Fine Art- Culture Series

Here are a couple pictures of a fine art series I am doing right now on Culture. The idea came to me looking at my past, and now my future and where I am at in my life. Unfortunately, in my naive world, I always assumed people's ethnicity. I quickly realized through experiences that you cannot define ones ethnicity based on their appearance. Since then, I have married into a family that is rich in culture. They are Bolivian, some Italian, etc. My eyes were open to a world where I began realizing that you never really know what culture a person can be. My own husband has been thought to be lots of different ethnicities. In our society today, we tend to lump a group of people into one place. Somehow, in our naive minds, every Asian is Chinese, every Latin American is Mexican, every Native American are Indians (even though the Indian culture is it's own and entirely different), and we are terrified of those that are Muslims. We should recognize that we shouldn't pass judgment on what we don't know. The point of my project was to take one woman and dress her in a way that represents a certain culture. In the four pictures shown here, she is portrayed as a Muslim, Native American, Guatemalan, and Samoan. The clothing is all authentic. In the Samoan portrait, that is a real Samoan Headdress that was given to me to use. The point is that you don't know what culture this woman really is, as she is portrayed in each picture. We should recognize that within each of us, there are bits and pieces of lots of different cultures. I hope to make people realize that we should stay far from labeling people because most likely we are very wrong and mistaken. Just like the majority won't be sure which culture this woman is actually associated with.