Mixed Race Studies

At Peace With Many Tribes

The New York Times
2013-05-19

Carol Kino

HUDSON, N.Y. — One sunny afternoon early this month Jeffrey Gibson paced around his studio, trying to keep track of which of his artworks was going where.

Luminous geometric abstractions, meticulously painted on deer hide, that hung in one room were about to be picked up for an art fair. In another sat Mr. Gibson’s outsize rendition of a parfleche trunk, a traditional American Indian rawhide carrying case, covered with Malevich-like shapes, which would be shipped to New York for a solo exhibition at the National Academy Museum. Two Delaunay-esque abstractions made with acrylic on unstretched elk hides had already been sent to a museum in Ottawa, but the air was still suffused with the incense-like fragrance of the smoke used to color the skins.

“If you’d told me five years ago that this was where my work was going to lead,” said Mr. Gibson, gesturing to other pieces, including two beaded punching bags and a cluster of painted drums, “I never would have believed it.” Now 41, he is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half-Cherokee. But for years, he said, he resisted the impulse to quote traditional Indian art, just as he had rejected the pressure he’d felt in art school to make work that reflected his so-called identity…

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Ellen Gallagher: AxME

Tate Modern: Exhibition
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
2013-05-01 through 2013-09-01

Ellen Gallagher is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists to have emerged from North America since the mid-1990s. Her gorgeously intricate and highly imaginative works are realised with a wealth of virtuoso detail and wit. This is her first major solo exhibition in the UK, providing the first ever opportunity to explore an overview of her twenty-year career.

Gallagher brings together imagery from myth, nature, art and social history to create complex works in a wide variety of media including painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film and animation. The exhibition explores the themes which have emerged and recurred in her practice, from her seminal early canvases through to recent film installations and new bodies of work.

In her series of wig-map grid collages, Double Natural, POMP-BANG, and eXelento, Gallagher has appropriated and incorporated found advertisements for hair and beauty products from the 1930s to the late 1970s from publications such as Ebony, Our World, and Black Stars. These advertisements fostered ideals in black beauty through wigs and hair adornments, which Gallagher has then recontextualised, collaging the Afro wig elements and embellishing them with plasticine. As she comments: ‘The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the “race” magazines of the past. But again, I have transformed them, here on the pages that once held them captive.’…

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‘One Drop of Love’ Creates Ripple Effect at UCSB

The Bottom Line
Weekly Newspaper of Associated Students, UC Santa Barbara: News, Features, Video & Investigative Journalism for UCSB
2013-05-13

Yuen Sin, Staff Writer

The personal is very much the political, as actress-playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni illustrated through her solo show “One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for her Father’s Racial Approval.” The show was performed at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Multicultural Center on May 7.

First formulated as a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) thesis project, “One Drop of Love” began as Cox DiGiovanni’s personal attempt to revive her estranged relationship with her Jamaica-born father, who failed to show up at her wedding years before.

What ensued was a powerful multimedia, one-woman play laced with wit, warmth, and depth that fused her fragmented experiences with racial and cultural dispossession into a coherent narrative. The multidimensional show traversed back into the years of Cox DiGiovanni’s family history to untangle the weight of the socio-political events that have inevitably contributed to a crucial part of her identity and self-perceptions today…

…Cox DiGiovanni slipped in and out of multiple roles with dexterity, first imperiously bearing down at the audience as an anonymous U.S. Census Bureau officer, and then staggering affectionately across the stage with a lilting accent as her grandmother, revealing through her impressions the fluid and ultimately arbitrary nature of identity labels.

Her personal trajectory of “placelessness”—not seeing herself as “black” enough to join the Black Students Union, and yet having candy vendors in Cape Verde, West Africa, come up to her (while on a pilgrimage of sorts to trace back her African roots and understand her father’s pan-African attitudes) to ask her why she was so “white”—was interspersed with scenes that traced the evolution of the practice of racial categorization by the U.S. Census Bureau. The contrast brought to the forefront her sense of frustration from continually being racially defined by others, and the puzzling practice of placing someone in the category of “black” as long as they possessed even “one drop” of Negro blood—hence the play’s title.

