How to Escape the Funhouse Mirror of Culture Through Our Art
Artist Amy Sherald and Ta-Nehisi Coates discuss how she uses her portraits to explore her own multifaceted American identity (a search for self that’s relevant to all creative mediums)
“When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?” — Oscar Wilde, from DE PROFUNDIS: THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL AND OTHER WRITINGS (1905)
Identity is a tricky concept and one that most of us spend our whole lives trying to work out for ourselves. Much of the reason for this is we so often exist as a reflection of how others see us — or, rather, trapped in that reflection — a process that begins with our family and intensifies throughout our early education. It’s why so many of us don’t want to let go of our “glory days”, the ones we let pass us by in a wink of the eye (to paraphrase the Boss), because we were at our best in so many people’s eyes way back then.
I spend a lot of time at 5AM StoryTalk discussing one of art’s most critical roles as a mirror to be held up to society and to each of us, as individuals, to show us who we really are, to reveal…
