Obscured Identities:

Let’s take a look at these four items. What do they have in common? What are their differences?

These four objects are held at the Tufts University Art Gallery Collection in Medford, MA. Connected to these objects are 72 identifiers used by the gallery to catalog and keep track of these items, such as creator name, region of birth, ethnicity, and donor name. Not every object has all its identifiers complete. The four objects above each have about 20 identifiers recorded. Regardless of this limited information, each tells a unique story: its origin as a work of art, its place of creation, and its categorization within TUAG’s collections management system, PastPerfect.

As we explore each object, let’s begin to consider what is missing in the way its identity has been categorized. Does this limit our understanding of this object on its own, and within the collection? If so, does this limited view of these objects constrict our accessibility to them? As individuals, as a Tufts community, and beyond? Welcome to this exhibition.

You might have been reminded of the Great Seal of the United States. Below is an early version of the Seal from the 18th century. What differences do you notice between the two works?

One major difference is the artwork on the left features a lot more text than the seal. This is important. Let’s take a closer look at the text.

​Notice to Police Officers and Prosecutors. I do not wish to answer any questions without speaking to an attorney. I wish to speak to my attorney now. If you need my consent for any search or for any other procedure, I will not give it until I have spoken to my attorney. I will not waive any of my constitutional rights.

Have you heard this before? What do you think it means?

The embroidered words state the Miranda Rights but from the first-person perspective rather than the second. Listen to the Miranda Rights here:

Why do you think the artist chose to use the first person?

Here’s what one of our classmates thought:

“Homeland Sweet Homeland makes me feel tense, almost uneasy. There is a lot of weight in the words embroidered here and that weight has become all too familiar for many Americans. I have never had to utter these words in my life nor can I ever relate to the individuals and families who have had to say it before, but I feel disappointment when I look at this piece and I think my disappointment makes me feel even more sad in a way.” - Jane

The title Homeland Sweet Homeland calls attention to the idea of home. What does this tell you about the artist’s feelings about his home?

Are “nationality” and “home” the same? Are they different? Does your notion of home feel connected to larger aspects of your identity? Who might the artist be? And what might they be trying to say?

Here’s what the Gallery’s database says about the artist …

Name: Nari Ward Gender: Man Region: Latin America/Caribbean Race: Black Country: Jamaica Culture: Jamaican-American

Here’s what the artist has said about himself …

Having relocated to New Jersey, and later to Harlem, New York, from St. Andrew, Jamaica at the age of 12, Nari Ward's life experience and artistic practice tell us a story that doesn't fit into the binary categorizations commonly used to manage museum collections.

Given the clear frustrations with the American justice system that Ward articulates in this piece, isn’t it a bit odd the object’s data entry classifies Ward’s “country” as solely Jamaica? Yes, he was born in Jamaica, and this would definitely shape his experience.

By understanding the complexities of Ward’s identity, we can better ponder how home is or isn’t tied to nationality, in Ward’s case and in our own.

“It was this really special place – and maybe created this hyper-idealised expectation for what Harlem was. I got dropped into that and fell in love with that mythology and in some ways wanted to re-immerse myself in it. Then there is this image of Harlem as a destination for immigrants from the south, but also from the Caribbean. New York is called the Big Apple, Harlem is called the Big Mango. A lot of people don’t know that.” - Nari Ward on his home

This isn’t the only thing we’re missing about “Best in Hair Cut.”

The TUAG database says that Justice’s work is culturally African; yet we can at least confirm that the work is specifically Ghanaian. So why reduce this culture to a broad continental label?

… so how has colonization also affected Justice’s work?

One example is in its title. The title “Best in Hair Cut” is written in English, the lingua franca of Ghana since 16th-century colonial rule. Lingua franca refers to a language used “to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect.” Which means that in conversations not relating to trade, one of the 70 tribal groups’ languages are used. What did the barber shop want to express or communicate by writing in English?

Yet, when we look at where Ofoni’s work has been displayed on campus, much of that community aspect is lost.

The piece is isolated and disconnected from its home; the work is reduced to its color, its characters and with no context, the stories we make about it are simplified. Tufts’s narrative of Ofoni’s piece shifted its meaning from a marker of community-centered places of growth and connection, to an object for constant white consumption.

This context and story, left out from the data, provides a much richer experience for the object. Removed from context by supposedly objective data, it becomes susceptible to the colonizing uses of the Western culture we’re in.

