Mixed Race Studies

Faces In Between

Daniels Spectrum
585 Dundas Street East
Toronto, Ontario
Friday, 2013-02-01, 19:00-21:00 EST (Local Time)

A 3MW Collective art Exhibit at Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre during Black History Month exploring mixed race identity through painting and photography.

Join us to celebrate our first show as a collective!

Cash bar and amazing art!

We are three mixed-race women artists using portraiture in both painting and photography to address ideas of mixed-race identity. The subjects in our work are people who have parents, grandparents, and ancestors from different cultural backgrounds. The faces of our “models” do not conform to society’s outdated notions of human classification. These faces are loaded with issues of colonialism, racism, shadeism, as well as questions of history and identity.

In Canada, although we have a policy of multiculturalism, people are generally not comfortable talking about race. Our work aims to highlight the experiences of mixed people. These are the people whose “race” is not clear and who are often faced with questions such as, “What are you?” or “What is your ethnic background?” These persistent questions clearly reflect our society’s discomfort with an inability to classify people by racialized norms.

For more information, click here.

Afro-Mexicans and Winston-Salem Photo Gallery

Winston-Salem Journal
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
November 2007

Ted Richardson, Photographer

Irma Gonzales Alvarado prays before a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe at her Winston-Salem home. She invited several neighbors to her home on the last night of La Cuarentena, a 40-night observance of the Virgin leading up to Dec. 12th, the day an apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego.

View all of the photographs here.

Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story

University of Minnesota Press
2010
272 pages
23 b&w plates, 6 x 9
cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6678-2

George Lipsitz, Professor of Black Studies and Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Considered by many to be the godfather of R&B, Johnny Otis—musician, producer, artist, entrepreneur, pastor, disc jockey, writer, and tireless fighter for racial equality—has had a remarkable life by any measure. In this first biography of Otis, George Lipsitz tells the largely unknown story of a towering figure in the history of African American music and culture who was, by his own description, “black by persuasion.”

Born to Greek immigrant parents in Vallejo, California, in 1921, Otis grew up in an integrated neighborhood and identified deeply with black music and culture from an early age. He moved to Los Angeles as a young man and submerged himself in the city’s vibrant African American cultural life, centered on Central Avenue and its thriving music scene. Otis began his six-decade career in music playing drums in territory swing bands in the 1930s. He went on to lead his own band in the 1940s and open the Barrelhouse nightclub in Watts. His R&B band had seventeen Top 40 hits between 1950 and 1969, including “Willie and the Hand Jive.” As a producer and A&R man, Otis discovered such legends as Etta James, Jackie Wilson, and Big Mama Thornton.

Otis also wrote a column for the Sentinel, one of L.A.’s leading black newspapers, became pastor of his own interracial church, hosted popular radio and television shows that introduced millions to music by African American artists, and was lauded as businessman of the year in a 1951 cover story in Negro Achievements magazine. Throughout his career Otis’s driving passion has been his fearless and unyielding opposition to racial injustice, whether protesting on the front lines, exposing racism and championing the accomplishments of black Americans, or promoting African American musicians.

Midnight at the Barrelhouse is a chronicle of a life rich in both incident and inspiration, as well as an exploration of the complicated nature of race relations in twentieth-century America. Otis’s total commitment to black culture and transcendence of racial boundaries, Lipsitz shows, teach important lessons about identity, race, and power while encapsulating the contradictions of racism in American society.

Pete Souza’s Portrait of a Presidency

Time LightBox
Time Magazine
2012-10-08

Phil Bicker, Senior Photo Editor

Pete Souza/The White House

The long view of history tends to be the judge of a presidency. As President Obama embarks on a second term in the Oval Office, it may still be too early to draw conclusions about his legacy as Commander in Chief. What we do know is that Obama’s first term has been a historic one: the first African American to hold the county’s highest office, Obama and his Administration have battled a recession, passed health care reform and legislation to end the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, formally ended the war in Iraq and brought Osama bin Laden to justice.

Through adversity and triumph, public victories and private setbacks, chief official White House photographer Pete Souza and his team of photographers have relentlessly documented the actions of the President, the First Lady and the Vice President since Obama took office in early 2009.

As the President runs for a second term, LightBox asked Souza to reflect on his time photographing Obama and share an edit of his favorite images that he and his staff made during the President’s first term; the photographs offer a fascinatingly candid insight into the life of the President while painting a portrait of Barack Obama the man, husband and father…

Read the entire article and view the 125 photographs here.

Evoking the Mulatto: Exploring Black Mixed Identity in the 21st Century

2012

Lindsay C. Harris, Creator, Director, Artist & Lead Curator

Tida Tippapart, Producer and Co-Curator

Chelsea Rae Klein, Web Designer and Co-Curator

Evoking the Mulatto is a multiplatform narrative and visual art project examining black mixed identity in the 21st century, through the lens of the history of racial classification in the United States.

