'Undressing Race' through art

“Revolution,” “humanity,” “you are not alone,” “borderless sky” — these slogans decorate T-shirts in the “Undressing Race” exhibit.

The Race Dialogue Project set up a display in the Claudia Cohen Hall Fox Gallery this Sunday. The group aims to foster a dialogue on campus by providing “a magnified look at the layers of race,” College senior and RDP Art Director Jane Shim said.

Featuring work by students and two Philadelphia artists, the exhibit examines the intersection of race and appearance with painted T-shirts, two video art pieces and a photography piece.

“We want to break down the barriers of race and make people more aware that this is something that we need to talk about,” College senior and RDP co-Director Janice Dow said.

Beginning with a T-shirt creating activity during Homecoming, the RDP asked students to create “outer shirts” representing how the outside world perceives their identity and “undershirts” representing what lies beneath that appearance.

“We wanted it to be subversive. Some of them show resentment, happiness … a whole spectrum of emotion,” said Dow, a former Daily Pennsylvanian opinion artist.

College junior and Daily Pennsylvanian photographer Shrestha Singh contributed a series of photographs that reflects “the spectrum of human features,” College junior and RDP co-Director Mansi Kothari said.

The gallery also features a blank white canvas on which visitors are encouraged to write thoughts generated by the artwork. “It’s an alternative to a guest book,” Shim said. This installation represents the RDP theme for the year: “Race Confessions.”

“We’re not just putting on this one-time gallery,” Dow said. “We’re trying to sustain dialogue.”

For College senior and Excelano Project Director Justin Ching, Penn is home to social groups that fail to acknowledge and learn about each other. Since these groups are often formed by racial similarities, “there is a lack of awareness between one group and another,” he said.

Kothari agreed, saying, “People do talk about race at Penn, but it’s within their own ethnicity, their own ethnic groups.”

Micro-aggressions are also a concern on campus. These aggressions can be as small as “when someone’s walking by and they clutch their purse a little tighter because they might be afraid of you,” United Minorities Council Political Chairwoman and College senior Mariama Perry said.

“Although people claim that overt racism doesn’t exist anymore, there are subtle racial prejudices that manifest themselves in every day small-scale interactions and conversations,” Kothari said of micro-aggressions. “It still exists, but in the subtexts.”

“Race conflicts don’t have to be full-blown conflicts,” added Dow, who cited smaller racial aggressions that arise in interactions between friends, especially when there is a “token” ethnicity within a social group.

For Wharton and Nursing senior and UMC Chairman G.J. Melendez-Torres, race remains an issue on campus because “topics when not discussed can be very dangerous.”

“We don’t examine our own bias. We don’t examine the problems inherent in those biases,” Melendez-Torres said. If there is no discussion, “you’ll have a lot of misunderstanding.”

“It’s not just black and white anymore,” RDP Advertising Chairwoman and College sophomore Aya Saed said. “We need to realize what race means in our world, now.”

The exhibit will run until Dec. 8.

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