“Hopis live surrounded by clay and its sweetness, which is most perceptible when the air in their desert environment contains moisture.” - Lea McChesney, "Hopi Women Shaping the World"

When an object is added to a museum, certain pieces of information are collected and recorded in its database. From a cataloging perspective, the entry for the Hopi Pot is thorough, every aspect of the piece is recorded. However, this data leave out an important element of Hopi pottery.

In the Hopi culture, pottery making is a social activity and process. Creating pots is not as much about the finished product, but about the communal experience of making the piece. Although this process is not valued in the traditional museum style of information collecting, it would have been extremely important to the artist. 

Here is what one of our classmates thought:

“There is something yet to be said about how we relate to objects produced from other epistemologies. We have to stop seeing Native/Indigenous objects as study cases and instead offer spaces to interact with them relationally.” - María

What information would be valuable to craft a story that centers Muriel, her life, and culture? 

Although we do not know much about Muriel, we can make some inferences about the Hopi Pot based on its physicality and historical context.

For example, the pot’s dimensions suggest that it might have been a souvenir meant for tourists.

Did Muriel Nevaytewa sell her creations as souvenirs? Is the Hopi Pot an example of a pot produced for tourists?

If the pot is indeed tourist art, maybe that is why the artist’s name, the date 1997, and the word “Hopi” are present at the base of the object, as a way to catalog a purchase.

Examples like the Hopi Pot highlight the gap between biographical information and a person’s identity and story.

Here’s what one of our classmates thought:

“Although we know so little about Muriel, I feel connected to her through the medium of clay. I know her skin would have become dry after working with clay as mine has been. I know the inside of her nose would have become orange as she breathed in the dust of drying clay, just as mine did. It feels wrong to know these intimate details of her life without knowing the rest of her story.” - Claire

We need both the object and the context for any meaningful awareness of artmakers’ experiences. The current data do not allow for deeper context which is a loss for the artist, the culture represented, and those learning from the object.

Hello, my name is Katelyn and I would like to personally introduce you to this next object and the artist that created it, Jorge Tacla. Tacla is a new favorite of mine and my intention here is to show you why I think his work so eloquently sums up the themes of this class project. This next exploration will touch on themes of trauma, but I will leave you in safe hands with Tacla.

Jorge Tacla was born in Santiago, Chile to a family of immigrants, but has lived between there and New York City since the 1980s. Tacla expresses a sense of multiculturalism when speaking about his own identity. Tacla found a similar sense of multiculturalism so welcoming, homey, and creatively productive when he arrived in NYC in the 80s.

Tacla was in Santiago during the La Moneda presidential palace bombing, and New York City when hijacked airplanes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The tragic events that devastated his home cities both occurred on September 11th, in 1973 and 2001 respectively. Both attacks proved intensively traumatic on a national level in their countries. Further, both were the result of, and had lasting impact on, international politics and power dynamics.

Tacla has returned to both attack sites in his work repeatedly. With Identidad Oculta 117, he has painted a blurring view of the traumatic repercussions of La Moneda presidential palace’s bombing in dark oil and cold wax.

Tacla’s work shows how intimately he understands these cycles of violence. Despite his familiarity with these moments, the images in his work remain obscured. In Identidad Oculta 117, and in many others in this series, Tacla looks at these events so closely I feel like I might suffocate. I get it. Tacla is quite literally showing this swirling hazy scene of La Moneda, the view of it and its memory; the very identity of this trauma begins to shift and distort the longer you look at it.

He points out that there is a danger for the cycle to repeat itself because of the systems that, having been built by humans, perpetuate violence through the inherent biases that exist in our language.

“Sometimes the aggressor doesn’t have any consciousness of his aggressiveness and comes to the victim without any knowledge of the damage that has been created..” - Jorge Tacla

In the museum world – and the world at large – we repeat the cycle when we fail to look at our systems of data, categorization, and naming. The things that we note down in spreadsheets fail to adequately span our lived realities. These oversimplifications are not neutral because they create meaning and space inside computing systems, catalogs and labels on museum walls – and our own thinking.

Tufts University Art Galleries is actively working on their systems of categorization now. They have reached out to living artists to ask them to fill out a form for self identification. What’s interesting to note is that there are terms on this form that are indicative of recent language shifts. For example, Tacla noted on his form a preference for the term “Latine,” a gender neutral term that has developed as recently as 2020 by Spanish speakers grappling with the intersecting complexities of power dynamics in that language.

