Jim Escalante
Jay Katelansky’s "Hoodwinked" runs through May 29 at the Chazen Museum.
Jay Katelansky was walking home from her Frances Street art studio about three years ago when she noticed a police officer trailing her. Newly arrived in Madison from New Jersey, with iPhone in one hand and groceries in the other, she stopped to ask why. The officer said she matched the description of a woman who was reportedly begging for money in the area. She said it was a case of mistaken identity, but the officer did not believe her. He offered to drive her to a women’s shelter.
“I had to explain my existence, and that’s something that will always happen,” says Katelanksy, who recently won the 2016 Chazen Museum Prize for an Outstanding MFA Student. “I don’t know one person of color that isn’t depressed here.”
Katelansky’s Hoodwinked is an art installation drawn from the experiences of people of color. It runs through May 29 in the Oscar F. and Louise Greiner Mayer Gallery at the Chazen Museum of Art.
Katelansky, who is black, uses her creation “PhantomNegro” to explore black trauma, which she describes as any situation in which black people no longer have control over their bodies. “PhantomNegro” is a shape-shifting, gender-shifting, time-traveling entity that protects blacks during traumatic race-based experiences throughout the ages, allowing them to reclaim their power.
“Even though black people are so vastly different from each other, trauma forms a people. It makes us bond together,” Katelansky says, noting that traumatic experiences have birthed expressions of joy — the blues, soul food and hip-hop — that have propelled black culture. More recently, new movements represented by social media hashtags #blackgirlmagic and #carefreeblackgirls are pointing out the strength and resilience of black women.
Affirmations from Katelansky’s writings cover the largest wall in the long and shallow gallery. One hundred and sixty hand-cut screenprints, colors on white paper, offer musings like “The softest parts of me are black” and repetitions of the sentence “You BELONG here.”
LCD screens looping images of her friends laughing create palpable joy. By focusing on the joy, Katelansky wants to counteract images of black people as victims, unintelligent or weak.
Another screen at the far end of the room loops synonyms for the word “alive” as Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” plays on headphones nearby. Katelansky says the song has motivated her, and she hears it as rallying cry for people of color in Madison, who often feel marginalized. “I wanted to create a space which doesn’t quite exist on campus that would be a space in which people could come meditate,” says Katelansky. “A space to see themselves.”
