Us Them We exhibition gallery guide by Worcester Art Museum

WO R C E ST E R A RT M U S E U M

On view February 19 through June 19, 2022

WORCESTER ART MUSEUM worcesterart.org

Creating Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity In December 2021, curators Nancy Kathryn Burns and Toby Sisson asked each other a series of questions about their respective experiences organizing Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity. Below is an excerpt of that conversation.

NB: What made co-curating this exhibition compelling to you? TS: I had multiple reasons to take on the role of cocurator for this exhibition. First, the theme aligned with my own studio practice, which explores history, place, and identity within the context of race and ethnicity. I was also eager to collaborate with you, an art historian working in a museum with a growing collection of works by historically underrepresented artists. Coincidentally, I was planning a course for the following year that would address diversity, equity, and inclusion issues within contemporary art. And finally, work on the project commenced in the spring of 2020 when the global response to the murder of George Floyd and the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on people of color meant that discussions of race were taking place in a way that had never happened before. NB: I’m flattered that you wanted to work with me, and the feeling is mutual. When I was beginning to outline the idea for this project, you were one of the first people I wanted to talk to precisely because you have addressed identity, particularly race, in your work for much of your career. You also immediately connected with what I wanted to prioritize in this exhibition: to consider the concept of identity while keeping the visual strategies artists employ central to the exhibition’s thesis. If nothing else, I think that is what’s original about this project. I’ve described this approach as a kind of “informed formalism.” In this exhibition, viewers are encouraged to look closely at how craft impacts an object’s message. Recently, I’ve found that many museum exhibitions tackling race and ethnicity focused primarily on the biographies of the artists represented rather than the physical objects themselves. I think that our approach is an especially compelling way to consider how artists use abstraction in the service of narratives dealing with identity. 2

NB: Determining the title for the exhibition was challenging. Several people weighed in, and we finally settled on Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity. Could you speak to that process and what we hoped to accomplish with this title? TS: This exhibition encompasses layers of meaning about complex topics, so the words in the title needed to be equally expansive. Eventually, however, we settled on something clear, direct, and concise. Although the title doesn’t include reference to the formal devices that ground the show, we are confident that the idea of visual strategies is illuminated in the arrangement of the artwork. The binary of “us” and “them” is straightforward: everyone who is not you is someone else. Recognition of self and other is not inherently “othering;” rather, us and them is everyone, which is reflected in the word “we.” NB: It’s true that giving up our focus on formal devices in the title was a sacrifice, but I agree that the exhibition’s engagement with race, ethnicity, and identity needed to be front and center. And as you stated so well, our identities are the product of recognizing how our lived experiences are similar and different. I like to think that the phrase “us them we” hints at how difference informs craft. That said, rarely can one fully convey the contours of a complex idea in five to six words. TS: Has the experience of working on this exhibition and its supporting installation by the Clark students provided you with more clarity about your belief system or perspectives on race, ethnicity, and identity? NB: Doing the Contemporary Directions course with you at Clark was really illuminating. The students challenged the role of museums and even

Fig. 1 Dread Scott, #WhileBlack, 2018, screenprint diptych. © Dread Scott. Museum purchase through the estate of Blake Robinson, 2021.81

my role as a curator in some cases, which I honestly appreciated. Until then, I hadn’t fully considered the contours of identity as a concept. As a result, I think I see identity far more comprehensively than I did before. Most conversations limit identity to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, and ability. But so many other facets of our lives also inform our identities like nationality, political ideology, language, religious beliefs, and geography. Our class helped me see how my lived experience inﬂuences the way I engage with art, its history, and perhaps most importantly, how it impacts my approach to organizing exhibitions. TS: What evolved for me as a direct result of cocurating this show was my ability to articulate my thoughts around issues of identity with a broader understanding of what it constitutes. I learned a lot from my students about the transformation of identity across generations and how internal shifts impact external perceptions.

