Christina Reed began her art journey in the 1960s when she started weaving and making textural pieces of art. After having children, she attended the University of Washington School of Art and earned a B.F.A. in painting. There she studied alongside artists Jacob Lawrence and Michael Spafford, who significantly impacted her understanding of art and activism. Decades later, those themes are deeply present in her current exhibit at Seattle Central College. “Reckoning” dives into the interconnection of racism and whiteness and calls for audience members to undermine it.
There is something so obnoxious about white people talking about whiteness. The constant compulsion to center white experiences, the fragility, the evasion, and the virtue signaling set me on edge (even as I participate in it). But the only thing worse than white people talking about whiteness is white people who ignore whiteness or refuse to talk about it.
It was in this cringey tension that I held a copy of a recent collection of essays — and the centerpiece of this Thursday’s Town Hall event, “Whiteness Is Not an Ancestor: Essays on Life and Lineage by White Women.” The book — edited by Bellingham-based therapist, author, and publisher Lisa Iversen — is urgently personal. Whiteness is a system and all white people, past and present, have served to uphold it. Feeling the discomfort and pain in that truth — and using it to motivate change — is at the center of the project.
