WHITE POWER (REWOP ETIHW)
Artist/Culture
Michael Ray Charles
(American, born 1967)
Date1994
Mediumetching, aquatint, drypoint, and spit bite with hand coloring on cream Arches wove paper
Dimensionsplate (irregular): 40.3 x 30.1 cm (15 7/8 x 11 7/8 in.)
sheet: 76.2 x 55.9 cm (30 x 22 in.)
sheet: 76.2 x 55.9 cm (30 x 22 in.)
ClassificationsPrints
MarkingsUnidentified chop, l.r.; Watermark: ARCHES/FRANCE (with infinity symbol)
Credit LineHelen Sagoff Slosberg Fund
Object number1998.186
Label TextCharles is an interdisciplinary artist best known for appropriating 19th- and 20th-century racist caricatures of Blackness from American popular culture, including advertisements, billboards, and TV commercials. In both of these prints, he reverses the text in an attempt to subvert derogatory stereotypes. According to Charles, reversal creates an empty, backward icon that no longer holds true.
Early in his career, Charles started placing a penny heads-up and upside-down into each of his works. For Charles, flipping the coin’s portrait upends President Abraham Lincoln’s standing as the sole emancipator of the enslaved in the United States. Here, pennies were embossed into the paper in the lower right of WHITE POWER.
ProvenancePurchased from Gottheiner, Ltd., St. Louis, MOOn View
Not on view
