The artist wrote on Instagram: ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Does that include blackface?’
Oh dear. The artist Glenn Ligon has discovered some surprising points of apparent similarity between his work and … the paintings of Rachel Dolezal.
‘Art by Rachel…. Rachel Dolezal, that is,’ Ligon wrote on Instagram, accompanied by an image of Dolezal’s painting Anthology. ‘Well, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Does that include blackface? Just asking. #distress-textured’.
Ligon’s own text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, explore the intersections between language and African American history, drawing on the writings of figures such as Zora Neale Hurston and Jesse Jackson.
Dolezal, formerly a teacher and civil rights activist, was revealed in 2015 to be a white woman, despite ‘identifying’ as black. Less commented on at the time, perhaps, was her artmaking – which is often concerned with African American identity – though some have pointed out similarities between her painting The Shape of Our Kind and J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship.
