"United Under One Race"

For this project, our class had to imitate or create an art piece from a famous artist. The artist that I was studying was Vik Muniz, who is known for making collages that creates an ultimate image for viewers. I decided to create an artwork that is influenced off of Vik Muniz and has a message to give to other viewers. I call this art piece “United Under One Race”.  

The materials that I used for this art piece were sharpie markers, construction paper, and newspapers. With the sharpie marker, I drew an outline of a person with her arms sticking out and cut out a bunch of heads from the newspaper. Then, I glued all all of the heads of colored people within the body, and all of the heads from white people and surrounded the body with them. The technique of using a collage of white people surrounding black people is essential to this art piece because it helps viewers get a better understanding of the message that I want my art piece to share. This art piece doesn’t really relate to my previous work because my focus on this art piece was to send a message to the black community, while on the previous work, I didn’t really focus on a message. The message that I wanted this art piece to display is: “We’re all we have, we’re all we need.” The reason why I wanted to display this message is because in recent history, there are times when we still feel like we’re surrounded by racism. And, I wanted to display this message to remind those people that during those times we need to lookout for each other and speak as one race to bring awareness to racism.

Overall, one thing that I wish that I could improve would be to make the art piece look better, but I’m not beating myself over it because this was my first time making a collage. However, my goal wasn’t really to create a beautiful art piece, but more of a meaningful art piece, and that’s something that I’m proud of because I felt like I made it very meaningful. I hope that one day someone can actually look at my art piece and acknowledge the message that I tried to implement into it.