BLURRING THE LINES
BLURRING THE LINES

Tyler Dehaarte

The Unspectacular Negro: Searching for The Oasis Promised

EDITION

2021

school

Parson School of Design
New York, United States

The Unspectacular Negro: Searching for The Oasis Promised is a multi media reexamination of my upbringing and the expectations of Black bodies in society. I, like my community, am searching for the oasis promised. There is a performance that is often ingrained into Black society, the role of the spectacular negro: conditioning to perform away one’s Blackness. This performance equates to being considered human in society . What does outgrowing this lack of freedom in both public and private spaces look like? To truly be free and at rest is to be unspectacular, void of any expectations or imaginations of what you should be. The work focuses on the paradox of being invisible while simultaneously being visible. More often than not, Blackness is portrayed in the media as a monolithic experience; however, this series strays from creating a public performance that fits a mold. Each collaborator in this work was chosen to represent different, but not all perspectives of the Black experience and how living as a Black individual may also change the very way one identifies themselves.

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Tyler Dehaarte

The Unspectacular Negro: Searching for The Oasis Promised

EDITION

2021

school

Parson School of Design
New York, United States

The Unspectacular Negro: Searching for The Oasis Promised is a multi media reexamination of my upbringing and the expectations of Black bodies in society. I, like my community, am searching for the oasis promised. There is a performance that is often ingrained into Black society, the role of the spectacular negro: conditioning to perform away one’s Blackness. This performance equates to being considered human in society . What does outgrowing this lack of freedom in both public and private spaces look like? To truly be free and at rest is to be unspectacular, void of any expectations or imaginations of what you should be. The work focuses on the paradox of being invisible while simultaneously being visible. More often than not, Blackness is portrayed in the media as a monolithic experience; however, this series strays from creating a public performance that fits a mold. Each collaborator in this work was chosen to represent different, but not all perspectives of the Black experience and how living as a Black individual may also change the very way one identifies themselves.

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