “whys” behind our identities are as given back to me, no way to see myself as others saw me. Consequently, we come to regard portraits as we do varied as our methods of self-expression: a woman with too Even today, I rarely use mirrors—a remnant of my habit of Close began painting portraits based on photographs—recall pictures of the deceased. Both are of people of a bygone much testosterone from a hormone imbalance, an intersexed avoidance—but they no longer hold a dark magic over me. his monumental portrait of Philip Glass—before turning to time; their portraits inspire in us reflection and nostalgia for man with a doctor who made a choice he was too young to When I look into the mirror, I see a portrait. My body is a truth photography as a medium for portraiture. Wall-scale, his the person who was once so young, promising, beautiful, consent to and now cannot reverse, a transgender-identified that changes in different perspectives and lights, shifts photographs yield torrents of information—the innumerable successful—we feel a wistfulness, as when seeing human in the midst of a transition they cannot afford to according to hair length and jewelry: a truth not begotten but hair follicles, pores, and skin creases ranging over hills and photographs of departed acquaintances, provoking complete. We have heard the phrases, “Oh, I didn’t know made in an accidental collision of cells and tangled, earth- vales of the face. They read as mural landscapes, becoming in us the quiet pang of mortality. they still did that,” or maybe, “that’s fascinating,” as a generic grown matter, as ever-changing as creation itself. topographical epics which unfold with the infinite minutia of response, accompanied by lifted eyebrows and slightly surface details. As Monstrous drawn-back shoulders. Counterintuitively, as gender fluidity Vampires of lore are said to have no reflection because they Another rhetorical consequence: Dorian Gray lived above and non-conformity enter the mainstream, we attract more have no eternal soul. I have no eternal body. Instead, I am a As Secret Ambition life and death, above the laws of man and nature. He grew and longer stares. We are sexualized, reviled, probed, swirl of ephemeral cells that replace, reform, and rearrange. If a portrait is to capture the likeness of its subject, it does so monstrous in his defiance of law. Yet this showed only in his celebrated, and judged all within a single bus or train or I am a reality that creates itself anew as I better learn to by preserving that likeness in time, as its subject changes painted portrait, not on his face. How true is this of all portraits subway ride. We have chosen to embrace our difference understand myself as myself, and in relation to others. My with age. In Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, in defying natural law? Is there not something monstrous with sarcasm and flamboyance, our own lifted eyebrows and body is a journey, a resting place, a canvas for creation, a Gray’s portrait startlingly does the opposite, giving the lie, about the little reliquaries we carry in our pockets? half smiles. While this visibility is exhausting, it gives us at semi-literate expression of many indescribable ways of perhaps inadvertently, to the central machination of all least an illusion of control, of ownership over these strange being. My soul is eternal, complete, perfect, and whole. portraiture. Fantastically, the painted portrait has assimilated Jorge Daniel Veneciano is a scholar of modern and human shells that already feel not our own. the reality of its subject so intimately that it doesn’t simply contemporary art and former director of the Paul Robeson Carla Christopher Waid is a queer former poet laureate, reflect or represent Gray’s likeness, but instead replaces him Galleries. He has written on portraiture and is the curator of community activist and diversity trainer, and pastor-in- in that most crucial distinction: the portrait’s congealment of Imago: The Drama of Self-Portraiture in Recent Photography. training based in York, .

56 57 THE GUERRILLA GIRLS ARE A COLLECTIVE OF FEMINIST ACTIVIST ARTISTS. THEY WEAR GORILLA MASKS IN PUBLIC AND USE FACTS, HUMOR AND OUTRAGEOUS VISUALS TO EXPOSE GENDER AND ETHNIC BIAS AS WELL AS CORRUPTION IN POLITICS, ART, FILM, AND POP CULTURE. THEIR ANONYMITY KEEPS THE FOCUS ON THE ISSUES. THEY BELIEVE IN AN INTERSECTIONAL THAT FIGHTS DISCRIMINATION AND SUPPORTS HUMAN RIGHTS FOR ALL PEOPLE AND ALL GENDERS.

58 59 60 MANUEL ACEVEDO 64 98 PEGGIE MILLER ZOË CHARLTON 66 100 ANNA OGIER-BLOOMER PAOLO CIRIO 68 102 POLIXENI PAPAPETROU DAVID ANTONIO CRUZ 70 104 PATRICIA PICCININI KEVIN DARMANIE 72 106 WENDY RED STAR E.V. DAY 74 108 FAITH RINGGOLD LEAH DEVUN 76 110 KEVIN BLYTHE SAMPSON NONA FAUSTINE 78 112 MARÍA VERÓNICA SAN MARTÍN TATYANA FAZLALIZADEH 80 114 DREAD SCOTT ANNE-KARIN FURUNES 82 116 LEO SELVAGGIO PHYLLIS GALEMBO 84 118 LAURA SPLAN CHITRA GANESH 86 HYPHEN-LABS 88 120 BEAT STREULI WILLIAM KENTRIDGE 90 122 ARNE SVENSON RIVA LEHRER 92 124 SHOSHANNA WEINBERGER ANI LIU 94 126 DEBORAH WILLIS JESSAMYN LOVELL 96 128 MARTHA WILSON

Guerrilla Girls, Birth of Feminism, 2001, paper poster, 24x18” Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy guerrillagirls.com GUERRILLA GIRLS

61 62 63 “There had to be a conversation. A certain amount of intimacy had to happen. I couldn’t get the shot right away.”1

anuel Acevedo has been a leading figure of the of the Newark art scene for over Mthree decades. From the beginning of his career, the city has been a frequent subject of Acevedo’s work. For example, his series The Wards of Newark 1982–87 represents a cross section of life in Newark, including not only citizens (politicians and children), but the very city streets. These portraits of the city and its inhabitants are a negotiation between Acevedo and his subject, and are executed with a shrewd attention to powerful, transient moments. In Altered Sites, a series dating from the 1990s, Acevedo augments Newark landscapes, drawing imaginative lines of flight on the image’s surface to connote an array of possible futures for the city. Acevedo’s more recent work combines projected image, wall drawing, animation, and photography. Images of domestic scenes are projected onto images of typical Newark houses in the series Untitled (Night Projection) (2002–present), using light and motion to explore how architecture shapes our psychological experiences and understanding of the built environments. Throughout his career, Acevedo has been committed to working with alternative and nonprofit spaces, community-based art centers, and educational organizations, largely circumventing the commercial art gallery system.

Acevedo is a graduate of the School of , New York. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, most recently at River Art Center; Cuchifritos Gallery, New York; the Latino Cultural Center, Dallas; Real Art Ways, Hartford; Project Row Houses, Houston; the Jersey City Museum; the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster; Exit Art, New York; Third Steaming, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; MoMA PS1, Queens; the Queens Museum of Art; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. He has held residencies at SPACES World Artists Program, Cleveland; the , New York; Visual Art Network Residence at the Camera Communis, Knoxville; Center for Book Arts, New York; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, New York; and . His is the recipient of awards from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Baltimore; the Bronx Council on the Arts’ Longwood Arts Project Digital Matrix Commission; and the Foundation, New York, among others. Acevedo lives and works in New York.

Manuel Acevedo, Jump! from the series The Wards of Newark 1982-87, 1987, gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches (unframed), 17 x 21 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist 1. Manuel Acevedo quoted in Carrie Stetler, “The Wards of Newark,” Hycide, http://hycide.com/THE-WARDS-OF-NEWARK

64 65 “I’m really interested in perceptions of power. How a body translates that through the objects it is wearing (or carrying) contributes to its relationship to power, history, or identity.”2

oë Charlton creates drawings that explore the ironies of contemporary social and Zcultural stereotypes. Working in video, drawing, gouache, and collage, she creates images of culturally loaded objects and landscapes with undressed bodies, pointing to her subject’s relationship with their world. For example, the series Paladins and Tourists (2010–11) emerged from a 2010 residency wherein the artist found herself primarily in the company of white men. Her fellow residents were keen to convince Charlton of their status as allies, making frequent references to cultural touchstones such as reggae music and charities like Water for Africa. Charlton imagined these men as modern day paladins (knights) who donate money to charity and consume “exotic” cultures as tourists instead of charging into battle. The artist’s Festoon series (2012–13) is a thematic expansion of Paladins and Tourists. A traditional festoon is a decorative chain of flora or ribbons hung in a curve. Works in the series depict Black and white men naked, save for oversize festoons made of overdetermined tokens like African masks, tall ships, red barns, Southern oak trees, colorfully wrapped gifts tied with bows, horses, Southern mansions, and ocean waves. The subjects in the series are literally and figuratively burdened by the symbolic weight of these tokens’ painful histories.

Zoë Charlton holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Charlton’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago; the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Connersmith, Washington, DC; the Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington; and Haas & Fischer Gallery, Zurich. She has participated in residencies at Creative Alliance, Baltimore; McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Charlotte; Art342, Fort Collins; the Drawing Center, New York; the Skowhegan School of Painting; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, among others. She is a recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, and was a finalist for the Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize. In 2014, Charlton was nominated for both the Anonymous Was a Woman Award and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. Charlton is based in Baltimore and is associate professor and chair of the Department of Art at American University in Washington, DC.

2. Zoë Charlton quoted in Amy Boone-McCreesh, “Inertia: Zoë Charlton,” Bmore Art, November 20, 2016, http://www.bmoreart.com/2016/11/inertia- Zoë Charlton. Be Sarah (still), 2011. zoe-charlton.html Single-channel video, 2:38. Courtesy of the artist

66 67 “The way information flow is managed in our age is really at the core of our democracy. It shouldn’t be controlled only by companies and authorities—there should be a democratic process to let people decide what should be public or private, accessible freely or not.”3

aolo Cirio engages with legal, economic, and semiotic systems of the information Psociety. His work investigates social fields impacted by the Internet, such as privacy, copyright, democracy, and finance. Cirio’s research and online intervention-based works are exhibited as photos, installations, videos, and public art. His series Street Ghosts (2012–17) appropriates images of people accidently captured by Google Street View cars. Cirio created life-size posters from these images and affixed them to the walls of public buildings located where the people were originally documented, memorializing the ghostly figures that appear as collateral in Google’s agenda of total information capture. Global Direct (2014) consists of a series of fifteen diagrams of alternative protocols, procedures, and policies for organizing a global, participatory democracy. The opportunities offered by distributed network technology for participatory decision- making, transparent accountability, and civil awareness are centered as being fundamental to the creation of a worldwide democracy. With the software Google Will Eat Itself (2005), co-authored by Alessandro Ludovico and UBERMORGEN, Cirio hacked Google’s AdSense initiative, creating bots to click on banner ads inserted into a series of hidden websites. The profits generated were directed to GTTP Ltd., a dummy firm created to purchase and redistribute Google shares to the public, effectively using Google’s advertising strategies against itself. An ouroboros of digital media and late-capitalist abstraction, Google Will Eat Itself made apparent the company’s wide- reaching control of online information and economies.

Paolo Cirio is a graduate of the University of Turin, Italy. His work has been exhibited at major institutions nationally and internationally, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Museum für Fotografie, Berlin; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum, Cambridge; the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent; the Haifa Museum of Art; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZMK), Karlsruhe; Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel; Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art of Luxembourg; Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; the Tate Modern, London; the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; Vancouver Art Gallery; and Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. He is the recipient of a number of awards, including a second prize at transmediale, Berlin and the Golden Nica first prize at Ars Electronica, Linz. He has held residencies at Eyebeam, and the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Brooklyn. Cirio lives and works in New York.

3. Paolo Cirio quoted in DJ Pangburn, “An Artist Blurs More Than 15 Million Paolo Cirio. Mugshots.com N.2 from the series Mugshots To Protect Your Right To Privacy,” Good, May 6, 2016. https:// Obscurity, 2016. Archival inkjet print, 36 1/2 × 29 3/4 inches www.good.is/articles/your-mugshot-does-not-have-to-be-forever (unframed), 42 × 32 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist

68 69 “After my first exhibition in Puerto Rico, I was considered and talked about as a ‘foreign’ artist. There was no natural space for me that I belonged uncontested or at home. I had to think about these spaces as separate identities and learn to negotiate the two, not really being of one or the other.”4

avid Antonio Cruz fuses painting, drawing, video, and performance to explore the Dinvisibility and silencing of brown and Black queer bodies throughout history and within contemporary communities. In Cruz’s practice, strokes of paint, symbols, sounds, and actions coalescence into something more than the sum of their parts. Cruz’s work communicates the complexities of the inner lives and outer struggles of queer people of color with richness, vibrancy, and psychological depth. In works like So Let Them Eat Asylum Pink (2016), Cruz touches on and expands cultural and art historical references like Balthus’s The Guitar Lesson (1934). The painting depicts two figures—the artist’s friends, Randy Harris and Ian Marrero—in an erotic and anticipatory position, with one man draped over the other’s knee. The background is painted pink, a color most often associated with young girls and mental hospitals, gesturing to the criminalization and pathologization of homosexuality. Cruz’s interactive, operatic bilingual performance, green,howIwantyougreen (2015–17) is based on Federico García Lorca’s Sonnets of Dark Love (written in 1935, but banned from publication until 1983), inspired by his relationship with Rafael Rodriguez Rapún. In Cruz’s performance, Lorca’s poems are fused with personal coming out narratives, as well as texts excerpted from two plays written around the time of Lorca’s assassination: Lillian Hellman’s The Children Hours (1933) and Oscar Wilde by Leslie and Sewell Stokes (1938). Green,howIwantyougreen combines elements of high and low culture to construct visible queer narratives and expose forgotten histories.

