White Anxieties

September 21-October 13, 2018

Curated by Raul Zamudio and Juan Puntes with Peter Wayne Lewis

Since the twenty-first century, the U.S. seems to be in a state of accelerated social transformation and this has been cause for alarm for many conservative, White Americans. One of the most notable benchmarks of these changes is Barack Obama’s election as America’s first African-American president. Researchers also predict that in the coming decades, Latinos/Hispanics will be the largest demographic in the U.S. superseding the current White majority. Other communities that have been historically marginalized and now ostensibly asserting their rights including LGBTQ, have added to the perception that we are living in a different America than in the past. Another phenomenon altering the American social landscape is the influx of immigrants that some construe as potentially usurping the purported dominant culture and its traditions. Even Donald Trump’s campaign slogan of Make America Great Again, subliminally harks back to a reactive era of intolerance and exclusivity.

White Anxieties is a mixed media, international group exhibition that takes the pulse of what haunts the conservative, American psyche. That is, an anxiety-inducing America that is less white, heterosexual, and male, and where other languages than English are spoken and where People of Color can openly express their cultural traditions without accusations of not being “real” Americans. Some works in the exhibition, for example, address the dismantling of Confederate monuments, the problematics of assimilation, and xenophobia’s prevalence while others target the most disturbing manifestation of American socio-political regression and of an America historically unresolved: David Duke and acolytes who run for political office while attempting to normalize their racial supremacist ideology.