# data[].attributes.body
This is The New York Times Art and Design section article addressing the historical prevalence of white male artists represented in the national museums and the ongoing attempts by those institutions to change that narrative. The museum curators are increasingly trying to include artists of color and women in the museum exhibitions and to show the historical pieces but present them from different viewpoints, representing today's perspectives. It can be a good introduction to my Visual art analysis of the artist Iris.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Museums Change Their Approach to Showing White Male Artists (Published 2022)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, business-as-usual gets a rethink.

# data[].attributes.body
This book is a contemporary work about the articles, people, and events that seemingly do not seem to support racism but inadvertently support the white-dominated society and culture. The stories were used without any additional nuanced commentary that justifies racial inequalities. This would be a good additional information to my art lesson.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thank you for shopping independent, queer, and feminist!
Most orders are processed within 48 hours and ship/are available for pickup within 1-7 business days.
Our website reflects what is available to order, NOT what is on our shelves.
To check in stock availability or if you have other questions, please call the store at(404) 524-0304 10am-7pm daily (Sundays, Noon-6pm).
We will do our best to get books and other items ready for pick-up or shipping in a timely manner,
however, we cannot guarantee any shipping or delivery times.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, Fifth Edition (Paperback)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's acclaimed Racism without Racists documents how, beneath our contemporary conversation about race, there lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for--and ultimately justify--racial inequalities. The fifth edition of this provocative book makes clear that color blind racism is as insidious now as ever.

# data[].attributes.body
This article about seven works of art (and artists) shed light on the racism in the US. Their perspectives visually explore the serious issues that institutionalized racism in America is present today. The commentary adds to the visual pieces and can be a conversation starter about today's society, representation (and non-representation) of black artists in the US.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Seven works of art that explore race in America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This month, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the murder in Memphis of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we asked three Atlanta curators and one artist to tell their own truth about race. These are the pieces they selected.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a book about Anne McCarty Braden (1924-2006), a woman who rejected her segregationist, privileged past to become one of the civil rights movement's staunchest white allies. In 1954, she was charged with sedition by McCarthy-style politicians who played on fears of communism to preserve southern segregation. She is a great example of someone who countered racism and jeopardized everything for social justice. The information about this person and her life can be compared to the artist we analyze for the lesson.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thank you for shopping independent, queer, and feminist!
Most orders are processed within 48 hours and ship/are available for pickup within 1-7 business days.
Our website reflects what is available to order, NOT what is on our shelves.
To check in stock availability or if you have other questions, please call the store at(404) 524-0304 10am-7pm daily (Sundays, Noon-6pm).
We will do our best to get books and other items ready for pick-up or shipping in a timely manner,
however, we cannot guarantee any shipping or delivery times.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twen) (Paperback)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Anne McCarty Braden (1924-2006) rejected her segregationist, privileged past to become one of the civil rights movement's staunchest white allies. In 1954 she was charged with sedition by McCarthy-style politicians who played on fears of communism to preserve southern segregation.

# data[].attributes.body
Bell Hooks is a writer and social justice activist who worked on abolishing racism and sexism more than twenty years before the Black Lives Matter movement. This book examines the internalized racism in movies and the media, among other areas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Description

"hooks's books help us not only to decolonize our minds, souls, and bodies; on a deeper level, they touch our lives." -Cornel West
More than two decades before Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement roiled America, bell hooks was declaring that abolishing racism and eradicating sexism must go hand in hand. In Killing Rage, one of our premier cultural and social critics brings the Black feminist's voice to bear on this country's public discourse on race, redressing the historical shunting of women's writing in this sphere to the side. In incisive essays, hooks addresses the wide spectrum of topics dealing with race and racism in the United States: friendship between Black women and white women; psychological trauma among African Americans; and internalized racism in movies and the media. hooks tackles the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it, sharing a vision where "killing rage"-the fierce anger of Black people stung by repeated instances of everyday racism-offers not only a wellspring of love and strength, but also a realistic catalyst for positive change.
This seminal book is one Americans need today if we're to remain united tomorrow.
"An angry book that pulls no punches.... Her frankness and willingness to face up to the divisive issues that refuse to go away make her a voice to be reckoned with in the debate on race in America." -The New York Review of Books

About the Author

bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, was an American author who used lowercase as both an homage to her maternal great-grandmother and an attempt to keep readers' focus where it belonged: on her work. When she died in 2021, hooks left behind a lifetime of thought that was decades ahead of its time. In the heyday of feminism, when the movement claimed to represent all women equally, hooks revealed in Ain't I a Woman-written when she was only nineteen-how the specific life experiences of Black women were being marginalized.

She never lost this pioneering spirit, bringing it to bear on more than thirty books of literary criticism, children's fiction, poetry, and autobiography, including Killing Rage: Ending Racism, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Where We Stand: Class Matters, Communion: The Female Search for Love and the New York Times bestseller All About Love: New Visions.