Cruz holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and a Master of Fine Arts from , New Haven. His paintings, videos, and performances have been shown in venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts; BRIC, Brooklyn; the Jersey City Museum; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; the High Line Park, New York; Gateway Projects, Newark; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Gardens, Staten Island; and The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. Cruz has participated in residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, New York; Gateway Project Spaces’ Project For Empty Space, Newark; and Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. He is the recipient of awards from Franklin Furnace and the Urban Artist Initiative Award. His work has been reviewed in , the Wall Street Journal, Journal USA, Studio Magazine, Arc Magazine, Time Out New York, BOMB, and El Centro Journal. Cruz lives and works in New York.

David Antonio Cruz. Puerto Rican Pieta, 2006. Oil on canvas, 5. David Antonio Cruz quoted in Sasha Dees, “David Antonio Cruz– 70 × 70 inches. Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York. alwaysagoodtime,” ARC, March 17, 2014. http://arcthemagazine.com/ Museum Purchase through a gift from the Jacques and arc/2014/03/david-antonio-cruz-alwaysagoodtime-2/ Natasha Gelman Foundation [acc#: 2015.7]

70 71 “People look at the Caribbean as being this simple culture, but it’s actually much more complex than that. And vice-versa. Sometimes it looks much more complex, but you can also see it as relatively simple. I kind of like that back-and-forth.”6

evin Darmanie’s practice melds critical theory and fine art techniques with comic Killustration, tackling questions of fairness and cultural difference with incisiveness and wit. Darmanie’s work takes a variety of forms, including public projects, paintings, and sculptural objects, and ranges in degrees of verisimilitude, from abstract murals to text-based pieces to representational works. His public mural Code To Freedom: A Legend De-constructed (2016) was inspired by quilts stitched with coded messages created to help guide escaped slaves traveling the Underground Railroad to freedom. The abstract patterns of the mural draw on the visual vocabularies of quilts made by Black women quilt makers in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, nautical symbols, and kente cloth. The mural Free World Boss (2014) references a phrase coined by the fans of dancehall musician Vybz Kartel after he was sentenced to life in jail. The mural draws together two worlds—the Caribbean and the United States—foregrounding the simultaneous conflict and sense of possibility that spawns from a blending of two identities. The viewer perceives a sense of freedom seemingly apparent in each identity when viewed from the confines of the other. Darmanie began sketching as a young man in Trinidad and Tobago, turning school composition notebooks into comic books. His graphic novel Kulprit (2009) deconstructs the idea of the hero, telling the story of an officer of justice whose techniques skirt the law. The main character struggles to maintain a sense of right and wrong in the face of the law’s many failings.

Darmanie was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been exhibited in a number of venues, including the Lex Leonard Gallery, Jersey City; Rupert Ravens Contemporary, Newark; Gallery Aferro, Newark; and Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University–Newark. Darmanie is a largely self-taught artist whose work is comprised of paintings, murals, installations, comic books, and works on paper. He lives and works in Newark, NJ.

6. K evin Darmanie quoted in “Newark Artist Integrates Two Cultural Perspectives In His Collection Of Murals At Rutgers’ Paul Robeson Galleries,” Discover Jersey Arts, April 16, 2014. http://features.jerseyarts. com/content/index.php/nj-visual-arts/2014/04/newark-artist-integrates- two-cultural-perspectives-in-his-collection-of-murals-at-rutgers-paul- Kevin Darmanie. Master of Reality, 2008. Colored ink on paper, 22 × 30 robeson-galleries/ inches (unframed), 42 × 32 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist

72 73 “Barbie is an action figure and her superpowers are whatever you need to impose upon her to feel powerful at any given time, be it a rock star, a nurse, or an art collector, and always with a supermodel physique.”7

.V. Day’s work explores themes of sexuality and humor by manipulating iconic images Eand objects from popular culture: wedding dresses, fishnet stockings, Barbie dolls, and Stealth Bombers. Day transforms these materials into new, often architectural arrangements to illuminate contradictions in gender roles and stretch the confines of social stereotypes. Golden Rays / In-Vitro (2017), installed at the American Academy in Rome, was inspired raggi, the golden rays of light radiating the Virgin Mary in paintings of the Annunciation. These rays both herald the presence of the Holy Spirit and are the means by which Mary conceives the Christ child. Here, the rays—made from an Aircraft cable, gold leaf, monofilament and hardware—suggest contemporary flows of immaterial power, as in electromagnetic waves, the Internet, and fiber-optic cables, as well as assisted-reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization. Speed, sexuality, mass production, and consumption are brought together in Day’s G-Force series (2001 – present), in which the artist coats thong underwear in resin and suspends the garments from the ceiling in various flying formations using monofilament. In Bride Fight (2006), which developed out of the earlier Exploding Couture series (1999– 2002), two deconstructed wedding dresses are suspended between ceiling and ground by complicated arrangements of heavy-duty fishing line and hardware. The battling brides rend one another’s garments as they shatter from within. Bride Fight invokes imagery from Abstract Expressionism, Italian futurism, and 3D animation to shatter bridal tropes.

E.V. Day holds a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, New Haven. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca; Lever House, New York; MoMA PS1, Queens; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; and the Musée Nationale des Beaux-Arts du Québec, Québec City. Day’s work is in the permanent collections of the ; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the , New York; the ; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; and numerous private collections. Day has been awarded grants and residencies from the Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program at Claude Monet’s Garden, Giverny; the New York Foundation for the Arts; Dieu Donné, New York; the Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, funded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York; and ArtPace International Artist-in-Residence, San Antonio. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize. Day is based in New York.

7. E.V. Day quoted in Jill Spalding, “E.V. Day interview: ‘I stiffened 200 thongs to look like jet fighters and strung them in the atrium of Philip Morris’s. That would not have happened in the 70s.’,” Studio International, November 13, 2014. http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/ev-day-semi-feral-review- E.V. Day. Mummified Barbie, 2007. Yellow beeswax, twine, and Barbie doll, 12 interview-exploding-couture-catfight 1/2 × 2 1/2 × 3 inches. Courtesy of Carolina Nitsch, New York

74 75 “These photos suggest that we think more carefully about how we categorize bodily experiences as ‘natural’ or ‘artificial,’ how entwined our lives are with technology, and how the experience of birth blurs the distinctions we usually make between our bodies and the external, ‘artificial’ devices that are now so much a part of parenthood.”8

eah DeVun’s photographs and videos explore the legacy of queer and feminist Lhistories. The Summit (2016), made in collaboration with Lauryn Siegel, is three- channel video installation inspired by the life of Ethel Smyth. The Summit draws from Smyth’s biography as a pioneering opera composer, suffragist, lesbian, and mountain climber, as well as the Greek myth of Sisyphus, placing both these stories in direct parallel to the uphill battle faced by modern-day queer, feminist, and transgender activists. The series Lesbian Land (2010) documents some of the communities associated with the Women’s Land Movement and lesbian separatism, dating to the 1970s and ’80s, and re-performs moments from that history. The series speaks to the politics of land ownership, the breadth and depth of queer communities outside of major urban centers, and the necessity of radical approaches to the present. Beauty Knows No Pain (2008–09) is the product of chance encounters with young Miley Cyrus fans at the height of Hannah Montana’s popularity. DeVun saw throngs of fans dressed as their idol queuing for a stadium concert and asked the girls to sit for portraits. In the photographs, the little fans strike poses in their best Hannah Montana costumes, make-up, toy microphones, and long blonde wigs, adopting and reinterpreting mass media gender norms.

DeVun holds a PhD from Columbia University, New York. She has participated in numerous exhibitions, programs, and panels at venues such as the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; Houston Center for Photography; ONE Archives Gallery and Museum at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Yale University School of Art, New Haven; The Front, New Orleans; the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs; and MoMA PS1, Queens. DeVun is the author of the award-winning book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time (Columbia University Press, 2009). She has lectured internationally and received grants and residential fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Alexandria; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of California, Los Angeles; the Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino; and the Stanford Humanities Center. Her work has received coverage in publications such as Artforum, Art Papers, LA Weekly, and Modern Painters, among others. DeVun lives in Brooklyn and is currently associate professor at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Leah DeVun. Erica from the series In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 8. Leah DeVun, “In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Statement.” 2016. Archival inkjet print, 40 × 30 inches (unframed), http://leahdevun.com/in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction-st. 42 × 32 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist

76 77 “I live in a city and a country that are filled with monuments and icons of all sorts— mostly to white men. They convey their history. It’s a one-sided legacy. This is the only country I know. My daughter is half-Chinese, and I think about what America means to the Chinese and to every immigrant who has come here. Isn’t it their country too? For me, it’s a claim. I am American, this is my country.”9

orking mainly in photography, Nona Faustine’s practice focuses on history, Widentity, and representation. Her work calls for a critical and emotional understanding of the past, proposing a deeper examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes. The series My Country (2016) is made of images of famous monuments—the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument— all horizontally bisected by black void. In a moment in which Americans are collectively re-evaluating which histories we monumentalize, the obscurity that cuts through Faustine’s compositions directs the viewer’s thoughts to a history of white supremacy that the exultant structures both cover over and rely upon. The series From My Beach Chair (2016–17) documents the wide variety of bodies of ’s working and middle classes that populate the public beaches of Brooklyn and Queens during the summer months. Mitochondria (2008) presents intimate portraits of three generations of women in Faustine’s family: herself, her daughter, and her mother. The photographs’ immediacy conveys the love, conflicting desires, and generational differences between the three women. In the series White Shoes (2013), the artist posed naked save for a pair of white high heels—the kind often worn by Black women to church—at various sites around Manhattan associated with the slave trade. The history of slavery in Northern states is often effaced; this series serves as a reminder of slavery’s role in the development of New York City, making visible in the present the restless ghosts of the past.

Faustine is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the International Center of Photography at Bard College. Her work has been exhibited at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; the International Center of Photography, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York; and the Art Gallery of College of Staten Island. She has lectured at Albany State University; , Columbus; Bucknell University, Lewisburg; Aperture Foundation, New York; and Marist College, Poughkeepsie. Faustine’s work has received wide recognition, and has been published in a variety of national and international media outlets such as the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, the Village Voice, the Guardian, Artforum, Fader Magazine, and the LA Times, among many others. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

9. Nona Faustine quoted in Demie Kim, “‘New York Artist Nona Faustine Exposes the City’s Slaveholding Past,” Artsy, December 26, 2016. Nona Faustine. Venus of Vlacke bos from the series White Shoes, 2012. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-new-york-artist-nona-faustine- Digital chromogenic print, 15 1/8 × 9 3/4 inches (unframed), exposes-city-slaveholding-past 19 1/4 × 14 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist

78 79 “This is all about how women’s bodies are consumed and are considered public property for display, comment, and consumption. Women need to start talking about their daily moments because it’s the smaller stuff that affects the larger things like rape, domestic violence, harassment in the workplace.”9

atyana Fazlalizadeh works in painting, illustration, and public art. Most notably, she is the Tcreator of Stop Telling Women to Smile (2012–present), an international street art project that tackles gender-based street harassment. This public art project can be found on walls across the globe, and has drawn international attention for the ways in which it tackles violence against women in public spaces. Each poster features the drawn likeness of a woman accompanied by a quote about her personal experiences with street harassment. Fazlalizadeh’s installation of wheat-pasted portraits Not Going Anywhere (2017) features images of American artists and activists, asserting the presence and necessity of a diversity of people and perspectives in the continuation of the American experiment. The artist created Coney Island Portraits (2015) for the second annual Coney Island Art Walls mural exhibition. Fazlalizadeh met with and photographed local children, drawing their portraits from the photographs and composing the drawings into a single design. Her painted portraits, like those of Black Girls Rock (2016), commissioned by Black Entertainment Television (BET), are marked by a sense of compositional intimacy and intense focus on the subject.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States, including SOHO20 Gallery, Brooklyn; the Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College, Chicago; the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit; Butter Gallery, Miami; and Mills College Art Museum, Oakland. She was included in Forbes magazine’s annual “30 Under 30” list, and was recognized as one of Brooklyn’s most influential people by Brooklyn Magazine. Fazlalizadeh’s work has been written about in Artnet, Vice, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, and Mother Jones, among many other publications. She has lectured at the Brooklyn Museum; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center; , Providence; and Stanford University. Her work has been featured on the television networks Black Entertainment Television (BET) and Oxygen, as well as in Spike Lee’s feature filmDa Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014). Fazlalizadeh is the art consultant for the Netflix seriesShe’s Gotta Have It. A native of Oklahoma City, she currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

