Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  8. Elinor Bowles, Cultural Centers of Color: Report on a National Survey (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 1992), 7.

  9. Ibid., 21.

  10. The definitive account of the CARA exhibition and its decision-making process is Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Chicano Art: Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas, 1998).

  11. Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art, 161.

  12. Elaine Kim, “Interstitial Subjects,” 7–8.

  13. Eric Gibson, “Politically Correct ‘Chicano’ Is a Radical Dud,” The Washington Times, June 21, 1992, D8.

  14. Hilton Kramer, “Studying the Arts and Humanities: What Can Be Done?”, New Criterion, February 1989, http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Studying-the-arts-and-humanities--what-can-be-done--5788.

  15. Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Partisan Review 7:4 (July–August 1940).

  16. Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, eds., Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (New York.: W. W. Norton, 2006), 12. Citing Lange, interview by Suzanne Reiss, “Dorothea Lange: The Making of a Documentary Photographer,” 1968, transcript, University of California Regional Oral Office, Berkeley, 181.

  17. W. E. B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” originally published in The Crisis, October 1926, http://www.webdubois.org/dbCriteriaNArt.html.

  18. Hilton Kramer, “Differences in Quality,” New York Times, November 24, 1968. There Kramer had written, “It wasn’t easy for anyone to be an artist in America in the thirties. For a black artist, the situation was infinitely more arduous and problematical. No one with a sense of history and a sense of justice can feel anything but sorrow, indignation, and guilt that this should have been the case and that it may very well still be the case. But these feelings, though they have an important role to play in the redress of social grievances, are of IittIe use in judging the quality of works of art.”

  19. Ibid.

  20. Hilton Kramer, “Black Art or Merely Social History?”, New York Times, June 26, 1977.

  21. Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 243.

  22. From PESTS flyer dated December 6, 1986.

  23. Howardena Pindell, The Heart of the Question: The Writings and Paintings of Howardena Pindell (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1997), 7.

  24. Pindell also compiled a list of hundreds of artists of color who lived in the New York area and sent them to galleries and museums.

  25. Maurice Berger, How Art Becomes History (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 146.

  26. Tucker admitted to Conwill, “[O]nce you saw that the New Museum’s mission was to try to break apart the ‘canon,’ so to speak, to position itself in opposition to or outside of the mainstream, you joked, ‘Well you guys want to get rid of the canon just at the moment when we are about to enter it!’”

  27. Michael Brenson, “Quality and Other Things,” American Art 6:4 (Autumn 1992), 6–7.

  28. Alexandra Chang, Envisioning Diaspora: Asian American Visual Arts Collective (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2009), 36.

  29. Karin Higa, “Origin Myths: A Short and Incomplete History of Godzilla,” in Karin Higa, Melissa Chiu, and Susette Min, eds., One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 22.

  30. From “Is There an Asian American Aesthetics?”, taken from a plenary session at Defining Our Culture(s), Our Selves conference, June 8, 1991, Hunter College, transcribed by Gargi Chatterjee and edited by Augie Tam, in Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood, eds., Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 631.

  31. Kay WalkingStick, “Native American Art in the PostModern Era,” Art Journal 51:3 (Autumn 1992), 15.

  32. Ibid.

  Chapter Eight

  Imagine/Ever Wanting/to Be: The Fall of Multiculturalism

  1. Steven Kaplan, “New York: The Whitney Biennial 1991,” ETC 15 (1991), 91.

  2. John Yau, “Official Policy: Toward the 1990s with the Whitney Biennial,” Arts 64:1 (September 1989), 51, 54.

  3. Robert Hughes, “The Whitney Biennial: A Fiesta of Whining,” Time, March 22, 1993.

  4. Judd Tully, “The Multicultural Biennial,” Art & Auction, March 1993, 91.

  5. See Gilbert Coker, “The Whitney’s Golden Years,” International Review of African American Art 15:4 (1999).

  6. Thelma Golden in “The Theater of Refusal Roundtable,” April 16, 1993, Humanities Research Institute, University of California. See also Catherine Lord, ed., The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (Irvine: Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, 1993), 62–63.

