Exhibition: Re/Presenting: Art Beyond the Color Line

Re/Presenting: Art Beyond the Color Line is a year-long project to reinterpret Mead collections, posing critical questions about making and consuming art in a multiracial democracy. The exhibition brings together a wide range of work from the 18th century to the present, by artists from Brazil, France, Haiti, India, Japan, North America, and Tibet, as well as art made throughout the year by students at Wildwood Elementary School and visitors to the exhibition. It explores art that creates, affirms, and challenges ideas of beauty, value, power, and presence.

Re/Presenting takes inspiration from EmbraceRace's innovative curriculum Drawing Differences. The curriculum provides a framework for addressing the underrepresentation of diverse characters in children's drawings through hands-on activities that encourage a wide range of depictions of skin colors, hair textures, and facial features. The organizers of Re/Presenting aim to hold space for visitors to think critically, feel fully, and be active participants in making art that is compassionate and true. The interactive exhibition at the Mead invites people of all ages and backgrounds to think deeply and expansively about the role of color, heritage, and media representation–in and beyond art on view in a museum–in shaping powerful political ideas, and to experience an art exhibition by sketching, braiding, sculpting, and talking.