So this summer my husband and I made our big move to Tejas from Boston, which I must admit has been the best decision we could have ever made. It's been an amazing experience and it's enabled us to spend more time with our family. I'm now studying in the brand new Ph.D program in Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas, which has been a whole new journey for me. Coming from a fine art background this coursework has provided new areas of research and context for my future work.
Prior to leaving Boston I had been coordinating with curators Beth Kantrowitz(www.bkartprojects.com) and Kathleen O'Hara(www.ohprojects.com) to participate in a new exhibition entitled, Who am I? which also features the work of Ben Sloat, Millee Tibbs, and Stephanie Fetter, all who explore issues of identity. Kantrawitz and O'Hara have curated this show in their new gallery space in Watertown called Drive-By. It was a bumpy road to get this new work produced because there was such a number of huge transitions happening in my life: moving across country, starting a new graduate program(with a mega course load), and transitioning into our new life in Texas. Yet despite of the challenges with transitioning, I'm very happy with this work. It is a continuation of past works that I've produced on brown paper bags, yet I tried some different approaches this time around.
In my past works, I drew most of my inspiration towards representations of black women within Black publications, however, in this work I focused on the representations of white women in mainstream fashion magazines. This for me seemed to make the work even more relevant for its purpose, which is a question of assimilation. The "brown bag test" to me references a point in history certain groups of black people felt they needed to assimilate to survive or separate themselves from the masses. What I'm questioning in this work is how beauty and fashion media has encouraged black women to assimilate to the mainstreams standards. This work challenges the viewer to see past the visual and determine how assimilation may affect ones connection to identity.
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