Link: Five female artists you should invest in now

I’m in this Australian online article pitched at art collectors. I use gender neutral pronouns (and haven’t used my birth name in years) but am exhausted with explaining this at length to every journalist, and newspapers often survey ‘female artists’ together, and so these are the compromises I choose.

I am much more distressed finding out, now that the article is online, that one of the other artists is Sarah Contos, who makes culturally appropriative work that needs a trigger warning especially for black and Native people. I won’t post images here but the article shows one of her -relatively- less offensive ‘exotic’ images.

It’s all about Thanks-taking with this artist and “her interest in tribal influences as seen through the use of Navajo jingle cones, Maasi (sic) beads and other reconfigurations of ‘tribal aesthetics"  (from a previous exhibition description). Why are white female artists getting profiled for this kind of work instead of Indigenous and black female artists?  I mean, I know why, but it’s frustrating being a model minority in this mix, making work about cultural and colonial legacies. And I’m sighing again that the journalist is also brown. 

Here’s a link to the piece I wrote a little while back 

“Contemporary art and the cutting edge of cultural appropriation”. I might just have to repost it every week for my own health. 

PS I do love Hiromi Tango’s work who is also featured. I still have some of her intricate treasures she gave me years ago when in Melbourne for a show I curated her in at Brunswick Bound.