VISUAL ADOVCACY

    My work seeks to accomplish one goal; to begin a narrative that flips or diffuses the continually rebirth of negative racist imagery. The examination of the relationships between social justice art making and what I would call visual social advocacy can define a broader stage and response to how art making, particularly visual art making, may stand on its own alongside of those social justice initiatives that have illuminated injustice within our civil condition. I consider myself working within the social justice arena, as an advocate who seeks to address visualized injustices. Visual art advocacy stepped in a tradition of social justice lens has been used to illustrate movements and causes, but remains separate, for the most part, from developing strategies and actions found in the missions of community art making, graffiti, social justice theatre, and the spoken word initiatives. These concepts created during the Jim Crow Area still plague our subconscious today.

   

    The root of racist imagery comes out of the fears of slave owners in the late 1860’s at the end of slavery, as an economic stimulus. It was ending and so began an area of confusion and adjustment by both white and black. Then, a few years until reconstruction proved untenable for whites who ushered in Mr. Jim Crow. The need to regain white supremacy was the father of racial prominence propaganda illustrating its rightful place in white America at gave us the Coon, Black Face, The Pickaninny, The Black Sambo, the Step’in Fitch, the Uncle Tom, and the Nigger, as images white people would embrace to this day of how they would see people of color. I am seeking a clearer definition and application of visual justice, as a black art maker, by starting at the beginning of racial injustice and how it turned into a social sanctioned a visualized form of racial injustice that has given us Moreover, I have often wondered why there has been little address attempting to challenge the consistent litany of racist imagery produced for the last two-hundred years whose intent was to dehumanize people of color. That is not to say that there’s a hierocracy to addressing issues rooted in social change.