A professor of English, African and Afro-American studies, American literature, and women's studies, hooks taught at USC, Yale, among other institutions, including Berea College in her home state of Kentucky, where the bell hooks center was established to honor her work. Winner of the American Book Award in 1991 for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, a 2000 nominee for the NAACP's Image Award, a 2018 inductee into Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, and one of Time 's 100 Women of the Year in 2020, hooks left her mark in every field she entered.

Praise For...

"Her books help us not only to decolonize our minds, souls, and bodies; on a deeper level, they touch our lives." - Cornel West

"Almost everyone's assumptions about race will be challenged in this volume . . . Anyone who is not in denial about racism will be motivated to work for its demise after reading Killing Rage." - Emerge

". . . Anyone who is not in denial about racism will be motivated to work for its demise after reading Killing Rage." - Emerge

"An angry book that pulls no punches . . . Her frankness and willingness to face up to the divisive issues that refuse to go away make her a voice to be reckoned with in the debate on race in America." - The New York Review of Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"hooks's books help us not only to decolonize our minds, souls, and bodies; on a deeper level, they touch our lives." -Cornel WestMore than two decades before Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement roiled America, bell hooks was declaring that abolishing racism and eradicating sexism must go hand in hand.

# data[].attributes.body
This book educates about our knowing or unknowing grappling with race and racism daily. The book helps the readers understand white privilege and provides strategies for creating societal changes. This can be a direct reflection to the artist that we analyze for the lesson.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Description

Knowingly and unknowingly we all grapple with race every day. Understanding White Privilege delves into the complex interplay between race, power, and privilege in both organizations and private life. It offers an unflinching look at how ignorance can perpetuate privilege, and offers practical and thoughtful insights into how people of all races can work to break this cycle. Based on thirty years of work in diversity and colleges, universities, and corporations, Frances Kendall candidly invites readers to think personally about how race -- theirs and others' -- frames experiences and relationships, focusing squarely on white privilege and its implications for building authentic relationships across race.

This much-anticipated revised edition includes two full new chapters, one on white women and another extending the discussion on race. It continues the important work of the first, deepening our knowledge of the recurring history on which cross-race relationships issues exist. Kendall's book provides readers with a more meaningful understanding of white privilege and equips them with strategies for making personal and organizational changes.

About the Author

Frances E. Kendall is a nationally known consultant who focuses on organizational change and communication, specializing in issues of diversity, social justice, and white privilege.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Understanding White Privilege: Creating Pathways to Authentic Relationships Across Race (Teaching/Learning Social Justice) (Paperback)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Knowingly and unknowingly we all grapple with race every day. Understanding White Privilege delves into the complex interplay between race, power, and privilege in both organizations and private life. It offers an unflinching look at how ignorance can perpetuate privilege, and offers practical and thoughtful insights into how people of all races can work to break this cycle.

# data[].attributes.body
This book sheds light on the idea of whiteness and strategies that white-dominated society uses to avoid the difficult issues of race. Also, it gives implications of "whiteness" on our history, our lives, and social and cultural institutions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thank you for shopping independent, queer, and feminist!
Most orders are processed within 48 hours and ship/are available for pickup within 1-7 business days.
Our website reflects what is available to order, NOT what is on our shelves.
To check in stock availability or if you have other questions, please call the store at(404) 524-0304 10am-7pm daily (Sundays, Noon-6pm).
We will do our best to get books and other items ready for pick-up or shipping in a timely manner,
however, we cannot guarantee any shipping or delivery times.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Witnessing Whiteness: The Need to Talk About Race and How to Do It (Paperback)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Witnessing Whiteness invites readers to consider what it means to be white, describes and critiques strategies used to avoid race issues, and identifies the detrimental effect of avoiding race on cross-race collaborations. The author illustrates how racial discomfort leads white people toward poor relationships with people of color.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a Literary Hub article that asks questions about the reasons why more white artists and writers do not engage in the representation of whiteness in their works.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Lately, I've been thinking about ownership. I've been considering it within the context of writing and art making, wondering who has the right and responsibility to explore the problem of white supremacy, and how, or even if it can be done by white artists without furthering the trauma of marginalized people. I've been swimming through these ideas in one way or another for years now, but they all snapped into focus a few days ago when I was in conversation with another writer friend, commiserating over what he called "self-celebrating liberals"-those people who imagine themselves allies to people of color but refuse to address their own complicity in white supremacy. Specifically, we were discussing a growing trend we've noticed in the publishing world: that only people of color should make art about racism.

"What should white people be writing about if not racism?" he said. "I feel like half the work that means anything is trying to place and understand the destructiveness of my whiteness."