9. Tatyana Fazlalizadeh quoted in Felicia R. Lee, “An Artist Demands Civility on the Street With Grit and Buckets of Paste,” the New York Times, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh. Installation view, Stop Telling Women to Smile, April 9, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/arts/design/tatyana- at Paul Robeson Galleries, 2018. Wheat-paste fazlalizadeh-takes-her-public-art-project-to-georgia.html installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist

80 81 “In these photos, there is no posing, no smiles. I was searching for portraits, because even though they are anonymous, each individual is interesting. They have their own personality, strength, and integrity. I hope the onlooker experiences the sense of facing another person, as if it were a real meeting with a real person at this moment in time.”10

nne-Karin Furunes’s research-based practice focuses on the forgotten histories housed Ain contemporary archives, transforming archival photographs of anonymous people into portraits that poignantly emphasize humanity and individual experience. Furunes creates these portraits by perforating canvas and metal—an act that is both violent and revelatory—using holes of varying sizes to form an image by manipulating the way the human eye perceives light. Furunes began working with perforation in 1992, first manually cutting canvas with scissors, and eventually began employing a hammer and different sizes of hole punchers. The artist begins each work by painting a monochrome canvas, usually either white or black, and then meticulously punctures the surface with holes to form a portrait. Furunes works with found archival images, and has sourced portraits from the Military Archives of Finland, the Carolina Rediviva Collection of the Uppsala University Library, and elsewhere, appropriating often-anonymous photographs of Venetian women workers, German soldiers during the occupation of Norway, Finnish women fighters, patients in psychiatric hospitals on San Servolo island, Italy, and victims of the Holocaust. Although the subjects of these photographs are recorded in state and private archives, their stories are missing from common cultural narratives. Furunes’s appropriations of, and alterations to, these photographs literally pokes holes in dominant histories written by those in power, calling her viewer to question the motivations of the authors of history.

Furunes was trained as an architect and artist and received her degree from the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Espoo Museum of Modern Art; University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie; Kimen Cultural Centre at Stjørdal Kunstforening; Millesgården, Stockholm; Trondheim Kunstmuseum; Västerås Konstmuseum; and Palazzo Fortuny, Venice. Large-scale commissions of her work have been realized at Barcode Project, Oslo; the National Theatre Station, Oslo; Deutsche Bank, Sydney; St. Olavs Hospital, Trondheim; and the Trondheim Airport, among others. She is represented in prominent public collections worldwide including the National Museum, Beijing; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; and the Museum of Art, Trondheim. Furunes lives and works in Stjørdal, Norway.

10. Anne-Karin Furunes quoted in Jordan G. Teicher, “These People Were Likely Victims of a Swedish Eugenics Institution,” Slate, June 5, 2016. Anne-Karin Furunes. Of Faces X (Portraits of Archive Pictures), 2016. http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2016/07/05/_of_nordic_archives_by_ Acrylic on perforated canvas, 98 3/8 × 177 1/8 inches. anne_karin_furunes.html Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York

82 83 “I’m not a very fashionable kind of person, but as a photographer, I have always been interested in ritual and acts of transformation. I’m interested in that energy, the music, and the dance. Most of the photographs that I show do not necessarily reveal those aspects— I’m more interested in creating the portraits and really documenting the ritual clothing.”11

hyllis Galembo has made over twenty trips to sites of ritual masquerade in Africa and the PCaribbean, capturing cultural performances with a subterranean political edge. Her impressive body of photographs depicts the physical character, costumes, and rituals of African religious practices and their diasporic manifestations in the Caribbean and South America. Masking is a complex and profound tradition in which participants transcend the physical world and enter the spiritual realm. In vibrant images, like those in her series Sierra Leone (2008–09), Galembo documents an ornate code of political, artistic, theatrical, social, and religious symbolism and commentary. The series Sodo (1997–2001) visualizes the transformative power of ritual, documenting the pilgrimage to a sacred waterfall near Ville Bonheur, Haiti, where it is believed the Viej Mirak (Miracle Virgin) dwells. The lush images capture pilgrims as they bathe at the base of the waterfall. Works in the series Cross River, Nigeria (2004) highlight the creativity of individual masqueraders as they morph into fantastical representations of themselves, having brought together materials from their immediate environments to manifest themselves as visions of mythical figures. Galembo’s portraits emphasize both her subject’s personal identity and the ways in which they tap into larger dynamics of religious, political, and cultural affiliation.

Galembo graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and has been a professor in the fine arts department of State University of New York, Albany since 1978. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston; the at Duke University, Durham; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover; the Photographers’ Gallery, London; the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), New York; the American Museum of Natural History, New York; International Center for Photography (ICP), New York; the Newark Museum; and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, among others. Galembo’s photographs are included in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library; the Rockefeller Foundation, New York; ICP, New York; and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga. She lives and works in New York.

Phyllis Galembo. Aye Loja (The World Market Place 11. Phyllis Galembo quoted in Sophie Pinchetti, “Masked Spirits And Divine That We Visit), Benin, 2006. Ilfochrome print, 29 1/2 × 29 3/4 inches Theatrics Of The African Diaspora,” Third Eye, December 7, 2012. http://www. (unframed), 40 × 40 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist thethird-eye.co.uk/divine-theatrics-and-masked-spirits/ and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

84 85 “I’m interested in representation that falls outside of what would be socially appropriate, or acceptable, or beautiful.”12

hitra Ganesh’s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of Cfemininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from the literary and art historical canon. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed-media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspirations and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms. Her visual vocabulary draws from surrealism, expressionism, Hindu and Buddhist iconography, and South Asian pictorial forms such as Kalighat and Madhubani painting, connecting these with the contemporary mass-mediated visual languages of comics, science fiction, news photography, and illustration. In her recent wall work Pussy Riot (2015), imagery of Hindu deities meets psychedelia in an homage to the eponymous Russian feminist punk band. Architects of the Future (2014), a portfolio of prints, employs a 1960s and ’70s science-fiction aesthetic, loosely referencing Amar Chitra Katha, a long-running comic series that portrays traditional Indian epics, history, and mythology. In collaboration with , Ganesh maintains the Index of the Disappeared (2004– present), an experimental archive of post-9/11 detentions, deportations, and human erasures, as well as a public platform for dialogue on related issues.

Chitra Ganesh holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University, Providence, and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, New York. Ganesh’s work has been widely exhibited, including at the Brooklyn Museum; Kunstverein Gottingen; Saatchi Museum, London; the Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; MoMA PS1, Queens; MOCA Shanghai; and Fondazione Sandretto, Turin. She has held residencies at Smack Mellon Studios, Brooklyn; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Ganesh has received numerous grants including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts and a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, as well as awards from the Art Matters Foundation; Joan Mitchell Foundation; New York Foundation for the Arts; and the New York Community Trust, among others. Her works are held the collections of the ; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the San Jose Museum of Art. Ganesh lives and works in Brooklyn.

Chitra Ganesh. Untitled from the portfolio Delicate Line: Corpse She Was Holding, 2010. Monotype and three-run silkscreen on Stonehenge paper, 22 × 28 inches (unframed), 28 1/4 × 34 1/4 inches (framed). Edition of 24. Produced in collaboration with 12. Chitra Ganesh quoted in Alex Zafiris, Chitra“ Ganesh: Of This Time,” Guernica, Randy Hemminghaus and published by Brodsky Center, Rutgers. December 15, 2014. https://www.guernicamag.com/of-this-time/ Courtesy of the artist and Brodsky Center, Rutgers

86 87 CARMEN AGUILAR Y WEDGE, ECE TANKAL, ASHLEY BACCUS

“They [the products] all tell a story … about security, protection, and visibility of Black women’s bodies, women of color’s bodies. What are the issues we face during our daily lives, what is the technology that is available to us, and what kind of alternatives can we offer to ensure security, and to ensure visibility and protection?”13

yphen-Labs is an international team of women of color working at the intersection Hof technology, art, science, and the future. Through their global vision and unique perspectives, they create meaningful and engaging ways to explore emotional, human- centered speculative design. In this process, Hyphen-Labs challenges conventions and stimulates conversations, placing collective needs and experiences at the forefront of evolving narratives. We_Walk (2017) is an interactive work in which the viewer controls the movement of two figures across three screens, weaving them in and out of view and relation to suggest the messy vicissitudes of interpersonal relationships. Prismatic_NYC (2016) is a kinetic light installation on the High Line, New York. It is comprised of sixty-six individual prisms, each driven by a brushless motor, together beaming over 40,000 integrated LEDs. Prismatic_NYC is a poetic meditation on the beauty of light, geometry, and waveforms. Moss Voltaics (2014) is a green façade system that explores moss as a potential source of renewable energy, and proposes ways in which it could be implemented on an urban scale. Fab Textiles is a platform and research line focused on textiles, soft architectures, and innovative materials, exploring how new technologies could shift away from mass consumption of fast fashion to modes of customized, personal, and local fabrication.

Hyphen-Labs is a speculative design firm with members based in New York, London, and Barcelona. It is led by Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Co-Founder, Experience Designer, and Creative Director; Ashley Baccus, Speculative Neuroscientist and Creative Director; and Ece Tankal, Co-founder and Creative Director. Collaborators include Elena Mitro, Jin Shuihi, Lajune Mcmillian, Anastasia Pistofidou, Halime Maloof, Melanie Hoff, Michelle Cortes, Ale Diaz De Leon, and Nitzan Bartov.

13. Hyphen-Labs quoted in Adi Robertson, “Building the Afro-feminist future at Sundance, one cyberpunk beauty salon at a time,” The Verge, January Hyphen-Labs. Installation view, NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism, 26, 2017. https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/26/14377214/neurospeculative- at Paul Robeson Galleries, 2018. Virtual reality installation, afrofeminism-vr-science-fiction-sundance-interview-2017 dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artists

88 89 “One has to think of the black ink as blood, and the brush mark as a dagger stroke. In a way, there has to be a meeting of a formal language or material—knowing that it has to be ink and paper, or charcoal, or torn paper, or sculpture—with some thematic element of the project, which is interesting. So that has to do with instability and desire, with the pictures shattering and reconvening.”14

illiam Kentridge’s animated films, prints, books, , sculptures, and Wperformances combine politics and poetics to explore the history and culture of South Africa through a personal lens. He was born and raised in South Africa, where he still lives and works. In his work, form is related to content: the artifice of a work’s surface gestures toward the structures of apartheid, colonialism, and totalitarianism. Kentridge places these oppressive systems under scrutiny, challenging ideologies that would assert white supremacy as the natural, default ordering of society. He is best known for his stop-motion films, which he creates by filming successive charcoal scenes drawn on the same sheet of paper, forming a palimpsestic structure of erasure and recreation. Each time Kentridge erases his work to draw a new scene in its place, traces of his previous work remain; this process is evocative of historical time, and the ways in which events of the past linger in the present. Kentridge first came to international prominence with his series of short films,9 Drawings for Projection (1989–2003). This work tells the story of Soho Eckstein, a wealthy South African mine owner and land developer, as his empire grows while his personal life declines, set against the backdrop of South Africa’s changing social and political realities.

