EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS: Youngstown State holds taxpayer-funded '#notwhite collective' art exhibit
The '#notwhite collective' features 13 female artists who 'seek liberation through sharing space and stories.'
One of the displays stated, 'Both Brasil and the US are antiblack regimes built on stolen land and colonized but [sic] supremacists who enslaved my people.'
A public university in Ohio recently hosted an anti-white exhibit at its campus art museum.
During the fall 2023 semester, Youngstown State University’s McDonough Museum of Art displayed the artwork of the “#notwhite collective” from Sept. 5 to Nov. 4.
“The #notwhite collective is a group of 13 women artists whose mission is to use non-individualistic, multi-disciplinary art to make our stories visible as we relate, connect, and belong to the Global Majority,” the group’s website states.
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“We are bi/multi-racial/cultural, immigrant or descendants of immigrants investigating the many ways we are seen or not seen, how we self-identify and how we seek liberation through sharing space and stories; research and art-making; discussing the history of imperialism and its effect on us, on the whole not-white world,” it continues. “We actively reject colonialism through our non-hierarchical process.”
The museum featured several exhibits from the group, including one entitled “LIEbrary.” It consisted of an altered library street sign with the phrases “liebrary” and “take off your privilege” painted on it while hanging over a stack of history books. The latter was also painted in acrylic on glass in another exhibit titled, “Take Off Your Privilege.”
The displays were the work of Dr. Amber Epps, an adjunct professor at La Roche University and writer who notes on her personal website, “I am a powerful, weird situation.”
Another of Epps’ works, titled “DNT C CLR Redux,” consisted of a street sign altered to read “Color Blind Person” situated above glasses with painted white lenses. The glasses were painted with the phrase, “DNT C CLR.”
A placard near Epps’ exhibit read, “The perfect frames for those who claim they don’t see color. Here ya go…”
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A framed photograph titled, “The Future is Decolonized,” credited to activist Liana Maneese in collaboration with Sarah Huny Young, was also displayed at the museum.
The exhibit’s placard read, “The merging of families, of culture and color, interracial and immigrant, in any era is to be celebrated in a country that has done nothing but wanted you dead spiritually and physically - Both Brasil and the US are antiblack regimes built on stolen land and colonized but [sic] supremacists who enslaved my people and continue to commit atrocities daily with no accountability.”
Maneese is also a licensed counselor who works “through a lens of Somatic Abolitionism, structural oppression, racial formation, and intersectional feminist theories,” according to her LinkedIn profile.
According to the YSU website, “These exhibitions are made possible in part by state tax dollars allocated by the Ohio Legislature to the Ohio Arts Council.”
Campus Reform contacted Youngstown State University and all artists mentioned for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
