Joyous multiracial kids brighten California photo exhibit
VIDEO - From The LA Times - Multiracial children and their parents tell their honest, personal stories in the new California photography exhibit, "Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids"...
From Karen Wada, The Los Angeles Times:
The kids in these photographs don’t look like they belong in a museum. They’re having too much fun. They gloat and grin, share secrets and show off their retainers and rock collections.
“I wanted to capture them exactly as they are,” says artist Kip Fulbeck. ” ‘If they liked soccer,’ I told them, ‘Bring a ball.’ ‘If you’re a goof be a goof.’ I just wanted to avoid that posed Christmas card thing.”
Most of all, Fulbeck wanted to give these children – all of whom are of mixed racial heritage – the freedom to answer the simple but potentially fraught question: “Who are you?”
Which is why the UC Santa Barbara art professor created Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids,> an exhibition that opens this weekend at the Japanese American National Museum downtown. The museum is an apt location for the show because it’s estimated nearly one-third of Japanese Americans are of mixed ancestry. The museum also hosted the premiere of Fulbeck’s first multiracial exhibit, “Part Asian, 100% Hapa,” in 2006.
[…]
Fulbeck, 44, says the main inspiration for his latest project was the birth of his son, Jack, who just turned 1. Also, he says, he liked that “kids have a certain honesty that eludes adults” – especially when it comes to race. Where the statements in “Hapa” might be political, poetic or self-categorizing, the children wrote or drew about what they liked to do or how they felt.
“That’s how they tell you who they are,” Fulbeck says. “One kid said, ‘I’m a little boy that has no friends.’ You’d be hard-pressed to find adults who’d say that.”
Continue to the full article at The Los Angeles Times website.
Mixed> runs Mar. 20 through Sept. 26, 2010 in Los Angeles, CA.
WATCH PARENTS AND CHILDREN FROM THE “MIXED” EXHIBIT ON THE TODAY SHOW
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