Race & Gender in Art

Finding Their Place

Race and Art

• Art that Promotes Ethnic History and Values• Art that Criticizes Racism• Who is Looking at Whom?• Gender Issues• Clan• Class

Fred Wilson (American, born 1954). Grey Area (Brown version), 1993. Paint, plaster, and wood, Overall: 20 x 84 in. (50.8 x 213.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum

Fred Wilson often appropriates art objects to explore issues of race, gender, class, politics, and aesthetics.

Made up of five portrait heads of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, Grey Area (Brown Version) refers to one of the most copied works of ancient civilization. The otherwise identical plaster effigies, which he purchased and painted, illustrate a value scale ranging in color from oatmeal to dark chocolate.

Thus, Wilson raises, but does not answer, controversial questions about the racial identity of ancient Egyptians.

Kara Walker

Kara is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures.

With one foot in the historical realism of slavery and the other in the fantastical space of the romance novel, Walker’s nightmarish fictions simultaneously seduce and implicate the audience. Walker is at her most provocative when interrogating the stereotyping that defined race relations in the antebellum south, and still exists today.

Michael Ray Charles

His graphically styled paintings investigate racial stereotypes drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials. Charles draws comparisons between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities, and athletes—images he sees as a constant in the American subconscious. “Stereotypes have evolved,” he notes. “I’m trying to deal with present and past stereotypes in the context of today’s society.”

Caricatures of African-American experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are represented in Charles’s work…In each of his paintings, notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge and converge, reminding us that we cannot divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we are portrayed.

Kehinde Wiley

Los Angeles native and New York based visual artist, Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, among others, Wiley, engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and the sublime in his representation of urban, black and brown men found throughout the world.

Where once there were only white kings and their queens, Kehinde Wiley inserts the "brown faces" long absent from Western art.

Ice T Kehinde Wiley, 2005

Napoleon I on His Imperial ThroneJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867)

Enrique Chagoya

When Paradise Arrived, 1989, Charcoal & pastel on paper, 80 x 80 inches

Enrique Chagoya juxtaposes secular, popular, and religious symbols in order to address the ongoing cultural clash between the United States, Latin America and the world as well.

He uses familiar pop icons to create deceptively friendly points of entry for the discussion of complex issues. Through these seemingly harmless characters Chagoya examines the recurring subject of cultural clash that continues to riddle contemporary life. Recently his work has been addressing issues on immigration and the economic recession.

13.6 James Luna. The Artifact Piece, USA, 1986. Installation/performance at the San Diego Museum of Man. Museum of Man, San Diego.The purpose of art is often to make simple stereotypes more nuanced and accurate. Luna’s work is intended to debunk a simplistic image of Native Americans.

In The Artifact Piece, Native American James Luna challenged the way contemporary American culture and museums have presented his race as extinct and vanished.

Luna posed himself dressed only in a leather cloth. Various personal items were displayed in a glass case.

Half Indian/Half Mexican, 1991

"Take a picture with a real Indian"

Luna challenged the viewer to reconsider what museums teach about cultures and what is a cultural artifact.

Contemporary Artist: Guillermo Gomez Pena

• Guillermo Gómez-Peña is a Chicano performance artist, writer, activist, and educator, working in multiple media, including performance art, experimental radio, video, photography and installation art.

Temple of Confessions• Outrageous Stereotypes• Confrontational art• Interactive• Viewers’ were encouraged to

“confess” reactions to the displays

“Artist Statement

The installation of Temple of Confessions-- exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery and conceived at the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Scottsdale Center for the Arts…

…Creating a new ethnographic "diorama" based on religious reenactments displayed in Colonial Mexican churches, Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes exhibit themselves for three-day periods in Plexiglas boxes as cultural specimens and living saints from an endangered Religion. From inside their display cases El Mexterminator and El Cybervato challenge us to reevaluate our beliefs and confess our prejudice”

Gender in Art

• Female artists have been involved in making art in most times and places.

• Many art forms dominated by women have been historically dismissed from the art historical canon as craft, as opposed to fine art.

• Women artists faced challenges due to gender biases in the mainstream fine art world.

Feminism & Feminist Art• Beginning in the late

1960s and 1970s, feminist artists and art historians created a Feminist art movement, that overtly addresses the role of women in the art world and explores women in art history.

Self portrait, Artemisia Gentileschi

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 - 1652/1653), daughter of well-known Roman artist, Orazio Gentileschi (1563 - 1639), was one of the first women artists to achieve recognition in the male-dominated world of post-Renaissance art. In an era when female artists were limited to portrait painting and imitative poses, she was the first woman to paint major historical and religious scenarios.

Judith and her Maidservant with the head of Holofernes, by Artemisia Gentileschi

Created between 1974 and 1979 (with the help of several hundred volunteers), Judy Chicago’s mixed media installation The Dinner Party consists of several colossal, banquet-style tables. Included are 39 different place settings for mythical and historical women, celebrating their cultural achievements. Each place setting features a unique butterfly/flower-like sculpture rising from the plates, meant to symbolize a vulva. There are 999 names of other important women inscribed amongst the installation.

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party 

“I became a feminist because I wanted to help my daughters, other women and myself aspire to something more than a place behind a good man.”

-artist Faith Ringgold

“I’ve always sought to express a tension in form and meaning in order to achieve a veracity. I have come to the conclusion that the art world has to join us, women artists, not we join it. When women are in leadership roles and gain rewards and recognition, then perhaps ‘we’ (women and men) can all work together in art world actions.”

Anonymous activist group Guerrilla Girls have been asking important questions about women and the art world since the mid ’80s (in gorilla masks, even!) “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” demanded an explanation for female inequality on the walls of museums — pointing to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recent Guerrilla Girl works have questioned the lack of female presence in Hollywood and other messy politics.

In 1964, Yoko Ono invited audience members on stage for a conceptual performance piece called Cut Piece. While kneeling quietly on the floor in a traditional, passive Japanese pose, viewers were offered the chance to cut her clothing away piece by piece until she was naked. Audience members reacted differently (depending upon what country the work was performed in) as Ono transformed herself into a vulnerable object — a role she felt had long been forced upon women in art and media.

Barbara Kruger’s works feature juxtapositions of images and texts that address cultural constructions of power, identity, and sexuality. Since 1980, the artist’s work has developed a highly recognizable oeuvre of black, white, and red photo-text montages.

Cindy Sherman, CenterfoldsCindy Sherman hasn’t always described herself as a feminist, but the metamorphic photographer has become an icon thanks to her memorable female characters. Sherman’s 1981 Centerfolds series depicts female stereotypes seen in the media. Untitled No. 96 — a garish portrait of an orange-colored woman clutching a crumpled personals ad (pictured above) — is one of several images that toy with cliché gender roles and voyeurism, inspired by the center spreads in fashion and pornographic magazines.