TS: Are there one or two works in Us Them We that you find especially compelling? NB: I’m interested in seeing the public reception of Dread Scott’s diptych #WhileBlack (Fig. 1). In 2018, the same year Scott created #WhileBlack, author and influencer Black Aziz asked his Twitter followers to use the hashtag #LivingWhileBlack in reply to the question: “Have you ever had the cops called on you for some innocuous reason?” The response was widespread and extensive. The Twitter responses became a virtual journal of the daily injustices enacted upon African Americans. Similarly, the left side of Scott’s work recalls events that involved a white person contacting law enforcement on Black men and women who were engaging in everyday activities. The other side of #WhileBlack includes a second list of hashtags that blend the desires of African Americans with what white people assume are the fantasies of Black people. Using the language of social media—the soapbox of our times—Scott spells out the relationship between unwarranted fears held by white people and justified fears experienced by African Americans.

TS: There are so many objects I love in this show, but I’m especially engaged by Laylah Ali’s compelling work, The Redheads Take a Sore Revenge (Attack of the Blueheads) (Fig. 2) that depicts the aftermath of violence. It’s a remarkable artwork that gets to the heart of this exhibition’s message about how similarity and difference impact our understanding of prevailing power structures. For example, where are the redheads noted in the title? Also, sustained viewing reveals that the hanging figures are wearing female-identifying garments while the lower figures do not. This small and detailed gouache painting demands careful viewing, and I revisit this work again and again to discover elements that shift my thinking. NB: It was important to you that we incorporate white artists in this exhibition. Why? TS: Absolutely. The dominant culture in America (e.g., white culture) is often viewed as neutral, the default or yardstick by which all non-whites are judged. But that presumes that whiteness is not racialized. Globally, issues of race operate within white identity, although it is seldom recognized or called out as such. To address whiteness as every bit as raced as the identity of non-whites, we included the work of white artists in the exhibition. We noted in the wall labels how identity was operating in the works, although we didn’t always identify the artist’s race or ethnicity. Audrey Flack, a white artist, centered white war heroes in her screenprint Fourth of July Still Life. This celebratory depiction didn’t include non-white individuals crucial to America’s founding, such as Crispus Attucks and James Armistead. Excluding people of color from the valorization accorded to whites is a racialized choice reflected in most depictions of American history.

NB: Admittedly, it took some convincing on your part for me to embrace the inclusion of white artists in the exhibition. I had some ambivalence about whether it was appropriate for white artists to be addressing race and ethnicity in their work, particularly if they were representing identities they did not share. However, as a direct result of our many conversations, you made me realize that an honest and inclusive dialogue about race needed to recognize that to be white is to be raced. Our identities inform who we are and how we engage with the world. These experiences necessarily impact— consciously or unconsciously—what artists choose to represent or reject in their work. TS: How do you hope WAM’s audience will receive this exhibition? NB: This is a surprisingly hard question for me to answer. I think that’s because what I want is for this exhibition to be unresolved and even a bit untidy. Usually, I try to convey a clear point-of-view and communicate that idea throughout an exhibition without being too heavy-handed. But this exhibition can’t and shouldn’t try to offer neatly packaged answers. It can challenge viewers to meditate on their own lived experiences and the experiences of others while simultaneously considering the importance of an artist’s craft. It can ask people to sit with ideas that feel foreign and sometimes unpleasant. And ideally, it can spark conversations inside and outside the museum. If that happens, it would be really gratifying. TS: I think audiences will be excited by the depth and breadth of the artwork exhibited and the variety of ways contemporary artists address the subject of identity. Even if race and ethnicity are not clearly evident in a work, we aim to illuminate how issues like power and beauty are embedded in our conceptions of identity. I also hope viewers discover new ways to think about the formal elements artists use to explore these essential ideas.

