Sheet 5 (Stamped series)
2018 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
22.5 x 24.75 in
John Lucas and Claudia Rankine
Historically, blondeness has been a signifier for desirability and beauty, speaking to “purity” — the purity of whiteness — like no other bodily attribute except, perhaps, blue eyes. In the twenty-first century, blondeness is the look desired by American presidents, pop stars, rappers, television announcers, Hollywood celebrities, the boy next door, and some Asian Americans, African Americans, white Americans, Arab Americans, and LatinX Americans. The desirability of blonde hair has no genre boundaries, no pronoun limitation, and no class limit. Whether one is a bottle blonde or regularly goes to the salon, blondeness is ubiquitous. In Sheet 5 from the series Stamped , filmmaker and photographer John Lucas and writer Claudia Rankine collaboratively capture photographs of dyed blonde hair as seen on the heads of strangers and acquaintances. These images — zoomed in and cropped — are framed as still images and also transposed onto real postage stamps. The stamp, a form of currency with inherent mobility, becomes a metaphor for questioning value and utility.
John Lucas and Claudia Rankine are interdisciplinary thinkers and makers committed to exploring the nuances of race and power in our daily lives. Claudia Rankine is a writer based in New York. John Lucas has directed and produced several films and multimedia projects. John Lucas has worked as a documentary photographer for more than 25 years. Lucas has directed and produced several cutting-edge multimedia projects including the collaborative work Situations with poet Claudia Rankine. In 2014, he completed his first feature length documentary film The Cooler Bandits. Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely ; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue ; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind .
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