Kentridge earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and went on to receive his diploma in Fine Arts from the Johannesburg Art Foundation. He later studied mime and theater at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris. Kentridge has had major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among many others. He has participated in Documenta 10, 11, and 13 in Kassel; Prospect.1, New Orleans; the 2003 Sydney Biennale; and the 1999 Venice Biennale. His opera and theater works, often produced in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, have appeared at the Festival d’Avignon; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; and the Standard Bank National Arts Festival, Grahamstown. His production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose, premiered in 2010 at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in conjunction with a retrospective organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. William Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

William Kentridge. Scribe 3, 2011. Photogravure, drypoint, and burnishing, 11 × 12 1/4 inches (unframed), 17 1/8 × 19 3/8 inches (framed). 14. William Kentridge quoted in Emma Crichton-Miller, “Black & White: Interview Edition of 34. Produced in collaboration with Kristen Cavagnet and Randy with William Kentridge,” Apollo Magazine, July 28, 2015. https://www.apollo- Hemminghaus and published by Brodsky Center, Rutgers. Courtesy of the magazine.com/black-white-interview-with-william-kentridge/ artist and Brodsky Center, Rutgers

90 91 “Self-portraits have been a way for me to explore my evolving relationship with my own body. These works also allow aspects of formal experimentation that do not have an impact on anyone else’s self-image. In working with my own body, I can go in directions that would be difficult to ask of another person.”15

iva Lehrer is an artist, writer, and curator whose work focuses on issues of physical Ridentity and the socially challenged body. She is best known for representations of people with impairments, and those whose sexuality or gender identity have long been stigmatized. Her series of portraits Circle Stories (1997–2014) depicts individuals with disabilities who work in the arts, activism, and academia. Lehrer conducted extensive interviews in advance of beginning each work, ensuring that the resulting portrait would be a collaboration between sitter and artist. The “circle” referred to in the series’ title is simultaneously this circuitous process of making, the circle of community the series documents, and the circle of the wheelchair. Similarly, in her Risk Pictures (2015–present) series, the artist leaves the sitter alone in her studio, allowing them to make changes to her work, and repeating this process until both parties agree that the work is done. Lehrer handles her subjects with nuance and imagination. For example, the series Mirror Shards (2011) emerges from the artist’s interest in metaphor and myth, and the ways in which early cultural stories blur boundaries between animal and human. Leher used these anthropomorphic tales to explore ways to build empathy and understanding. In the resulting portraits, sitters are given the characteristics of animals and mythical creatures, suggesting new ways of understanding difference.

Lehrer’s work has been exhibited in venues including the Chicago Cultural Center; the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln; the United Nations, New York; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Illinois State Museum, Springfield; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Lehrer is the recipient of awards from Chances Dances, Chicago, and the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation. She has held residencies and fellowships at 3Arts Residency Fellowship at the University of Illinois, Chicago; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Haverford College and Bryn Mawr College; and the Prairie Fellowship at the Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest. Her writing and visual art are included in publications including Criptiques (May Day, 2014), edited by Caitlin Wood; Sex and Disability (Duke University Press, 2012), edited by Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow; TriQuarterly, the literary journal of Northwestern University; Lesbian Art in America (Rizzoli, 2000) by Harmony Hammond; and the Feminist Studies Journal. A longtime faculty member of the School of the and other institutions, Riva Lehrer is currently instructor in Medical Humanities at Northwestern University, Chicago. She lives and works in Chicago.

15. Riva Lehrer, “Self Portraits: Ghost Parade,” Riva Lehrer. 66 Degrees, 2016. Acrylic on wood panel, https://www.rivalehrerart.com/self-portraits-ghost-parade 24 × 36 inches. Collection of Laura and Larry Gerber

92 93 “Nine out of ten cells on your body are not your own. Emerging research shows that the impact of these microorganisms is profound. How much of our identity is predestined by our DNA, and how much of our behavior is influenced by the constellation of microorganisms that reside within us?”16

ni Liu works at the intersection of art and science. Liu combines experimentation, Aintuition, and speculative storytelling with rigorous scientific research to explore the social and psychological implications of emerging technologies. Her work takes a variety of forms including prosthetics, architecture, augmented reality, and synthetic biology: for example, Mind in the Machine: Psyche in the Age of Mechanical Production (2017) is a series of one-of-a-kind textiles which Liu began after spending a month working in a Chinese textile factory. To inscribe the mark of the human hand back into the process of textile making, Liu translated electroencephalogram signals into textile patterns. The worker’s given state of mind at the moment of the scan dictates the tensility and texture of the fabric. In her work with the HOTMILKS Foundation collective, which is made up of scientists, designers, engineers, and artists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Liu conducted speculative research on the possibility of programming emotions. In performances at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, museumgoers were invited to visit the Affective Induction Spa (2016–17), where scientific findings were used to induce experiences of pleasure and happiness. In The Botany of Desire: Experiments in Interspecies Interfaces (2016–17), Liu uses biotechnology to create sensorially evocative artwork. In the most recent iteration of the project, Liu combines a specific set of plants designed to trigger emotionally charged reactions in viewers, exploiting the relationship between smell and memory to explore new sensorial paradigms as a potential means to relive transitory experiences.

Ani Liu holds a Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College, Hanover; a Master of Arts in Architecture from Harvard University, Cambridge; and a Master of Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Liu’s work has been presented at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts; Open Gallery, Boston; Harvard University, Cambridge; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum, Cambridge; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, Cambridge; Wiesner Student Art Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. She has served on numerous design panels at institutions including Dartmouth College, Hanover; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and Harvard University, Cambridge, and is on the committee of art scholars at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Liu lives and works in New York.

Ani Liu. Microbial We, 2017–18. Microorganisms from the artist’s mouth and the mouths of those in close contact to her, agar, and nutrient 16. Ani Liu, “Statement,” email to the author, October 30, 2017 solution, 61 × 20 × 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist

94 95 “I wanted it to be like: she was a criminal, and she did something bad to me. And it just wasn’t that. None of that satisfaction of, ‘I got her!’ It was just … this weird transition. And anger started to be replaced with empathy.”17

essamyn Lovell works in photography, video, writing, book making, and map-making. JShe mines her personal and familial history to explore the dynamic between private and public identity. In No Trespassing (2008–12), Lovell created a portrait of her estranged father by combining old materials (for example, papers from her parents’ divorce) with new “research” gleaned from surveilling his house and taking photographs of him with a telephoto lens. Lovell documented this work on a blog, sharing details of the experiential and emotional process of performing reconnaissance on her father. Renaissance Faire Key & Soul Retrieval Feather (2011) from her series of diptychs titled A New Age pairs scanned objects to examine the artist’s spiritual past. The objects depicted—a feather and an old key—are suspended in a simultaneously luminous and dark void created by the process of scanning. This technique imbues the key and feather with a kind of beguiling liveliness. Lovell’s series Catastrophe, Crisis, and Other Family Traditions (2001) emerged as a way to make sense of her fraught home life. The series documents the activities of daily family life from the mundane, like eating meals together, to the emotionally harrowing, as in images of her bedridden mother injecting insulin. In viewing the specific activities of one family, we see the outlines of a larger American story.

Lovell holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Master of Fine Arts from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. Her work has been exhibited widely at venues such as the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at the University of California, Davis; Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin; LoBot Gallery, Oakland; Richmond Art Center; Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco; SF Camerawork, San Francisco; CCA Santa Fe; and Robert B. Menschel Photo Gallery, Syracuse. She has held residencies at Light Work, Syracuse, among others, and is the recipient of the Aperture Portfolio Prize, the American Society of Media Photographers Award, and a CaDre Grant, among others. Lovell has been invited to speak about her work widely, including at Art Miami Basel; the Colorado Photographic Art Center, Denver; Parsons School of Design, New York; the State University of New York at Plattsburgh; Sierra College Ridley Gallery, Rocklin; Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park; San Francisco State University; and the Hollister Gallery at Babson College, Wellesley. She is a senior lecturer in the departments of art and cinematic arts at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

17. Jessamyn Lovell quoted in Miki Meek, “Act Three. The Haunted Becomes the Haunter: Same Bed, Different Dreams,”This American Life, Chicago Jessamyn Lovell. Mug Shot from the series Dear Erin Hart, Public Radio, May 1, 2015. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/ 2012. Archival inkjet print, 15 × 11 3/4 inches (unframed), episode/556/transcript 16 1/2 × 12 3/4 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist

96 97 “My focus has always been on aggressive women because I’ve never felt the aggressive woman got all the attention that’s needed … we are always hid because of who we are. … You’re aggressive, so sometimes it’s not good remarks. I wanted to make sure we were shown in our best light. … That’s why I love showing them or showing myself. I don’t model, but I put it together, showing how beautiful, that we are beautiful, regardless, and that we should be seen.”18

eggie Miller established the New Millennium Butch project with the goal of increasing Pvisibility for butch women in mainstream society and celebrating their style. Unlike gay men, who have enjoyed relative acceptance, lesbian women have “taken a back seat,” Miller writes. She believes that lesbians of color, particularly those who are identified as “butch” or “aggressive,” need to step out: “It is time to emerge and be noticed.” Miller, who identifies as a butch woman, began the New Millennium Butch fashion shows in Newark, New Jersey, in 2000. These annual events, which showcase butch-identified models, designers, and entertainers, have enjoyed great success over the last decade. To celebrate this success, Miller created a photograph book, NMB: New Millennium Butch. Of her work, she writes, “I decided to take us to the next level and bring us out of the darkness into the light for the whole world to see.”

Miller was born in Kershaw, South Carolina and attended high school in New Jersey. She works in a variety of entertainment and activism-related endeavors, and is an active community member of the Unity Fellowship Church, Newark, NJ.

18. Peggie Miller quoted in Kristyn Scorsone, “Peggie Miller,” Queer Newark Peggie Miller. Chucky from the series New Millennium Butch, 2009. Oral History Project, March 7, 2017. https://queer.newark.rutgers.edu/ Archival inkjet print, 10 1/2 × 12 inches (unframed), 17 × 21 inches (framed). interviews/peggie-miller Produced in collaboration with Akintola Hanif. Courtesy of the artist

98 99 “I turn my lens on these physical elements: pain on the surface of the skin, illness, emotional outpouring of love and distress, a breast engorged with milk. I confront the complexity of these seemingly contradictory states of being.”19

orking mainly in photography, Anna Ogier-Bloomer’s art reveals the intricacy of Wfamilial relations, particularly between women, using her own family as material. The diptychs in her series Books From My Mother (2009) pair a scanned book cover with commentary from the artist’s mother, including her analysis of the book and its role in her life. Here, sharing books is figured as a form of second-hand influence, and the passages highlight generational differences. The seriesMother/Daughter/Public/Private (2010–11) is comprised of screen grabs from video calls between the artist and her mother, including moments of humor, boredom, and exhaustion. The series illustrates how repetition functions as a mechanism of relationship maintenance. Family Pictures (2004–11) compiles images of retirement parties, children hula hooping in the backyard, fights over divorce, and shooting ranges. The photos capture a full spectrum of human emotion: tense moments between family members, periods of waiting that surround the ceremonies of death and birth, and fragments of life that usually pass without ceremony. The images in the series East 88th Street (2013–14) document the artist’s husband’s family in South Los Angeles. These pictures illustrate the range of feeling that varies from one family to the next based on location, culture, and societal position, capturing familial relations with different stakes attached.

Ogier-Bloomer holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University, Medford, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design, New York, and an MPS in Digital Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Ogier-Bloomer’s work has been shown at galleries and museums nationally, including the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Gallery42 Fine Art, Mason; Bridge Art Fair, Miami; Ad Nauseum Lyceum, New York; Project for Empty Space, Newark; and Jewett Art Gallery at Wellesley College. She has held residencies at Project for Empty Space, Newark and the Bakery Photographic Collective, Westbrook. Ogier- Bloomer is the recipient of numerous grants from the Awesome Foundation, Chashama, CSArts Cincinnati, as well as awards from Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has spoken about her work at the Bakery Photographic Collective, Portland; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; School of Visual Arts, New York; and Gateway Projects, Newark. She serves on the graduate faculty at the School of Visual Arts, New York and was previously an adjunct assistant professor at the City University of New York. She currently lives in New York.

Anna Ogier-Bloomer. Nursing and peeing, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2015. Pigment inkjet print, 24 × 36 inches (unframed), 25 × 37 inches (framed). 19. Anna Ogier-Bloomer, “Statement: Let Down,” 2015 Courtesy of the artist

100 101 “I would describe the pictures as storytelling, works that contain narratives about identity and how we create roles that sometimes take us to another world.”20

olixeni Papapetrou uses photography to reveal the dynamic relationship between Phistory, popular culture, identity, and being. Her series of triptychs, Searching for Marilyn (2002), pairs pictures of Marilyn Monroe impersonators on the left and right panels with appropriated images from Renaissance paintings occupying the center panel, providing a provocative exploration of female archetypes, cultural projection, and collective desire. The Ghillies (2013) is a series of striking images of figures standing in the landscape wearing ghillie suits, which are typically used by hunters to camouflage themselves. The word “ghillie” comes from the Scottish word for “lad” or “servant,” specifically referencing an underling who would accompany and assist a Highland chief on expedition. This camouflage suit, first developed by Scottish gamekeepers, was eventually adopted for use by the British army. Papapetrou’s figures are disquieting, at once alien and natural, and provide an inventive approach to explore the complicated relationships between masculinity and nature, land and servitude, and colonialism and combat. Since 2002, Papapetrou has also created work on the cultural positioning of childhood. Her series of Consequence (2008) shows children in nature, playing with ropes, making improvised homes, and climbing rocks. Here, their activities take on a sinister edge, appearing to be only a moment away from turning into something dark, closer to the fraught power dynamics of adult life.