Fig. 2 Laylah Ali (American, born 1968), The Redheads Take a Sore Revenge (Attack of the Blueheads), 1997, gouache over graphite on white wove paper Charlotte E.W. Buffington Fund, 1998.97

We Who Are Gathered Here: Art and the Plurality of Being Kimberly Juanita Brown Entering an art museum is like meeting familiar versions of yourself made strange. It is to be in conversation with those versions, that self. Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity leans into this encounter to illuminate its artistic potential. In this, the viewer is also the subject of presentation and we, us, them, gather at the Worcester Art Museum to explore these pluralities of existence. Marginalized communities know a great deal about the multiple axes of identity they navigate. Race, gender, ethnicity, class, nationality, sexuality, age, ability, language, religion— all play a role in how we receive ourselves and how we are received by others. This is not a problem. Problems ensue when these identities are not allowed to exist, are stifled, erased, or circumscribed from without and within. Author Audre Lorde described herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and refused any invocation that did not address all the manifestations of her identity she offered the world.1 We might imagine the intricate thematic organization of Us Them We as a portal to an artistic world that exceeds the measure of the moment it reflects. A moment encapsulated by a deadly global pandemic, debates about race, gender, immigration, labor, and the meaning of individuality within a collective. Curators Nancy Kathryn Burns and Toby Sisson have assembled a mélange of imagery that is transgressive in its multi-dimensional deployment, fluid in its artistic maneuvering, and determined in its aesthetic production. The exhibition is thematically organized through four parts. “Text,” “Juxtaposition,” “Pattern,” and “Seriality” are the portals through which to view the shifting regulatory apparatus of the exhibition space. Burns and Sisson have brought together a series of images that are in conversation. At the center of this conversation is the layered production of humanity in all its plural formation. What unfolds, then, in this exhibition is the relational aesthetic illumination possible when art and identity are brought together in a purposeful physical 6

enclosure. These pluralities herald a change that must be rendered visually, where they can shift a long-overdue conversation forward. What is at the center of this exhibition are two questions for the Worcester Art Museum: How can one exhibition navigate the manner, mode, and stipulations that encompass identity? What are the questions that have artistic solutions at their center? In the gestural offerings located in Us Them We there is the directional body of the art world writ large. Author and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison sees the necessary work of representation as vital to art’s ability to reﬂect the world in which people live, work, form community, and invest in themselves.2 Us Them We, in a purposeful exchange, bridges generational, communal, interior, and externalized rubrics of belonging and holds them together for all to see. The result, then, is the predictive exposure to modern expressions of joy, love, grief, wonder, ambivalence, and care. We are asked to measure the modality of aesthetic production through a circular apparatus of the visual. This apparatus affords one a symbolic undercurrent but doesn’t ripple the framework. Understanding this, Burns and Sisson ask that we alter the directional structure of vision so that it includes analyses of identity as constructed, renewed, resisted, and made malleable. This is a task that exposes the viewer to images that insist upon the meaning-making of visual production in ways that sustain instead of detract. If we pause here, it is possible to engender a sense of vulnerability and exposure that accompanies any insistence on visibility, understanding, or value. And yet, we can also see that the central project of this exhibition is a kind of gathering—of selves and others who constitute a community—a whole. These selections are, put together in this way, stunning. They allow for much in the opening of a very particular ﬁeld of vision. This is a counterclockwise movement, for it must account for altered histories, dispersed trajectories, and submerged subjectivities.

Fig. 3 Brooke Williams, Self with Family, Jamaica, 1987, tea-toned cyanotype and cyanotype in sixteen parts, Gift of the Artist, 2015.46

That these subjectivities are also shifting, in meaning and signiﬁcance, is the measure of artistic invention present in the show. With the range and breadth of aesthetic intentions on display, Us Them We grafts together light, color, shadow, genre, and shape in order to make a cohesive artistic statement. The discursive possibilities for expression are evident in one of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs, located in the section on Seriality. Frazier’s 2008 image Momme has at its center the visual portmanteau that the linguistic Momme highlights: namely, Mom + Me. An us that has two parts, two points of view, two directions, subjectivities, and two narratives, all in one frame. The photograph is a convergence of imagistic import that greets the viewer. Frazier and her mother appear at two angles; one offering the viewer a side view, while Frazier, front-facing, gazes back at the viewer. “Photography,” cultural theorist Roland Barthes assures us, “began, historically, as an art of the Person: of identity, of civil status, of what we might call, in all senses of the term, the body’s formality.”3 Seriality, in this way, is repetition with a marked difference. It is the visual production of scaffolding

