Gaze at me

- "Advertisements create communities of like-minded individuals. Some advertisements admit to this: they offer membership – become part of the McDonald’s family, join the Stüssy tribe, be part of Qantas world and so on. As such they provide a reassuring identity."

- "Every advertisement is a mystery. Raymond Williams (1983) characterized the advertising industry as magical in that it makes something from nothing, it transforms rhetoric and image into objects and facts."

- "..advertising is not only about retail sales. It is a form of communication that reaches millions of people and promulgates shared values. Advertisements create communities of like-minded individuals."

- "Fashion is also a process that transforms the mundane activities of everyday life into more elaborate and complex aesthetic experiences by altering the emotional investment surrounding the display"

    Portrayals of minorities in the media not only affect how others see them, but it affects how they see themselves. Amy Sherald has done an amazing job with representation of Black people within her art. In an interview she spoke about how her art teacher encouraged her to "paint images that looked like me," and "that I should be my own ideal." Sherald dabbled in American Realism to help her subjects to become universal and mirrors of their viewers who will note them not for their race, but for their familiarity. Amy Sherald had continued to explain how she didn't want her work to be marginalized and be put in a corner because she didn't want the discussion to be solely about identity. "blackness without the gaze of whiteness" is what she had said.

   Kehinde Wiley is a contemporary black painter known for his distinctive portraits. Wiley's subjects are often young black men and women in a photorealist style against a vibrant patterned background. Unlike hiphop's precursors; classical music, jazz, and rock; which have give a historical time frame within art, hiphop continues to be seen merely as entertainment and a cultural hindrance. However, Kehinde Wiley's series of portraits speak specifically to that juxtaposition and reestablishing what is deemed important and when it is deemed as such. Through his art, Wiley is taking control of the narrative.