This conversation came up, in part, because I am a white woman writing about the toxic inheritance of white supremacy. It is, admittedly, a fraught position to write from with no shortage of examples of seemingly well-intentioned white women (and men) doing their damnedest to address racism while contributing to it instead. There've been some epic disasters of late with Anders Carlson-Wee's poem published in The Nation and quickly called out for its blackface performance of language, director Kathryn Bigelow's 2017 gratuitously violent movie Detroit, based on the 1967 race protests and the Algiers Motel murders when three teenagers were beaten and killed by the Detroit police during the protests; there's Dana Schutz's sorrow-stealing painting, Open Casket, of Emmitt Till at the Whitney Biennial and her later defense of her right to paint it since she, too, is a mother; and then there's Minneapolis's Walker incident with Sam Durant's traumatizing Scaffold sculpture that referenced, among other historical executions, the 38 Dakota men hung by the state in 1862 after the federal government broke their treaty agreements and the starving Dakota rose up in protest.

White artists and writers have done such a poor job of addressing white supremacy in their work that it's practically its own sub-genre. I'm not interested in shaming them further here, but these instances, in conjunction with the conversation with my friend, have made me question why we have so few examples of white artists who do this work well, and what that lack might point to.

When white art that is meant to address white supremacy fails, the reason most often given for that failure is that the white artist hasn't taken the time to listen to the groups they imagined they were advocating for. In an interview in the Los Angels Times, Durant addressed his failure to engage with his subjects in a non-traumatizing way by saying that, "The museum-and I'm sharing the blame -didn't reach out to the community. We didn't think of it, to start a dialogue before we started building it. There was no information."

This is, no doubt, a large part of the issue. But it doesn't get at what seems to me to be the underlying problem at hand: white artists often fail at this work because they haven't centered themselves within the violence of their own whiteness. Had any of them placed themselves in the position of the aggressor instead of the victim, and then asked themselves what it means to inherit the violent history of being born white, I imagine some different kinds of art might have been made.
"If there's anything that good art has in common across the spectrum of forms, it's that good art is always, at heart, in some deep and profound way, honest about being human."
Last summer, in a public conversation on Facebook that I watched from a distance about white artists and their art making across a spectrum of forms, Christopher Harris, the chair of the prestigious MFA film program at the University of Iowa, wrote that he wished white people would start making art about being white and stop trying to embody the stories of black people. When I heard that, I thought, yes. Absolutely. This is what we need to learn how to do better: investigate our own whiteness. Ask ourselves why we are so committed to it, and why we become afraid and violent when we imagine someone taking it from us.

Why white people try to embody stories of marginalized people instead of the ones of white oppression isn't really a mystery-it's much easier and more comfortable for a white person to position themselves within the body of the wronged instead of within the body of the aggressor. Few people want to be seen as that asshole-or worse, that murderer or thief-in life or in art.

But beyond avoiding asshole status, speaking from the mouths of marginalized people can seem to white artists like access into the experience of oppression, and an imagined kind of "honorary membership" to that community, one in which the burden of having to work through the inheritance of white supremacy is no longer necessary. In a distorted way, I imagine that this can seem reasonable to white artists-art making is usually about transgression and traversing spaces in one form or another-breaking the rules, pushing at boundaries, imagining experience that you haven't had and making connections where there are none-so this borrowed pain feels similar to other art making choices, like a work of imagination instead of the appropriation or ventriloquism that it is-ventriloquism being less about exploring another body's reality and more about using that body to emphasize your own voice.

This is especially problematic because it ignores the fact that the pain can be returned like a pair of too large shoes when the white artist has finished with it. But it's also an enormous problem because it denies white artists the opportunity to address the fact that being born white means they've already been the aggressor at some point, whether through ignorance, unequal opportunities given them, insensitivity, cruelty, a sense of superiority or through the generalized benefit of living in a world that bends itself to the pleasure of whiteness. To imagine otherwise is to be dishonest, and if there's anything that good art has in common across the spectrum of forms, it's that good art is always, at heart, in some deep and profound way, honest about being human. To bypass that truth in favor of speaking from a less culpable position is to make art that doesn't engage with the difficult truth at hand.

It seems important to acknowledge here that I, too, have been dishonest in the interrogation of my whiteness in my own work at times. In the five years this new book has taken me to write, I've read countless stories of what it means to be a person of color in the United States; I've spent hours upon hours in archives reading old diaries, newspapers and journals; I've toured museums, read history books, gone to lectures, talked to friends, watched movies, asked for feedback, done everything I can to try to recognize the place where my whiteness pushes through and alters my understanding of reality.

And yet, I'm still white, living in a white-centered world. I will never be able to be completely aware of the way that shifts my understanding because that work is a lifetime commitment, I know, and not a one-stop-shop where I learn a single lesson and move on.

What I've also noticed since I began to write about whiteness, is that a lot of white people don't like it. Surprising, I know, and this is also what brought me to that conversation with my friend. White artists and gatekeepers have told me often, and in a variety of ways, that my writing inserts me into places I don't belong, and that it also puts them on the defensive-that I should take a more "side-winding" gentler approach to such a "touchy" subject as race. Since I began this book, I've learned that to feel the emotions of defensiveness rise up within me is to wake to the violence of my absorbed white supremacy. What's also disturbing to me though, is how I've seen too many liberal, white "ally" artist/gatekeepers transform that defensiveness into distance between themselves and that feeling, and then hear their proselytizing that to be white and to address racism is to insert yourself into a conversation that you don't have the right to be a part of.