What we’ve looked at so far in this virtual exhibit is about the ways that binary-thinking based data collection re-enacts violence and literally obscures identity. If we don’t look at and name the issues with the data, it continues to systemically disrupt identity. The issues within the data are very human issues that have been created by humans. The data are not neutral. It is important to remember this, in the museum world and more broadly as increasingly data-reliant professionals.

Thinking back to Homeland Sweet Homeland, Best in Hair, and Hopi Pot, a noticeable pattern emerged from the data showing how it served to decontextualize aspects of these pieces that are vital to the stories they can tell, while robbing the artist’s voice of nuance and meaning.

It bothered me how much this system disengages the artist of their voice, especially where those voices are readily accessible elsewhere. We are lucky that for Tacla, an artist who is currently living and working, we have the opportunity to reach out to him and allow him to give voice to his work himself.

This is something we cannot currently do for the creators of Hopi Pot or Best in Hair Cut. I would like to turn our platform now over to Jorge Tacla himself to see what he has to say about his work and the nature of systemic violence:

We have become divided by design. Data and data collection are not neutral, and can even be actively harmful.

In an attempt to better grasp the objects in this collection, our system of cataloging has reduced the objects to categories like medium, creator culture, title and subject gender. We can keep adding rows to capture multiple categories, but that becomes an awkward solution, bounding off and separating each category instead of allowing them to be intersecting. Which doesn’t allow for a nuanced understanding of these objects. The full lived experience of a human cannot be contained in a cell, or as Katelyn put it, “humans do not belong in cells.” While our lived experiences are often intersectional and even contradictory, spreadsheet cells can be populated only by either “this term” or “that term” (or that, or that, etc.). This is binary thinking, a pillar of White Supremacy Culture ( Tema Okun , 2021). This isn’t serving us as a student body, as practitioners of the arts, and the community within and surrounding the university.

We hope in our interpretation of these pieces you have been able to see beyond the data. We hope you take from these examples an ability to re-examine different systems in your own spaces and question whose story/perspective you are being told. Other systems of logic exist that allow for multiplicity and inconsistency – for things to be both/and – such as schools of paraconsistent logic in Brazil or Janist Seven-Valued logic from Ancient India.

This is a messy practice. These messes are human, the more we grapple with these messes the more familiar and understandable to us they become because we all make them. Data systems will always struggle to represent the world they describe, but we can find more accurate and less oppressive ways to do it. Ways that allow for multiple voices to be centered and shared, rather than reinforcing marginalizations. We are all a work in progress. Tufts University Art Gallery is working on changing the ways in which this data are used as well as what data are collected. But this is also the work for all of us, to add our stories back into the objects that surround us. To imagine better. Just remember as much as we made this system of categorization we can recreate it, re-imagine it. That it can serve us better, and serve more people. It is not too late. Do you dare imagine where we can go from here?

This was the semester-long project for a Spring 2022 graduate seminar in the Tufts University Museum Education program. The seed for this project was planted in February of 2022, when we attended the “ Art Datathon ” conference put on by Tufts’ Data Intensive Studies Center and the Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG). During the Datathon, we analyzed TUAG’s’ digitized catalog of their collection, presented to us as a dataset on a spreadsheet. The objects in the collection were listed and categorized based on various criteria such as artist name, region, and race. Looking at how artists of different identities are represented within the dataset, we observed how data can be oversimplified, misleading, and even biased against people of diverse backgrounds. The four pieces explored in this project serve as case studies that exhibit how museum catalogs can sometimes misrepresent the objects’ stories. Guided by the praxis of “ Critical Cataloging ,” for this virtual exhibition, we interpreted the pieces from a perspective that celebrated the artists’ holistic identities, not just their catalog entries. We hope you enjoyed!

Content Development: Ally Cirelli, Claire Pellegrini, Elizabeth Elliott, E. Jane Lapasaran, Gaby Perez-Dietz, Katelyn Leaird, Kylie Burnham, Maria Mancera Perez, Michaela Antunes Blanc

Site Design: Claire Pellegrini

Course Professor: Cynthia Robinson

We’d like to thank the Tufts University Art Galleries’ staff, specifically Dina, Laura and Liz, for their continued help and support with this endeavor. We are also grateful to the Art Datathon’s organizers, featured speakers, and participants.

The title of this exhibition, "Obscured Identities," was inspired by the title of Jorge Tacla's series "Hidden Identities."