“While the United States has become increasingly diverse since then, the culture of our schools has remained much the same as in my childhood: white middle-class. American Alphabets is an attempt to remake the buildings blocks of our language to reflect our differing cultures. The young people I worked with chose the words and suggested the imagery of their alphabets. I created a Spanish alphabet with Spanish-speaking children of immigrant farm workers. The words they chose—like nervioso or impostor—were symptomatic of their uprooted way of life. Taken as a whole, their lists of words amounted to a kind of cultural self-portrait. Students in Cleveland worked with me on an African Alphabet and girls in a private school on a Girl’s alphabet. At the Queens Museum I collaborated with Arabic speaking middle school students to create the Arabic Alphabet. The students had emigrated with their families from Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco and Lebanon.” Wendy Ewald
Catherine Opie Portraits
Catherine Opie: The self portraits were in some ways what ended up launching launching me into the larger art world. I made “Self-Portrait/Cutting” on my back and it’s two stick figure girls with skirts, sort of what a kindergartener would draw of their family– a little house with a smokestack.
And then because we’re dealing with issues in 1993, still in the AIDS epidemic actually, the kind of polarizing politics of the time and realizing that this image spoke in many different ways. And then to literally have it cut in your skin so that the blood begins to be part of the discourse, was a way for me to begin to really deal with larger issues of homophobia and what it is to be in our bodies and to be identified as queer beings.
[The person who drew this on my back was] a really amazing artist here in Los Angeles by the name of Judie Bamber and she was part of the larger leather community that I was a part of. I had her practice on chicken breasts in the kitchen before she did it. And every time she would make a mark, her hand would shake. My friends kept having to calm her down and tell her that is was OK and that it was consensual and I was asking her to help me make this piece.
From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried
“With From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Carrie Mae Weems reveals how photography has played a key role throughout history in shaping and supporting racism, stereotyping, and social injustice.
Weems re-photographed and enlarged these images and printed them through colored filters: two blue-toned images bookend a grouping of images printed in red. She framed the red-toned prints in circular mattes, meant to suggest the lens of a camera, and placed all of the prints beneath glass sandblasted with text. About her choice of text the artist has said: “I’m trying to heighten a kind of critical awareness around the way in which these photographs were intended.” She hopes this strategy “gives the subject another level of humanity and another level of dignity that was originally missing in the photograph” - MoMA