  7. Jean Nathan, “Silence Is Not Golden,” New York, January 11, 1993.

  8. Paul Richard, “Scrawling in the Margins,” Washington Post, March 4, 1993.

  9. Thelma Golden, “What’s White?”, in 1993 Biennial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), 35.

  10. Coco Fusco, “Passionate Irreverence: The Cultural Politics of Identity,” in 1993 Biennial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), 75.

  11. Guerrilla Girls poster, “Whitey Biennial,” 1993, http://www.guerrillagirls.com/posters/whitey.shtml. See also Eleanor Heartney, “Identity Politics at the Whitney,” Art in America 81 (1993).

  12. Tully, “The Multicultural Biennial,” 89.

  13. David Ross’s quote is taken from “Whitney Biennial Audiotape,” a performance audio piece, 1993. © Andrea Fraser. Permission granted courtesy of Andrea Fraser.

  14. Thelma Golden, ed., Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 29.

  15. Lorna Simpson’s piece inspired an influential debate in the art journal October. See “The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney Biennial,” October 66 (Fall 1993), 3–27. Nizan Shaked’s research on this debate is especially illuminating: Nizan Shaked, “The Paradox of Identity Politics as an Agent in Critical Art: 1970s to the 1990s,” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2007, 208–20.

  16. Requoted in Eugenie Tsai, “Between Heaven and Earth,” in Threshold: Byron Kim, 1990–2004 (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, and Pacific Film Archive, 2004), 17.

  17. Harry Gamboa Jr., “In the City of Angels, Chameleons, and Phantoms: Asco, a Case Study of Chicano Art in Urban Tones (or Asco Was a Four-Member Word),” in Richard Griswold Del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, eds., Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation: An Interpretive Exhibition of the Chicano Art Movement, 1965–1985 (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, 1991), 124.

  18. Ibid., 125

  19. Chon Noriega, “The Orphans of Modernism,” in Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox, and Chon A. Noriega, eds., Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 24.

  20. Max Benavidez quoting Chon Noriega in Max Benavidez, Gronk (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 47.

  21. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 1900–2000, (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2003), 148.

  22. Daniel J. Martinez, Artist’s Statement from 1993 Whitney Biennial files, Whitney Museum of American Art.

  23. Fusco, “Passionate Irreverence,” 76.

  24. Ibid., 85.

  25. Jan Avgikos, “Kill All White People,” Artforum 31:9 (May 1993), 11.

  26. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation 122:3181 (June 23, 1926), 694.

  27. Langston Hughes, “I, Too,” in Arnold Rampersad, ed., The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 46.

  28. Deborah Solomon, “A Showcase for Political Correctness,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 1993. See also John Taylor, “Mope Art: Decons
tructing the Biennial,” New York, March 22, 1993; Richard Caseby, “PC—or Racism?”, The Sunday Times, April 4, 1993; Bill Van Siclen, “Get the Message?”, Providence Journal, March 28, 1993.

  29. Ross answered, “It couldn’t have been done because it wouldn’t have been about the position of dominance.” Peter Plagens and Carolyn Friday, “From Hopper to Hip-Hop,” Newsweek, November 8, 1993, 76.

  30. He later recanted. And Danto praised Martinez’s tags in a retrospective book of his work. The tags, Danto later said, revealed Martinez not so much as an activist but as “an anti-formalist, making an art whose force and meaning did not rest upon getting the design formally right.” Arthur Danto, “Daniel Joseph Martinez’s Museum Tags as Anti-formal Performances,” in Daniel Joseph Martinez: A Life of Disobedience (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Canz, 2009), 201.

  31. Jed Perl, “From Tung Ch’i-Ch’ang’s China to David Ross’s Manhattan,” New Criterion, April 1993. See also Andrew Graham-Dixon, “Still Alive, But Only Just,” Independent, March 9, 1993; Christopher Knight, “Crushed by Its Good Intentions,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1993.

