Tag Archives: Endia Beal

“How Do You See Me?”: Stunning Chicago Exhibition

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Laurie Says:

Medina Dugger, Blue Coiling Penny Penny, 2017

These remarkable works, by artists Alanna Airitam, Endia Beal and Medina Dugger, can be seen in an exhibition called How Do You See Me? at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago thru October 27th.

The three women confront the way African Americans are perceived in art, the work place, and through their physical appearance.
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Quotes from BBC
Alanna Airitam addresses the absence of black people in the history of Western art, with rare appearances showing dark-skinned people “represented in paintings and films as domestic workers, slaves or barbarians”.

In her series The Golden Age, the artist invited African-Americans to pose in the style of classic Dutch portraiture, to celebrate black identity and highlight the racial divide seen in art history.
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Alanna Airitam, Queen Mary, 2017

Airitam said: “When I see the beauty and power in the eyes of the people in the portraits, it immediately counters all the negative stereotypes and narratives we receive on a daily basis.

“It is (and always will be) especially important for me to combat the barrage of dehumanising messages black people face through media with messages that clearly state that we are beautiful, powerful, valuable, worthy human beings and we’re here to stay.”

The portrait below, named Queen Mary, is of a model named Mary. Her family is from Saint Croix, an island in the Caribbean Sea. Mary shared a story with Airitam about three women who led a successful rebellion against Dutch colonialism in Saint Croix in 1878. One of the women was called Mary Thomas.

Airitam decided to name the portrait Queen Mary in honour of the story. The model is symbolically showing that the key to abundance is self-love, beauty, majesty.

Airitam pays homage to the Harlem Renaissance, a period of American history in the early 20th Century that saw a boom in African-American social and cultural expression, centred around Harlem in Upper Manhattan, New York. The image is named after Dapper Dan, the Harlem-based clothes designer who defined hip hop fashion in the 1980s and 90s. Many of her images are named after places in Harlem.
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Alanna Airitam, Dapper Dan, 2017

In her series, “Am I What You’re Looking For?”, Endia Beal positions her models against a fake backdrop of a traditional office setting, wearing an outfit that the model would choose to wear in the workplace. Beal, a professor at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, has spent the last four years using photographic narratives and video testimonies to examine the personal stories of minority women working within the corporate space.
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Endia Beal, Christian, 2016

The artist’s previous personal experience of working in mostly white corporate workplaces includes people talking behind her back and making comments about her hair, which did not conform to their view of beauty. She says of the creative industry: “As a black, female photographer, I witnessed the under-representation of contemporary minority stories within fine art circles and photojournalism.”

Many of the subjects in her series are students at the university where she works. She also traveled around North Carolina and photographed women in their childhood homes. “These environments foster comfort allowing the women to be open about their concerns. I asked each woman to wear what she would love to wear to an interview and imagine she is waiting for the interview.

In her portrait series, Chroma: An Ode to JD ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Medina Dugger pays homage to Nigerian photographer JD ‘Okhai Ojeikere, who spent 40 years creating black and white photographic studies of African women’s hairstyles.
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Medina Dugger, Purple Kinky Calabar, 2017

Ojeikere’s work helped establish modern celebration of black hair culture, documenting African hair-braiding methods that date back thousands of years.

Nigerian hair culture is often an extensive process, which begins in childhood, with methods and variations being influenced by social and cultural patterns, historical events and globalisation. Traditionally, Nigerian hairstyles can be purely decorative or convey deeper meaning and symbolism around social status, age and family traditions.

Dugger said: “As a white American living in Nigeria, creating work on Nigerian hair culture, I understood from the beginning that I first needed to learn about the history of the practice and knew that I wanted the process to be collaborative in nature.” In her portraits, Dugger experiments with historical and imagined hairstyles inspired by Ojeikere but also by Nigerian hairstylist Ijeoma Christopher, along with hairstyles she has seen in Lagos.

The gallery web site has a beautiful and full display of the exhibition and the artists’ statements which are a must read. Check it out.