I am / I am not – How do we use art to talk back to stereotypes?

By Alison Rutsch   

During her fieldwork experience at Achievement First Middle School in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Alison Rutsch worked with art teacher Ruby Singh and designed a curriculum unit as part of a long-term exploration of identity with 8th graders. The project was designed to explore how stereotypes work and then give students the opportunity to subvert the ways that they and others are often reduced and mischaracterized. Students created a series of prints that replaced all too common stereotypes with complex, empowered images of their identities.

Over the course of this exploration, Alison introduced contemporary artists Kerry James Marshall and Lorna Simpson who use portraiture to challenge stereotypes. Students wrote poems about about their own identities and the expectations that others have about them using an “I am/I am not” structure. Finally, Alison taught a series of printmaking techniques to translate student ideas into a set of paired self portraits– an “I am” and an “I am not” view of themselves and powerful rebuttal to the ways they are perceived and diminished in the eyes of the media and larger society.