Vitus Shell is a very talented, accomplished and young artist currently pursuing his Masters of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) at the University of Mississippi...You can view more of his work as well as some of his equally talented art comrades at www.nia-memphis.org ...This was a review of his show Socially Handicap at the Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee which received rave reviews during its run which ended 2 weeks ago... Remember his name because he's going to be doing some big things real soon!!! 
Frantz Fanon, the French psychologist and theorist of colonialism and Third World liberation, observed that members of an oppressed group will frequently internalize the attitudes of their oppressors and then direct that aggression at each other: “The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people.” The phenomenon shows itself in America’s internal corollary to colonialism, the long generations of slavery, and Jim Crow laws, when African Americans accorded higher social status to people with a lighter complexion. The brown paper bag test was a ritual once used by black sororities and fraternities and other social organizations to determine social ordering based on skin color: anyone whose skin was darker than a brown paper bag was ineligible to join.
Vitus Shell, an artist from Memphis currently working on an MFA at Ole Miss, uses the brown paper bag test as the unifying motif for a show at the Tennessee Arts Commission. His work draws attention to the psychological wound of color prejudice within the African American community and connects it, in his statement about the show, with current threads in contemporary black society showing up in magazines and music videos.
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This sounds like a very strong collection of works. Will any of the works or will the entire collection be shown anywhere else soon?
Posted by: Devon | July 15, 2006 at 04:03 PM