At the post-show dialogue with UCSB’s professor of sociology G. Reginald Daniel, Cox DiGiovanni reiterated the importance of engaging in “scary conversations about race and racism,” reflecting that her work producing and performing “One Drop of Love” completely transformed the nature of her family relations after their involvement in her show…

Read the entire review here.

Ellen Gallagher: wigs, waterworlds and Wile E Coyote

The Guardian
2013-05-07

Bim Adewunmi

Adverts from black magazines, Plasticine, eyeballs – in the work of Ellen Gallagher, it’s all woven together into something new. Bim Adewunmi visits her chaotic Rotterdam studio

Throughout our interview, Ellen Gallagher makes frequent trips to a large bookcase on the other side of her studio, pulling out items she thinks are relevant and interesting. By the time I leave, I have a list of names written down on a piece of paper: people from the realms of visual art and literature whose work Gallagher implores me to seek out.

Overlooking the port of Rotterdam, her studio is a whitewashed space bathed in light, with vast windows and occasional glimpses of passing clouds via skylights. It is busy and not especially tidy: the artist’s red, paint-spattered desk is cluttered with books, little knives and intricate paper cutouts. You get the impression, however, that she knows where things are. On the walls are a couple of newer paintings: abstract, blue, serene. On a low table, there are proofs of the catalogue for AxME, her new show at the Tate Modern in London. Its title is a play on the fictional Acme corporation that supplied Wile E. Coyote with mail-order gadgets in the cartoon Roadrunner, as well as a reference to the African-American vernacular for “Ask me”.

Born in Rhode Island in 1965, to a black father of Cape Verdean extraction and a white Irish Catholic mum, Gallagher studied writing before attending art school in Boston. She is probably best known in the UK for Coral Cities, which appeared at Tate Liverpool in 2007. The show featured Watery Ecstatic, a series of paintings inspired by the myth of Drexciya, or the Black Atlantis – an underwater city populated by the descendents of Africans thrown off slave ships. Gallagher’s fantastical lost souls and eerie sealife fascinated the writer Jackie Kay, who called her work “jazz on a huge canvas”. The playwright Bonnie Greer is a big fan, too…

Read the entire article here.

DePaul Art Minute – War Baby/Love Child exhibition

DePaul Newsroom
DePaul Art Museum
2013-05-16

DePaul University Associate Professor Laura Kina discusses how art featured in the “War Baby/Love Child” exhibit helps to tell the story of mixed race Asian Americans and the complexities of their mixed-heritage identities, in the third installment of the DePaul Art Minute, which provides a forum for DePaul professors to relate their expertise to artwork at the DePaul Art Museum.

Local Artists Collaborate on Asian Heritage Art Exhibits at DePaul

Vocalo Morning Amp
Vocalo 90.7 FM
Chicago, Illinois
2013-05-16

Brian Babylon and Molly Adams, Hosts

The exhibit War Baby/Love Child at the DePaul Art Museum highlights the work of mixed race artists who share Asian heritage in their identities. Curator Laura Kina and artist Mequitta Ahuja joined AMp hosts Brian Babylon and Molly Adams in the studio this morning and discussed their personal family lineage, the stereotype stamped on mixed children whose roots came from Asian countries where the United States was involved in, and how kinship is formed among “war babies” through artistic expression and exhibits.

Download the story here.

‘War Baby’ is something to see, if you can let go

The Chicago Tribune
2013-05-08

Lori Waxman, Instructor of Art History, Theory and Criticism
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

It was the Hello Kitty tepee that did it for me.

Some exhibitions can be so challenging that it takes a particularly unexpected artwork for the viewer to finally let go and get into the swing of things. “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” currently up at the DePaul Art Museum and featuring work by a dozen-and-a-half artists, is one such show. A riotously colored digital print by Debra Yepa-Pappan featuring a purple-haired Native American woman, lifted from an iconic Edward S. Curtis photograph and set against a background of space-age tepees, one of them marked with the equally iconic and silent face of everybody’s favorite Japanese cat, is one such artwork.

