2016/17 season details coming soon!
XOJ Gallery
This exhibition has been rescheduled to January 2021 – see details at the button below.
Sally Binard’s portraits combine painting with ceramic and mixed media to comment on the tension between one’s identity in the eyes of others, and the one we choose ourselves. Intensely personal, the pieces touch on Binard’s racial and cultural history.
sponsored by Amsterdam’s Curry Mansion Inn
supported by Anne McKee Artists Fund
“Being mixed-race and being non-identifiable as either of the cultures or races that I am comprised of, so often I am questioned or even brazenly told what I am. It is only recently that this personal phenomenon has begun to unsettle and agitate me. In my youth, I outwardly accepted what others labeled me, never questioning those who had the power to define me, even though, at the core, I felt something just wasn’t right. When certain age and life-related seismic shifts occurred and I chose to look inward a little deeper, I noticed myself getting offended and frustrated and questioning much of what I had accepted. This series of portraits is a means for me to voice what I am uncovering about my complicated racial and cultural past and share my private dialog about the effects of allowing others to decide for you what and who you are. It is also my way of making my identity just that – mine.”
— Sally Binard