Feeling Brown or Acting White? Spectacles of Racialized Performance and Pain in José Clemente Orozco’s U.S.-based Prints

• Published in: American art Vol. 37; no. 2; pp. 2 - 27
• Main Author: Coffey, Mary K
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York University of Chicago Press 01.06.2023
• Subjects: 20th century; Affect (Psychology); American culture; Black people; Color; Iconography; Offset printing; Orozco, Jose Clemente (1883-1949); Performance theory; Prints and printmaking
• ISSN: 1073-9300; 1549-6503
• DOI: 10.1086/725900

In this essay I undertake a speculative reading of two lithographic prints made by the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco during his second and longest stay in the United States, between 1928 and 1934. The first and last prints he made during this sojourn both represent spectacles of performance and pain associated with the public life of Blackness. Using affect theory to read the formal and iconographic cues in these prints, I suggest that they reflect the artist’s complex relation with the U.S.-American “color line.” Rather than assuming Orozco’s images reflect a White subject position, I explore the ways they intimate what the performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz theorized as a “sense of brown.”