  32. John Taylor, “Mope Art”; Deborah Solomon, “A Showcase.”

  33. Paul Richard, “Scrawling in the Margins”; John Taylor, “Mope Art”; Bill Van Siclen, “Get the Message?”; Carol Strickland, “Politics Dominates Whitney Biennial,” Christian Science Monitor, March 26, 1993; Fredric Koeppel, “Art Tirades at Biennial Simply Get Tiresome,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 28, 1993; Peter Plagens, “Fade from White,” Newsweek, March 14, 1993.

  34. John Leo, “Cultural War at the Whitney,” U.S. News & World Report, March 22, 1993.

  35. Hilton Kramer, “The Biennialized Whitney: Closed for Deconstruction,” New York Observer, March 29, 1993.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Ronda R. Penrice, “The Whitney’s ‘Black Male’: It’s a Shame, Girl,” Routes, the Biweekly Guide to African-American Culture 4:15 (December 6–19, 1994), 7.

  Chapter 9

  All the Colors in the World: The Mainstreaming of Multiculturalism

  1. Lewis Blackwell, “Casual but Smart,” Creative Review, April 1991.

  2. Randall Rothenberg, “Benetton’s Magazine to Push Vision, Not Clothing,” New York Times, April 15, 1991.

  3. William Leith, “The Observer Interview: Oliviero Toscani, the Wild Man of Italian Knitwear,” Observer, March 16, 1997.

  4. Theodore Levitt, “The Globalization of Markets,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 1983, 94.

  5. Ibid., 93.

  6. Ibid., 93, 102.

  7. Jonathan Mantle, Benetton: The Family, the Business, and the Brand (New York: Warner Books, 2000), 142, 208.

  8. Keith Robertson, “On White Space In Graphic Design,” Originally published in Émigré No. 26, 1993.

  9. One could write a history on the use of the white backdrop. Penn, Avedon, George Lois, David Bailey, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others had made their names with minimalist work. The cover designer of the 1970 Pocket Books editions of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and The Status Seekers had, with casual irony, wrapped the white background around Packard’s takedowns of the ad industry and the 1 percent. Even Saatchi & Saatchi’s galvanizing “Labour Isn’t Working” poster for Margaret Thatcher’s 1978 Tory campaign had long dole lines stretching toward the horizon against a white background. Then in 2000, Bruce Mau and Barr Gilmore would use white space for their cover of Naomi Klein’s anti-branding classic No Logo, echoing the cover of Notorious BIG’s Ready to Die done by Cey Adams.

  10. Noreen O’Leary, “Benetton’s True Colors,” Adweek, August 24, 1992.

  11. Patricia Clough, “The Posters Shock … But We All Buy the Knitwear,” Independent, December 16, 1992.

  12. Oliviero Toscani in Benetton, Global Vision: United Colors of Benetton (Tokyo: Robundo, 1993).

  13. Judith Graham, “Benetton ‘Colors’ the Race Issue,” Advertising Age, September 11, 1989.

  14. Ibid.

  15. “An Interview with Oliviero Toscani,” The Florentine, September 21, 2006.

  16. Martha T. Moore, “Controversial Adman Bares His Concept,” USA Today, July 25, 1991.

  17. Russell Ferguson, William Olander, Marcia Tucker, and Karen Fiss, eds., Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture (New York: New Museum and MIT Press, 1990), 198.

  18. Alison Simko, “Do the Left Thing,” Advertising Age, January 13, 1992, S22.

  19. Tibor Kalman in Peter Hall and Michael Bierut, eds., Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 26.

  20. Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 3.

  21. Mantle, Benetton, 218.

  22. Bruce Horovitz, “Shock Ads: New Rage that Spawns Rage,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1992.

  23. Hall and Bierut, Tibor Kalman, 266.

  24. Farrell Crook, “Angry Readers Protest Photo of Black Queen,” Toronto Star, March 28, 1993.

  25. Sontag, On Photography, 140.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Adrienne Ward, “‘Socially Aware’ or ‘Wasted Money’: AA Readers Respond to Benetton Ads,” Advertising Age, February 24, 1992, 4.