Papapetrou’s work has been exhibited worldwide at the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, Bogotá; Quartier General, La Chaux-de-Fonds; Museum Hilversum; Lishui Museum of Art; Photolux Festival of Photography, Lucca; Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; Le Mois de la Photo, Montreal; Yale School of Art, New Haven; Photofestival Noorderlicht; and the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Australia Council for the Arts and Arts Victoria, and counts among her awards the MAMA Art Foundation National Photography Prize, the Windsor Art Award, the Josephine Ulrick and Win Shubert Photography Award, and the Albury Regional Art Gallery National Photographic Award. Papapetrou’s work is held in private and institutional collections including the Fotomuseo, Bogotá; the Art Gallery of Queensland/ GOMA, Brisbane; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Gävleborg Kulturutveckling; the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Papapetrou lives and works Melbourne, Australia.

20. Polixeni Papapetrou quoted in Oswald Kazoo, “Empty Kingdom Polixeni Papapetrou. Spring, 2016. Pigment ink print, 50 1/8 × 33 1/2 inches Interview: Polixeni Papapetrou,” Empty Kingdom, December 25, 2015. (unframed), 51 3/4 × 35 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist; Michael Reid http://www.emptykingdom.com/featured/ek-interview-polixeni-papapetrou/ Gallery, Sydney; and Jarvis Dooney Galerie, Berlin

102 103 “This essential mutability of life is something that I find very interesting, and I see it as very much a hallmark of how we see the world. Human beings change things. It is what we are most proud of. Sometime we do it for the good, but not always.”21

atricia Piccinini’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses digital photography, video, Pinstallation, and sculpture. Her work creates another world, referencing the emergent technologies of today to point to potential lifeworlds of the future. Piccinini examines the potential emotional landscapes of possible new forms of humans, animals, and objects, visualizing the types of relations that could emerge between them. The initial strangeness of a creature like The Naturalist (2017) fades with sustained engagement, allowing its vulnerability to come to the fore. Piccinini compels viewers to be curious about how such a creature might exist, and what its existence would mean in relation to our own. Her practice is rooted in drawing, and from this initial process, she decides the specific materiality of a given work. In her series of drawings, Meditations on the Continuum of Vitality (2014), she centers corporality, representing blood, organs, skin, and hair to emphasize the body’s permeability. These elements are gathered in odd combinations, exceeding their bounds to become something else that oscillates between being abject and arresting. Her sculpture Embryo (2016) melds the aesthetics of automobiles with the shape of a human embryo. The term “embryo” is used to define the early stages of an organism’s development, a time when it is quite difficult to determine its species. In our current moment, technology’s status as an agent of change is equally amorphous, straddling biological, physical, and mechanical realms, and often being used to ethically indeterminate ends. Piccinini reflects on this agential uncertainty of technology in works speculating on the development of self-driving cars as self-determining beings.

Piccinini holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economic History from the Australian National University, Canberra, and Bachelor of Arts in Painting from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. She has exhibited extensively at venues such as the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; the Brooklyn Museum; the Des Moines Art Center; Arter Space For Art, Istanbul; the Fridericianum, Kassel; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; New York Academy of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Frye Museum, Seattle; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; and in the Australian Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. Piccinini’s work is held in collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Griffith University, Brisbane; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Parliament House, Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Monash University Art Gallery, Melbourne; University of Melbourne; Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and Artbank, Sydney.

Patricia Piccinini. The Osculating Curve, 2016. Silicone, fiberglass, 21. Patricia Piccinini, “Some thoughts about Embryo,” 2016. and human hair, 21 1/4 × 28 3/8 × 11 3/4 inches. https://www.patriciapiccinini.net/writing/102/435/44 Courtesy of the artist and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco

104 105 “The connection is made through the act of looking: by adding the mirror, the viewer must confront their own image, be accountable, and connect directly with these women.”22

endy Red Star’s cross-disciplinary practice spans photography, sculpture, video, Wfiber arts, and performance. Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, she explores the intersections of Indigenous ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Red Star appropriates and transforms archival materials, offering new and unexpected perspectives. In her seriesThe Medicine Crow & The 1880 Crow Peace Delegation (2014), she draws on photographs found on the Library of Congress website of Crow tribe members who traveled to Washington, DC to sign a peace treaty with government officials. In bold red lines drawn on the images, Red Star emphasizes the sitter’s apparel and writes notes about the meanings of the men’s attire and their family histories. She includes moments of gentle humor—“Hairbows were out of fashion in 1880,” “I am not a fan of the white man,” “I can kick your ass with these eyes”—creating works that are at once inquisitive, witty, and unexpected. Intergenerational collaboration is integral to her practice, as well as creating a forum for Indigenous women’s voices in contemporary art. Her series Apsáalooke Feminist (2016) depicts Red Star with her daughter, Beatrice Red Star Fletcher. They pose on and around a couch covered in blankets and some of Beatrice’s toys, evoking the long history of ’s echoes in the present, as well as the relationship between self-representation and self-determination.

Red Star holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Montana State University, Bozeman, and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has exhibited in the United States and abroad, at venues including the Hood Art Museum, Hanover; Domaine de Kerguéhennec; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris; the Portland Art Museum; and the St. Louis Art Museum, among others. She served a visiting lecturer at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Fairhaven College, Bellingham; Figge Art Museum, Davenport; Dartmouth College, Hanover; Yale University, New Haven; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Flagler College, St. Augustine; and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. Red Star has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Cue Art Foundation and has held residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Wendy Red Star. Clara White Hip, from the series Grandmothers (I Come As One But I Stand As Ten Thousand), 2016. Mirror and digital images sourced from the Richard Throssel papers at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming 22. Wendy Red Star, “Statement: Grandmothers and printed on PhotoTex, 25 × 25 inches (unframed), (I Come As One But I Stand As Ten Thousand),” 2016 27 1/2 × 27 1/2 × 3 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist

106 107 “It’s the African mask straight from African faces that I look at in Picasso’s studio and in his art. He has the power to deny what he doesn’t want to acknowledge. But [the] art is the truth, not the artist. Doesn’t matter what he says about where it comes from. We see where, every time we look in the mirror.”23

aith Ringgold’s activist politics traverses her broad body of work across media including Fpainting, performance, quilting, sculpture, and writing. Ringgold began painting in oils in the 1960s. Though her method was traditional, her subject matter carried contemporary messages in support of civil rights. In the early ’70s, she switched to acrylic paints and used unstretched canvases with fabric borders, a technique that resembles Tibetan silk paintings. Out of these experiments grew her well-known painted-narrative quilts, a notable example of which is The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles (1991). The quilt represents eight powerful African-American women—Madam Walker, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells, Fannie Lou Hammer, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ella Baker, and Willia Marie Simone, a character invented by Ringgold—holding a quilt that is a communal symbol of their achievements. An important early example of Ringgold’s sculpture-based work is the series Family of Woman Masks (1973), which includes thirty-one masks commemorating women in her life. Many of her mask sculptures can be worn, and this naturally progressed into a series of performance-based works, such as The Bitter Nest (1985), a masked performance set during the . Ringgold is the author and illustrator of seventeen children’s books. Her first,Tar Beach (Crown Publishers, 1991), won the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award and the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration.

Ringgold holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Arts degrees from the City College of New York. Her work has been shown extensively, including exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Center Georges Pompidou, Paris. Ringgold is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including twenty-two Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees; a National Endowment For the Arts Award; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; and the La Napoule Foundation Award. Her work is included in many private and public art collections, including those of the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Ringgold is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego and is based in Englewood, New Jersey.

Faith Ringgold. Listen to the Trees, 2012–14. Archival digital inkjet, silkscreen, 23. Faith Ringgold quoted in Melody Graulich And Mara Witzling, “The Freedom woodcut, and acrylic on Habotai silk, 44 × 45 1/8 inches. Produced in to Say What She Pleases: A Conversation with Faith Ringgold,” NWSA collaboration with Randy Hemminghaus and published by Brodsky Center, Journal 6.1 (Spring 1994), 1–27. https://daily.jstor.org/power-in-the-painting-faith- Rutgers. Courtesy of the artist and Brodsky Center, Rutgers. © 2018 Faith ringgold-and-her-story-quilts/ Ringgold and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

108 109 “I am a member of my community, and my job is to get their hopes, dreams, loves, and hates out there. It’s my obligation. I go out in the streets. I run my mouth all day long. I find out what people are thinking about most things. I try to find out the real stories behind people’s lives. I need all of them to make my day and to make a piece of work.”24

evin Blythe Sampson’s sculptures are made of reworked and transformed found objects Kincluding cement, bones, tiles, fabric, and various painting mediums including acrylics, oils, and stains. These objects—bones, tiles, tiny specks and leftovers from day-to-day living—are poetic archaeological elements that he sees as part of a conceptual vocabulary of impermanence and memory. His work teems with barely harnessed, dangerous energy, crackling with political, religious, and racial significance. His subjects are people he has known, who have been part of this world, and who lived lives he thinks ought to be remembered. By constructing sculptures of physical memories inspired by Caribbean and American Southern styles, he builds works that are about family in all its forms. His sculptures are at once political and intimate, frightening and freeing. In works like Blue Meat (2000), Sampson weaves together personal narrative and spirituality. The title references conversations between the artist and his father, who shared stories of consuming the “blue” meat of crows to survive during the Depression. Sampson was simultaneously disgusted and fixated on the idea and, in the work, he uses once-lively organic materials to imbue the work with the same kind of transfixing power.

Sampson was raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey as the son of a civil rights leader. He initially trained with and joined the New Jersey police force as a sketch artist and served for eighteen years, ten of which were spent police sketching. A series of family tragedies eventually compelled him to heal himself by making art. Sampson’s work has been exhibited at the American Visionary Museum, Baltimore; Corridor Gallery, Brooklyn; Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago; the Shore Institute of the Contemporary Arts, Long Branch; Newark Museum; Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York; the American Folk Art Museum, New York; Noyes Museum of Art, Stockton College, Oceanville; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan; the New Jersey Center for Visual Arts, Summit; and Rizomi Art Brut, Torino. He has held residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Brooklyn. Sampson’s work is held in the collections of the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago; the American Folk Art Museum, New York; and the Mennello Museum of American Folk Art, Orlando. Sampson lives and works in Newark, NJ.

24. Kevin Blythe Sampson quoted in Wayne Cox, “Kevin Sampson: Kevin Blythe Sampson. Beulah’s Ball Gown, 1997. Memorial Maker,” Folk Art Society of America, 2001. Mixed media, 57 × 32 × 15 inches. Courtesy of the artist and http://folkart.org/mag/kevin-sampson Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York

110 111 “There are messages that can be interpreted as corresponding to what happened in the transition from dictatorship to democracy. As , it also made sense to me. An image that disappears in the printmaking process then reappears printed on paper, like the search for truth and reconciliation.”25

aría Verónica San Martín is a Chilean printmaker, bookmaker, and performer whose Mwork examines the often-silenced violence in Chilean collective memory. Make the Economy Scream (2017) was inspired by a now-declassified document produced during the Nixon administration, titled “Meeting with the President.” The document outlines a plan to protect American commercial interests in Chile by staging coup d’état of the democratically elected government of socialist president Salvador Allende. Three years later, a military operation was planned to catalyze the depreciation of the copper market; economic turmoil ensued and left the country vulnerable. Make the Economy Scream is comprised of a copper box containing plastic sheets depicting the faces of some of the 1,248 people “disappeared” by the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the secret police force of brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet. These sheets are wrapped in a handkerchief printed with text appropriated from the declassified document detailing a conversation between President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and John Mitchell, in which they discuss the plan to overthrow the Allende government. The-right-to-know: Under This Sky (2016) is a room-size installation of images of the disappeared taken from the Report of Truth and Reconciliation, which was published by the Chilean government in 1990. The images are drawn on the floor, and follow an incomplete alphabetical-order grid with blank rectangles interspersed among the portraits. These refer to the hundreds of disappeared unaccounted for in government records— a status which leaves their families haunted by unresolved trauma. The installation symbolically buries the victims through the gesture of looking to the ground.

