"Dance Around the Monkey"

Dance Around the Monkey –

In the United States, the term “monkey” when referring to a person, carries overt racial prejudice aimed specifically at black people and implies that our large facial features and dark skin are more closely related to our evolutionary cousins. In Asia, the term “monkey” when referring to a person describes someone who disrupts the harmony of a situation. In the context of American history, the disruptors were predominantly white as evidenced by the lasting impact and current conditions of the African-American, Native-American and Latin-American communities among others. Globally, the disruption of harmony all indigenous groups suffered historically came by the hands of white conquerors. For this reason, I have chosen to paint white monkeys in familiar situations with African American men. White monkeys are predominantly native to Asia but in this series of paintings represent “Americans” from the “African-American” vantage. This work is a reimaging of \”who\” a monkey could be and recontextualization of an overtly prejudiced term that simultaneously interrogates and audits language used contemporarily.