In his essay Why I'm Done Talking About Diversity Marlon James says, "It's not for the black person to be more open-minded. It's for the white person to be less racist." White supremacy is a white problem that white people need to fix, and it's a further imbalance of justice to sit around expecting people of color to do the work of addressing it for us. There is nothing noble or generous in stepping aside and playing the observer in this work. Not only is that a gross misunderstanding of actual justice, it's not going to do a thing to move this country towards real and true equality.

I also want to acknowledge that white people have a history of taking things over-countries, industries, cultures, movements. We get excited about something, even a good thing like ending racism, and pretty soon we're pushing marginalized people off platforms in order to take center stage ourselves. We're not very good at following someone else's lead (and following the lead of people of color in this is absolutely necessary), because we are used to power and used to leading everything ourselves. We've had centuries of standing in the spotlight with no intention of widening the circle to include other people. We've taken up all the publishing spots, lecture spots, teaching spots, student spots, governing spots, but have taken only the smallest pains to show we have any intention of really changing things in a meaningful way.

But just because we have a history of needing to control everything for our own benefit, doesn't mean that it's not our responsibility to learn how to collaborate better now. In my mind, this is one of the trickiest parts of the conversation, because the answer isn't an either/or solution. It's necessary to acknowledge that people of color have been silenced through exclusion, violence, diminishment of ability and opportunity, and to address that through equalizing access to historically white spaces (which is another way of saying all spaces); but it's also possible for white people to use this as an excuse to step so far to the side that we step out of the conversation altogether and place that burden solely on the shoulders of people of color. It's easy to pass this side-stepping off as an attempt at increasing diversity, when it's actually disinterest in the work, or a desire to maintain power, or based on a fear so strong, of getting things wrong, that stepping aside becomes more like running away. And none of this even touches on the fact that artists and writers of color are often expected to live out some kind of eternal recurrence on a theme of only addressing racism in their work when the entire universe of ideas is at their feet, same as any other artist.
"White supremacy is a white problem that white people need to fix, and it's a further imbalance of justice to sit around expecting people of color to do the work of addressing it for us."
This increasing social fear of white writers and artists at the possibility of getting this work wrong and causing harm when they intended good, is a reasonable fear for anyone who is actually paying attention, but not for the decrease in social status that's driving it. A corrected white person can be devastating in their embarrassed and terrified thrashing when confronted. And when it comes to absorbing the effects of white supremacy, it isn't just the matter of increased amounts of stress that people of color have to deal with-though those are substantial and destructive in their own right-but actual bodily harm: we've ruined and taken lives while we turn inside our fear, and so the risk of addressing white supremacy is never equal. What a white person stands to lose in these attempts gone wrong is not the same as what a person of color stands to lose: their very lives.

Put within that context, the possible embarrassment of getting the work of addressing white supremacy wrong is a gross imbalance, and yet, it's a hurdle that white artists and writers stumble over repeatedly. I've often heard them defend their criticized art or actions or language with the words "but that's not what I meant, " as if not meaning to cause harm excuses you from doing so. But intention is only a part of the puzzle, not the entire picture, and it works in conjunction with history and culture and power.

The fact that these elements sometimes merge in ways that reveal a white lack of understanding the still traumatizing effects of history, was made manifest in Daniel Handler's "ill-advised" joke about Jacqueline Woodson being allergic to watermelon at the National Book Awards in 2014. His comments left her devastated on a night when she should have only felt celebrated, and exposed the flabbergasted nature of seemingly well-intentioned white people who function as though there is a silly secret rulebook for people of color, illegible to white people, instead of an historical context for pain that they haven't bothered to understand. And this feels like a good place to acknowledge, again, that I've done this also-that I am still learning how to do this work in ways that do not harm.

All of this brings to mind the artists and writers of the future, or, at least the ones represented in my mostly liberal, white undergraduate writing students, and the growing unease I've seen building within them. I teach at an institution that works hard to make its students aware of white supremacy and how they are a part of that structure-either in upholding it or dismantling it. There was a time when most of them would have felt emboldened to drone on for entire class periods if I didn't stop them, to proclaim how horrified they were about their racist uncle, and can you believe some people still say that kind of stuff? But now, most of them know better. Kind of. They know that it's not all right to talk over people of color, or to speak on their behalf, or from within their bodies, and they feel the social danger of messing that up, but most of them don't exactly know why they shouldn't, and they don't know how to do it in a way that's not taking over. And so they, like many of us, choose silence instead of engagement, and back out of the conversation completely.