San Martín received a Master of Arts from the Corcoran School of Art and Design at George Washington University, Washington, DC. Her work has been exhibited at the Centro Cultural Estación Antofagasta; LARVA—Varieties Arts Lab, Guadalajara; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago; Stanford University Museum; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. San Martín has participated in residencies at Art OMI International Artists Residency, Ghent, and the Center for Book Arts, New York, and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her work can be found in the collections of Harvard University, Cambridge; Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum, the Hague; Yale University, New Haven; the New York Public Library; Klingspor Museum, Offenbach am Main; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Stanford University; and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

25. María Verónica San Martín quoted in Matías Celedón, “Every María Verónica San Martín. In Their Memory: Human Rights Violation Disappearance Implies A Search,” 2016. https://www.mveronicasanmartin. in Chile, 1973–1990, 2012. Screen print on paper and ink, com/every-disappearance-implies-a-searc 7 1/2 × 12 1/4 × 1 1/2 inches (extends to 20 inches). Courtesy of the artist

112 113 “People can make revolution; they have in various parts of the world across history, and that will happen again. My commitment is based on finding the world as it is completely intolerable and absolutely unnecessary.”26

read Scott works in a range of media, including performance, photography, screen Dprinting, and video, posing significant social questions to push formal and conceptual boundaries. Scott’s work first received national attention when he was an art student.What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag? (1989) consists of a photograph, a shelf with a book and pen, and an American flag placed on the floor below the shelf. The viewer must step on the flag to access the work. President George H. W. Bush called the work “disgraceful” and the Senate passed legislation to “protect the flag.” In his performance,On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide (2014) Scott repeatedly subjected himself to a jet of water from a firehose, referencing the 1963 civil rights struggle in Birmingham, Alabama in which nonviolent protesters and bystanders faced similar treatment. Scott’s Sisyphean performance points to the fact that the struggle for racial freedom in the US continues, most evidently in the present-day Movement for Black Lives. After the extrajudicial killing of Walter Scott by a police officer, Scott createdA Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday (2015), a black flag printed with this phrase in white, capitalized letters. In July 2016, the flag was hung outside Jack Shainman gallery in New York, referencing the flag flown from the New York offices of the NAACP during the 1920s and ’30s on the day after a lynching, which read “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.”

Scott holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. Scott’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Contemporary Art Center New Orleans; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Yerba Buena Art Center, San Francisco; and MoMA PS1, Queens. He has held residencies at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; the McColl Center for Visual Art; McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Charlotte; Art Omi International Artists Residency, Ghent; and Workspace, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York. His work is included in the collections of Akron Art Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; Laura Lee Brown, Steve Wilson Collection, International Contemporary Art Foundation, New York; the New Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Art at Washington State University, Pullman; and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute’s Museum of Art, Utica.

Dread Scott. Wanted, 2014. Community-based project: offset prints, performance, 26. Dread Scott quoted in Rawiya Kameir, “Artist Dread Scott: Cops video, website, inkjet prints, forums, and community Don’t Go To Jail For Murder’,” The Fader, October 3, 2016. participants. Developed collaboratively with No Longer Empty, http://www.thefader.com/2016/10/03/dread-scott-revolutionary- the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, and young adults in Harlem. art-interview Sketches drawn by Kevin Blythe Sampson. Courtesy of the artist

114 115 “The first mask had to be a white man’s because there is nothing more invisible to surveillance than a white man in a suit. Surveillance practices are built upon prejudicial architecture. I am hoping that URME Surveillance can expose the blueprints of those structures by examining the role of identity in surveillance culture.”27

elvaggio is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the intersection of identity Sand technology. He approaches his work as a kind of creative research, an iterative line of questioning manifest in focused and rigorous projects. Selvaggio explores the ways in which personal data is implicated in a larger context of surveillance, and how the prejudicial architecture surveillance systems are built upon affects how we perform our identities in public spaces. Eyesight Surveillance Window (2013) is an interactive video of an eye projected onto a window, which moves and blinks in real time. The eye’s pupil serves as a mask for a live video feed of small area across the street; when a pedestrian walks through this area, they see themselves in the center of the eye. The work points to the many forms of surveillance that surround us, and the ways techniques of watching are internalized by the surveilled. In his recent work, Selvaggio weaponizes and disseminates his own identity as a defense tool others can use to protect themselves against surveillance technologies. In 2013, the artist was invited to create a site-specific project at Block 37 on Randolph St. in Chicago. IMU: Google Street Portraits (2013) inserts his image onto the blurred-out faces captured by Google Street View, replacing those unintentionally documented with an intentional misrepresentation.

Selvaggio holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rutgers University–Newark and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia College, Chicago. He has exhibited internationally, including at the Roman Susan Gallery, Chicago; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago; Fuse Factory, Columbus; Wende Museum, Culver City; Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden; Tetem, Enschede; the Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts, Lausanne; Art SouTerrain Art Festival, Montreal; Arts-A-Field, MacLeish Field Station, Smith College, Northampton; the Saint-Etienne International Design Biennial; Currents New Media Arts Festival, Santa Fe; and the 21st International Symposium on Electronic Art, Vancouver, among other venues. His awards include an Albert P. Weisman Grant and a DCASE Individual Artist Professional Grant from the city of Chicago. Selvaggio’s work has been featured in publications such as Hyperallergic, Techcrunch, the Washington Post, CNET, The Verge, The Creator’s Project, and others. Selvaggio’s academic work has been published in the International Journal for Performance Arts and Digital Media and as part of “Behind the Smart World—Saving, Deleting, and Resurfacing Data,” published by LAFKON.

27. Leo Selvaggio quoted in Ben Valentine, “Masks for the Leo Selvaggio. Installation view, URME Surveillance: Demipanoptiversal, Surveillance State,” Hyperallergic, May 22, 2014. Paul Robeson Galleries, 2018. Light stands, sandbags, convex security mirrors, and https://hyperallergic.com/127797/masks-for-the-surveillance-state/ Urme Surveillance Prosthetic, 48 inches (radius). Courtesy of the artist

116 117 “I was interested in interrogating how experiences of the outside world are embodied and the ways we assess and quantify this embodiment institutionally and culturally. Wonder, a rather difficult-to-define experience, meets the quantification of the body, a historically problematic science.”28

aura Splan is an artist and lecturer working at the intersections of art, science, Ltechnology, and craft. Her conceptual projects examine the material manifestations of our mutable relationship with the human body. She reconsiders perceptions and representations of corporeality with a range of traditional and new-media techniques. Splan often combines the quotidian with the unfamiliar to interrogate culturally constructed notions of order and disorder, function and dysfunction. She frequently mixes textiles with technology, and much of her work involves experimentation with materials and processes (blood, cosmetic facial peels, digital fabrication), which she mines for their narrative implications and untapped potentials. For example, Blood Scarf (2002) is scarf knit out of clear vinyl tubing. The wearer’s blood flows from an intravenous device affixed to the user’s hand through the tubing, keeping the wearer warm as it drains them of blood. Her recent work uses biosensors (electromyography, electroencephalography) to create data-driven forms and patterns. Embodied Objects (2016) is a series of computerized jacquard-loom- woven cotton tapestries, whose patterns are derived from electromyography data collected while the artist performed tasks and expressions such as squinting, blinking, and even unraveling a finished tapestry.

Splan holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine and a Master of Fine Arts from Mills College, Oakland. Splan’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale; the Columbus Museum; Museum Kunst der Westküste, Foehr; Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine; Jönköpings County Museum; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Pelham Art Center; Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland; Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY Purchase; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; CURRENTS New Media Festival, Santa Fe; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Rosa; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; and Baltazar’s Laboratory, Vienna, among others. She has held artist residencies at the Institute for Electronic Arts Residency, Alfred University; Kala Art Institute Artist Residency, Berkeley; Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency, Johnson; SÍM Artist Residency, Reykjavík; the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Salzburg, Austria; and Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence Program, Woodstock. Splan’s work is found in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, Chicago; Institute for Figuring, Los Angeles; Fales Library at New York University; New York University Langone Art Collection; Infectious Disease Department, University of California, San Francisco; and many private collections. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

28. Laura Splan quoted in Quintan Ana Wikswo. “#FiftyQuestions with Laura Splan,” Some Serious Business, August 2, 2017. Laura Splan. Manifest (Furrow), 2015. Laser-sintered polyamide http://someseriousbusiness.org/2017/08/02/fiftyquestions-with-laura-splan/ nylon, 8 × 4 3/4 × 4 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist

118 119 “The aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can.”29

orking in photography and video, Beat Streuli captures anonymous city dwellers— Wgenerally unaware of or unaffected by the recording—as they negotiate the urban environment. Bruxelles Midi (2006) depicts unnamed pedestrians as they move through Brussels-South, the largest and busiest railway station in Brussels. Although Streuli uses techniques of traditional documentary photography, such as a telephoto lens and natural light, his goal is not to represent “otherness” or the rhythms of the city. Bruxelles Midi is made from inkjet-printed wallpaper and installed in larger-than-life size dimensions, making palpable the internal life of the people it depicts and the commonalities between them. His video Central 04-05-15 (2015) focuses on a group of women sitting in a public area in Hong Kong. The women eat lunch, chat, listen to music, use their cell phones, sit with their thoughts, and so on. The durational structure of the video abstracts Streuli’s subjects, both visually and thematically. We watch the common drama of daily life unfold as a play of colors: the high-key hues of t-shirts and purses, the way a body slouches over a meal or a cell phone screen, moments of self-consciousness between two speakers and moments of candid enjoyment, the city dweller’s performance of blankness as protection.

Between 1977 and 1983, Streuli studied at the Schule für Gestaltung in Basel, the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste in Zurich, and the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. His work has been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; the Kunstmuseum Bonn; BOZAR, Brussels; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Tate, London; LACE, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MoMA PS1, Queens; the Castello di Rivoli; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; in the 7th Sharjah Biennial; and at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, among many others. His work is held in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris; Center Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Kunsthaus Zurich; Credit Suisse, Zurich; and UBS, Zurich. Streuli lives and works in Zurich.

29. Beat Streuli quoted in Brigitte Werneburg, “The Cruel Radiance of Glamour: Beat Streuli’s View of Urban Pedestrians,” db artmag, March 1, 2006. Beat Streuli. Pallasades 05-01-01, 2001. Video, 45 minutes. http://db-artmag.de/archiv/2006/e/3/1/430.html Courtesy of the artist and Bank of America Art Collection, Charlotte

120 121 “If I had to use just two words to describe my interests as an artist, they would be ‘resuscitation’ and ‘reanimation’: the breathing of life into the moribund, dormant, and/or unseen citizens and objects of our culture.”30

ver the course of his career, Arne Svenson has documented a variety of subjects, Ofrom landscape photographs of Las Vegas to portraits of sock monkeys, forensic facial reconstructions, chewed dog toys, and medical museum specimens. Across his diverse body of work, he creates narratives that facilitate understanding of that which is hidden or obscured. The Neighbors (2012), a series of images looking into Svenson’s neighbors’ windows, shows people eating breakfast, napping, watching television, and playing with the family pet. In Svenson’s work, intimate and usually unobserved moments of life are made visible. The Workers (2014) is an extension of The Neighbors, and depicts the people who labor in his neighbors’ apartments. These bodies perform concentrated, arduous tasks; their industry makes his neighbors’ leisure, as shown in the previous set of images, possible. In his series Strays (2012), stray kittens are photographed in such a way as to deny the viewer a view of the kitten’s face. The animals look over their shoulders or turn their backsides to camera. In denying his viewer both pleasure of looking and resolution of visual information, Svenson emphasizes his subject’s status as nameless and homeless. He is currently working on a long-term portrait project with a group of autistic teenagers in collaboration with the Andy Warhol Museum.

Svenson has exhibited widely at venues including the National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at the University of California, Davis; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; the Photography Museum at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Grey Art Gallery at New York University; the Drawing Center, New York; the Modern of Art Museum, New York; White Columns, New York; the Palo Alto Art Center; Colette Gallery, Paris; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. His work has been written about extensively in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Artnews, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, the Los Angeles Times, the National Post, the New York Times; the New Yorker; and the Village Voice. His work can be found in the collections of the Cleveland Clinic; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the New York Public Library; Goldman Sachs, New York; the Walt Disney Corporation, New York; the West Collection, Oaks; the Mutter Museum, Philadelphia; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; and Swiss Re Capital Bank, Zurich. Svenson lives and works in New York.

30. Arne Svenson quoted in “Unspeaking Likeness—Arne Svenson Arne Svenson. Unspeaking Likeness #3, 2005. Portrays the Sculpted Faces of Unidentified Corpses,”Foto Room, Silver gelatin print, 50 × 40 inches (unframed), 52 × 42 inches (framed). http://fotoroom.co/unspeaking-likeness-arne-svenson/ © Arne Svenson. Courtesy of Julie Saul Gallery, New York

122 123 “My drawings touch on a broad cultural range of body portraiture. My drawings are a body of work that explores contemporary connections stemming from the myth of ‘otherness doing otherness things,’ as well as addressing and defining cultural stereotypes and historical references of subjugated women as modern-day Hottentots.”31

orn in Kingston, Jamaica, Shoshanna Weinberger’s work explores her Caribbean- BAmerican background, drawing strongly on the complexity of heritage and assumed norms as she defines and investigates female archetypes. She references herself among a sea of antiquated stereotypes, adolescent memories, and current affairs. Working primarily in mixed media on paper, Weinberger renders her female muses as excessive, sexualized, sometimes passive, and sometimes dominant, to question notions of beauty. For example, in the series Dirty Bottom Pin Ups (2014–15), an abstracted, body-like form is rendered in black with brightly colored lips and abundant hair, as well as a generous backside. Many drawings feature suggestive texts written below the figures, like, “All you desire,” “Take me baby,” “Whatever you want.” In the series Strangefruit (2012–present), the trunk of the body is often indicated by negative space, and is given shape by other elements, such as lips, hair, and legs. The title of the series references the eponymous Billie Holiday song, a cri de cœur against the practice of lynching in the American South, revealing the relationship between representational and real violence done to Black women’s bodies.

