Hi. My name is Mequitta. Thank you for coming.
And I just want to say thank you to Moira
Reilly and Linda Nochlin. I really am proud
to be part of this exhibition. It's very exciting.
I was introduced to feminism before I was
introduced to ideas about race. By introducing
the idea that gender is a social construction
as opposed to determined by biology, feminism
set the basis for me to think about race from
that same position. I state that now because
while I do not speak about feminism in the
rest of my talk, I credit the work done by
women as part of the feminist movement as
setting the foundation on which I base my
arguments.
"The anomalous is a phenomenon which cannot
be judged by its relation to a standard. Impartial
and owing no loyalties, it is a threat to
all identity thinking." Can everybody hear
me? Yeah? That was a quote by Steve Baker
from "The Postmodern Animal."
I became black when I was 10. It was similar
to becoming a woman, which also began that
same year. Each had its own debut. Previous
to age 10, I was unracialized and prepubescent.
Some people might say that I was born black
and I just didn't know it or understand it
until I was 10. But that's ridiculous. It
assumes that race exists, which we know is
not true. The PBS special "The Myth of Race,"
Noel Ignatiev's book "How the Irish Became
White," DNA results from The Genographic Project
in which people of one skin color meet their
cousins with different skin colors, taught
us that race exists only as a social construction.
Which is not something one is born into, we
are born into society. But we have to grow
into our social constructions.
Growing into our current social constructions
means growing out of inter and trans ethnic
mobility, out of quick and easy language acquisition,
out of gender ambiguity and into a position
named for its relationship to the center.
You are assimilated, minority, hyphenated,
or "people of color."
My father is Indian and my mother is African
American. By the time I was in fifth grade
I was frequently asked the question, "What
are you?" What I hear from adults now is not
much different. "Which do you identify with
more, being black or being Indian?"
Both questions position racial identity as
something that is exclusive and quantifiable.
Our collective history of the one drop law
and the cultural phenomenon that a white woman
can birth a black baby but a black woman can't
birth a white baby is the context of these
questions. It is those questions within that
context that I have continually responded
to in my work. I can trace my attempt to envision
an alternative to race through each development
in my art.
The history of art from India reflects the
global conflict between domestic traditions
and Western cultural and economic dominance.
The paradigm has a slightly different but
interestingly similar manifestation in African
American culture in which post abolition mirrors
post colonization. In both cases, one strategy
of the oppressed group is to reassign meaning
of the dominators tools via appropriation
and alteration, irony, hybridity and self
representation.
In this way, artists and individuals establish
the validity and vitality of their ethnic
traditions in complex dialogue with the reality
of the global dominance of Western culture
and ideology.
The confluence of elements with different
cultural origins in my painting titled "Suckle"
is my attempt to do just that. "Suckle" is
the first painting I made that begins to embody
the complexity of my ethnic experience. In
Hindu religion the God Ganesh has the head
of the elephant and the body of a man. In
my piece the relationship is reversed. The
body of a comparisioned Asian elephant with
a black man's head looms large above the girl.
She sucks on her cultural traditions and they
change her. Both she and the elephant are
in an ambiguous field. The modernist grid
is present as a stand in for the rigidity
of racial categories. But the grid is dissolving.
And you can't see that very well in this image
but there are these incised lines on this
piece.
The jeweled elephant floats as if lifted from
an Indian painting. His body is locatable
in one set of references and his face from
another. The gold leaf tooth is more at home
in "Vibe Magazine" than in "The Illustrated
Rumiana." The black mass on the right is a
displaced organic shape, a bush or a cloud
or one half of an afro. And this piece is
64 inches by 80 inches and it's oil, enamel,
glitter and gold leaf on canvas. And I have
two details.
The animal alone and the animal in intimate
relation with the human is a recurrent image
in my work. Having not fit easily or comfortably
into society's racial categories and having
failed to pass litmus tests from both sides,
I was sometimes referred to as an exception.
And I have always felt like an anomaly.
Animals offer me an alternative to human identity
and racial belonging. Thinking as animals,
we are released from personality. With animals
we shed social categories. Steve Baker in
his book "The Postmodern Animal" refers to
the anomalous this way.
"The anomalous is a phenomenon which cannot
be judged by its relation to a standard. Impartial,
owing no loyalties and inhuman, it is a threat
to all identity thinking. It is a phenomenon
of bordering an edge. The word anomalous itself
carrying from Deleuze and Guattari the sense
of designating the cutting edge of deterritorialization.
As with other senses of the cutting edge,
it is a phenomenon of the limit, the farthest
dimension of a multiplicity. To know this,
to have access to this limit knowledge, is
of course to be a sorcerer. It is sorcerers
who know that it is always with the anomalous
that one enters into alliance to become animal.
