Jamie Dawson
"Acid Is Watching You: Womyn of Color"
UW-Madison students of color are channeling their frustration over racism on campus into a multimedia visual and performing arts showcase at the Chazen Museum.
"Unhood Yourself: The Real UW One Day Exhibition" will take over the Chazen’s Rowland Gallery and Mead Witter Lobby this Friday from 6 to 9 p.m. The event, organized by members of the university's First Wave hip-hop scholarship program and other multicultural students, is in response to recent incidents of hate and bias on campus and the social media protest campaign that followed, #TheRealUW.
Organizer Jamie Dawson, a UW-Madison freshman and First Wave scholar, says the goal of the exhibition is to “generate further conversation” about racism on campus. Student artists will perform poetry and spoken word pieces detailing their personal experiences. Visual art, photography and video inspired by #TheRealUW will also be on display. Dawson describes the showcase as “a radical form of protest” that will allow viewers to be “engulfed” by the realities that students of color face every day.
“[The exhibition] is giving those stories a higher platform,” Dawson says. “It’s important knowing people are receptive and hearing us, besides a ‘like’ on Facebook or a retweet.”
Dawson and the other First Wave students live in a creative learning community called “The Studio” in Sellery Hall, a campus residence hall that has been the site of several recent racially charged incidents. On March 12, an African American First Wave student was pushed and spit on in the dormitory. About three weeks later, another African American student found a note containing racial slurs and obscenities slipped under her door.
Marina Kelly, The Studio’s program coordinator, says #TheRealUW movement has brought to light “incidences of anti-black racism and other acts of physical and emotional violence [that] are happening to students of color and other marginalized groups all over this campus.” But she has faith in UW-Madison’s student leaders.
“Yes, we have endured some heartbreaking incidents this semester, but we are moving through this time as a creative community,” she says.
Dawson, who moved to Madison from Tampa, Fla., says such instances of racism toward people of color on the UW-Madison campus are common. But she’s also observed that many people are reluctant to believe that the problems exist. She hopes the art exhibition will help the campus community gain a greater understanding.
“[People] want to believe that people are nice, or that [students of color] are making it out to be worse than what it actually is,” Dawson says. “But these things are true.”
