Response to Berger: Picturing Whiteness: Nikki S. Lee’s The Yuppie Project

After reading this short article about Nikki S Lee’s work The Yuppie Project, I thought about the similarities between Lee and William Pope.L, an artist we talked about in class several weeks ago. In Pope.L’s piece, The Great White Way and in Lee’s work, The Yuppie Project, the two artists execute their work in different but equally interesting ways by challenging their audiences to recognize whiteness.

In Pope.L’s piece The Great White Way, the black artist crawls across Broadway in Manhattan over the course of several years. Nick Stillman notes in his text, “Artseen: The Great White Way, Fulton Street to Reade Street, Manhattan,” that when Pope.L crawled through the Financial District, he was, “a man battling not just nature, but outcast status among his own species as he crawls pathetically along the dirty, heavily populated street.” Many reactions to his work include laughing and indifference. To a more receptive viewer, however, a black man crawling through the historically symbolic epitome of white privilege brings up questions of racial identity, status, and the exclusion from whiteness.

Nikki S. Lee’s piece, The Yuppie Project, also brings up issues of race and exclusion and one of her locations of choice is Wall Street as well. As Berger mentions in his text, “Picturing Whiteness: Nikki S. Lee’s Yuppie Project,” Lee is bringing to light the complexities and “fluidity of human identity.” While she seems to “fit in” with other groups of people, Berger notes that she never quite fits into the yuppie world. “Though she masquerades in the fashions, make-up, and body language of white yuppies, her Asianness and her visceral discomfort read as distinctly as their whiteness.” (pg. 56). Lee is drawing attention to the distinct difference between blending in with other racial minority groups as a minority herself and trying to blend in with “white privilege.” By locating herself within these different racial groups and by drawing attention to the difference of fitting in with the white power culture, Lee challenges her audience to recognize this whiteness as part of a larger dialogue about racism.

I think both of these artists make important and interesting work that comments on whiteness and exclusion in America. When artists like William Pope.L and Nikki S. Lee comment on such race relations in complex and engaging ways, it complicates the definitive identity, both racially and socially, of the viewer as well as the artist.

*Lee photograph is The Yuppie Project (17.) Taken from www.albrightknox.org
*William Pope.L photograph is The Great White Way: 22 Miles, 5 years, 1 street. Taken from www.tenbyten.net