Damali Ayo Presents at PSU
Damali Ayo spoke to “the realities of what it means to be an activist artist, a feminist anti-racism performance artist” on October 30th, opening the Bitch Magazine Feminism and Pop Culture Series at the Smith Memorial Ballroom. Ayo’s willingness to speak to her observations about race relations started at an early age, as she showed us in a insightful and highly engaging slideshow of her work, starting with the multicultural Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls she brought to her preschool as a child.
Her oeuvre includes panels of paint matched from the flesh tones of various parts of her own body and audio tapes of the paintmixers’ conversations with her, presented at the Seattle Center of Contemporary Art in 2003; name tags that read “Hi, My Race Is…” and were to be filled out as white, black or other at gallery openings (I believe she said the Mark Wolley gallery) through 2001-02; and perhaps most famously, her Rent-a-Negro website where you could allegedly hire a person of color for services such as tolerating your racist relative, now a book as well. Throughout her career, she has aimed to “create a cognitive dissonance in our collective unconsciousness.”
She also is retiring however—it’s not easy doing this sort of work. Some of the examples of hate mail she showed us were truly appalling, and she has suffered from chronic fatigue for years in addition to PTSD from a sexual assault she survived as a young woman. Still, I can’t help but think she’ll be missed.
Tags: activist, Bitch Magazine, Danali Ayo, feminist, performance, Portland, Portland State University, PSU, race relations, racism