Weinberger holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, New Haven. Her work has been exhibited at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol; Nomad Gallery, Brussels; SMAC Gallery, Cape Town; Woman Made Gallery, Chicago; Davidson College; Tiwani Contemporary, London; Carol Jazzar Contemporary, Miami; Shirin Gallery, New York; the Newark Museum; Project House, Newark; and William Paterson University, Wayne. Weinberger was included in the Martinique Biennale and has been a five-time participant in the Jamaica Biennial at the National Gallery of Jamaica. She has held residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans and the Gateway Project, Newark, and has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, among others. Her work is included in public collections including those of Davidson College; the Girls Club Collection, Fort Lauderdale; the Margulies Collection, Miami; the Sagamore Collection, Miami; the Newark Museum; and New Jersey State Museum, Trenton. She lives and works in Newark, NJ.

31. Shoshanna Weinberger quoted in “In Collection: Shoshanna Weinberger. Banana Dancer Second Portrait, 2017. Gouache Shoshanna Weinberger,” Africanah, September 14, 2014. and ink on paper, 26 3/4 × 18 3/4 inches (unframed), http://africanah.org/collection-shoshanna-weinberger/ 27 1/2 × 19 1/2 × 1 1/4 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist

124 125 “I grew up in a beauty shop … I used to sit on the floor and listen to women talk about their lives, their hopes, and their disappointments. I was a young girl, but I understood that there was something central and important about that experience.”32

eborah Willis is a photographer and one of the nation’s leading curators and historians Dof African American photography, whose work expands representations of Blackness in circulation. Her photo series Hip Hop South Beach depicts moments of camaraderie and community in the Miami neighborhood known for its beaches and nightlife. The series Embracing Eatonville (2002–03) captures mundane moments in the daily lives of inhabitants of Eatonville, Florida, which is the oldest Black-incorporated town in the United States. Willis has previously held positions as the curator of photographs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library and the exhibitions curator at the Center for African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution. Willis is the curator of exhibitions Posing Beauty, 1968: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, Engulfed by Katrina: Photographs Before and After the Storm, and Reflections in Black. Willis is also co-author of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery with Barbara Krauthamer (Temple University Press, 2013), Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” (Temple University Press, 2010), Obama: the Historic Campaign in Photographs (Amistad, 2008), and The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Temple University Press, 2002), among many others.

Willis holds a Bachelor of Arts from Philadelphia College of Art, a Master of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, a Master of Arts from the City College of New York, and a PhD from George Mason University. Her photographs have been exhibited widely, including at the Birmingham Museum of Art; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Project Row Houses, Houston; Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City; Katonah Museum of Art; Aperture, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; the New Museum, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York; Light Work, Syracuse; Howard University, Washington, DC; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Willis is the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, a Richard D. Cohen Fellowship in African and African American Art at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center, as well as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Willis received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her co-authored book (with Barbara Krauthamer) Envisioning Emancipation. She is professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Social and Cultural Africana Studies. She lives and works in New York.

Deborah Willis. Carrie at the Euro Salon, 2010. Digital chromogenic print, 30 × 23 3/4 inches (unframed), 32. Deborah Willis, “Carrie in Euro Salon, Eatonville,” 2010 42 × 32 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist

126 127 “We project upon the world what we need to see. So the portrait ends up being a portrait of my audience instead of a portrait of me in the end.”33

artha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist working in performance, video, and music, Mas well as a gallery director. Wilson’s work explores female subjectivity and the construction of identity through performance, role-playing, costuming, and adopting various personas. She studied with Vito Acconci during his tenure at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, and further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving to New York in 1974. In 1976, she founded and continues to be director of Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion, and preservation of artists’ books, , video, online, and performance art. As a performance artist, she founded DISBAND in 1978, an all-girl punk conceptual band of who could not play instruments. In 2008, the first solo exhibition of Wilson’s work in New York, arthaM Wilson: Photo/Text Works, 1971-74, was held at Mitchell Algus Gallery. In 2009, Martha Wilson: Staging the Self, an exhibition of Wilson’s early photo and text work accompanied by one project from each of Franklin Furnace’s first 30 years began international travel under the auspices of ICI (Independent Curators International); in 2011, ICI published the Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces.

Wilson holds a Bachelor of Arts from Wilmington College and a Master of Arts from Dalhousie University, Halifax. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum; BOZAR, Brussels; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University, Montreal; Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick; the Met Breuer, New York; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway; MoMA PS1, Queens; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including the CCS Bard Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, the Courage Award for the Arts, and an Obie Award for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression. Her work is found in the collections of Arter, Istanbul; Banco Espirito Santo, Lisbon; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Smith College, Northampton; Moderna Museet, Sweden; and Sammlung Verbund, Vienna. Wilson lives and works in New York.

Martha Wilson. I Make Up the Image of My Perfection/I Make Up the Image of My Deformity, from the portfolio Femfolio, 2007. Digital print on Somerset Enhanced Velvet paper, 12 × 12 inches 33. Martha Wilson quoted in Bad at Sports, “Interview (unframed), 21 1/8 × 21 1/8 inches (framed). Produced in collaboration with with Martha Wilson,” Art Practical, May 3, 2012. Chris Erickson and Josh Azzarella. Courtesy of the artist, the Brodsky http://www.artpractical.com/column/interview_with_martha_wilson/ Center at Rutgers, and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York

128 129 I’M SURE I’M GOING TO LOOK IN THE

MIRROR AND SEE NOTHING. PEOPLE

ARE ALWAYS CALLING ME A MIRROR

AND IF A MIRROR LOOKS AT A MIRROR,

WHAT IS THERE TO SEE?

Shoshanna Weinberger, Escape Artist, 2017, gouache and pencil on paper ANDY WARHOL AMERICAN ARTIST, DIRECTOR & SOCIALITE (1928-1997)

130 131 I’M SURE I’M GOING TO LOOK IN THE THE IN LOOK TO GOING I’M SURE I’M CONTENTS OF THE EXHIBITION PEOPLE NOTHING. SEE AND MIRROR

MIRROR A ME CALLING ALWAYS ARE Manuel Acevedo Manuel Acevedo Paolo Cirio At Biase’s from the series The Wards of How Sharpe? from the series Mugshots.com N.2 from the series Newark 1982-87 The Wards of Newark 1982-87 Obscurity AND IF A MIRROR LOOKS AT A MIRROR, MIRROR, A AT LOOKS MIRROR A IF AND 1986 1986 2016 Gelatin silver print Gelatin silver print Archival inkjet print 11 x 14 inches (without frame) 11 x 14 inches (without frame) 36 1/2 x 29 3/4 inches (without frame) WHAT IS THERE TO SEE? TO THERE IS WHAT 17 x 21 inches (with frame) 17 x 21 inches (with frame) 42 x 32 inches (with frame) Collection of Clement Price, Rutgers Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist University - Newark Manuel Acevedo Paolo Cirio Manuel Acevedo Jump! from the series The Wards of Mugshots.com N.1 from the series Bronx Boy Newark 1982-87 Obscurity no date 1983 2016 Gelatin silver print Gelatin silver print Archival inkjet print 11 x 14 inches (without frame) 11 x 14 inches (without frame) 36 1/2 x 29 3/4 inches (without frame) 17 x 21 inches (with frame) 17 x 21 inches (with frame) 42 x 32 inches (with frame) Collection of Clement Price, Rutgers Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist University - Newark Manuel Acevedo David Antonio Cruz Manuel Acevedo Lawman’s Cigarette Break from the Puerto Rican Pieta Embrace from the series The Wards of series The Wards of Newark 1982-87 2006 Newark 1982-87 Gelatin silver prints Oil on canvas 1986 1986 70 x 70 inches Gelatin silver print Gelatin silver print Collection of El Museo del Barrio, 11 x 14 inches (without frame) 11 x 14 inches (without frame) New York 17 x 21 inches (with frame) 17 x 21 inches (with frame) Museum purchase through a gift from Collection of Clement Price, Rutgers Courtesy of the artist the Jacques and Natasha Gelman University - Newark Foundation [acc#: 2015.7] Manuel Acevedo Manuel Acevedo Three Girls in Church from the series Kevin Darmanie Father and Son #1 from the series The Wards of Newark 1982-87 Confetti The Wards of Newark 1982-87 1987 2008 1987 Gelatin silver print Colored ink and paper collage Gelatin silver print 11 x 14 inches (without frame) 22 1/2 x 15 inches, width variable 11 x 14 inches (without frame) 17 x 21 inches (with frame) Courtesy of the artist 17 x 21 inches (with frame) Courtesy of the artist Collection of Clement Price, Rutgers Kevin Darmanie University - Newark Zoë Charlton Kedar: An Alien In Babylon Be Sarah 2008 Manuel Acevedo 2011 Ink and ashcan collage on paper Newark’s Finest from the series Single-channel video 28.5 x 19 inches (without frame) The Wards of Newark 1982-87 2 minutes 38 seconds 42 x 32 inches (with frame) 1986 Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist Gelatin silver print 11 x 14 inches (without frame) Kevin Darmanie 17 x 21 inches (with frame) Master of Reality Collection of Clement Price, Rutgers 2008 University - Newark Colored ink on paper WARHOL ANDY 22 x 30 inches (without frame) 42 x 32 inches (with frame) AMERICAN ARTIST, DIRECTOR & SOCIALITE (1928-1997) SOCIALITE & DIRECTOR ARTIST, AMERICAN Courtesy of the artist

