Exhibits
Friday night, 2 days after the full moon and we're walking through the Mission catching up on six months of lived life. After burritos and observing teenage drug dealers count money and profess their love for us, I accompany la niñaluna to Galeria de la Raza for an opening art exhibit but the building is locked and looks dead except for a cryptic note about meeting places on the security gate. She says how there's an exhibit at another gallery about seven blocks away and I hesitantly agree to go despite the event advertising containing obvious stop signs like "evolutionary music."
It's at 20th and Florida and upon sight of the sidewalk in front of the Culture Cache gallery niñaluna remarks that we should just keep on walking. But the scene is too tempting to continue on; like a car crash appeal–something hideous and potentially intriguing to dissect. The main exhibit is based on the 7 deadly sins using mixed media technique with christian imagery and daily tools rendered useless by fire. I stand around in a daze, listening to conversations and staring at people who mix and mingle and seem like they just got off work from their important suit professions and didn't have enough time to change.
On the opposite side of the showing, two artists are doing their thing painting huge images as onlookers stand around practicing the perfect bored stance. It feels voyeuristic as hell and I wonder why any artist would put themself through this. One of the artists is young-ish and Latino using acrylic and canvas to create soft spraycan style abstractions. I wait for someone to comment that his art is "so street" but luckily do not have to endure that brand of idiocy.
Next to him a woman is painting the image of a vacant looking woman on a cityscape. The painted woman seems to be in every piece, I notice, like some dark skinned woman of color motif with large exaggerated eyes, lips and nose. I look at the artist who happens to be a white woman with blond hair and particularly thin anglo facial features and note how strange and fabricated it is when the art seems so disconnected from the creator. I wonder if this is the her she sees as abstraction, the colored woman within, wanting to be free with nature yet trapped within the city but it seems more offensive than anything that could be artistically justified. I wonder if the artist realizes the implications of being a white woman creating images of "3rd world" women (or actually the same damn "3rd world" woman) in all of her pieces. If she realizes what it means to create such art in this gallery smack dab in the historically Latino Mission district at an event triumphed as a showcase of "community" art wherein the concept of "community" is obviously used to promote the exhibit as valid and attract those who are interested in their false and self-congratulatory bonds with "their" neighborhood.
By now it is definitely time to leave but niñaluna decides to take a look at the flyers for the event and gallery in a real masochistic move. She shows me the advertising material for this evening's event and upon seeing how it's produced like some street smart hip hop stylized flyer, I tell her she can just put that back where she found it. It was of course a flyer proclaiming "Culture Cache" as a community art center, and to prove the fact I suppose they thought it appropriate to use wyld style graffiti lettering for that straight from the street appeal.
We quickly get the hell out of there and walk to 16th and Mission to catch trains back to our respective homes. On the way we discuss art produced by white women and men that incorporates images of people of color, "tribal" motifs, non-white cultural references, and characters of non-English/ non-European languages. I feel relieved that I'm not the only one who was disturbed by the white woman at the gallery who used the woman of color as her artistic trademark. Niñaluna relays the story of a friend who was a white hippie-ish woman who used images of non-white cultures because "white america is so boring." I start cracking up at the idea that someone would think that was a justification, just imagining what I would say if someone ever said something of that (lack of) gravity in my presence. Niñaluna says she just told the woman to stop talking because she couldn't stand to discuss the matter anymore without becoming extremely upset.
Eventually we hit 16th and Mission and board the train. After hugs and goodbyes, I transfer to another train and find my favorite seat, relieved to be away from bullshit galleries and gentrification gone mad. At the stop before mine, the train is delayed by track work for 20 minutes and we just sit there. I finish reading a zine, then a little newpaper and then stare off into the night outside. I catch the reflection of a woman with braids sitting across from me in the glassiness of the window and remember how my aunt gave me a photgraph of her from the days she lived in New Mexico.
In the picture, my aunt is sitting, staring at the camera with trenzas and turquoise necklaces and earrings. It was a rare photograph photos from her younger years; she was 18, pregnant, and everywhere she went, tourists begged to take her picture mistaking her skin and bone structure for Dine/Navajo (as if that's the only southwest tribe). After stating that she did not want to be photographed, often the camera crazed people would try to snap a quick photo but she was prepared with a newspaper or purse to shield her face from the flash.
I wonder if the photo-happy tourists thought she was some crazy india who was scared they were trying to steal her soul with their image replicating invention. I wonder if in some way that was true; a bit of her was indeed stolen, a misrepresentation on glossy prints. and how maybe in some way, that was true. False photographics truths, unwanted documentation and sterile "historical" proof in a 3x5 photograph, in acrylic on canvas, in graphite scratched onto paper, in poems, stories, essays, history books and paintings mounted on gallery walls....