I will admit, there are ways that this makes my teaching life seem easier. I worry about my students of color becoming the training ground for these white students to practice on, and the furthered trauma of students of color becoming the cost of the white students' awakening is obviously not the solution either. But to follow all this side-stepping and silence through to its logical endpoint, means that my students of color are left feeling forced into only making art that addresses white supremacy, and my white students are excused from having to learn to be a part of the conversation and get to sit like sulky teenagers at the table, judging and rolling their eyes without contributing anything meaningful to the difficult and painful conversation that the adults are having.

Like any good conversation, the work of undoing white supremacy as a white person means learning to take your turn, putting in the effort to understand where the other person is coming from, apologizing when you get it wrong, knowing when to shut-up and just listen, and how to notice that someone else is being crushed under its burden, in need of another body to step up and take on that devastating weight themselves.

How to simultaneously protect people of color from further trauma without excusing the white ones from participating altogether is a conversation that I think white artists should be working to be a part of in all the spaces they find themselves in throughout this country. It's the work that terrifies me and draws me on the most, all of which is to say it's the work that I'm committed to learning how to do better, alongside anyone interested in walking that path with me.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
White Artists Need to Start Addressing White Supremacy in Their Work

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lately, I've been thinking about ownership. I've been considering it within the context of writing and art making, wondering who has the right and responsibility to explore the problem of white sup...

# data[].attributes.body
This article examines the book called "The White Imaginary," a guide and commentary about the historical and mythological implementation of whiteness, which unfortunately became a neutral standard in this society. The images presented are shocking and right in the visual narrative for our lesson.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A guide through the history, mythologies and implementations of Whiteness, exposing its shadowy enterprise in becoming the neutral standard.
By Lisa Andrine Bernhoft-Sjødin, ArtConstructs

Whiteness as an image works on two levels: both the instrumental picturing of whiteness - the attempt to find its physicality so to speak - and whiteness as an imaginary, an elusive, imagined power hierarchy that guides and penetrate our social and physical spaces. The editor of the recently launched anthology, The Image of Whiteness, Daniel Blight, calls it an anthropological image which separates the image from the picture. The picture of Whiteness is largely a physical object like a photograph, Whiteness, on the other hand, was invented by white skinned people and this imagining continues to transform and perpetuate the myth of white supremacy.

The Image of Whiteness is a concrete tool to make visible Whiteness as a phenomenon, a backdrop with an urge for heteronormativity and commodity culture. The personalised introduction by Blight sites white people, himself included, as silent cohorts to Whiteness culture if they don't start speaking up on the injustices. He writes that to be an ally demands continuous work in terms of self-interrogation and a politics of humility. The images dwells on a willingness for introspection through works that challenges exotic consumption side by side with protectionism and xenophobia rather than the tropes of skin and surface.

The book's constructed on four key themes derived from the symposium What Should White Culture Do? - organised in 2017 by Daniel Blight and Art on the Underground at the Royal College of Art in London. The four themes; Fragments of the white body, The white gaze, The borders of whiteness and The symbols of whiteness; reads like a comprehensive on the invention of Whiteness, engaging praxises that exposes white consumerism of black and brown bodies, the desire for the exotic Other, the frontier logic of white supremacy and the instrumentation of white symbolism.

Its image plates start off with the Kodak original colour cards for normal lighting from the 1960s. The images are appropriated by the artists Broomberg & Chanarin, published in 2012 as part of the series How to Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light. Their work's employed throughout the plates section, underlining photography's instrumental role in perpetuating whiteness as standard, of which we are extremely and overly saturated, simultaneously exposing the shadowy enterprise of the inventive nature of Whiteness, even as we practice it today.

Carefully curated, the images ranges from how Whiteness presents itself through Buck Ellison's images via Libita Clayton's play with light and fragmentation in her Quantum Ghost (2019) series, and the somewhat surrealist images Sophie Gabrielle has created in her BL_NK SP_CE (2015) series. The latter images designates how elusive a subject we're dealing with, and challenges us to look closer and see the blank spaces within what seems like a tight- knitted enterprise. To Paul Mpagi Sepuya's Mirror Study (2018). The images explores not only the photographic, but the camera and the black body as instrumental for the white body to appear. Sepuya creates his images in concert with other photographers, and literally bring things that are outside of the frame into the frame, i.e. into space. His images plays with the tension between subjective and objective positions, and calls attention to how individuals depend on each other to move through space. The creation of power structures and selfhoods are questioned as visual culture seems to cement them.

Claudia Rankine and John Lucas' work Stamped (2018), also frames and manipulates assumption through a series of close-ups of dyed blond hair framed by the valuation of first class stamp patterns. A fetishised commodity, blondness is weighted, qualified and packaged as a perpetual centerford of beauty and value. In what ways do we reiterate white symbolism and supremacy? Stamped seems to answer trough an intricate language, both internal and socialised, surfacing through blondness. And to articulate that this form of valuation is not just external, but by way of being gazed as the Other, is also internal.

