DAMALI AYO AT PSU

damali ayo spoke to "the realities of what it means to be an activist artist, a feminist anti-racism performance artist" on October 30th, opening the Bitch Magazine Feminism and Pop Culture Series at the Smith Memorial Ballroom in Portland.

ayo's oeuvre includes  panels of paint matched from the flesh tones of various parts of her own body and audio tapes of the paintmixers' conversations with her, presented at the Seattle Center of Contemporary Art in 2003; name tags that read "Hi, My Race Is..." and were to be filled out as white, black or other at gallery openings (I believe she said the Mark Woolley gallery) through 2001-02; and perhaps most famously, her Rent-a-Negro website where you could allegedly hire a person of color for services such as tolerating your racist relative, now a book as well. Throughout her career, she has aimed to "create a cognitive dissonance in our collective unconsciousness." —Nora Robertson