Today as a way to continue class discussion of Citizenship (as interrogated in Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Homi Bhabha’s The Locations of Culture), I want to begin with the following piece of visual art (is it a life installation?) by African-American artist Renee Green. What do you see?
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During out class discussion of Green’s installation, a student directed us to the following website http://www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org/Artists/ArtistDetail.aspx?ArtistId=d73e052f-8aca-4d44-b7e7-b6386058e8f0#
which explains how Greene altered the fabric, “toile,” and “made small yet significant changes to the usual figural vignettes that characterize toile’s highly decorative patterning. Specifically, Green replaced some of the original vignettes with images she discovered in the groundbreaking book The Image of the Black in Western Art (Harvard University, 1989). The benign and bucolic scenes from the original fabric are now side by side with scenes from antebellum America and colonial Europe.”
Commenting on her alterations, Green said “that the aim of her work is to ‘help people think about themselves in relation to different histories and alternative ways of seeing.'”
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Reblogged this on The Däumer Blog and commented:
We had a great class discussion about this piece of installation art by Renee Green. One of my students directed us to the following website: http://www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org/Artists/ArtistDetail.aspx?ArtistId=d73e052f-8aca-4d44-b7e7-b6386058e8f0# on which Green explains how she altered the fabric and introduced jarring scenes of antebellum America and Colonial Europe. She said that “the aim of her work is to ‘help people think about themselves in relation to different histories and alternative ways of seeing.’”
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