'Beauty Beyond the Eye of The Beholder' by Raven D.

In creating my project, I was inspired by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald’s work. Their style consists of vibrant colors or elements that complement the model and accentuate their presence in the piece. For my portrait I chose to adorn the background with sunflowers since it's my favorite flower, taking inspiration from Wiley’s style of using floral accents in his backgrounds. For this project, the materials I used were foam board, acrylic paint, glitter glue, stickers, and magazine cutouts.

My project addresses the themes we’ve been discussing such as how fashion and media influence identity, culture, and societal norms. In my piece, I’ve painted a self-portrait of myself and made a collage out of mixed media within the lens of my glasses. The reason why I chose to make that specific accessory into a collage is to represent and address the exposure of outside influences from the media of fashion and beauty standards. I’ve collaged magazine cutouts of models in fashion and beauty advertisements along with text that society would describe it as. I noticed in a lot of these advertisements, they would mostly consist of non-POC models and hardly any black or POC ones that don’t have features closely resembling Eurocentric ones from face to body type. There was one picture of four models, three of them are non-POC and only one appears to be a POC. I specifically included this in the collage to show how scarce diverse representation in the fashion and beauty industry is. Also how the media has always presented these as the ideal beauty standards, which can be damaging to people’s view of their appearance if they don’t fit them. According to Joanne Finklestein in The Art of Self Invention, she states “Consumption, advertising, fashion and the display of possessions are inextricably attached to the processes of self-invention” (Finklestein, 160). Aside from aesthetics, I was hugely inspired by Wiley and Sherald’s work because of their purpose in creating to showcase and empower Black people in art. Finklestein has stated that “Since then the spread of visual cultures has been rapid and the prominence of the image has made the technical and aesthetic realm of art, design, and representation all the more important.” (Finklestein, 6) 

Representation is and always will be important especially with the way the media construes the world, we need more of it. From learning about other artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, and Amy Sherald who’ve used their art to be the empowering Black representation that we see less of in the art and media world, I’ve truly felt inspired to do the same when I create. Thomas stated in an article titled The Photographed, Collaged, and Painted Muses of Mikalene Thomas by Hyperallergic journalist Carey Dunne that, “By portraying real women with their own unique history, beauty and background, I’m working to diversify the representations of black women in art.”(2) If we see less representation in a certain space we should create add to that space or a newfound one of what’s underrepresented. From what I’ve seen in recent years for modern, the emphasis on inclusiveness and representation is more present than it was before. In Ways of Seeing by John Berger, he states that “We never look at just one thing, we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves”. (Berger, 9). It’s just the beginning and more work needs to be done in creating spaces for representation in art and media.