Francoise Duresse

Francoise Duresse is an African American artist that focus's on the complexities of memory and place, body language, the spoken language and shifting political realities of race identities. A lot of her work reflects on her oral history where she has transformed her personal experiences int the work into a poetic visual dialog. Francoise uses life, color, sound and performances to communicate to with her paintings, drawings and her video works. Duresse is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Colorado. She exhibits her work internationally and nationally including: The Middle East, Europe, South and Central America along with the United States.

Her most famous work is the "Paper Bag Test." The history behind the paper bag test was a practice in the African American community, they held a paper bag up to someone's face to determine if they could get into public places. The ones that had lighter or equal to the same color of the bag were able to get in and those with the darker skin were not. It was one of my examples of "colorist" -  the lighter skinned people were known as smarter and better than the ones with the darker skin. That theory still exists within a many ethnic communities around the globe.

When Francoise came to BSU she had her collection of the "paper bag test." It was a collection of ink drawings based on culture, she had portrait paintings of her self along with documentary style interviews.  What I got out of the work was that it was a display of the social status that reflected skin color differences that went on from one generation to another.

I really appreciated her work because she was able to express her history and what she went through during the civil rights time. She was able to put her experiences in and make them art. Her work was beautiful and really had a powerful message. People were able to understand her. While i was looking at her display I was very engaging, I was able to really ask questions to myself. It left me questioning and wanting more information.