Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America

From Introduction: "The cross-cultural process is a recalcitrant, elusive subject, and I have tried to respect is urgency without succumbing entirely to its contradictions. This book's title, 'Mixed Blessings,' is an ambivalent play on the possibilities of an intercultural world that reflects not doubt about its value, but a certain anxiety about the forms it could take. Although the book concentrates on art made in the United States, the 'America' of the subtitle refers to the entire hemisphere. Each chapter is defined by a gerund because the gerund (from the Latin 'to carry on') is the grammatical form of process. The first chapter is 'Naming.' It is about self-naming and being labeled, about coming to terms with self-representation, despite the shape-shifting identities most of us are forced to assume. The next chapter is 'Telling,' about history, family, religion, and storytelling. It looks back to where the intercultural process began and weighs the burdens of the past on the present. 'Landing' is about roots and points of departure, about taking place and being displaced. The fourth chapter, 'Mixing,' is about 'mestizaje,' or miscegenation -- the double-edged past of rape and colonization, the double-edged future of a new and freely mixed world. The last chapter is 'Turning Around,' about subversion and trickery, the uses of humor and irony by which subjugated people survive. The brief postface is 'Dreaming,' proof that this subject has no conclusion. ***** I want to make it clear from the outset that this book is not a survey of art from Native, African, Asian, and Latino American communities. It is not a book 'about' artists of color in the United States. The art reproduced here demonstrates the ways in which cultures see themselves and others; it represents the acts of claiming turf and crossing boundaries 'now', in 1990, two years before the 500th anniversary of Columbus's accidental invasion of the Americas. Most specifically, it deals with the ways cross-cultural activity is reflected in the visual arts, what traces are left by movements into and out of the so-called centers and margins. This is not intended as a book about 'the Other,' but a book about the common 'anotherness.' Thinking about crossing cultures makes us look more closely at our own environments. Most of us cross cultural borders every day, usually unconsciously. Assuming a dynamic rather than a passive role for the arts in society, one of my goals is to raise these daily encounters -- at least in the realm of language and imagery -- to a conscious level."

Covers minority art, lots of colored pictures and artist comments/barriers in representation and discrimination. A must read for all artists.