#cindygate

1) Did anyone else feel like Marcia X got thrown under the bus, presented as the far left and an extremist ("the pendulum can swing too far") in their assessment that “the art world is centered around the white gaze on the blk/poc body.” I think that could be parsed out more and given more consideration. To simply dismiss it by saying "The art world as a multi-faceted sphere of activity, and Cindy Sherman’s work, do not define this world, nor set the agenda for what is seen, discussed, or valued" is missing how Black bodies are handled in art the rest of the time Cindy Sherman is off being Cindy...particularly, Marcia has been doing AMAZING research on Lili Reynaud-Dewar and her use of Blackface in performance which has been shown at spaces like New Museum (now "justified" by her use of "other colors, too")

2) Cindy Sherman will still be famous, white and privileged without anyone defending her ignorance by saying she was young. We know she was young (or I knew), but isn't that just more proof that she, like all of us, was raised and effected by a system of white supremacy that maybe told her the Black viewer isn't relevant?

3) I don't care that Martha Wilson used a Black woman make-up artist or that she also did portraits as Nancy Reagan...there is NO SUCH THING as sophisticated Blackface and feeding a white person's fantasy that they can slip on Blackness isn't okay. I don't care why neo-liberals have decided Martha Wilson gets a free pass. Literally last night I saw Tracy Ellis-Ross play Michelle Obama for Halloween in Blackish and no darkening make-up was used. It can be done, and maybe that would've been a MORE INTERESTING IMAGE AND LESS OF A ONE LINER THAT IS PROTECTED BY PRIVILEGE.

4) I still have hope that some bright-eyed academic will take this further someday and add in some text about the fungibility of the Black body and that history and how it relates to all this, why the work was shown in Paris at the Jeu de Paume but not at MoMA, etc.

5) This is what happens when you leave art history for art and then realize that maybe you need a clone that goes back to get the PhD writing about the history of photography (did my senior thesis in Art History on photographs relating to the Civil Rights movement in undergrad) that you don't have time for...

Here we go again. #Myhsa (aka @E_SCRAAATCH) has called attention to artist Cindy Sherman’s blackface performance in some rarely seen works from 1976 by using the tag #cindygate. The work consists of black and white portraits of Sherman posing as bus riders of varying ethnicity, making what would become the signature methodology of her oeuvre. These performance/photography images in which she appears in blackface are so obviously deplorable, it feels like there is not a great deal of critical work to be done in parsing them.

#CINDYGATE

In 1976, Cindy Sherman performed in Blackface for her series Bus Riders. I decided to do some research into this series and shared the information on Facebook and Twitter, linked via the hashtag #Cindygate. An archive was constructed by the posts and includes information about other white performance artists that have used Blackface within their work. Cindy Sherman’s wikipedia page was also changed to reflect Margo Jefferson’s critique of the series from 2005.