Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Neal Ambrose-Smith
Corrales, New Mexico
Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes, 2007
Digital photography
This installation was inspired by Jane Elliott’s historic “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes” experiment, begun the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, to teach her third-graders what it means to experience bigotry.
Elliott told her students that people with blue eyes are inferior to those with brown eyes, thus exposing them to the experience of being a minority and suffering discrimination. By choosing blue as the inferior eye color, Elliot proved that even an attribute considered positive and beautiful –as blue eyes often are in western culture –could be used as a marker to elicit hate. Elliot’s experiment demonstrated that discrimination is a learned behavior, a social construct, and that racism must be taught and reinforced in order to exist.
The mother and son team, Jaune and Neal, enlisted the help of their friends who modeled for this project. In this installation, subjects in blue-eyed glasses are arranged opposite portraits of people in brown-eyed glasses. The artists deliberately chose the same people to wear both blue and brown glasses to demonstrate that race is a socially-constructed category, and that discrimination, also constructed, can be unlearned.
Bios
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is one of today’s most acclaimed American Indian artists and collaborated with her son on this installation. Smith has had over 100 solo exhibits in the past 35 years and has done printmaking projects nationwide.Over that same time, she has organized and/or curated over 30 Native exhibitions. She has also lectured at more than 185 universities, museums, and conferences internationally, most recently at five universities in China. Smith has completed several collaborative public art works, such as the floor design in the Great Hall of the Denver Airport; an in-situ sculpture piece in Yerba Buena Park in San Francisco; and a mile-long sidewalk history trail in West Seattle.
Neal Ambrose-Smith, descendent of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation of Montana, is a contemporary Native American painter, sculptor, printmaker, and Professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has also developed an app Artist Ideas with 100 ideas for making art, available for Android and Apple. His work is included in the collections of many national and international museums and institutions, including the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Galerie municipale d’art contemporain in Chamalières, France, and Hongik University in Seoul, Korea. He received his BA from the University of Northern Colorado and MFA from the University of New Mexico.