  28. Randall Scotland, “Benetton’s ‘Black’ Queen Sparks Ad Debate,” The Financial Post, April 17, 1993.

  29. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 87.

  30. “Benetton Gets Case of the Blues Following Run of Bad Publicity,” South China Morning Post, February 26, 1995.

  31. Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999), 114.

  32. Hall and Bierut, Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, 302–3.

  Chapter Ten

  We Are All Multiculturalists Now: Visions of One America

  1. David A. Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,” The American Historical Review 108:5 (December 2003), 1364.

  2. Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 258.

  3. Michael J. Weiss, The Clustering of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 144.

  4. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Hants, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 8.

  5. Raymond A. Bauer, Scott M. Cunningham, and Lawrence H. Wortzel, “The Marketing Dilemma of Negroes,” Journal of Marketing, 29:3 (July 1965), 1.

  6. Henry Allen Bullock, “Consumer Motivations in Black and White,” Harvard Business Review 39 (May–June 1961), 93.

  7. Ibid., 95.

  8. Ibid., 91.

  9. Bauer, Cunningham, and Wortzel, “Marketing Dilemma of Negroes,” 2.

  10. D. Parke Gibson, The $30 Billion Negro (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 20.

  11. Gibson, $30 Billion Negro, 9.

  12. Ralph Lee Smith, “The Wired Nation,” Nation, May 18, 1970, 584.

  13. Juan Gonzales and Joseph Torres, News for All the People (New York: Verso, 2011), 318.

  14. Harold H. Kassarjian, “The Negro and American Advertising, 1946–1965,” Journal of Marketing Research 6:1 (February 1969), 29.

  15. Arnold M. Barban, “The Dilemma of ‘Integrated’ Advertising,” Journal of Business 42:4 (October 1969), 477–96.

  16. Dorothy Cohen, “Advertising and the Black Community,” Journal of Marketing 34:4 (October 1970), 4.

  17. Emphasis added. Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 19.

  18. Turow, Breaking Up America, 37.

  19. Robert Johnson and Brian Dumaine, “The Market Nobody Wanted,” CNN Money, October 1, 2002, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2002/10/01/330571/index.htm.

  20. Brett Pulley, The Billion Dollar BET: Robert Johnson and the Inside Story of Black Entertainment Television (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2004), 32.

  21. Turow, Breaking Up America, 26.

  22. Johnson and
Dumaine, “Market Nobody Wanted.”

  23. Jason Chambers, Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 226.

  24. The Madison Avenue Project continues to call attention to racial discrimination in the advertising industry. See http://www.madisonavenueproject.com.

  25. Table 1, “U.S. Buying Power Statistics by Race, 1990, 2000, 2009, and 2014,” in Humphreys, Jeffrey M., “The Multicultural Economy 2009,” Georgia Business and Economic Conditions 69:3, Selig Center for Economic Growth, University of Georgia, third quarter 2009, 3.

  26. Johnson and Dumaine, “Market Nobody Wanted.”

  27. Pulley, Billion Dollar BET, 53–54.

  28. Ibid., 200

  29. Ibid., 112.

  30. Ibid., 111.

  31. Ibid., 6–7.

  32. Italics mine. Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 11–12, 20–22.

  33. Peter Francese, “A Symphony of Demographic Change,” Advertising Age, November 9, 1988.

  34. Kristal Brent Zook, Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5.

  35. George Gerbner, “Women and Minorities on Television: A Study in Casting and Fate: A Report to the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists,” June 1993.

  36. “How Blacks’ TV Viewing Habits Differ From Whites’,” Jet, April 26, 1993, 38.

  37. Daniel M. Kimmel, The Fourth Network: How Fox Broke The Rules and Reinvented Television (Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), 199.

  38. Kimmel, The Fourth Network, 199.

  39. Zook, Color by Fox, 10.

  40. Ibid., 11.

  41. Ibid., 106.

  42. “Three-Fourths of People Polled Oppose Affirmative Action,” Associated Press, March 24, 1995.

  43. Ward Connerly, interview by Brian Lamb, Booknotes, C-SPAN, April 30, 2000, http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/155997-1/Ward+Connerly.aspx.