The Art of Negative Stereotyping: Reframing Blackness in Katrina Andry’s The Unfit Mommy and Her Spawn Will Wreck Your Comfortable Suburban Existence (2010) and It’s About Hard Work, Not Crippling Handout for the Poor (2017)

• Published in: Surveillance & society Vol. 20; no. 2; pp. 221 - 226
• Main Author: Koellner, Sarah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kingston Surveillance Studies Network 01.01.2022
• Subjects: African art; Black people; Colonialism; Community; Complicity; Contemporary art; Gender identity; History; Minority groups; Oppression; Race; Racial identity; Racial stereotypes; Racism; Research subjects; Sexism; Socioeconomic factors; Stereotypes; Surveillance; Theater; Young adults
• ISSN: 1477-7487; 1477-7487
• DOI: 10.24908/ss.v20i2.14893

Koellner examines the works of New Orleans-based printmaker Katrina Andry. Andry reflects upon the hidden rheroric and logic used in communities to control subjects that are considered out-of-place, disobedient, or "unfitting." Instead of centering surveillance technologies within her creative practices, Andry's art focuses on the question of how negative stereotyping against black communities in the US plays into the acceptance of heightened community surveillance of othered bodies that are deemed to be unfitting in the places that they occupy. When contextualized as a "critical surveillance artwork" Andry's work initiates a discussion on the colonial history of the surveillance of blackness and the degree of the viewer's complicity in such systems of oppression. Her art draws attention to the remnants of colonial history and their echoes in the negative stereotyping of minority communities of today.