Group show including María Magdalena Campos-PonsUs Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity19.02. - 19.06.2022
Worcester Art Museum

The section on seriality engages with artists for whom multiplicity, movement, or transformation serve as an expression of similarity or difference. Byron Kim’s wax-and-oil paintings series—titled Synecdoche: Danielle Brunner, Dominic Shamyer, Ella Kim, George Gountas, Glenn Ligon, Jay Patrikios, Johannes Gachnang, Joanna Bossart, Joseph Benjamin, Konrad Tobler, Kyle Wilton, Louis Barney, Lourdes Mercado, Luciano Berti, Marc Pia, Marvin Siegel, Miguel Maldonado, Niki Hosig, Remy Pia, Roland Fellmann, Rosa Duran, Ruth Libermann, Sean Casey, Susann Bossart, Vijay Kapoor (1992-1998)—could be a Pantone color selection in shades of off-white, tan, and brown. But by naming each component after a person familiar to the artist, it becomes clear that the rectangles represent and reflect the skin tones of each individual.

A direct engagement with race is similarly present in Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ photo-based series Identity Could be a Tragedy (1995). These self-portraits show the artist’s progressive erasure until she has nearly disappeared, leaving a trace image of what was once a clear and distinct individual. Anders Bergstrom’s Brown Bag Test August 02, 2016 (2016), with its progressively darker shades of hand-made brown paper bags, relies on a readily identifiable object to refer to a colorist practice: the use of a brown paper bag as a comparative test of complexion to determine one’s eligibility to participate in different spaces within society.