Michael Ray Charles was
born in 1967 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and graduated from McNeese
State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1985. In college,
he studied advertising design and illustration, eventually moving
into painting, his preferred medium. Charles also received an MFA
degree from the University of Houston in 1993. His graphically
styled
paintings investigate racial
stereotypes
drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging,
billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials. Charles draws
comparisons between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier
era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities,
and athletes—images he sees as a constant in the American subconscious.
“Stereotypes have evolved,” he notes. “I’m trying
to deal with present and past stereotypes in the
context
of today’s society.” Caricatures of African-American experience,
such as Aunt Jemima, are represented in Charles’s work as ordinary
depictions of blackness, yet are stripped of the benign aura that
lends them an often unquestioned appearance of truth. “Aunt
Jemima is just an image, but it almost automatically becomes a real
person for many people, in their minds. But there’s a difference
between these images and real humans.” In each of his paintings,
notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge and
converge, reminding us that we cannot divorce ourselves from a past
that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we
are portrayed. Charles lives in Texas and teaches at the University
of Texas at Austin.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York
Michael Ray Charles on the Art21 blog |
