Yesterday, LU ran a piece noting that Rachel Dolezal, the embattled white woman who has passed herself off as black, was stepping down from her post as president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. The post was titled in part “Rachel Dolezal saga’s final chapter?” Kudos to the LU staffer who had the foresight to add a question mark. It turns out there is more to her web of deception.
Among her other achievements, Dolezal, it seems, holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Howard University and is “an exhibiting artist.” From the website ArtPal:
Doležal [sic] has fourteen years of experience as an exhibiting artist and has taught K-12 & college art lessons in public, private, and non-traditional school settings. Her works have been featured in The Artist’s Magazine, shown in 13 states and displayed at the United Nations’ Headquarters in New York. Doležal synthesizes art history, cultural studies and the creative process when teaching and believes that the creative process is part of what makes us human and unifies our self-identity with the world. Doležal is a professor in the Art Department at North Idaho College and the Advisor for the Black Student Union at NIC.
Among the works by her exhibited at ArtPal is a painting with the title “The Shape of Our Kind,” reproduced below:
A better title would have been ‘The Slave Ship.” That’s the title that Romantic landscape painter J.M.W. Turner gave to his 1840 masterpiece, which hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, shown below for comparison sake.
While Dolezal’s painting is not identical pixel for pixel, the style and content are unmistakably lifted from the Turner work.
Unlike the Turner painting, which is priceless, Dolezal’s near-knockoff comes with a price: $5,100.
Maybe a psychiatric evaluation wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.
(h/t Jolie Adams on Twitter)
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