Street Roots • Sept. 30-Oct. 6, 2016
News
Page 7
IF YOU GO
White
like
them
I Am My White Ancestors
An installation by Anne Mavor
Now through Oct. 28
Monday-Friday from 9 a.m. to 5.p.m.
Alexander Gallery inside the
Niedmeyer Center
Clackamas Community College
19600 Molalla Ave.
Oregon City
Join Anne Mavor at the exhibit:
Evening Reception Thursday,
Oct. 13 at 6:30 p.m.
Gallery Talk Tuesday, Oct. 25 at
7 p.m.
Bring your smartphone and ear buds
to listen to the audio diaries at
annemavor.com/audio-diaries
Anne Mavor
examines racism and
classism through the
lens of her ancestors
BY EMILY GREEN
STAFF WRITER
A nne Mavor was hoping to collaborate
/ % with a Native American artist for her
X JL next big project when she had a rude
awakening.
She was sitting among a predominantiy-
white audience at Portland State
University’s Native American Student and
Community Center when all of a sudden it
felt like the woman on stage was speaking
directly to her..
“You need to go back and find your own
people and claim your own people,” she
remembers the woman commanding the
crowd.
Mavor is a white women of Northern
European descent, and her project was
intended to be an exploration of sacred
sites.
She decided in that moment to drop the
idea and start over.
“That was appropriation,” she said,
looking back. She felt she was about to do
what white people have been doing to
Native Americans for 500 years: use them
for her own purposes, she said.
She began to ponder, “What if I turn it
around? What would it look like if I claimed
my people?”
Mavor lives in Northeast Portland’s Cully
neighborhood in a cohousing condo
community with her husband, Dennis Karas.
Now in her mid-60s, she decided to
concentrate on creating her social justice-
focused artwork full time shortly before
being laid off from her job as a graphic
designer in 2011. A decision she was able to
make, in part, due to her heritage.
Her new project would take three years.
To start, she researched her lineage and
carefully selected ancestors who
participated in different forms of oppression
throughout the past two millennia, seeking
to discover why they participated in
authoritarian acts against others.
Among the relatives she selected were
two slave owners in South Carolina - one
was her great-great-grandmother. She also
selected a Scottish farmer who sat on a jury
that convicted two women of witchcraft. She
said she wanted to understand why he might
PHOTO BY EMILY GREEN
Above, Anne Mavor with one of her works as part of her exhibit, “I Am
My White Ancestors: Claiming the Legacy of Oppression.” At right, Mavor
poses as John Salley, one of many characters from her family history.
choose to send two women in his
community to their deaths.
While they exercised their power over
others, many of her ancestors were facing
their own oppression at the same time.
Sibylla D’Anjou, for example, had to trade a
religious relic for her freedom, however she
did so after willfully participating in a
crusade that colonized Jerusalem.
Mavor pieced together information she
gleaned from documents on Ancestry.com,
poured over photos and letters from her
family’s early American history, and studied
the customs, common beliefs and historical
events taking place around each person she
selected - she wanted to illustrate how each
person’s environment may have affected his
or her worldview.
The resulting art installation, “I Am My
White Ancestors: Claiming the Legacy of
Oppression,” serves as a thought-provoking
tour through her ancestors’ perpetuation of
slavery, genocide and persecution.
Thirteen photographic self-portraits
depict Mavor as she embodies different
characters in her family’s history, and then
finally as herself in her art studio.
In each image she’s outfitted in a period
costume she’s designed complete with
professional hair and makeup.
Accompanying each panel is an imagined
autobiographical audio
diary entry that serves
as a glimpse into each
person’s perspective on
the oppressions they
were both perpetuating
and subjected to
themselves.
The exhibit is open
and free to the public at
the Alexander Gallery
inside the Niedmeyer
Center now through
October 28 on
weekdays. Bring your
smartphone and ear buds to listen to the
audio diaries on Mavor’s website:
annemav0r.com/ audio-diaries.
She will also host two evening receptions
on Oct. 25 and 28, where she will discuss
what she’s learned about oppression, both
from the creation of her exhibit and from 20
years of re-evaluation counseling practices
that she said have helped her to recognize
her own experiences with oppression.
Mavor’s exhibit begs the question: Can
Americans of European descent have an
honest conversation about the racism and
oppression without first acknowledging the
racism and oppression perpetuated by their
own bloodline?
PHOTO COURTESY OF ANNE MAVOR
“What I’m trying to do is model what it
looks like to learn about it, explore it,
acknowledge it and accept responsibility,”
she said. “I think it’s a process to become
reconciled. In a way, I don’t want to become
reconciled, I want to be outraged and grief
stricken at what happened.”
She explained that Caucasians are often
raised thinking of their race as the default
setting, almost like a non-identity.
“But it’s not the default. It’s an identity,
with'a lot of stuff that came along with it, so
it’s important to identify it, describe it and
understand it,” she said, “on the way to
giving it up.”
emily@streetroots. org