It's at 20th and Florida and upon sight of the sidewalk in front of the Culture Cache gallery niñaluna remarks that we should just keep on walking. But the scene is too tempting to continue on; like a car crash appeal–something hideous and potentially intriguing to dissect. The main exhibit is based on the 7 deadly sins using mixed media technique with christian imagery and daily tools rendered useless by fire. I stand around in a daze, listening to conversations and staring at people who mix and mingle and seem like they just got off work from their important suit professions and didn't have enough time to change.
On the opposite side of the showing, two artists are doing their thing painting huge images as onlookers stand around practicing the perfect bored stance. It feels voyeuristic as hell and I wonder why any artist would put themself through this. One of the artists is young-ish and Latino using acrylic and canvas to create soft spraycan style abstractions. I wait for someone to comment that his art is "so street" but luckily do not have to endure that brand of idiocy.
Next to him a woman is painting the image of a vacant looking woman on a cityscape. The painted woman seems to be in every piece, I notice, like some dark skinned woman of color motif with large exaggerated eyes, lips and nose. I look at the artist who happens to be a white woman with blond hair and particularly thin anglo facial features and note how strange and fabricated it is when the art seems so disconnected from the creator. I wonder if this is the her she sees as abstraction, the colored woman within, wanting to be free with nature yet trapped within the city but it seems more offensive than anything that could be artistically justified. I wonder if the artist realizes the implications of being a white woman creating images of "3rd world" women (or actually the same damn "3rd world" woman) in all of her pieces. If she realizes what it means to create such art in this gallery smack dab in the historically Latino Mission district at an event triumphed as a showcase of "community" art wherein the concept of "community" is obviously used to promote the exhibit as valid and attract those who are interested in their false and self-congratulatory bonds with "their" neighborhood.
By now it is definitely time to leave but niñaluna decides to take a look at the flyers for the event and gallery in a real masochistic move. She shows me the advertising material for this evening's event and upon seeing how it's produced like some street smart hip hop stylized flyer, I tell her she can just put that back where she found it. It was of course a flyer proclaiming "Culture Cache" as a community art center, and to prove the fact I suppose they thought it appropriate to use wyld style graffiti lettering for that straight from the street appeal.
We quickly get the hell out of there and walk to 16th and Mission to catch trains back to our respective homes. On the way we discuss art produced by white women and men that incorporates images of people of color, "tribal" motifs, non-white cultural references, and characters of non-English/ non-European languages. I feel relieved that I'm not the only one who was disturbed by the white woman at the gallery who used the woman of color as her artistic trademark. Niñaluna relays the story of a friend who was a white hippie-ish woman who used images of non-white cultures because "white america is so boring." I start cracking up at the idea that someone would think that was a justification, just imagining what I would say if someone ever said something of that (lack of) gravity in my presence. Niñaluna says she just told the woman to stop talking because she couldn't stand to discuss the matter anymore without becoming extremely upset.
Eventually we hit 16th and Mission and board the train. After hugs and goodbyes, I transfer to another train and find my favorite seat, relieved to be away from bullshit galleries and gentrification gone mad. At the stop before mine, the train is delayed by track work for 20 minutes and we just sit there. I finish reading a zine, then a little newpaper and then stare off into the night outside. I catch the reflection of a woman with braids sitting across from me in the glassiness of the window and remember how my aunt gave me a photgraph of her from the days she lived in New Mexico.
In the picture, my aunt is sitting, staring at the camera with trenzas and turquoise necklaces and earrings. It was a rare photograph photos from her younger years; she was 18, pregnant, and everywhere she went, tourists begged to take her picture mistaking her skin and bone structure for Dine/Navajo (as if that's the only southwest tribe). After stating that she did not want to be photographed, often the camera crazed people would try to snap a quick photo but she was prepared with a newspaper or purse to shield her face from the flash.
I wonder if the photo-happy tourists thought she was some crazy india who was scared they were trying to steal her soul with their image replicating invention. I wonder if in some way that was true; a bit of her was indeed stolen, a misrepresentation on glossy prints. and how maybe in some way, that was true. False photographics truths, unwanted documentation and sterile "historical" proof in a 3x5 photograph, in acrylic on canvas, in graphite scratched onto paper, in poems, stories, essays, history books and paintings mounted on gallery walls....
permalink posted on 9/17/2000 07:39:00 PM
