I’m honored to have four pieces in a show at the UC Santa Barbara Multicultural Center on transracial community building sponsored by the Chicano/Chicana Studies Department, April-June 2011. These are all older pieces but the issues they touch upon remain challenges today.
Burden of Imagination (24"x24" oil).The blank canvas is both gift and responsibility. My art resists escaping into abstraction or conceptual dryness. Instead, it seeks to connect, inspire and heal by embracing duality while affirming underlying unity. The images arcing down from top right are the mother of Emmett Till (the fourteen-year-old boy who was lynched in 1955 for whistling at a white woman), an Appalachian storyteller and a 100-year-old ex-slave. On the far left, a musician plays Peruvian pan flutes, a nun dances as a form of charismatic prayer near our biological relatives, a parrot, an ape, then a native of the endangered Amazon rain forest, and at the bottom, Hells Angel, and the wicked witch of the west.
The Baby Shoes (etching, 20” x 16”). In 1977 an international boycott against Nestlé products was modiblized by largely white, middle-class mothers in support of poor mothers of color in the developing world. The campaign was prompted by concern that the company’s promotion of breast milk substitutes (infant formula) contributes to the death and suffering of babies in impoverished nations around the world.
Powdered breast-milk substitutes must be mixed with water, which is often contaminated in poor countries, leading to disease in vulnerable infants. Impoverished mothers often use less formula powder than is necessary, in order to make a container of formula last longer, resulting in inadequate nutrition. They do not have access to clean water or fuel to boil water for sterilizing bottles. In contrast, Breastfeeding transmit natural immunities and strengthens bonds between mother and child, UNICEF estimates that a non-breastfed child living in disease-ridden and unhygienic conditions is between six and 25 times more likely to die of diarrhea and four times more likely to die of pneumonia than a breastfed child.
The Whitebread Conspiracy (etching, 20” x 16” framed). Since everyone is unique and no one is normal, the pursuit of “normalcy” is a questionable source of self-worth. But consumerism lures us into spending too much time and money choosing the right apparel, anti-perspirants, anti-dandruff shampoo and anti-depressants to help us “fit in.”
“Whitebread” Urban Dictionary definition #1: “... implies profound cultural naïvete, blind consumerism, and an unquestioning “follower” mindset.... Though whitebread individuals are usually white, the term is not necessarily racial in meaning - the implication lies more with the blandness, predictability, and banality of plain white bread. Accordingly, ‘wonderbread’ is often used as a synonym.”
Definition #3: “someone who is not white, for example a black person, who acts incredibly white.”
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