White protectionism is addressed in the images of Nate Lewis and Ken Gonsalez-Day. They expose the inherent nature of fear and spectatorship in the construction of Whiteness. Lewis' series Social Patterns (2017) and Latest Tensions (2018) show black and white images from Trump rallies; Trump supporters raging against non-white Trump protesters. The protesters are obscured by a texture similar to tv static, a form of protection from the aggravated Trump supporters or as an erasure of their bodies through that same rage. They expose the fear from which white supremacy and far-right forces derives their power in today's political landscapes. Gonsalez-Day's series Erased Lynchings (2013) pinpoints the spectatorship that lies inherent in whiteness in prescribing objectivity to the Other. Once the lynched body is erased from the image, all you see is the striking whiteness on a black background, rejecting whiteness as a neutral notion, but sustained by blackness to be visible, at all. A reverse notion Zora Neale Hurston "I feel most coloured when I'm thrown against a sharp white background" restated on Glenn Ligon's work by the same name from 1990.

The image plates ends with the series Our Present Invention (2012-2014) and All My Gone Life (2014-ongoing) by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa. Collectively they address the entanglement of white heteronormativity with violence. Here the white spectators and perpetrators are erased, only their gestures remain. They gesture to something palpable though invisible. The lone bucket-o-soldiers on the pavement, the deteriorating office space with a desk and chair in the middle of debris, a spotlighted monumental buck deer its partial shadow enlarged on the wall behind it and a mural depicting a greek myth with empty cafè furniture in front of it, these are all gestures to a violence upon the very language in which we speak, be it visual, syntactical or normative. His practice gestures to a way of seeing the invisible, not by trying to find the subject, but study it through the tracks it leaves behind.

bell hooks coined the term the oppositional gaze in an essay by the same name in 1992, (black looks: race and representation, hooks, bell, Routledge: Boston), the gaze that looks back, and a site of resistance. It's a critical gaze, a gaze that looks to document. By collecting a critical mass of exposure, both through images and artists conversation, the book intercepts the ways that we view and speak of our surroundings, tagging along as an elusive hyphen to mainstream culture. Whiteness is monumental in its presence, like a historical public monument, though we've seen it so many times, we don't really see it anymore. This not-seeing is both a choice and a response to the fact that these things are too familiar to be seen. Let's stare it down.

The Image of Whiteness: Contemporary Photography and Racialization, ed. Daniel Blight, SPBH Editions, London, 2019.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A guide through the history, mythologies and implementations of Whiteness, exposing its shadowy enterprise in becoming the neutral standard. By Lisa Andrine Bernhoft-Sjødin, ArtConstructs Whiteness as an image works on two levels: both the instrumental picturing of whiteness - the attempt to find its physicality so to speak - and whiteness as an imaginary, an elusive, imagined power hierarchy that guides and penetrate our social and physical spaces.

# data[].attributes.body
The article is about Iris Apfel, a former trade and businesswoman who instantly became a fashion icon and had a show at Met Museum. The article is interesting to examine from a series of different viewpoints. For example, asking questions like "How did she acquire her business"?, and "Which countries did she do business with, and which countries did she manufacture her garments?" She talks about seemingly neutral topics and the interviewer does not attempt to ask her more nuanced questions. Why is that? This interview is rich in text and a direct source for the class discussion about this person.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Coveteur: Inside Closets, Fashion, Beauty, Health, and Travel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We like to think we have a go-to phrase here at TC HQ: WWID, or, for the uninitiated: What Would Iris Do. We figure that when it comes to getting imaginative, there's no one quite as inspiring as the 92-year-old (yes, you read that number correctly), right? And it works with all sorts of situations: what would she see, what would she think, but especially, What Would Iris Say. We've really always wanted to know-'cause you'd think that after more than a few decades as the ultimate purveyor of extraordinary taste (we like to think that's our calling card too, kids), girl kind of knows what's up. So we finally had the chance to catch up over the phone while Apfel was in Palm Beach, and guys, Iris is everything we hoped she would be-only better.

On the topic of all things Iris, our friends over at One King's Lane are selling 800 pieces from Apfel's personal collection this week (don't worry: we're mentally calculating how to afford our rent this month, too), so we can all have a little piece of our favorite nonagenarian-but seriously, act fast. Apfel was straight up when she told us she hopes that her things will help others be a little less boring-but honestly, anything to be like Iris.

On selling pieces from her personal collection...

"I had all of these wonderful things and I'm not doing much with the business anymore as I'm doing so much with fashion. I put these items away when I sold my company years ago-we owned a company called Old World Weavers and I also had an interior design business. I couldn't do everything, but I always kept these pieces thinking that one day I would go back. Then my [MET] show came and my fashion life began, and I've been enjoying it so much that I decided that I preferred to do this. I have all of these lovely things that I've collected over the years that are just sitting there and are very hard to part with. I finally decided that it was ridiculous and that people should enjoy them. One Kings Lane came along and it was the perfect marriage, so we decided to go ahead and do a major sale."