Featuring filmed interviews with young artists and activists, photography, animation, and historical mappings, this video art project seeks to address a relevant contemporary issue by glimpsing at its chronicle. In an alleged post-race society, under governance of the first black (and mixed) president, the United States still criminalizes and demarcates black bodies, as made evident in the public realm by the recent death of Trayvon Martin and the extreme racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system (black men are over six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men). Even our current struggle over marriage equality is far too reminiscent of the fight to eradicate all miscegenation laws, which up until 1967, banned interracial marriage…

For more information, click here.

Jackie Kay and Sebastian Barry: Identity and struggle

The Guardian
2011-08-15

Sarah Crown

In our inaugural podcast from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Sebastian Barry and Jackie Kay talk to us about the themes that power their work

In our first podcast from the 2011 Edinburgh International Book Festival, we explore questions of identity and struggle as played out in the 20th-century…

…The poet and novelist Jackie Kay turned memoirist last year with her book Red Dust Road, an account of her search for her birth parents: a white Scottish woman, and a Nigerian man. Her writing reflects her grappling with the thorny issue of her own identity, and she reveals how this podcast has reconnected her with her family…

[Jackie Kay reads “Burying My African Father.”]

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

A Hapa Family in Chekhov’s Three Sisters

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 3 (2012), Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature
pages 130-146

Elizabeth Liang, Actress, Writer, Producer and co-host of “Hapa Happy Hour”

It is an act of courage or foolhardiness to produce theatre in the heart of the film world, depending on your point of view and how large the houses turn out to be. In the fall of 2005, I produced Three Sisters in a 60-seat theatre in Burbank, California (home of Disney and Warner Bros.). The odds were stacked even higher against the show’s success when I stipulated that the main characters, the upper-class and highly educated Russian Prozorov siblings, had to be played by hapa actors. This essay describes my attempt to interpret the play through a multi-ethnic lens while working with a monoracial director, and the challenges this posed, both on the stage and off.

Read the entire article here.

Laylah Ali’s show both confounds and mesmerizes

The Boston Globe
2012-02-19

Sebastian Smee,  Art Critic

Laylah Ali is an artist to reckon with. Any opportunity to see her work should not be missed, and for the next two weeks, the Jaffe-Friede Gallery, a small college gallery a short walk from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, is offering just such an opportunity.

Born in 1968, Ali grew up in Buffalo and lives in Williamstown. She has been an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College this winter. But the current show of drawings in pencil and black ink is the fruit of an earlier period. All were made between 2005 and 2007.

They show Ali’s inimitable cast of two-dimensional characters, many of them missing arms and other anatomical parts, some of them solo, others in groups of two or three. They are of indeterminate sex and indeterminate race. But all have extra features – strange encumbrances that resemble humps, hoods, headdresses, horns, turbans, goggles, burkas, and beards…

Read the entire review here.

Ten-Minute Talk: MoMA Conservator Scott Gerson on Ellen Gallagher’s Deluxe

Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
2012-03-05

Sarah Kennedy, Associate Educator, Lab Programs

Janelle Grace, Adult & Academic Programs 12-month Intern

This week’s Ten-Minute Talk features Scott Gerson, Associate Conservator in MoMA’s Department of Conservation who discusses the materials and processes explored in Ellen Gallagher’s featured work Deluxe on display in the Printin’ exhibition.

As part of Print Studio, we offer a weekly series of short talks focusing on issues related to the medium of print and the sustainability of ideas within the context of modern and contemporary art. During these Ten-Minute Talks, a variety of MoMA staff—from conservators to librarians and archivists—as well as guest artists and educators, share their expertise, offering insight on a variety of topics and a special behind-the-scenes look at MoMA’s engagement with the medium of print and selected Print Studio projects.

For more information, click here.

Debra Yepa-Pappan: Dual(ing) Identities

Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
108 Cathedral Place
Santa Fe, New Mexico
2012-08-17 through 2012-12-31

SmDivine Spirits

This exhibition focuses on Debra Yepa-Pappan’s reflective group of works that explore her dual identities. Yepa-Pappan is of Jemez Pueblo and Korean heritage. Through this multilayered collection of work, Yepa-Pappan layers instances of history, pop culture, stereotypes, authenticity, family, her identity, and the urban environment together. Through her dual identities, she embraces change in tradition as a reflection of herself, yet she also duels with the labels placed upon her.
 
About the Artist: DEBRA YEPA-PAPPAN was born in Korea in 1971 to a Korean mother and Jemez Pueblo father. She came to the U.S. with her mother when she was 5 months old. At this time, she was enrolled as Jemez Pueblo before becoming a U.S. citizen. In her work, Yepa-Pappan shares her experiences of being a mixed-race Asian/Native American living in an urban area, while exploring the issues of identity and challenging American Indian stereotypes. Having spent the majority of her life in Chicago, she is influenced by contemporary and urban culture, along with her deep connection to Jemez Pueblo. Because of her parents and their own strong ties to their cultures, she has a strong sense of self. She says, “I know who I am and where my people come from.” Yepa-Pappan attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and graduated with an Associates of Fine Arts in two- and three-dimensional art in 1992…

For more information, click here.