Notes on Obsessive Whiteness

Abstract

I remember viewing the Robert Ryman exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1993. I felt as if I were surrounded by the austere puritan heritage of a Protestant church in New England. Afterward, friends asked me to critique the show, and they reacted with surprise as I described it as a profoundly ethnic experience. They only conceived of ethnicity in terms of the Other, as if there were no ethnicity to whiteness. Years later, in 1999, I remember watching Martha Stewart during her daily CBS morning show, presenting her very Polish mother making pierogis. It was a mildly embarrassing moment for the queen of upper-middle-class whiteness, but a daughter's love allowed her pristine whiteness to crack briefly and show a working-class immigrant ethnicity.

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Notes on contributors

Ernesto Pujol

Ernesto Pujol has been a lecturer, visiting artist, and teacher with New York University and Cooper Union, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico, San Juan; and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a professor with the MFA Program in Visual Art at Vermont College.