132 133 E.V. Day Nona Faustine Phyllis Galembo William Kentridge Ani Liu Jessamyn Lovell Mummified Barbie (DAY-0057) Over My Dead Body from the series Aye Loja (The World Market Place Invisible Object (Sphinx) Microbial We Surveillance from the series Dear Erin 2007 White Shoes That We Visit) 2013 2017-2018 Hart, Yellow beeswax, twine, Barbie doll 2013 2006 Two-plate intaglio with photogravure, Microorganisms from the artist’s mouth 2013 12 1/2 x 2 1/2 x 3 inches Digital chromogenic print Ilfochrome print drypoint and burnishing and the mouths of those in close Single channel video without sound Courtesy of Carolina Nitsch, New York 39 ½ x 26 3/8 inches (without frame) 29 1/2 x 29 3/4 inches (without frame) 19 1/4 x 25 3/4 inches (without frame) contact to her, agar, nutrient solution 1 minute 55 seconds 42 ¼ x 29 inches (with frame) 40 x 40 inches (with frame) 22 1/2 x 29 inches (with frame) 61 x 20 x 20 inches Courtesy of the artist E.V. Day Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist and Steven Edition of 21 Courtesy of the artist Mummified Barbie (DAY-0061) Kasher Gallery, New York Produced in collaboration with Kristen Jessamyn Lovell 2007 Nona Faustine Cavagnet and Randy Hemminghaus, Jessamyn Lovell Dear Erin Hart, from the series Dear Erin Yellow beeswax, twine, Barbie doll Venus of Vlacke bos from the series Chitra Ganesh and published by Brodsky Center, Surveillance Book from the series Hart, 12 1/2 x 2 1/2 x 3 inches White Shoes Untitled from the portfolio Delicate Line: Rutgers Dear Erin Hart, 2014 Courtesy of Carolina Nitsch, New York 2012 Corpse She Was Holding Courtesy of the artist and Brodsky 2014 Hand written letter sealed in 5 x 7 inch Digital chromogenic print 2010 Center, Rutgers Archival inkjet print paper envelope with handwritten name E.V. Day 15 1/8 x 9 ¾ inches (without frame) Monotype and three-run silkscreen on 15 x 11 3/4 inches (without frame) on outside Mummified Barbie (DAY-0115) 19 ¼ x 14 inches (with frame) Stonehenge paper William Kentridge 16 1/2 x 12 3/4 inches (with frame) 5 x 7 inches 2010 Courtesy of the artist 22 x 28 inches (without frame) Scribe 1 Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist Barbie doll, beeswax, twine, silver 28 1/4 x 34 1/4 inches (with frame) 2011Photogravure, drypoint, and glitter Tatyana Fazlalizadeh Edition of 24 burnishing Jessamyn Lovell Jessamyn Lovell 12 1/2 x 2 1/2 x 3 inches Stop Telling Women to Smile Produced in collaboration with master 11 x 13 inches (without frame) P.I. Folder from the series Dear Erin Hart, Dear Erin Hart, Courtesy of Carolina Nitsch, New York 2018 printer Randy Hemminghaus, and 17 1/8 x 19 3/8 inches (with frame) 2013 2015 Wheat paste installation published by Brodsky Center, Rutgers Edition of 34 Archival inkjet print Book, archival inkjet print E.V. Day Dimension variable Courtesy of the artist and Brodsky Produced in collaboration with Kristen 15 x 11 3/4 inches (without frame) 15 x 11 3/4 inches Mummified Barbie (DAY-0116) Courtesy of the artist Center, Rutgers Cavagnet and Randy Hemminghaus, 16 1/2 x 12 3/4 inches (with frame) 1st edition 2010 and published by Brodsky Center, Courtesy of the artist Published by San Francisco Barbie doll, beeswax, twine, silver Tatyana Fazlalizadeh Chitra Ganesh Rutgers Camerawork glitter America is Black Untitled from the portfolio Delicate Line: Courtesy of the artist and Brodsky Jessamyn Lovell Courtesy of the artist 12 1/2 x 2 1/2 x 3 inches 2018 Corpse She Was Holding Center, Rutgers Mug Shot from the series Dear Erin Hart, Courtesy of Carolina Nitsch, Wheat paste installation 2010 2012 Peggie Miller New York Dimension variable Four-run silkscreen on Sekishu Natural William Kentridge Archival inkjet print Chucky from the series New Millennium Courtesy of the artist paper Scribe 3 15 x 11 3/4 inches (without frame) Butch Leah DeVun 22 x 28 inches (without frame) 2011 16 1/2 x 12 3/4 inches (with frame) 2009 Erica from the series In the Age of Anne-Karin Furunes 28 1/4 x 34 1/4 inches (with frame) Photogravure, drypoint, and burnishing Courtesy of the artist Archival inkjet print Mechanical Reproduction Of Faces X (Portraits of Archive Pictures) Edition of 24 11 x 12 1/4 inches (without frame) 10 1/2 x 12 inches (without frame) 2016 2016 Produced in collaboration with master 17 1/8 x 19 3/8 inches (with frame) Jessamyn Lovell 17 x 21 inches (with frame) Archival inkjet print Acrylic on canvas, perforated printer Randy Hemminghaus, and Edition of 34 P.I. from the series Dear Erin Hart, Produced in collaboration with Akintola 40 x 30 inches (without frame) 98 3/8 x 177 1/8 inches published by Brodsky Center, Rutgers Produced in collaboration with Kristen 2013 Hanif 42 x 32 inches (with frame) Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Courtesy of the artist and Brodsky Cavagnet and Randy Hemminghaus, Archival inkjet print Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist Gallery, New York Center, Rutgers and published by Brodsky Center, 15 x 11 3/4 inches (without frame) Rutgers 16 1/2 x 12 3/4 inches (with frame) Peggie Miller Leah DeVun Phyllis Galembo Hyphen-Labs: Courtesy of the artist and Brodsky Courtesy of the artist Little J from the series New Millennium Jennifer from the series In the Age of You Can’t Buy Wisdom at the Market, Carmen Aguilar y Wedge, Center, Rutgers Butch Mechanical Reproduction Benin Ece Tankal, Ashley Baccus Jessamyn Lovell 2009 2016 2006 NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism Riva Lehrer Stake Out from the series Dear Erin Archival inkjet print Archival inkjet print Ilfochrome print 2017 66 Degrees Hart, 10 1/2 x 12 inches (without frame) 40 x 30 inches (without frame) 29 1/2 x 29 3/4 inches (without frame) Virtual reality installation 2016 2013 17 x 21 inches (with frame) 42 x 32 inches (with frame) Courtesy 40 x 40 inches (with frame) Dimensions variable Acrylic on wood panel Archival inkjet print Produced in collaboration with Akintola of the artist Courtesy of the artist and Steven Courtesy of the artists 24 x 36 inches 15 x 11 3/4 inches (without frame) Hanif Kasher Gallery, New York Collection of Laura and Larry Gerber 16 1/2 x 12 3/4 inches (with frame) Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist

134 135 Peggie Miller Patricia Piccinini Kevin Blythe Sampson Laura Splan Shoshanna Weinberger Shoshanna Weinberger Peggie Miller from the series New The Osculating Curve Beulah’s Ball Gown Manifest (Furrow) Encore for Princess Tam Tam Third Sighting of My Doppelgänger Millennium Butch 2016 1997 2015 2017 2017 2009 Silicone, fiberglass, human hair Mixed media Laser sintered polyamide nylon Ink and collage on paper Ink and gouache on paper Archival inkjet print 21 1/4 x 28 3/8 x 11 3/4 inches 57 x 32 x 15 inches 8 x 4 3/4 x 4 3/4 inches 26 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (without frame) 26 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (without frame) 10 1/2 x 12 inches (without frame) Courtesy of the artist and Hosfelt Courtesy of the artist and Cavin-Morris Edition of 5 + 1 AP 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (with frame) 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (with frame) 17 x 21 inches (with frame) Gallery, San Francisco Gallery, New York Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist Produced in collaboration with Akintola Hanif Wendy Red Star María Verónica San Martín Laura Splan Shoshanna Weinberger Deborah Willis Courtesy of the artist Clara White Hip from the series In Their Memory. Human Rights Violation Manifest (Swallow) Escape Artist Carrie at the Euro Salon Grandmothers (I Come As One But I in Chile. 1973-1990 2015 2017 2010 Peggie Miller Stand As Ten Thousand) 2012 Laser sintered polyamide nylon Gouache and pencil on paper Digital chromogenic print Jae from the series New Millennium 2016 Screen print on paper and ink 8 x 4 3/4 x 4 3/4 inches 26 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (without frame) 30 x 23 ¾ (without frame) Butch Mirror, digital images sourced from 7 1/2 x 12 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches, extends to Edition of 5 + 1 AP 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (with frame) 42 x 32 inches (with frame) 2009 the Richard Throssel papers at the 20 inches Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist Archival inkjet print American Heritage Center, University Edition of 20 + 2 AP 10 1/2 x 12 inches (without frame) of Wyoming and printed on photo tex Courtesy of the artist Beat Streuli Shoshanna Weinberger Martha Wilson 17 x 21 inches (with frame) 25 x 25 inches (without frame) Pallasades 05-01-01 Footprint I Make Up the Image of My Perfection Produced in collaboration with Akintola 27 1/2 X 27 1/2 x 3 inches (with frame) Dread Scott 2001 2016 / I Make Up the Image of My Deformity Hanif 2 AP Wanted Video Collage on paper from the portfolio Femfolio Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist 2014 45 minutes 26 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (without frame) 2007 Community based project: offset prints, Courtesy of the artist and Bank of 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (with frame) Digital print on Somerset Enhanced Anna Ogier-Bloomer Wendy Red Star performance, video, website, inkjet America Art Collection, Charlotte Courtesy of the artist Velvet paper Nursing and peeing, Cincinnati, Ohio Indian Woman (untitled) from the series prints, forums, community participants 12 x 12 inches (without frame) 2015 Grandmothers (I Come As One But I Dimensions variable Arne Svenson Shoshanna Weinberger 21 1/8 x 21 1/8 inches (with frame) Pigment inkjet print Stand As Ten Thousand) Developed collaboratively with Unspeaking Likeness #3 Gypsy Edition of 65 24 x 36 inches (without frame) 2016 No Longer Empty, The Stop Mass 2005 2016 Produced in collaboration with 25 x 37 inches (with frame) Mirror, digital images sourced from Incarceration Network and young Silver gelatin print Collage on paper Josh Azzarella, Alan Comfort, Chris Courtesy of the artist the Richard Throssel papers at the adults in Harlem. The sketches were 50 x 40 inches (without frame) 26 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (without frame) Erickson and Dolores Zorreguieta, and American Heritage Center, University drawn by Kevin Blythe Sampson. 52 x 42 inches (with frame) 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (with frame) published by Brodsky Center, Rutgers Polixeni Papapetrou of Wyoming and printed on photo tex Courtesy of the artist Edition of 3 Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist, Brodsky Center, Blinded 25 x 25 inches (without frame) Courtesy of the Julie Saul Gallery, New Rutgers and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York 2016 27 1/2 X 27 1/2 x 3 inches (with frame) Leo Selvaggio York Shoshanna Weinberger Pigment ink print 2 AP URME Surveillance: Demipanoptiversal She Runs With a Crooked Smile 50 1/8 x 33 1/2 inches (without frame) Courtesy of the artist 2018 Shoshanna Weinberger 2017 51 3/4 x 35 inches (with frame) Lightstands, sandbags, convex security Addendum Ink and collage on paper Courtesy of the artist, Michael Reid Faith Ringgold mirrors, Urme Surveillance Prosthetic 2017 26 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (without frame) Gallery, Sydney and Jarvis Dooney Listen to the Trees 4 feet radially Ink and gouache on paper 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (with frame Galerie, Berlin 2012-2014 Courtesy of the artist 26 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (without frame) Courtesy of the artist Archival digital inkjet, silkscreen, 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (with frame) Polixeni Papapetrou woodcut, and acrylic on Habotai silk Laura Splan Courtesy of the artist Shoshanna Weinberger Spring 44 x 44 1/4 inches Manifest (Blink Twice) Stepping Out Wearing Liz Lips 2016 Edition of 10 2015 Shoshanna Weinberger 2017 Pigment ink print Produced in collaboration with master Laser sintered polyamide nylon Banana Dancer Second Portrait Gouache, ink, and collage on paper 50 1/8 x 33 1/2 inches (without frame) printer Randy Hemminghaus, and 8 x 4 3/4 x 4 3/4 inches 2017 26 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (without frame) 51 3/4 x 35 inches (with frame) published by Brodsky Center, Rutgers Edition of 5 + 1 AP Gouache and ink on paper 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (with frame) Courtesy of the artist, Michael Reid Courtesy of the artist and Brodsky Courtesy of the artist 26 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (without frame) Courtesy of the artist Gallery, Sydney and Jarvis Dooney Center, Rutgers 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 1 1/4 inches (with frame) Galerie, Berlin Courtesy of the artist

136 137 THE POWER TO DEFINE THE OTHER

This catalog is published in conjunction with the exhibition Copyright ©2018 Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers SEALS ONE’S DEFINITION OF ONESELF. Mirror Mirror. This exhibition was organized by the Paul University –Newark. No part of this publication may be Robeson Galleries. reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, Exhibition Dates: February 19 – December 20, 2018 photocopying, or otherwise, without prior permission of Paul Robeson Galleries the Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University – Newark. Rutgers University–Newark Copyright of the works of art and/or texts reproduced in Express Newark this publication is retained by the artist &/or authors &/or 54 Halsey Street, Third Floor their legal successors. Newark, New Jersey 07102 U.S.A. http://artgallery.newark.rutgers.edu/ ISBN: 978-1-970015-01-0 The Paul Robeson Galleries’ programs are supported, in part, by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and by private donations. We are also supported by Express Newark, the Robeson Campus Center and the Cultural Programming Committee, Rutgers University–Newark.

Catalog Design: Ludlow6, LLC., James Wawrzewski, Creative Director & Principal Designer is supported by Printer: Riegelmann LLC, Printing, Catalog Editor: Valerie Werder Exhibition Design: Chiaroscura Design Studio, Archana Kushe, Founder & Artistic Director

Past Now Forever © Anonda Bell A Portrait of Postfeminist Perfect Mother © Susan Bright A Reflective Portrait of Short Stature © Amanda Cachia Mirror Mirror: How Do We See Through Our Bigotries © Nancy Cantor & Peter Englot I See You © Victor Davson & Anne Englot Artist Pages © Jacqueline Mabey Race & Representation © Nell Painter Mirror Mirror © Dorothy Santos Industrial Portraiture, Memory, and Power © Jay Stanley Feminist Portraiture: Two Sides of the Mirror © Anne Swartz The Many Ambitions of Portraiture © Jorge Daniel Veneciano Large The Reflection of A Genderless Spirit © Carla Print Christopher Waid JAMES BALDWIN AMERICAN WRITER (1924-1987)

138 139 OTHER THE DEFINE TO POWER THE

SEAL’S ONES DEFINITION OF ONESELF. OF DEFINITION ONES SEAL’S

BALDWIN JAMES AMERICAN WRITER (1924-1987) WRITER AMERICAN

140 3