On her antique collection's origins...

"All over the world; I travelled extensively. For my business I used to do two trips a year, mostly to Europe and England, to buy for my clients. I had a big interior design business of my own and I also sold antiques through the Old World Weaver showrooms around the country. Then there were a number of my own things that I've collected over the years, so it's an amalgamation. But it's a long, long collection from all over the place."

On what she looks for while shopping (because haven't you always wanted to shop with Iris Apfel?)...

"It has to jump out and say something. I like offbeat things; I have very few run of the mill things. I have a lot of pieces that are from other periods that may fit perfectly, but are not the usual thing that you would see. You can't do houses and have everything you need right at your fingertips, and clients don't like to wait too long. So whenever I saw unusual things I bought them-in all kinds of crazy places."

On what she collects now...

"I've had to cut down drastically as we've run out of wall space. Fortunately, I'm not a minimalist, as I'm sure you've noticed. I have a couple of storage spaces. I still buy small things that appeal to me and I still collect jewelry with a vengeance."

On the last thing she bought...

"Let me think... I'm trying to remember. I bought a wonderful pin recently; it's all pavé stones and must be about eight inches high. When you look at it at first it looks like a 19th century dandy. The gentleman has a long frock coat and interesting hat, like a top hat, but it's a trembling piece-its head wiggles. When you look more however, he's not a man, he's a monkey. He's really quite wonderful."

On what you'd find inside her beauty cabinet...

"My favorite shade of lipstick? Very, very, bright, bright, bright red. My husband and I use the same scent, it's very nice but not easy to find. We used to buy it in Paris but now you can get it in the States. It's called Yagatan [cologne]."

On her signature shades...

"I found them in the flea market and I started to wear them when I needed to wear glasses! As a matter of fact, I liked them so much-the great big ones-sometimes I'd wear them without any lenses just as an accessory, as I thought they were so fantastic."

On her favorite piece inside her closet...

"I still have the dress I wore on the first date with my husband, which was more than 66 years ago. I still have it and it still fits."

On her favorite decade for design...

"There were a few decades that I hated, but I loved most things. The world is not black and white; there are lots of shades of grey. There are good things and bad things in every era, and I think it's kind of very blindfolded to say one era was wonderful, as it was wonderful, but there were a lot of bad things as well. Art Nouveau I don't like, but people were doing some wonderful things. I love things with a sense of Baroque. I love big, bold things, as well as very simple things. I go from one to the other and I like to mix them up."

On the best piece of advice she's ever received...

"My father told me once not to expect anything from anybody so I wouldn't be disappointed. If somebody was nice and did nice things for me I should be overjoyed, but I shouldn't go through life expecting it, which is very good advice."

On where she shops in New York...

"I never had special places as you never know what you're going to find-I always tried to keep an open mind. I could find a treasure in a junk shop or junk in a very elegant emporium."

On nailing down her style...

"It's very eclectic-everything I like, I put together. I don't like the norm. I think there's a lot of wonderful decorating around, but it all looks the same. While some of these homes are very beautiful, they look anonymous to me. They could be suites in very expensive hotels, but they don't tell you who lives there. I like an apartment that has some personality. When it comes down to it, everyone is different."

On the state of fashion today...

"The anonymity of it-it's all too similar. I think people should express themselves more and not just buy what's in. While it can be very beautiful and it may suit you perfectly, I'm sure it doesn't suit everyone in the same way. I like people who express themselves and are more individualistic."

Shop Iris' Essentials

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We go head-to-head with fashion's favorite nonagenarian.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
“I have an obsession with exposing what lies beneath the surface. It is my constant examination of the spirit, and no doubt - my intense curiosity with the cycle of life and death. Everyday, I think of peeling away layers, and imagine what I will find. I know that what I am looking for is not tangible, and with all my years of studying science, not even it can help me describe this thing. When I do finally get to a place of imaginative clarity, the visions are so intricate, and intertwined, that I find them too complex to communicate through my work. I am not yet skilled enough to show you all what I see, but I work to break that barrier each, and everyday.”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Iris | Lesson Plan Clips | PBS LearningMedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The video clips provided with this lesson are from Iris, a film that pairs the late documentarian Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter), then 87, with Iris Apfel, the quick-witted, flamboyantly dressed then-93-year-old style maven who has been an outsized presence on the New York fashion scene for decades.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Editor's Note: Brooklyn-based Her work is thus ripe for interpretation through the lenses of fashion history and theory. Although fairly new to the New York art scene, her work has been enthusiastically received, being featured in the Brooklyn Reader, Huffington Post, and RollingOut, among other publications, while she has become a favorite figure on the AfroPunk scene. Fabiola is presently preparing new work that will be shown this fall at the Dusable Museum of African American History and Alan Avery Art Company. As busy as she is, however, she managed to find an afternoon to open up her studio doors to FSJ's Kim Jenkins to share her passions and practice. Kim's account of her visit follows. Fabiola Jean-Louis wishes that she could rewrite history.[1] Her artistic practice, which is deeply embedded in the cultural politics and discourses of the Black Lives Matter movement, stands as a potent commentary on contemporary race relations but makes liberal references to the past. Her stunning body of work-which also weaves together sci-fi and Surrealist themes-is a form of "visual storytelling" that confidently straddles the artistic disciplines of photography, video art, sculpture, and performance. Fabiola's favored medium, however, is fabric-or at least that's what it seems. The sumptuous gilded and embroidered textiles that are such a presence in her work are actually made of paper, which she weaves into recognizable seventeenth- and eighteenth-century silhouettes.

