This body of work was one that I began before grad school, though I developed it in a more focused way during that time, so that it became my Thesis Exhibition. I continued with these themes for a few years, until I transitioned into my next body of work, My Miami, and then to It Was to be A Glittering City.
This body of work developed out of my investigations into whiteness, privilege, family and legacy–I particularly wanted to make work that interrogated the legacy of slavery–not by speaking for or about a generalized group of Black people, but by making work that included an imagined network of Black friends, family and neighbors. These are fictional relationships illustrated symbolically, but drawn from the reality of my own family’s geographic origin, whiteness and history. I am an introverted artist who does not naturally engage with social practice works, so rather than go spend a season interviewing people and making work based off of that, I instead ‘wrote’ a fiction while trying to be as honorable, sincere and generous as I could. It was an attempt to make space, an attempt to see what I could do within the white, privileged realm that has been my life and the history of my family. The questions were these: is it possible to undermine whiteness while speaking from within it? It is possible to create an inclusive narrative from within the space of whiteness? Or, alternatively, is it possible to talk about the culpability of whiteness without falling into the classic pitfalls of white guilt or white atonement? And also: Is it possible to correct or challenge the narrative of art and history while making work within a historically marginalized field (printmaking vs painting)?
That is the other reason the work focuses on the use of symbols and signs, rather than depictions of people; the narrative of the work is a narrative of ideas rather than a specific narrative of events. The works are strongly informed by art history, Black feminist criticism, and by feminist linguistic theory. I was trying to create a visual syntax that would re-encode particular forms in a way that undercut the larger narrative of art history as well as some language from the domestic sphere.
The work was exhibited at BFI from June 13 through August 9, 2009. The original post I wrote for the exhibition is located here, and reviews about the work can be found here. Some more recent thoughts about this older body of work can be found incorporated in this post of mine from 2020.
A selection of prints from this body of work are below; this page has the older works at the top; I continued to explore these ideas through around 2012.
