Artist + Self

Hi, my name is Britney Previl. I am 20 years old and a 3rd-year student at NJCU. I am a Biology Major hoping to get into the nursing program here. I was born in New York but raised in New Jersey. My hobbies include drawing a reading in my spare time.

The digital selfie I took was inspired by a poster created by an artist by the name of Ricardo Levins Morales. His art comes from his connections and passion for communities and movements in struggle. The original poster shows a woman who is walking on broken ground and barbwire while carrying a basket on her head filled with trees and broken building parts on her way to rebuild after a natural disaster. My family is from Haiti, so this art was very important and personal to me, showing the resilience of Haiti after the 2010 and 2021 earthquakes because every day Haiti is trying to rebuild and still remains strong. 

Readings:

The Interventionists, Trespassing Towards Relevance:

• “People wait in line with their items of blackness only to have them transformed into some of the most unlikely, and unexpected objects: rubber duckies, prayer rugs, drinking water. The experience is as far away from didactic as possible, yet one can not help but think that in that ambiguous experience, they received the one thing Pope L. promises the Black Factory will provide: opportunity.”

• “If one were to survey the surface of what represents American art over the last ten years for traces of this urgency, one would not be too encouraged.”

Response: People have doubts about how art has changed and has not been as political as it once was. However, whether people feel like art is in fashion or provides opportunities, it is still relevant, constantly changing and influencing others. 

Understanding Patriarchy by Bell Hooks: 

• “At church they had learned that God created man to rule the world and everything in it and that it was the work of women to help men perform these tasks, to obey, and to always assume a subordinate role in relation to a powerful man. “

• “Like many visionary radical feminists, I challenged the misguided notion, put forward by women who were simply fed up with male exploitation and oppression, that men were “the enemy.”

Response: From a young age, gender roles are places on children because of patriarchy, confusing them. Both younger and older women should not be confined to just supporting a man or being behind a man. Feminism has nothing to do with belittling men, but the goal is to challenge the fact that women should not be treated as less than a man but as equals.