Last night Esther Hi’ilani Candari posted The Body of Christ, a good article about race in our religious art. Hear, hear. (Disclaimer: I’m included in the long list of artists at the bottom, but I would recommend the article regardless.)
Blog: #race
I just read James Goldberg’s post Why I Hate White Jesus. It’s a good piece, well worth reading. Over the last few years I’ve become much more aware of the rampant racism and tribalism and sexism still alive in America, and it breaks my heart. I fear we may never stamp it out in mortality, but we certainly need to try.
Since I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before: The reason I usually use red for the humans in my art is to reference the mortal blood we all share, with the goal of avoiding any specific skin tones. I tend to use the color white as a symbol for holiness — going off of Isaiah’s “white as snow” — and I hope nobody misreads it as being about skin. (Especially because seeing the colors as skin instead of symbols means my work is full of naked albino and severely sunburned people. Nothing against either category, of course.)