Artist Michaela Pilar Brown. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)

Before one of her works was pulled from an exhibition at the Harvey B. Gantt Center, former artist-in-residence Michaela Pilar Brown had to face a bigger censor: herself.

The decision by Gantt officials she understood — the image, after all, contained frontal nudity, and the center has school-age visitors. Self-censorship, however, she could not understand.

Brown — a resident of Coulmbia, S.C., and a graduate of Howard University who uses photography, performance art, painting and more to explore everything from cultural hierarchies related to beauty to the challenges of race and gender — had always considered herself fearless. But the sexual content in her work had her filled with apprehension.

“I had a conversation with [Gantt’s former] Creative Director Ce Scott,” says Brown, whose residency started in September and recently wrapped in late November. “And she [told me to], you know, move forward. It didn't take me long to step back inside myself, and I began to push the images again.”

Brown pushed out “The Battle of Bo Derek,” which depicts a miniature black doll riding the back of a black Barbie, who holds a tangle of braids in one hand and a machine gun in the other. Brown says she wanted to talk about cultural appropriation. “Often, those things that are beautiful and worthy about us are talked down to us but appropriated by the mainstream culture and sold back to us,” she says.

"Speak No" — art by Michaela Pilar Brown.

“Prior to that image, braided hair was referred to as ‘pickaninny,’ and then Bo Derek is wearing cornrows and suddenly it's popular,” she continues, “so there is this idea that [African Americans] are not valuable, but secretly everyone wants to be us.”

After hearing about the SlutWalk, organized by a group of feminists in New York, Brown pushed out “Speak No,” too. The photo collage features Brown in blackface, a row of green toy soldiers sprouting from her scalp like unruly hair. The miniature doll sits on her shoulder; her lips are studded with rows of red dots in the shape of an “X.” The piece, says Brown, deals with “the silencing of the black feminist.”

“In the crowd [of protesters] was a woman carrying a sign that said 'Women are the Niggers of the World,’” she says. “And I thought, 'Here we are, 40 years into the feminist movement in this country, and black women are still being asked to check their blackness at the door; still being asked to choose between the battle for gender equality or the battle for racial equality.”

Brown says her stint as an artist-in-residence at the Gantt helped her to engage a larger audience in a discourse about her work, and gave her insight to the symbols that were working and those that were not. “I found myself answering questions about the work that I had not answered before,” she says.

With the residency behind her, she is gearing up for a busy 2012: two shows — at the FAB Gallery and Trustus Theatre — in South Carolina next February, and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in March. The Gantt Center will display Brown's works in June alongside its next artist-in-resident, Rashaad Newsome. In the summer, she will also teach a photography course at Columbia College, followed by a solo exhibition in the fall.

For more information, visit www.michaelapilarbrown.com.
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Editor's Note: This article was created as part of the Charlotte Arts Journalism Alliance, a consortium of local media dedicated to writing about the arts scene.

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