Way Down in Niggaville

2013

We are racially profiled as early as pre-natal, due to the race of our mother. Actions that haven’t yet been made have already been assumed, due to the skin color of our mother. While stereotyping and profiling is a plight that we will all face, my perspective comes from growing up in what I call “Niggaville”. A place where every child was a minority, and we each received the privilege of being just another “statistic”, “spic”, or “nigga”, before we had the ability to walk. Denied the differences, uniqueness, individuality, and rareness that we each possessed. The paintings in this body explore how difficult it is to maintain any uniqueness or individuality when being fiercely and constantly bombarded with stereotypes. The prints in this body explore how easy and common it is to stereotype, judge, and lump individuals together by simply glancing at them. Closer examinations of the prints reveal that they are each unique and no two prints have the same color, although they appear to. I believe that if people were able to examine and judge other people in this manner, stereotyping could become a crude artifact of the past.