that provides the viewer with one way to envision its ardent truths, whatever those may be. Also in Seriality, Brooke Williams’s Self with Family (Fig. 3) extends Frazier’s investigation and appears to highlight the often-fraught negotiation of individual and collective representation in the gallery space. Williams’s sixteen-piece cyanotype combines word and image to signify the notions of self, other, family, and kinship. A complex visual narrative emerges, one that highlights Williams’s intimacy with abstraction and ﬁguration. Self with Family underscores the way in which approaches to identity and self-possession are invoked when aspects of subjectivity include examinations of race, gender, nation, and their concomitant pluralities. For Williams, the grainy saturation of the photographic subjects (sometimes Williams herself, sometimes others) offers a visual multiplicity that speaks to identity’s collective construction. To this, she adds parts of texts: personal writings and passages from political activist Marcus Garvey (1887 – 1940), for example, in order to round out her presentation of interiority. 7

Fig. 4 Troy Michie, This street long. It real long, 2018, Paper weaving collage, gouache, ink, acrylic, China marker, magazine pages, and photographs, Image courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery, New York

Juxtaposition images like Audrey Flack’s Fourth of July Still Life confront the viewer with shiny accoutrements of patriotic American ephemera: bunting, the American flag, a portrait of George Washington, fireworks, and a trumpet announcing the grandeur to which the nation purports to claim ownership. Condensed together in this color screenprint, the trappings of national investment are color-saturated and rigid. Flack crowds the frame in order to highlight the performative aspect of citizenship, how it morphs around subjects and forms something else that must be unpacked and detangled. Pattern is embedded in Jennie C. Jones’s 2017 triptych Untitled (Dynamics). The artist’s sonic-visual investments come from a space of deep looking and deep listening. To follow the artist’s eye is to allow the imagistic cartography of movement to render itself visible. Jones’s sharp lines and minimalist color signals an environment of looking and contemplation in threaded balance. Troy Michie’s This street long. It real long (Fig. 4) in Pattern follows the structure of collage-making, gifting the viewer with an immersion into texture, patterns, and tone. More than this, there is the register of duplication that riffs on previous mixed-media artwork while functioning in a fluid register of visibility. There are symmetries at play with This street long—symmetries that depend on previous negotiations of structure and framing. Viewed together in this way, audiences will no doubt notice how easily movable the categories and artistic pieces are. Individual images and entire series are able to move fluidly between the sections, as they are able to sustain multiple readings/renderings in a single look. Importantly, the thematic structure of the exhibition as well as the flexible navigation within it are reminders of the site-specific performances of identity that we all work within.

How we, or they, navigate this in-between, this duplication of being, changes depending on place, time, and opportunity. This art exhibition is an offering of human investment, an offering that will go a long way to visually addressing the selves that make up the whole in the contemporary moment. There is a texture to aesthetic environments—museums, galleries, and other exhibition spaces—that functions as an invitation to peruse. An opening, we might call it, insisting upon visual navigation and human engagement. If this opening meets the measure of the subjects represented, there is always much to see. Like any invitation to peruse, the rest is up to those who enter the exhibition space. For the viewer, the space may be a source of joy, introspection, pride, or simply a way to commune with others. Entering a museum space is to be in a binding contract with the world. It is to take that contract as far as humanly possible, using artists as guides. It is to expand upon the ﬁeld of vision so that you, too, are included therein. As the poet Gwendolyn Brooks writes, “…we are each other’s harvest / we are each other’s business / we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”4 Us Them We endeavors to acknowledge the magnitude and bond that fuels contemporary artistic production. Kimberly Juanita Brown is an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Her research engages the site of the visual to negotiate the parameters of race, gender, nation, and belonging. Her book, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press) examines slavery’s profound ocular construction and the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space. Brown is the founder and convener of The Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar. The Dark Room is a working group of scholars who are invested in the intersection of critical race theory and visual culture studies.

