Margaret Vega

During my Sabbatical, I plan to create a body of work, reflecting influential stereotyping, systematic branding and marketing of bias as it relates to the color labeling of flesh. I propose to create a series of mixed media and installation work reflecting the deliberate, or not, contemporary marketing of the color flesh that encourages a sense of hierarchy, otherness, based on skin color. I plan to contrast these ideas within the context of ancient Rome when the diversity of skin color was a fact of life and racism did not exist as we know it today. I am interested to research the history of polychromy within Roman statuary juxtaposing it with the unsettling question: “if we know these statues were polychromatic, why do they remain lily white in our popular imagination?” Whiteness, Racism And Color In The Ancient World – Forbes2017                                                                                               

As an American, of half Mexican decent, I used a flesh colored crayon during my childhood, the only accepted color of skin, a peachy generic symbol of all humans. This was not the color of my skin. My sense of self developed during these years as did a generation. I came to accept if I wanted to draw a person or self-portrait, I used the flesh crayon. Documenting our investigations with image is intrinsically tied to our intimate knowledge of something. As artists, we use image as carrier of insight; a blueprint into understanding our world; to explain what we see; to see what we cannot. I hope this work will have a comparable truth, provoking awareness as we struggle to understand our differences in being human.                                                                                                                  

As a painter, I will be venturing into the somewhat uncharted territory of installation. I envision this work as a somewhat interactive piece informed by the diverse and dynamic American Academy in Rome experience. This piece will be fluid, blurring organic, transitory/fixed and contained boundaries about bias and perception, while asking the participant to viscerally and physically interact with space and color. The viewer maintains a degree of identity, serving as the comparative element of object, deciding the boundaries invented to divide us into otherness. The participant acts as catalyst; a poetic, didactic reminder; an instrument of change-responsible for the decision, can we ever be flesh neutral?    

I was awarded a Vising Artist and Scholar position at the American Academy in Rome for one month to further develop this idea which grew to include the Roman decree of Damnatio Memoriae, ”the erasing of history”. The experimental work represented on this page was shown as a series of vignettes at the American Academy in Rome in Open Studio 255: “Color Me Flesh, Visual Commentary on the Influential and Systematic Branding of Other”.                                                                                                   

Cleopatra Cabinet prototype