User:Gbuechler/sandbox/Grey Area

Grey Area

Grey Area, by Fred Wilson, is made up of five busts, made of plaster and wood, modeled after the Nefertiti Bust, the most copied work from the ancient world. The portraits are painted in five different skin tones, as Wilson describes gradually moving from an “oatmeal to chocolate” color.“  All of the casts, each about 19 x 13 inches, are evenly spaced on individual shelves in a horizontal line. Additionally, each bust is placed high on the ceiling forcing the viewers to look up and examine the five Nefertiti’s. The piece was most famously exhibited in the 1993 Whitney Biennial and later in the Brooklyn Museum’s 21: Sections of Contemporary Art from the Brooklyn Museum exhibit in 2008 under Wilson’s larger “Re: claiming Egypt installation. Grey Area is now owned by the Brooklyn Museum as part of their permanent collection. Brooklyn, where Wilson lives and works, is a cultural hub for artists and the Brooklyn Museum holds many culturally contemporary artists. Its 2008 exhibition featured notable works that entered the collection over the past four decades. The 1993 Whitney Biennial, where Grey Area was first held, was one of its most controversial ones in which examined some of the key issues around identity and politics in the United States at the time, especially anti-Black racism. Consequently, Wilson made each bust in the Grey Area a different skin color with the first one being white, the next three shades gradually getting darker until eventually, the last cast is a black tone. He paints the five Nefertiti’s each a different accent to speak to the racial discourses in the history surrounding ancient Egypt. This particular ongoing controversy, as a product of early racial attempts at whitewashing history, particularly in the 19th century, tackles the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptian civilizations. Rather than answer the racial identity of people in ancient Egypt, Wilson is asking the viewers to make their own conclusions. Wilson’s Grey Area was one of the highlights of the Whitney Biennial catalog and stirred up a great deal of conversation around important racial issues in a historical context, with historiography and the discipline of history, and a modern one, regarding conditions of modern society and ongoing systematic concerns.'' 

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson was born in the Bronx, New York, and currently lives and continues to work in Brooklyn. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (BFA) from SUNY Purchase in New York. In his specific program, he was the only black student. Following his education, he worked as a freelance worker in the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Craft Museum, while making his art. In 1999, Wilson received the MacArthur Foundation “green grant” in 1999 and the Larry Aldrich award in 2003. Wilson represented the United States at the Biennial Cairo in 1992 and the Venice Biennale in 2003. In May 2008, he was asked to become a Whitney Museum trustee. In his various museum positions, Wilson saw the ins and outs of museum environments and the systematic institutional problems that reside within these spaces. He observed how white individuals dominate the historical didactic surrounding various cultures, especially in museums, so his work rewrites historical narratives, specifically including black conversations on claims of the past. He is an artist and political activist, and his work has been featured and recognized in many world-renowned museums and exhibits. Since 1987, Wilson has created over forty installations using art and artifacts from various American and international museums. His work has mostly comprised mock museum pieces that challenge his audiences to question the meanings of significant and cherished art and artifacts. In an interview with the nonprofit art organization ART21, he shares, “I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one’s own perceptual shift—which is the real thrill.” Concerning Grey Area, Wilson used the bust of Nefertiti, a historical symbol of beauty, to address the problems associated with the racial discourses and conversations that emerge from the study of ancient Egypt and the discipline of history more broadly.

Reaction

The Whitney Biennial started in 1932, is an American art exhibition held every two years at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Close to 4,000 artists have participated in these exhibitions on various themes, topics, and issues and in 1993, the curators sought out artists of color and women who would represent issues specific to American life. The majority of critics and audiences responded negatively to the 1993 Biennial. Michael Kimmelman of the Times described it as, “grim, political sloganeering, and self-indulgent self-expression” Commenting directly on Wilson’s “Re: claiming Egypt” installation, Smith Roberta of the New York Times stated, “Fred Wilson’s wall label leads one to expect an intricate dissection of the museum’s ‘imperialist reality,’ but his installation does little more than present a fusion of museum and museum shop.”  The Whitney Biennial as a whole received mixed reviews because the artists, including Wilson, took on the risk of exposing multiple issues in American society at a hostile time. Other issues that artists tackled in this Biennial include the AIDS crisis, poverty, class, and race. Today, the 1993 Whitney Biennial remains a historical milestone in the art world. '''