There are already exceptional beings who are
primed for such becomings. Sorcerers have
always held the anomalous position at the
edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the
fringes, encountering the animal at the border.
It's therefore, it seems, as a sorcerer that
a human being makes an anomalous choice, strikes
a creative alliance and thus enters into his
or her becoming animal. These descriptions
make it difficult to think of the sorcerer,
the human who is able to make an alliance
with the animal, other than as an artist."
This quote addresses the position of the margin
as a creative opportunity, which is my response
to my own social lack of fit. It also provides
a context for understanding my use of the
animal. In this piece and the next are called
"Herald One and Two," and they are each 30
inches by 40 inches and are enamel and wax
charcoal on paper.
In this next series, "Tsunami Generation,"
I am again in relationship with animals. The
first four pieces of this series were done
prior to the Asian tsunami at the end of 2004
and the final four pieces were done afterwards.
In the pieces I made after the tsunami, the
space has altered and the water has come up.
The red of the girl's dress from the beginning
of this series now depicts blood. These are
each 24 inches by 18 inches and are enamel
and gouache on watercolor paper. And I have
some images of the individual pieces, a few
of them and some details.
I'm also interested in landscape and how landscape
itself contains cultural implications. "Indigo
Violet" is an attempt to apply an oil painting
materiality of thick thin and painterly brushstrokes
to a piece that derives its flatness, many
of its shapes, and stylistic characteristics
from Indian miniature painting. So I'm again
here thinking about formal hybridity.
This triptych called "Bridge" encapsulates
much of the central ideas of my work. A figure
in a landscape perches on the edge of two
distinct spaces. For much of my work I was
thinking about the text "The Jungle Book"
by Rudyard Kipling, which is a story about
a boy in India raised by wolves. In Kipling's
biography and in the main character, Mowgli,
I found complex parallels to my own ethnic
experience. Mowgli is physically and psychologically
caught between the village and the jungle.
His unreconciled identity resembles the internal
struggles experienced by multi ethnic people,
Native peoples, African Americans, and other
groups who are faced with a double consciousness.
As archetype, Mowgli proves the individual
ability to challenge assumptions, revise culture
and rewrite oneself. He cultivates a man animal
intelligence entirely unique to his experience
and thereby serves as a model for creatively
navigating internal conflicts. He is like
one of the sorcerers that Steve Baker speaks
of, a true anomaly, simultaneously man and
animal and neither man nor animal.
This is the final piece in that triptych.
This piece which is in "Global Feminisms"
was first exhibited in a show I titled after
a passage in "The Jungle Book." The title
of the show was "Dancing on the Hide of Shere
Khan." In addition to his identity conflict
and close relationship with animals, Mowgli
also reflects my aesthetic and conceptual
interest in childhood.
I think of the figures in much of my work
as almost self portraits and also as imagined
portraits of Mowgli. Like Mowgli when he dances
on the hide of Shere Khan, the figure in this
piece titled "Boogie Woogie" assumes a gesture
that can be interpreted in multiple ways,
defensive but also irreverent. In "Boogie
Woogie" the hybridity I began in earlier work
is now more fully realized. The human has
merged with the animal and a host of disparate
codes of painting are used in tandem.
Here in "Deepest Darkest" I come again to
landscape. I'm interested in the color of
the darkness for which I did not use any black.
In part, this piece is about the visual perception
of actual color in tension with the idea of
something being black. Many of the shapes
that comprise the piece are from the landscape
of Indian miniature painting. But rather than
the enamel like finish of burnish gouache,
this has a thick impasto of oil painting.
I wanted the dark color to contain the complex
ideas and associations of blackness, both
as a color and as a racial identifier, without
the presence of the black body.
I have been heavily influenced by Indian miniature
painting and Indian popular art as well as
the figuration of ancient Egypt and Mayan
civilizations, as well as many contemporary
artists, including several that are represented
by works in the exhibition "Global Feminisms."
My strategy is to view and use the history
of mark making like language, as many movable
elements to be cut and pasted in infinite
new combinations. This is the way I think
about painting and its continued survival.
And this piece, it's called "Woogie Boogie."
It is oil on canvas and is seven feet by six
and a half feet. And it was made as a partner
piece to "Boogie Woogie," which is the piece
in this exhibition. And here's a detail.
My work is about a paradox in American society,
in which language, art and the media persist
in referring to race. Even as race is now
known to exist only as a historic myth. And
denying multi ethnicity, even as multi ethnicity
is now known to be the future American majority.
My figures and the paintings as a whole depict
neither race nor ethnicity, but rather individual
subjectivity as a heterogeneous combination
of cultural and natural elements. The fusion,
however, embodies America's denial of this
view. The combination is awkward, tense and
precarious. It establishes itself, making
play in the process of its construction. But
it is established only within the realm of
make believe. Thank you.