Notes Representing artistic intention with a wide-range of formal comparative approaches, Us Them We employs the fullest measure of cooperative vision. Paintings, drawings, photographs, collages, etchings and sculptures occupy space in order to illuminate the in-between that situates subjectivity and belonging.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/audre-lorde

Toni Morrison Interview with Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reﬂections on Photography. New York: FSG Press, 1981, 79.

Gwendolyn Brooks, “Paul Robeson” in Blacks, Chicago: Third World Press, 1994.

CONTEMPORARY DIRECTIONS RACE

ETHNICITY

IDENTITY

In spring 2021, the students in Clark University’s studio art course, Contemporary Directions, examined how a selection of artists’ works in US THEM WE | RACE ETHNICITY IDENTITY connected with their own lived experience. Below are the students’ response artworks and corresponding wall labels.

Shea Kushnir, American, born 2000, Spindrift, 2021, photocollage, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Mickalene Thomas, Interior: Zebra with Two Chairs and Funky Fur Mickalene Thomas, Interior: Zebra with Two Chairs and Funky Fur, 2014, collage with relief, intaglio, lithography, archival inkjet, enamel paint, gold leaf, water soluble artist crayon on acid free 4-ply Crescent mat board. © 2022 Mickalene Thomas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Chapin Riley Fund at the Greater Worcester Community Foundation, 2019.16

Mickalene Thomas’ Interior: Zebra with Two Charis and Funky Fur depicts the patterns and prints of midcentury Afrocentric design and is evocative of the artist’s childhood home. In response to Thomas’ playfully nostalgic collage and memories of my own youth, Spindrift portrays multiple views of the porch in my family’s summer home. The reconstruction of these fragmented shapes and perspectives suggests our shared connection to distant times and places in the formation of our respective identities.

Zachary Zawila, American, born 2000, Documenting, Remembering, Experiencing, 2021, Digital inkjet print mounted on paper, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Osamu James Nakagawa, Rain

Osamu James Nakagawa, Rain from Ma: Between the Past, 2003, inkjet print. © Osamu James Nakagawa. Gift of the artist, 2006.11

Finn O’Driscoll, American, born 1999, Untitled, 2021, scans of photographs and color negatives printed on Epson premium luster photo paper, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Osamu James Nakagawa, Rain

Untitled pays homage to Nakagawa’s series Ma: Between the Past by echoing the theme of family history in Nakagawa’s Rain. Untitled reﬂects three generations of family photographs including a selfportrait at right. By assembling the three photos in chronological order, I illustrate how photographed experiences accumulate over the course of several generations and fuse into a collective memory. In this sense distant experiences collapse time, creating an illusory familiarity with my family’s past. Ultimately, both Rain and Untitled explore the question, “How do we construct meaning from our family’s photographed history?”

Like Nakagawa’s Rain, my work Documenting, Remembering, Experiencing explores the cultural connections and tensions that link self, family, and community. Here, I layered sketches of contemporary street-scapes over the background of family photographs taken in Elizabeth, New Jersey in the early 1960s. My memories of oftrepeated family stories about now-deceased relatives, accompany historic images of the familiar city. But inherited images don’t reﬂect the entirety of my identity as I am not from the city of my family’s past. As Nakagawa’s work suggests, intergenerational change and loss is inevitable despite the shared narratives of familial memory.

Daniel Macura, American, born 1998, Untitled, 2021, Inkjet print, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Osamu James Nakagawa, Rain

In 2019 I visited the Czech town of Orlová, where my ancestors emigrated from in the late 19th century. My arrival there was the first in five generations. Like the duality of Osamu James Nakagawa, JapaneseAmerican identity, my experience in Orlová straddled two cultures and several generations. I was neither a tourist nor a native. Sourcing images from both countries, Nakagawa’s Rain fuses an ancestral gap with his lived experience. Similarly, I digitally embed my own photographs over the image of a sign that identifies ancestral origin.

