In the photo Queen Mary, we see an African American woman wearing a crown of big colourful flowers. In one hand, she holds red raisins, and in the other hand, she shows a key. This enigmatic photo is a part of the series The Golden Age, in which Tuscon, Arizona-based photographer-artist Alanna Airitam explores the omission of the identity of people of colour in the official art narrative. "In the museums, I didn't see anyone like me. It felt like a lack of belonging."

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Alanna Airitam investigated the biased representation of history in the official canon of art. She missed the identity of people of colour, especially in the paintings of the Golden Age. "I grew up in New York and spent much of my younger years hanging out in different art spaces and museums. I loved being in those rooms with portraits and still lives. I was drawn to the light, the use of light, and the use of colour. But it always occurred to me that the paintings felt intangible to me. As a young person, I didn't fully understand what that feeling meant or where it was coming from. I felt like I wasn't supposed to be there or see something that wasn't for me. As I got older, I identified that feeling as a lack of belonging. Because I realized that as much as I loved looking at that art, I didn't see anyone like me, and I didn't see anybody like me that worked in those spaces."

This lack of identification also stretched out to the infrastructure of the museums, the staff and the workers. "As I progressed through my career, I started to understand how decisions were made and where the money came from. The people who are in high positions most often are white men. They make decisions about the exhibitions and acquisition of art, and in doing that, they choose people that look like them and feel familiar to them. That's why we see such a disparity of acquisitions between white male artists and black female artists."

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Colour, to me, is life. It is a fundamental underlayer of everything I'm working with.

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The Golden Age

Alanna Airitam started making her series The Golden Age while living in southern California. "I worked for many years in an advertising company, in a corporate field, and I got fed up with the environment and microaggressions in the office. I quit my job and started inviting my friends over to come and sit for portraits because I knew that to feel good for me is to take photos. Picking up the camera for me is my medicine. In the beginning, I had no finalized concept. Every time I made a photo, there was this unfolding of information around why I'm making this work."

Gradually, she became aware of the significance of the project to her and how she would progress. Airitam realized she was amid the turmoil of racist problems in the US. "I'm witnessing all this police brutality. I'm watching black people being hunted down in our country. And here again is the narrative around the lack of worth and belonging. And I just kept feeling like I needed to see something very different in my life. We are not uneducated. We are not unworthy. We are not ugly. And so I wanted to make these portraits because I felt I needed to be able to look at them and say, this is the proof that everything that they're saying is wrong."

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The portraits depict African American people and bear fictitious titles that appear to refer to the background of black people in the US, with connotations of various historical facts. Except for Queen Mary (The Queen) and Dapper Dan, an American fashion designer, the names of the portraits are Saints with reference to either a street name or historical landmark in Harlem, New York, the birthplace of the American Black Renaissance. There is a Saint Abyssinian, named after the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, a Saint Minton, named after Minton’s Playhouse and a Saint Sugar Hill, a national historic district. The flower crown of the series is worn by Queen Mary, named after Mary Thomas, one of the leaders of the labour revolution in the sugar fields on the island of Saint Croix in the Danish West Indies. "What I found interesting in this project was the juxtaposition with the 17^th-century Dutch art centred in Haarlem, Netherlands. The Black Renaissance or Harlem Renaissance happened after the Great Migration when the enslaved people were emancipated, and many moved from the south to the Northern states. In Harlem emerged a new vigorous culture. Langston Hughes wrote beautiful poetry while jazz music and dance evolved. I wanted to pay homage to this renaissance by calling the people in the portraits saints. I wanted to elevate these sitters to that status."

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Colonized Food

Other series are Ghosts, Take a look inside and Colonized Food. About the last series, Airitam explains how she came to the idea of photographing it. "When I bought Food in the store, I started thinking about how many people had to die in order for us to have bananas and our cereals in the morning. Many wars were fought in South America in order for us to have this luxury, this privilege, to be able to eat these fruits. It is easy to eat this Food and not think about it. But I don't want us to forget where we've come from, and I don't want us to forget how privileged we all are to have these things."  

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The photo Take a look inside shows a woman with a book with the same title, referring to the inner life of human beings, in contrast to the outer performance to which humans have to strive. "We easily get caught up with what's being told to us externally, with what we women have to go through; we're being told that we're not worthy or that we're incapable of taking care of our own bodies. We all are being inundated with the messages that we take in and internalize. These messages keeps us from living our full truth, and realizing our full potential. So I tried to embed these little messages throughout my work: remember who you are! Remember how awesome you are!"

Fine art and activist

The work of Alanna Airitam can be inscribed in the world of fine art, but at the same time, it has an activist's connotation. What are her thoughts about art? "I think that art is an effective tool to communicate problematic issues. I believe that art can be used to create a way to have conversations about challenging subjects." The activist side is shown by her work for communities, coming from the urge to create more opportunities for younger people of colour. "I have joined a couple of boards of some great organizations. Oakwood Arts in Richmond, Virginia, does a phenomenal job of providing education and work opportunities for young people in both the fine art field and film. They're giving young people the ability to work on film sets. I'm also on the board of Medium Photo, which offers photography scholarship and portfolio reviews for young black photographers and the neighbouring Mexican border artists coming up into the San Diego area."

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I think that art is an effective tool to communicate problematic issues.

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Colours

What is the meaning of colour to Alanna Airitam? "Colour, to me, is life. It is a fundamental underlayer of everything I'm working with. It is the sense of life and sense of beauty, and sense of growth. And I believe that colour does that when you see it in art, it just comes alive. The political colour is odd, Airatam says, because everybody's skin is made of the same tissue. "I think this racial stuff is so frustrating because it's silly. It's ludicrous. If we want to fight about cultural things, our beliefs, our religious beliefs, the foods we eat or how we raise our children, we can have many differences in that regard. But if we're going to argue over skin tone, it's a waste of time. It's like the most stupid thing to argue about."

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Alanna Airitam (1971) was named on the 2021 Silver List as one of 47 exciting contemporary photographers to follow. She is a 2020 San Diego Art Prize winner and recipient of the 2020 Michael Reichmann Project Grant Award. Her work has been acquired for the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s collection and selections from The Golden Age were recently added to the Center for Creative Photography’s permanent collection.

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