Nefertiti Bust

Found in Amarna in 1912 by the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt, the bust of Nefertiti is one of the most copied ancient artworks. The original piece is currently displayed at the Neues Museum in Berlin, Germany. Nefertiti is painted with tan skin, a slender symmetrical face, and a blue headpiece. Today, hundreds of thousands of viewers visit Berlin to see the Nefertiti bust admiring its beauty and impressive preservation of face structure and color. The Nefertiti Bust is not only a symbol of beauty but also sits at the center of debates around intersections of race, history, and colonialism, which is why Fred Wilson took on the likeness of Nefertiti in Grey Area. Controversy

Ancient Egypt was evidently a multiracial society. Geographically, it was located on the African continent, so Nubian people were living there, and it was close to the ancient Middle East. Thus, there were populations of various ethnicities residing there and people visiting from Rome and various other locations around the world. Yet history, unfortunately, includes racial discourses in conversations that emerge from the study of ancient Egypt which makes the civilization rarely associated with African culture.

In the fifth century BCE, the historian Herodotus visited the Nile Valley and wrote in his An Account of Egypt, “My own conjectures were founded, first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly hair, which certainly amount to but little since several other nations are so too.” Herodotus considered the “father of history” was the first to make a written account about ancient Egyptian civilization. Through tomb findings and conversations with native interpreters, he concluded that ancient Egypt was multiracial. In the 1800s, multiple white individuals tried to disprove Herodotus’ observations to defend the honor of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, an early Egyptologist, or historian who specializes in the study of ancient Egypt, among others in the 19th century, refused to believe that successful ancient civilizations included people with darker skin. Addressing this, Frank Martin writes in The Egyptian Ethnicity Controversy and the Sociology of Knowledge, “It is clear that the authors are grasping at straws...the above exercise shows clearly that mainstream Western scholars, regardless of their discipline, cannot objectively deal with evidence that clearly brings out the fact of the black African origin of Egyptian civilization.” Early white historians were desperate to prove that their racist beliefs of the past stood correct.

Although many archeologists, historians, and Egyptologists have propagated the idea that the ancient Egyptians were not black, other experts have debunked these assertions, including W.E.B Du Bois, Chancellor Williams, and J.A. Rogers. Notably, a Senegalian scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop, took over this conversation in his brilliant research in the 1970s. In his essay, “African Origin of Civilization,” he writes: “Already during the Middle Ages, the memory of a Negro Egypt that had civilized the world had been blurred by ignorance of the antique tradition hidden in libraries or buried under ruins. It would become even more obscure during those four centuries of slavery." This white bias has silenced the black voice in accounts of ancient history and denied them their part in the successful ancient civilization. This historical whitewashing of history is something that Fred Wilson has been trying to call attention to, especially having seen the systematic problems in his positions at famous museums. White people have continuously dominated the direction of history for many cultures and have left out many groups of people in these disciplines. Hence, Fred Wilson’s “Re: Claiming Egypt” uses Egyptian artifacts to include black voices in these historical conversations and to undo that racism.  Significance  Even though Western discourse tries to debunk traces of black history, it is clear that ancient Egypt was multi-racial based upon geographical historical evidence. Christopher Knight, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, explains that “From a Eurocentric point of view, Western civilization’s ancestry in Egypt is traced to rulers who were white. From an Afrocentric viewpoint, those rulers were black. In the original Berlin sculpture, Nefertiti has richly tanned skin. But is skin color the factor that determines race? What is race, anyway? Are such categories meaningful in any biological sense? Or are they cultural constructions, just like standards of beauty--the kind that museums articulate and perpetuate, purposefully or not?” Knight and Wilson reject that trying to label the race is antiquated because it is irrelevant to people or civilizations accomplishments. Fred Wilson takes one of the most beautiful and universally known artifacts in the world and shows the ugliness that lies within the whitewashing of institutions to comment on the way that institutions and cultures of white supremacy make the past white to augment their ideologies.

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