Hilarious and weird and crazily of its time — i.e., now — Yepa-Pappan’s collage lifted my thoughts up and over the various stumbling blocks that “War Baby/Love Child” presents. Curated by Laura Kina, an artist and DePaul professor, and Wei Ming Dariotis, a professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, the cogitative but overdetermined exhibition sets up a Catch-22. It wants to recognize the complex realities of a fast-growing segment of the American population — the 2.6 million who identify as Asian plus one or more other races — and to prove how far beyond stereotype those people go. And yet, two gargantuan cliches give their name to the exhibition itself.

The term “war babies” generally refers to the children of Asian or Pacific Islander women and the U.S. soldiers who were stationed in their home countries during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. “Love children” were born of the free love of a post-civil rights and flower-child era, and, as listed in the extensive exhibition catalog, their makeup includes Eurasians and Hapas (Mixed White Asians), Mixed Bloods (Mixed Asian Native Americans), Blasians (Mixed Black Asians) and Mestizaje (Mixed Latino Asians).

“War Baby/Love Child” thus finds itself in the counterintuitive position of wanting to replace its own title with a dozen less-loaded ones. Wall labels are one tool, and the ones here list an astonishing array of mixed identities as well as direct quotes from most of the artists, many of whom speak about personal experiences growing up amid racial presumption…

Read the entire article here.

‘Show Boat’ Steams On, Eternally American

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2013-05-07

Nina Totenberg, Legal Affairs Correspondent

It’s been more than eight decades since Show Boat — the seminal masterpiece of the American musical theater — premiered on a stage in Washington, D.C. Now the sprawling classic is back, in a lush production put on by the Washington National Opera.

Based on Edna Ferber’s epic best-selling novel, Show Boat was nothing like the frothy musicals and scantily clad Broadway revues of its time. Sure, the story is about a traveling showboat that plays to audiences along the Mississippi River, but the plot focuses on serious subjects: racial injustice, alcoholism, abandonment.

Panoramic in scale, the show spans 40 years, from 1885 in the South — not long after the Civil War — to the Roaring ’20s in Chicago. And displayed in all their glory are some of the most beautiful love songs of the 20th century: “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” “Make Believe,” “Bill.”

Show Boat made musical-theater history, pioneering the merging of music and plot, integrating them for the first time to provide a seamless transition from scene to song. Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, just 31 years old, worked closely with composer Jerome Kern to replicate Ferber’s sweeping narrative. In a 1958 interview released on vinyl by MGM Records, he explained how he used the Mississippi itself as the thread that would hold all the plot elements together.

“I thought that we lacked something to make it cohesive,” Hammerstein told interviewer Arnold Michaelis. “I wanted to keep the spirit of Edna’s book, and the one focal influence I could find was the river, because she had quite consciously brought the river into every important turn in the story. The Mississippi. So I decided to write a theme — a river theme.”

That theme, of course, became “Ol’ Man River,” one of the most primal American melodies ever sung.

‘Misery’ Restored, And Threaded Throughout The Show

Director Francesca Zambello, who pushed and prodded to get the current revival staged at the Kennedy Center, says she was drawn to the show because of the timeless issues it dramatizes — not least that key underlying theme of race, embodied in the show by Julie, the showboat’s star performer.

“Julie is the fulcrum of the show, because she brings the dramatic issue that changes everything,” Zambello says.

Secretly biracial, but “passing” — living publicly as a white woman — Julie has married a white man. That makes their relationship a crime in Mississippi, and in much of the rest of the country besides.

No surprise, then, that even before Julie is found out and forced to leave the showboat, the company’s mother figure, who’s in on her secret, senses trouble. “Misery’s comin’ around,” sings Queenie, the showboat’s cook, in a gorgeously melancholy melody that was cut from the original production for time.

