October 2005 - lately, I've begun to wonder whether Pope.L was right. Not about the yellow shoe stuff - I still think a shoe is a shoe. But I am beginning to explore whether one person can ever fully comprehend what someone else experiences. These cards were the start of my new exploration. The piece of art was sliced up and mailed as postcards to fifteen different mail artists throughout the world. Some will know they're only getting a small piece of something bigger. Others will have no idea there's anything but what they hold in their hands.

I Am As Black As a Yellow Shoe

MAY 2005 - Below is a collection of postcards that I made and sent to renowned performance artist William Pope.L. They were created in response to his piece The Black Factory. Let me be clear about the fact that I enjoy his work very much but don't always entirely agree with his position.

In the the documentary that accompanies the Black Factory installation there's a section entitled "A White Woman After Some Difference" in which I am shown debating the relationship (or lack thereof) between race, in this case "blackness," or as he prefers to call it "difference," and inanimate objects. The actual discussion, which took place in 2004 outside the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, lasted about twenty minutes and was with one of the Bates College students who was working on the project. Only a few minutes were edited into the video and the discussion centers largely around a yellow shoe - how it may or may not be considered a "black object." When I walked away from the Black Factory Truck I found myself muttering "I am as black as a yellow shoe." It stuck with me.

Pope.L used segments of my conversation in the video out of context. I was disappointed but not surprised. After all, he was trying to make his point. And I agree with him that issues of race are (globally) important. I just don't support his premise.

I chose to respond using postcards as my form of expression because that is a comfortable medium for me, plus I learned after reading Pope.L's self-titles book subtitled, The Friendliest Black Artist in America, that he once sent out a batch of postcards that said "I am still Black." Postcards seemed perfect.

The interesting thing is that after creating the first one or two, the postcards ceased to be about Pope.L and his work but were instead a way for me to explore and process my own attitudes about race, value, and the ways in which humans assign meaning to a host of (meaningless) things.

Strangely, in the profound way art can change one's thinking, there were instances when I was convinced that he is totally off base and then there were other moments when I was certain, almost afraid, that he was horribly right. All in all it was a great experience for me. Even though it wasn't about him anymore, or his work, I mailed one card a day to Mr. Pope.L at Bates College where he is a professor of, of all things, rhetoric. (I think that's the academic's term for "blah, blah, blah." ;-)

I don't know whether he received any of them. It doesn't really matter. I would like to some day have lunch with him though and hear more about his work and his creative process. I like what he's trying to do, I just disagree that it's necessarily about race; I often think we're more often judged on wealth. Which I realize still puts the non-Caucasian communities at a disadvantage but it sort of changes what the arguments are about - and what the solutions might be.

I will likely add more information about this project in the future, including the funny story about how I even came to see the installation video in the first place at Mass MoCA

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