The Herstory Exhibit

So here it is less than 48 hours before I have to hang and exhibit my show...and I am in a complete state of angst and anxiety. My stomach is twisted into knots and I am overwhelmed with mental noise. The only problem is the chief censors in my head that inflate my LACK of self-esteem and berate me with an onslaught of criticisms that only I could come up with.
Creatives write about this all the time, it's often the stuff writer's/artist block is made up of. What is that about? How and why do we do that to ourselves?

This show would be easier than any other, and I would not be going through any emotional upheaval, if not for the fact that I am doing representational art based off of the photographic images of the Herstory project and co-workers, students, employers are expecting to see a 'likeness' captured in the art work. Like in the images above. Now just because I did that once - doesn't mean I can do it again (and there are twenty photos I had to contend with) for the show. Grant it I only made it to six but with no where near the same resolution as the image above.
Believe me when I turn on the news and hear about tornados, earthquakes and other catastrophes the drama in my little spot of the world is trivial to say the least...but why can't I invoke Eckhart Tolle - be in the present moment and turn off the ego-driven, self-flagellation machine??????

I'm tired and I have to give up and let the work be what it is. The above photograph is an old image of a painting for the exhibit. It is of one of my students named Jazmin Hudson and in this image she is posing as Vengeance from the Paul Pierre Prudhon painting/study Vengeance Pursuing Crime.

What is the Herstory project about?

Well I came up with the idea to bite off more than I should chew and tried to tackle fostering self-esteem issues in young women of color in high-school situations. I asked 'what must it feel like to be a young woman of color sitting in a Western Art history class and see image after image of White European Women?'You can check out this youtube video to get a sense of what it feels like.

That wasn't a difficult question to answer seeing as I am a woman of color who has sat in those classrooms and always felt a level of disenchantment and lack of identification.

I was inspired by artist Kehinde Wiley (whose site I urge people to go to) and the generosity of Oprah Winfrey leadership school for young girls. I thought well what do my gifts/capabilities let me do? How can I make a difference?

The idea/project began as a labor intensive after school photography shoot in which self-identified young women of color posed in the compositions of iconic images from western art history. Images that I felt portrayed, wisdom, beauty, power, influence and strength. You can see the resulting photos under portfolio's Herstory.

The first part of the project is a body of photographic work, the second is a video about the project,in which the young women are interviewed about self-esteem, role- models, the media and participating in the project. This part ended up being very difficult and too-long, as I struggled with not wanting to cut-out any young woman's voice. I showed this Herstory' movie and a summary of the photography project at a National Educator's Conference (National Assoc. of Indep. Schools People of Color Conference) in Boston this past November. I got great feedback, but agreement that the hour-long video should be cut shorter. People asked if I got paid - but I did this all as extra-curricular activities for free and the young women loved it. I did however receive a professional development grant to create the edited video.

The third part is the body of visual art I created from those images to allow the young women to see themselves larger than life in an artwork. Here we are a year later and I am doing the first exhibit of the art work on Thursday. What was I thinking? The above painting is one of the strongest images in the batch and capturing a likeness in painting has proved to be my albatross...so the other paintings are less than what I would like them to be. But time is up - and they are going to go in as they are.