Finn O’Driscoll, American, born 1999, Untitled, 2021, assorted fabrics, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Mary Lee Bendolph, To Honor Mr. Dial

Left: Mary Lee Bendolph, To Honor Mr. Dial, 2005, softground etching, aquatint and spitbite on paper. © 2022 Mary Lee Bendolph / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Museum purchase through the estate of Blake Robinson, 2021.4

Celia Welton, American, born 2000, Picture, 2021 photocollage on paper, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Mary Lee Bendolph, To Honor Mr. Dial

Mary Lee Bendolph of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, has spent decades producing strip quilts with family members in her African American community. The practice among quilters of the region originated over six generations ago and is an important legacy of the region. As an artist, the objects I create often hold sentimental value; especially when they capture the likeness of friends and family. All taken throughout my teenage years, the photographs in Picture, although often omitting any ﬁgurative imagery, evoke distinct memories from my youth. Engaging ﬁlm-based photography, darkroom developing, and collaging the strips into original compositions, replicate the tactile process of both quilting and printmaking.

Inspired by Bendolph’s personal aesthetic and artistic philosophy, Untitled draws from her belief that quilt making “keeps your mind together.” In response this is my personal exploration of the visual and sensorial character of quilts. Using the color palette from Bendolph’s To Honor Mr. Dial in conjunction with a pattern used by my great-grandmother, I was mindful of each woman’s history during the process of making. In this sense, Untitled recognizes the communal methodology of quilting and its signiﬁcance as an object that references individual ancestry, themes historically present in Gee’s Bend quilts. Sam Rubin, American, born 1998 , L’Dor V’Dor, 2021, cotton t-shirts, embroidery thread, glue, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Mary Lee Bendolph, To Honor Mr. Dial

L’Dor V'Dor (from generation to generation) is an important value practiced in Judaism. Similar traditions are explored in Mary Lee Bendolph’s To Honor Mr. Dial through both the symbolism and substance of a Gee’s Bend Quilt. In Bendolph’s work, the rhythmic compositions of jazz echo in the improvisational design and the donated clothing of fellow artist Thornton Dial provides the raw material. In my own work, the pieced material gathered from my wardrobe references these practices. The inclusion of contrasting thread is an additional homage to my culture, as embroidery is commonly found on sacred Jewish fabrics such as Torah covers or prayer books passed down to me L’Dor V’dor.

Nyeema Morgan, Dear Arlene (Mom), 2019, screenprint, acrylic, Sumi ink, and graphite. © Nyeema Morgan. Image courtesy of the artist.

Tobi Pitan, American, born 2000, Hands in Hand, April

Emile Denno, American, born 1999, Treatment vs. Care,

2021, gouache, wax paper, rubber cement, laserjet ink on cold press paper, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Nyeema Morgan, Dear Arlene (Mom)

2021, collage with graphite, felt-tipped marker, and tracing paper mounted on paper, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Nyeema Morgan, Dear Arlene (Mom)

As the child of Nigerian parents, I recognize the subtle yet frequent ways immigrants are devalued and erased. In Hands in Hand words are underlined in red to reference digital software which “auto corrects” perceived errors into conformity. I counter these biases with repeated images of my mother, an emphatic restatement of her presence and importance in my life. Similarly, Nyeema Morgan’s Dear Arlene, lists the names of multiple Black artists, starting with her mother’s name. The frame is hung askew denoting the historic marginalization of Black artists, but this angle realigns the list and thus recenters it to a place of prominence.

Nyeema Morgan is an interdisciplinary, conceptual artist who responds to dissonance she experiences in encounters with images, objects, and information. Her work questions how and where information is sourced, often in an attempt to connect her identity within these investigations. Morgan says, “I’m constantly trying to reconcile these differences.” Inspired by this method, my collage is a depiction of psychosis in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 coupled with excerpts from Kasey Deems’ contemporary essay “We’re All Mad here.” Each reﬂect on the treatment of mentally disabled individuals in England during the nineteenth century. Treatment vs. Care connects issues of disability justice, identity, and the relationship of our bodies to our cultural environment. 13

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Me and Mom's Boyfriend Mr. Art from The Notion of Family, 2005, Gelatin silver print, copyright © LaToya Ruby Frazier. Chapin Riley Fund at the Greater Worcester Community Foundation, 2013.12

Sam Damon, American, born 1999, Untitled, 2020

Gabriella Sanchez, Side/Hide, 2018, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas. © Gabriella Sanchez. Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery and the artist.