“The theme of ‘Misery’ you hear not only with Queenie and all the women working, but it also weaves its way underneath the dialogue every time Julie speaks after that,” Zambello points out. “It becomes her sadness, and her secret.”

There are no U.S. laws against interracial marriage anymore; they were struck down in 1967 by the Supreme Court’s . But as Show Boat plays at the Kennedy Center this month, the court — just a couple of miles away — is considering questions of same-sex marriage, affirmative action and voting rights, while Congress focuses on how we as a nation treat immigrants.

“To do this kind of work that has such deep social underpinnings to it, and really speaks about social change, is I think rare in music theater,” Zambello says. “If you wrote this musical today, I’m not sure that it would get on.”…

Read the entire article here.  Listen to the story here.  Download the audio here.

Solo Show at UCSB’s MultiCultural Center Examines Notions of Racial Identity

Public Affairs & Communications
University of California, Santa Barbara
News Release
2013-05-01

Contact: Andrea Estrada: 805-893-4620; George Foulsham: 805-893-3071

Multimedia performance is produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Chay Carter

(Santa Barbara, Calif.)—When actress and playwright Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni married the love of her life in 2006, her father did not walk her down the aisle. In fact, he declined to attend the wedding altogether.

Seeking to understand why he chose not to participate, DiGiovanni began a trek through family history—and time and space—that ultimately led to her M.F.A. thesis project: the multimedia one-woman play, “One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Racial Approval.”

DiGiovanni will perform the hour-long show at UC Santa Barbara’s MultiCultural Center Theater on Tuesday, May 7. The performance begins at 6 p.m. and will be followed by a question-and-answer session with G. Reginald Daniel, professor of sociology at UCSB. Daniels is a leading expert in the field of critical mixed race studies…

…A leading activist on issues related to mixed race, DiGiovanni is an actor, comedian, producer, and educator. She developed “One Drop of Love” as the thesis project for her Master of Fine Arts degree in film, television, and theater from California State University Los Angeles. She will use footage from her performances—the most recent was at the University of Maryland—to produce a documentary film…

Read the entire news release here.

One Drop of Love: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father’s Racial Approval (at University of California, Santa Barbara)

University of California, Santa Barbara
MultiCultural Center Theater [Directions] [Map]
University Center, Room 1504
Tuesday, 2013-05-07, 18:00-20:00 PDT (Local Time)

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

Jillian Pagan, Director

Produced by: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Chay Carter

Q&A afterwards hosted by:

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni returns to the West Coast after a phenomenally successful performance at the University of Maryland.

Incorporating filmed images, photographs and animation, this one-woman show tells the story of how the notion of ‘race’ came to be in the U.S., and its effects on the narrator’s relationship with her father—a journey that will take audiences from the 1600s to the present, to cities all over the U.S. and to West and East Africa, where both father and daughter spent time in search of their ‘racial’ roots.

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni. ^©2103, Evan Tamayo

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni is a leading activist concerning mixed race, and is an actor, comedian, producer and educator. One Drop of Love is her MFA thesis, and she will be using footage from her performances to make a documentary.

Fanshen and her father after University of Maryland performance. (2013-03-29). ^©2013, Marvin T. Jones

Ms. Cox DiGiovanni appeared in the 2013 Academy Award and Golden Globe winning film Argo (2012); co-created, co-produced and co-hosted the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat (2007-2012); and co-founded and produced the annual Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival^® (2008-20012). For more on Ms. Cox DiGiovanni and One Drop of Love, visit: http://www.onedropoflove.org.

G. Reginald Daniel is a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a leading expert in field of critical mixed race studies. He received the 2012 Loving Prize from the Mixed Roots Film and Literary Festival in Los Angeles for his lifelong work as a scholar and participant within the multiracial community. He is the author of More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (Temple University Press, 2001) and Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). He is also the author of over 40 chapters and articles dealing with the topic of multiraciality. His latest book is Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

Fanshen and her parents after University of Maryland performance (2013-03-29). ^©2013, Michael J. Hardy

Admission is free.

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