Hi. My name is Mequitta. Thank you for coming.
And I just want to say thank you to Moira
Reilly and Linda Nochlin. I really am proud
to be part of this exhibition. It's very exciting.I
was introduced to feminism before I was introduced
to ideas about race. By introducing the idea
that gender is a social construction as opposed
to determined by biology, feminism set the
basis for me to think about race from that
same position. I state that now because while
I do not speak about feminism in the rest
of my talk, I credit the work done by women
as part of the feminist movement as setting
the foundation on which I base my arguments."The
anomalous is a phenomenon which cannot be
judged by its relation to a standard. Impartial
and owing no loyalties, it is a threat to
all identity thinking." Can everybody hear
me? Yeah? That was a quote by Steve Baker
from "The Postmodern Animal."I became black
when I was 10. It was similar to becoming
a woman, which also began that same year.
Each had its own debut. Previous to age 10,
I was unracialized and prepubescent. Some
people might say that I was born black and
I just didn't know it or understand it until
I was 10. But that's ridiculous. It assumes
that race exists, which we know is not true.
The PBS special "The Myth of Race," Noel Ignatiev's
book "How the Irish Became White," DNA results
from The Genographic Project in which people
of one skin color meet their cousins with
different skin colors, taught us that race
exists only as a social construction. Which
is not something one is born into, we are
born into society. But we have to grow into
our social constructions.Growing into our
current social constructions means growing
out of inter and trans ethnic mobility, out
of quick and easy language acquisition, out
of gender ambiguity and into a position named
for its relationship to the center. You are
assimilated, minority, hyphenated, or "people
of color."My father is Indian and my mother
is African American. By the time I was in
fifth grade I was frequently asked the question,
"What are you?" What I hear from adults now
is not much different.
"Which do you identify with more, being black
or being Indian?"Both questions position racial
identity as something that is exclusive and
quantifiable. Our collective history of the
one drop law and the cultural phenomenon that
a white woman can birth a black baby but a
black woman can't birth a white baby is the
context of these questions. It is those questions
within that context that I have continually
responded to in my work. I can trace my attempt
to envision an alternative to race through
each development in my art.The history of
art from India reflects the global conflict
between domestic traditions and Western cultural
and economic dominance. The paradigm has a
slightly different but interestingly similar
manifestation in African American culture
in which post abolition mirrors post colonization.
In both cases, one strategy of the oppressed
group is to reassign meaning of the dominators
tools via appropriation and alteration, irony,
hybridity and self representation.In this
way, artists and individuals establish the
validity and vitality of their ethnic traditions
in complex dialogue with the reality of the
global dominance of Western culture and ideology.The
confluence of elements with different cultural
origins in my painting titled "Suckle" is
my attempt to do just that. "Suckle" is the
first painting I made that begins to embody
the complexity of my ethnic experience. In
Hindu religion the God Ganesh has the head
of the elephant and the body of a man. In
my piece the relationship is reversed. The
body of a comparisioned Asian elephant with
a black man's head looms large above the girl.
She sucks on her cultural traditions and they
change her. Both she and the elephant are
in an ambiguous field. The modernist grid
is present as a stand in for the rigidity
of racial categories. But the grid is dissolving.
And you can't see that very well in this image
but there are these incised lines on this
piece.The jeweled elephant floats as if lifted
from an Indian painting. His body is locatable
in one set of references and his face from
another. The gold leaf tooth is more at home
in "Vibe Magazine" than in "The Illustrated
Rumiana." The black mass on the right is a
displaced organic shape, a bush or a cloud
or one half of an afro. And this piece is
64 inches by 80 inches and it's oil, enamel,
glitter and gold leaf on canvas. And I have
two details.The animal alone and the animal
in intimate relation with the human is a recurrent
image in my work. Having not fit easily or
comfortably into society's racial categories
and having failed to pass litmus tests from
both sides, I was sometimes referred to as
an exception. And I have always felt like
an anomaly.Animals offer me an alternative
to human identity and racial belonging. Thinking
as animals, we are released from personality.
With animals we shed social categories.
Steve Baker in his book "The Postmodern Animal"
refers to the anomalous this way."The anomalous
is a phenomenon which cannot be judged by
its relation to a standard. Impartial, owing
no loyalties and inhuman, it is a threat to
all identity thinking. It is a phenomenon
of bordering an edge. The word anomalous itself
carrying from Deleuze and Guattari the sense
of designating the cutting edge of deterritorialization.
As with other senses of the cutting edge,
it is a phenomenon of the limit, the farthest
dimension of a multiplicity. To know this,
to have access to this limit knowledge, is
of course to be a sorcerer. It is sorcerers
who know that it is always with the anomalous
that one enters into alliance to become animal.
