In the bastions of political correctness - where so many are happy to tell us what we can and cannot do - there are thought police, language police and now, it seems, the paint police.
Local artist Amanda PL, 29, has had her first solo show cancelled at a Leslieville gallery after critics slammed her for daring to paint in the style made famous by the late Anishinabe artist Norval Morrisseau when she was a white woman with no aboriginal roots.
The self-appointed guardians of indigenous culture accused her of cultural appropriation - imitating and even bastardizing the symbols, history and art of a race that is not her own. One indigenous artist went so far as to accuse her of cultural genocide.
PL saw her work as an homage to an art form that has long inspired her. Instead, she’s being called a plagiarist and a thief flexing her white privilege.
“A lot of the Aboriginal people had issues with me not being native … I feel like they think that I’m taking away from the culture, but really I’m not,” PL told CBC Radio last week.
“I think it’s a shame to say that an artist can’t create something because they’re not from that race,” she added. “That’s like saying any other culture can’t touch something like abstract art unless you’re white.”
Some other recent edicts by the culture police: Cornrows and dreadlocks can only be worn by someone of African heritage: Justin Beiber was skewered for wearing blond dreads last year. Yoga without its religious roots shouldn’t be commercialized: The University of Ottawa put their free weekly yoga class on hiatus while they consulted over “cultural concerns” that the practice was taken from India, a culture that “experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy.” The weekly class only resumed after the white teacher who’d taught it for eight years was replaced with someone with Indian background.
Yet we live in a mosaic surrounded by cultures from all over the world. The borders between us are fluid and we adopt and borrow and enrich our lives with what speaks to us. Isn’t that something to celebrate - not criticize?
In this case, Visions Gallery caved almost immediately to criticism. Not so the Whitney Museum in New York, where curators of their Biennial exhibit refused calls to take down a controversial work of art that outraged the Culture Vultures.
Cornrows and dreadlocks can only be worn by someone of African heritage
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that's ridiculous--my lady cornrowed her hair several years ago and it looked beautiful, much prettier on her than on any black woman have ever seen
she eventually went back to her former hairstyle(which is beautiful as well)as she just got tired of the cornrow look--no one's going to tell her how to wear her hair
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" the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. "--edmund burke
