a portrait of a gentleman, now confidently attributed to rubens, hangs in one of the met’s galleries of 17th century spanish paintings. teasingly, the wall label hints that the underdrawing may that be of velasquez himself, hence the curious hang address of this loan.
on tv this morning, a white woman assigns herself to be black. She has lived the black experience, as she puts it.
the performance of race is a fraught endeavor. we have no language to approximate the intangible contours of our identification, much more define what in it is material.