There are already exceptional beings who are
primed for such becomings. Sorcerers have
always held the anomalous position at the
edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the
fringes, encountering the animal at the border.
It's therefore, it seems, as a sorcerer that
a human being makes an anomalous choice, strikes
a creative alliance and thus enters into his
or her becoming animal. These descriptions
make it difficult to think of the sorcerer,
the human who is able to make an alliance
with the animal, other than as an artist."This
quote addresses the position of the margin
as a creative opportunity, which is my response
to my own social lack of fit. It also provides
a context for understanding my use of the
animal. In this piece and the next are called
"Herald One and Two," and they are each 30
inches by 40 inches and are enamel and wax
charcoal on paper.In this next series, "Tsunami
Generation," I am again in relationship with
animals. The first four pieces of this series
were done prior to the Asian tsunami at the
end of 2004 and the final four pieces were
done afterwards. In the pieces I made after
the tsunami, the space has altered and the
water has come up. The red of the girl's dress
from the beginning of this series now depicts
blood. These are each 24 inches by 18 inches
and are enamel and gouache on watercolor paper.
And I have some images of the individual pieces,
a few of them and some details.I'm also interested
in landscape and how landscape itself contains
cultural implications. "Indigo Violet" is
an attempt to apply an oil painting materiality
of thick thin and painterly brushstrokes to
a piece that derives its flatness, many of
its shapes, and stylistic characteristics
from Indian miniature painting.
So I'm again here thinking about formal hybridity.This
triptych called "Bridge" encapsulates much
of the central ideas of my work. A figure
in a landscape perches on the edge of two
distinct spaces. For much of my work I was
thinking about the text "The Jungle Book"
by Rudyard Kipling, which is a story about
a boy in India raised by wolves. In Kipling's
biography and in the main character, Mowgli,
I found complex parallels to my own ethnic
experience. Mowgli is physically and psychologically
caught between the village and the jungle.
His unreconciled identity resembles the internal
struggles experienced by multi ethnic people,
Native peoples, African Americans, and other
groups who are faced with a double consciousness.As
archetype, Mowgli proves the individual ability
to challenge assumptions, revise culture and
rewrite oneself. He cultivates a man animal
intelligence entirely unique to his experience
and thereby serves as a model for creatively
navigating internal conflicts. He is like
one of the sorcerers that Steve Baker speaks
of, a true anomaly, simultaneously man and
animal and neither man nor animal.This is
the final piece in that triptych. This piece
which is in "Global Feminisms" was first exhibited
in a show I titled after a passage in "The
Jungle Book." The title of the show was "Dancing
on the Hide of Shere Khan." In addition to
his identity conflict and close relationship
with animals, Mowgli also reflects my aesthetic
and conceptual interest in childhood.I think
of the figures in much of my work as almost
self portraits and also as imagined portraits
of Mowgli. Like Mowgli when he dances on the
hide of Shere Khan, the figure in this piece
titled "Boogie Woogie" assumes a gesture that
can be interpreted in multiple ways, defensive
but also irreverent. In "Boogie Woogie" the
hybridity I began in earlier work is now more
fully realized. The human has merged with
the animal and a host of disparate codes of
painting are used in tandem.Here in "Deepest
Darkest" I come again to landscape. I'm interested
in the color of the darkness for which I did
not use any black. In part, this piece is
about the visual perception of actual color
in tension with the idea of something being
black. Many of the shapes that comprise the
piece are from the landscape of Indian miniature
painting. But rather than the enamel like
finish of burnish gouache, this has a thick
impasto of oil painting. I wanted the dark
color to contain the complex ideas and associations
of blackness, both as a color and as a racial
identifier, without the presence of the black
body.I have been heavily influenced by Indian
miniature painting and Indian popular art
as well as the figuration of ancient Egypt
and Mayan civilizations, as well as many contemporary
artists, including several that are represented
by works in the exhibition "Global Feminisms."
My strategy is to view and use the history
of mark making like language, as many movable
elements to be cut and pasted in infinite
new combinations. This is the way I think
about painting and its continued survival.And
this piece, it's called "Woogie Boogie." It
is oil on canvas and is seven feet by six
and a half feet. And it was made as a partner
piece to "Boogie Woogie," which is the piece
in this exhibition. And here's a detail.My
work is about a paradox in American society,
in which language, art and the media persist
in referring to race. Even as race is now
known to exist only as a historic myth. And
denying multi ethnicity, even as multi ethnicity
is now known to be the future American majority.
My figures and the paintings as a whole depict
neither race nor ethnicity, but rather individual
subjectivity as a heterogeneous combination
of cultural and natural elements. The fusion,
however, embodies America's denial of this
view. The combination is awkward, tense and
precarious. It establishes itself, making
play in the process of its construction. But
it is established only within the realm of
make-believe. Thank you.
