@ksuarthistory Professor Klein recently presented at the Tufts University conference, “Within and Against Monocultures,” with her research on the banana and artistic reactions to the fruit’s unecological planting. Her conclusion: “artists are behooving us to consider how banana monoculture is unethical and imperiling the environment.”
Pictured: Victor Hugo Portillo, Banana, 2021.
@ksuarthistory is excited to announce that Prof. Shana Klein has won the William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art. This prize will support Shana’s current book project—“Spoiled Milk”—on the politics of motherhood in U.S. art. She accepted the award while at the Southeastern College Art Conference.
If you were born in the '80s, you might remember that Banana Republic clothing stores used to look like zoos. Elephant tusks formed archways over the entrances. Zebra and leopard prints covered dressing rooms. But the actual clothing was muted in comparison; khaki garments that evoked colonial costumes of military expeditions in "foreign" places. I'm excited to announce that I just published an article with Curator of Fashion, Sara Hume, on the colonial inspirations for the original Banana Republic Travel and Safari Clothing Company. We talk about the historical meanings of a material like khaki (originally worn by the British during occupation in India) and the continued problematic name of this company that needs reckoning. DM me for more info!
New research talk! I'll be discussing representations of Native American motherhood in U.S. art in a virtual talk this Monday at 7pm EST at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Excited to talk about my new research, but don't worry, I have not strayed far from studies of food. My discussion of motherhood analyzes milk, of course!? Link to talk in bio.
Artwork: Jamie Okuma, "Common Ground: Culture Isn't Black and White," Cradleboard, 2020.
Hannah Ryan and Lesley Anne Wolff just published this stellar book, “Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art,” with Yale University Press. I am grateful to have my banana research included! And a million thanks to @barriospinturas for letting me share his incredible artwork again.
I am in desperate need of an escape to John Singer Sargent’s Mallorca where pomegranates are busting open like heart arteries pumping with blood. Even his pears are bodily, with hourglass figures that would make Kim Kardashian jealous. I drooled over these paintings, which were at the @ngadc exhibition "Sargent and Spain." Anyone else see them?
In so many instances of fruit representations, artists edit laborers out of the picture or obscure their faces with ladders and generous hats. These images stand in sharp contrast to the picture I saw today on my tomato package: the face of David, an “Irrigation Leader” (Pic. 2). I was invited to learn more about David by scanning a QR code, which led me to a website describing how the tomato company is supporting David’s education (Pic 3). In the end, this visual experiment painted a fuller portrait of the fruit company and its benevolence rather than its employee. It makes me wonder: what are these portraits designed to do? How might individualized and detailed figural portraits also obscure farmworkers and fail to accurately show the work involved?
Artist Erika NJ Allen's work explores the political meanings behind fruits that seem delicious and innocuous. Here, she shows bananas extending from a glass pedestal. They are not lying on their side, silently cuddling one another. Rather, they shoot straight up, threatening to bite back and refusing to sit politely for consumers. Below them are green serpentine bananas that coil around the glass stand like snakes. Erika rejects the idea that fruit and its representation is something to merely satisfy one's appetite or decorate one's dining room. Wars have been fought over this fruit to satisfy imperial appetites.
I was so happy to be a part of Erika's exhibition opening at the @welcomeprojectcincinnati Brava, Erika!
What an honor to have Diné artist Melani Yazzie’s “My Quilt” in the exhibition, "Un-Settling: Indigenous Stories of Removal and Resistance." Yazzie has taken a bag of Blue Bird flour—a common brand on Navajo reservations—and transformed it into a quilt about land and identity. On the quilt, Yazzie has printed her "Certificate of Indian Blood," a document assigned by the U.S. government to members of federally recognized tribes. Although these documents have been recently used to protect Native artists and prevent fraud in Indian markets, they are another example of how the government has tried to police and regulate Native American people and determine the conditions of their identity based on blood quantum laws. Looking at Melanie’s quilt reminds me of novelist Tommy Orange who writes in "There There":
“We are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. We are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eights, sixteenths, thirty-second. Undoable math.”
So many sports mascots are racist, ya know? Artist @greggdeal addresses this in his work that includes Chief Wahoo, the former mascot for Cleveland’s baseball team. This logo was selected in 1951 and features a demeaning caricature that denigrates Native people as savage warriors and artifacts of the past. In 2018, the Cleveland American Indian Movement (AIM) successfully won a battle to change Cleveland’s baseball team name and mascot.
It is such an honor to be in conversation with Sundance, the Executive Director of the Cleveland AIM, who helped dismantle this mascot and others. We will be taking in-person today at the Massillon Museum at 5:30pm. Be there or be square. Link in bio.
How lucky am I to have the art of Moises Barrios on the cover of my book? Barrios is a contemporary Guatemalan artist who addresses the violent history of the United Fruit Company. In 2003, Barrios painted "Mosquitos," where three toy fighter jets defend a cluster of bananas. Planting these toy planes on the yellow terrain of a banana is an explicit commentary on the United Fruit Company’s occupation in Central America and how the banana, like oil, has been a political battleground throughout history.
I will be chatting virtually about the banana in art with the incredible founders of the online exhibition, @bananacraze2021
tomorrow, April 27, at 1pm Bogotá / 2pm NYC /8pm Madrid. My talk is kindly sponsored by @equifruit . Link in bio.