I visited Haitian-born artist, Fabiola Jean-Louis in her studio near the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Fabiola stands in a flowing white tunic with her gaze fixed on a small, crafted shoe she's painting. The delicate piece of footwear will be added to her collection, " Rewriting History," which has been a work in progress over the last couple of years. As you walk around the space, you're surrounded by a constellation of work, from photographed portraits to headdresses to, what Fabiola is most well-known for: elaborate paper dresses. Easily mistaken for fabric garments, it's the uncanniness of Fabiola's paper dresses that attests to her unwavering attention to detail and appreciation for fashion history. There's an observable indication of progress as the eye pans the spectrum of her work across the room-earlier dresses that appeared suitable for a damsel have now evolved into a gown fit for a 18th-century queen. What used to take one month to construct now takes five months, and Fabiola attributes the deepening of her artistic practice to the museum catalogs and pattern books stacked across the two craft tables nearby. Prior to her discovery of the catalogs, Fabiola managed with a limited perspective, using flat, forward-facing 16th and 17th century paintings as her guide. The latest nuances include paper designed to mimic opulent European textiles, overlaid with intricate patterns and meticulously detailed beadwork. Fabiola recounted her early concept-to-design methodology to me, maintaining her gaze on the shoe in hand, tapping out a dash of glitter. As a busy artist, she would have an assistant from time to time for general studio work, but an assistant couldn't replicate the visual representations that Fabiola stored in her mind. Working from visualizations alone ( no sketching), she would paint and build the paper dress to the form-similar to a modern-day Madeleine Vionnet.

Turning the gaze upwards, there's a nightgown suspended from the ceiling. Crafted from paper and worked into a soft, linen-like texture, the materiality of paper enables the appearance of a garment that was embodied, with its creases, wrinkles and loosened sleeve holes. The design is deliberate. As you examine the nightgown, Fabiola implores you to imagine the body that formerly occupied it. I also imagined Joanne Entwistle taking in this work, considering how craft can convey and deliciously complicate her theory of fashion as a situated bodily practice. Then I wondered what curator Judith Clark would think, seeing these glorious spectres around the room.

However, upon closer examination, from the tea-stained nightgown to her recently completed grand pannier dress, there's a far more complicated narrative for the dress' assumed wearer than meets the eye. "My work always centralizes around the black and brown female body, and it's looking at society-our place in society," Fabiola responds, as I seek to situate the intent for her designs. It's a manifesto materialized, with one of the paper dresses holding a small tableau embedded in the torso of the bodice, subversively replacing the traditional stomacher: a black man hangs from the branches of a blossomed tree, leaving a remark on the haunted and devalued black body. As I see it, the dresses that Fabiola conceives end up with an agency all their own, advocating for the unassumed (historically speaking) black and brown women they were made for, and Fabiola takes one step further as the midwife, staging photographed portraits that bear models returning the gaze in these fashioned pieces.

It becomes absolutely coherent that Fabiola Jean-Louis is reimagining and rewriting (fashion) history, and she's appropriating European historical fashionable dress with a motive. When I asked if she had considered African textiles, she had no interest in working with them. Though it's not with a disinterest in the cultural significance and material complexity of African textiles, it's that Fabiola prefers to seize what is deemed precious, luxurious, and conspicuous to European material culture and present a pastiche that disturbs the subject of early fashion portraiture and its relation to power and leisure. And it's not just about having a lovely dress embodied by a black or brown woman's body, it's precisely about having the privilege of leisure to stand around in the dress, Fabiola emphasizes as we engage in dialogue about black bodies and precarious social frameworks of power. The models that pose for her portraits (including her teenage daughter) pose a new narrative, a new way of representing fashion that will inspire young black and brown girls and encourage their elders. "Rewriting History" strikes at the pillars of fashionability and privilege, and with the shards of a troubled past, we can construct something anew.
Notes
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/omo-misha/rewriting-history_1_b_9648496.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fabiola Jean-Louis - The Fashion Studies Journal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As you walk around the space, you're surrounded by a constellation of work, from photographed portraits to what Fabiola is most well-known for: elaborate paper dresses. Easily mistaken for fabric garments, it's the uncanniness of Fabiola's paper dresses that attests to her appreciation for fashion h