Mulheron: Artist Statement

*I feel as if this may change but its what I have at this point.

In general, my work focuses on different aspects of my personal identity, whether racial, sexual or gender. This body of work focuses specifically on my experience and critique of being multi-racial, more specifically as “mulatto”. “Mulatto” is defined in many different ways depending on where you read and was originally an offensive term echoing the offspring of a mule and a donkey. Basically, it is a person of mixed white and black ancestry. To my knowledge, my mother is Swedish, German and French and my father is African-American, Cherokee Indian and a small percentage Irish. So my “hyphenated ethnicities” are Swedish-German-French-Irish-African/Indian American. I do not feel as if I am drawn to any particular culture and am interested what expectations are placed on being culturally black or white. There are social pressures to choose a side when one is multi-racial. Growing up with my white mother and my white stepfather left my sister and I looking as if we were adopted. That was the assumption and we had to prove otherwise. Some multi-racial people decide to identify as one particular race. What if I wanted to identify as white? My mother is white, so technically I am one-half Caucasian. But my skin is dark so I would have to identify as black. But I am more than that. I feel as if I straddle binaries, existing in this area of neutrality that neither represents or is a part of anything specific. If you are not black, and you are not white, then what are you? The “what are you?” question follows me daily. My secondary research focuses on bi-raciality, multi-raciality, the idea of the mulatto, racial binaries, as well as the idea of the “Other”. I hope to make a universal statement for and about the multi-racial person. In such a contemporary world you would think that it would be something more accepted, since it is more common.