Luster Inkjet Print, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Latoya Ruby Frazier, Me and Mom’s Boyfriend, Mr. Art

Jacqueline Pawlak, American, born 1998, Sensitive,

With two 35-mm, black and white images, accompanied by journal entries from May 2020, this collage depicts the challenges in my relationship with my autistic, younger brother. Inspired by Me and Mom’s Boyfriend, Mr. Art by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Untitled challenges the narrative of a “typical” family. The laptop is the physical and emotional barrier between my brother and me, much like Frazier’s use of a wall to create a physical separation between herself and her mother’s boyfriend, implies a psychological distance. Here, this assemblage of photographs with text emphasizes the detachment I experience from my brother, whose condition keeps him cloistered in his room. Both works represent the strain to bring family together across difference.

2021, acrylic paint on paper, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Gabriella Sanchez, Side/Hide

In Side/Hide artist Gabriella Sanchez reﬂects on the dualities of her identity as a Chicana living in spaces outside the dominant culture. In my work, I adopted Sanchez’s use of double meanings hidden within the wordplay of graphic text to complicate traditional stereotypes. I used my own perspective to communicate ideas about my whiteness and position in relation to how the world perceives me. Sensitive is a reﬂection on where I sit as a white woman and the reading of the title as a virtue or a vice.

Shirin Neshat, My Beloved, 1995, gelatin silver print on resin-coated paper, with hand additions in India ink. © Shirin Neshat. Sarah C. Garver Fund, 2002.35

Celia Welton, American, born 2000, Do you like my

Martha Rosler, Lounging Woman, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series, 2004, Photomontage, © Martha Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Stoddard Acquisition Fund, 2008.15

rhyme? 2021, ink and found photograph, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Shirin Neshat, My Beloved, 1995

Qiyu Chen, China, born 1999, Anti-discriminate, 2021,

Shirin Neshat’s My Beloved portrays an image of female power and vulnerability. Through the placement of a riﬂe next to the ﬁgure dressed in a chador adorned with a Persian love poem, Neshat invites the viewer to consider the complexity of women’s lives in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the degree of control or lack thereof they may exert. In response, I have constructed a work which addresses women’s relinquishing of autonomy through the impulse to seek external validation. Do you like my rhyme? references the need for approval from others to feel comfortable and accepting of one’s identity.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, there have been over 3,000 incidents of hate against Asians across the United States. While some call for peace through mass demonstrations, others remain in personal safe havens. In Lounging Woman, Martha Rosler juxtaposes a reclining figure with fighting figures as a way of illustrating American apathy toward the war in Iraq. Here, I juxtapose several Asians who have suffered beatings with a woman who lounges in her bed oblivious to their suffering. This juxtaposition of hate and indifference reflects my views on racism and the violent attacks against Asians in the United States. In doing so, I criticize those who ignore the suffering of others and do not offer help.

collage of found prints, Courtesy of the artist Responding to: Martha Rosler, Lounging Woman

Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity is organized by the Worcester Art Museum in partnership with, and with support from, Clark University. Additional support has been provided by Marlene and David Persky, Michael and Kristy Beauvais, Eve Griliches, Sara Shields and Bruce Fishbein, and Kristin B. Waters. This project is also funded in part by the John M. Nelson Fund and Hall and Kate Peterson Fund. Related programming is supported by the Amelia and Robert H. Haley Memorial Lecture Fund, Spear Fund for Public Programs, and the Worcester Arts Council, a local agency, which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. The Museum also extends its thanks to our lenders: Alvin Hall, Noel E.D. Kirnon, The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection, Millie Chen, Naﬁs White and Cade Tompkins Projects, and Howard Yezerski Gallery. In partnership with:

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