One highlight of the Balch’s Fall '98 season has been the exhibition, A Sense of Self: Contemporary Ethnic Women Artists. A Sense of Self presents the creative works of eighteen women artists from the Greater Philadelphia region that explore the complexities of ethnic experience and identity at the crossroads of gender, race, class, age, and sexuality. In doing so, the exhibit expands and depeens the Baich Institute’s mission to educate about American diversity through a variety of media. The works of art included in the show, by African American, Korean, Chinese, Latina, South Asian, Native American, and Jewish artists, raise important issues as they define and express issues faced by contemporary ethnic women: claiming and reinventing ethnic traditions as a source of female strength and power, locating and celebrating female ancestry or bonds between women, and struggling against racial and sexual objectification in American society as well as their own communities.

For some of these artists, ethnic traditions provide powerful and positive media for articulating a sense of self. The retablos of Marta Sanchez are updated examples of traditional religious painting which offer spiritual narratives of friendship and personal growth. According to Sanchez, drawing on traditional folk genres is an important way to reinvent her identity as Chicana distant from her community of origin: "Sometimes I feel as though I'm slowly fading out of my cultural circle. I'm a guest or a visitor.  In San Antonio I never had a question about my identity because there were so many Mexicanos and Chicanos there that I had a very fertile kind of cultural upbringing. When I came to the northeast I felt more of a longing. I’d have to recreate it because I'm not in my culture anymore.  That's not good or bad, but that's just the way it is. So I guess I reinvent." Katie Schuele, the adopted Navajo daughter of Anglo parents, it another artist who is reinventing tradition. For Schuele, reconnecting with Navajo culture is a means to construct a strong sense of female self: "I like the fact that in most Native cultures, the women are in charge.  The women are highly respected and they are in charge of the fields and give birth.   Unlike this culture, where women are not as respected.  But with Navajo people, women are the matriarchs and they’re honored they are in charge of nurturance."

For other artists, ethnic cultures are more overtly oppressive to women’s sense of self and they actively critique traditions of male dominance in their communities. Annu Palakunnathu Matthew ironically draws on images from South Asian popular culture (movie posters, advertisements) in photographs that question gender norms from a woman’s perspective: "All my posters are created from situations that I personally experienced as a woman living and growing up in India.  I use Indian movie posters as reflections of the melodrama of stereotypical Indian life." In OK for Sex, Matthew interrogates the position of brides as commodities in a South Asian diasporic context, and criticizes the suppression of female sexual expression: "In India when a woman gets married she rmust be untouched and a virgin. If she isn’t it it affects her rating in the arranged marriage market. Whereas a man can have affairs and the same people consider this OK. According to them, he will then be able to give his virginal bride a better time. I find this to be a double standard." Meiling Horm lyrically communicates the tragic consequences of misogynist beliefs in her family’s traditional Chinese culture, embodied in the proverb, "When fishing for treasure, don’t pull out a girl." A reference to the traditional practice of "fjshing" for errant objects carried away during annual floods. "For me," Hom comments, "it made connections with other Chinese sayings like, ‘It’s better to raise geese than daughters,’ just because the daughter would always be leaving the family and it was a useless investment to spend too much time on them. I’ve been thinking of all the unwanted Chinese daughters. When you grow up female in traditional Chinese culture, it’s hard to have a sense of self. But I can remake that identity and that past that I come out of, and the history that it carries with it." Hom "remakes" this proverb through a stunning installation in which clay heads, round and smooth like river stones, are positioned or the floor while a prickly screen of thistles suspended over them blocks their access to a warm, rosy, open space above.

Other artists focus on larger power dynamics of race and gender in American society that colonize women of color through stereotypes, invisibility, or actual physical victimization. Soraida Martinez’s vivid a playful oil figure, Puerto Rican Stereotype, mocks larger stereotypes of Latinas as flamboyant sexual objects, while Ayanah Moor’s Beauty Quiz draws on the iconography of minstrelsy to question standards of beauty that privilege whiteness by valuing straight blond hair and blue eyes. According to Moor, these standards are insidious, even in African American folk culture, and support a sense of inferiority among black women. "Hair is a very big deal in African American community," she comments, "How long will women continue to make getting your hair relaxed a rite of passage for their daughters? One's parents may not even realize the message that are being sent regarding hair.... My dad and I poke fun at people who get their hair relaxed and after a couple of weeks the natural texture of their hair starts to grow back. We always joke, you can straighten it all you want but Mother Africa keeps coming back."

In some cases, expressing a strong sense of self as ethnic women or women of color itself constitutes a resistance to dominant, racially inflected gender norms. Recalling that her mother and other female relatives encouraged her to pinch her nose to make it less flat and more "white," Marissa Maximo celebrates the alternative beauty aesthetics of her Filipina grandmother in Grandma’s Pantyhose: "Grandnta would wear purple and rust together and it wouldn’t matter." Beautiful images of often-marginalized women are central to the works of Rosetta Williams, whose quiet watercolors reveal the dignity of African American women’s bodies. According to Williams, black women are "considered sexual objects but not love objects." In Waiting for Anna, which portrays a classically posed pregnant nude, Williams conveys "a love for black women." As she points out, "I try and show in my artwork a love of our bodies as they are. As they move, as they live...There’s a rhythm and a grace in our bodies that has nothing to do with sex." This sense of beauty is also echoed in Barbara Bullock’s Beauty Parlor, which celebrates "the beauty of African American women."

Finally, Yasmin Hernandez, who protests the United States’ colonization of Puerto Rico in U.S. Colonial Penitentiary, reminds us that when ethnic women artists assert their claims to selfhood, they are uniquely positioned to unravel the interlocking identities, oppressions, and ironies of race, gender and ethnicity in the United States. Locating herself within a lineage of Puerto Rican female revolutionaries, Hernandez also combats male dominance in her own community, explicitly linking sexual objectification with political and cultural dominance to claim a strong sense of self: "As a woman I always believe that it’s the most oppressed who will react. And I think that within my culture it’s always the women who are most oppressed, by our fathers, by our brothers, by sons, by boyfriends, by husbands, and by machismo. It was my father who opened my eyes to all this stuff, and I completely owe my debt to him. But freshman year at Cornell when I start doing all these political paintings, I remember he came to visit me and he said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And then he looked at me and said, ‘You have such a pretty smile, I think you’d make a good stewardess.’ So it was this complete turnaround...Without people realizing it, I am following in the footsteps of tradition, except that machismo tries to subvert that and keep that quiet. It is this same patriarchal system that masters the role of tyrant oppressor, as did Spain and the U.S."

Kathryn Wilson has a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently works as Public Programming Coordinator at the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies in Philadelphia.

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**Editor's Note**

This article originally appeared in the Winter 1998/99 issue of Perspective (1, & 4-5) published by the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies.  We express our gratitude to the author and the Balch Institute for allowing us to reprint this article.  Unfortunately we are not able to include here the samples of artwork that are included in the original article.  You may contact the author for a copy of the original article.

Recommended Citation in the APA style:

Wilson, K. (1999). Engendering a Sense of Self. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education [online], 1(3), 8 paragraphs. <Available: http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/1999summer/wilson.html> [your access year, month date]

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