When addressing someone, Joseph Uduehi wants others to refrain from using the terms “black person” or “white person.”
“If you are to call me by my color, my color is coffee color with three drops of milk,” the associate professor of art education said. “Is that what you want to call me? If that is too difficult then just call me Joseph.”
We are all individuals, we are all human and we all have a name, he said.
Uduehi began teaching art education at USI in 1998. In 2000, he founded the Saturday Art Workshop in Evansville, where children can take art lessons. Uduehi sits on the Evansville Museum of Art History, Science’s Education Committee and received the 2010 Arts Educator Award from the Art Council of Southwestern Indiana.
As an artist, Uduehi said he enjoys painting and sharing creativity with others.
“I like to paint anything that has to do with landscape, human faces (and) abstracts,” Uduehi said.
Uduehi is scheduled to give a lecture from 6 to 7 p.m. Tuesday in Forum II in the Wright Administration Building about his latest art exhibit, “What is the Color of Your Skin.”
The exhibit will be Udehi’s third showcase on campus.
The series of paintings uses five main tones, in both abstract and figurative work, to break the simple classifications of black and white. His exhibit, which features 24 acrylic paintings will be on display through Dec. 3 in the Wright Administration Building’s McCutchan Exhibition Space.
One painting features each of the five main colors with blood types drawn in red on the skin tones to symbolize how we are all human. Another had a circle of faces, all ranging in different shades. A skin whitener was drawn next to the darker skinned face and tanning products were placed next to the lighter skinned face. Each picture had a meaning that Uduehi wants expressed.
“(I want) to bring a discussion to visual and the perception of how we see the color of the human skin,” Uduehi said. “How we see it, not how we think it. When you see a skin color, do you see it as black or white or do you see it as the color it should be.”
Uduehi began to construct the concept about the perception of skin color in 2012. He then executed his ideas and started to paint in January 2014. The concept took longer to develop than the art itself Uduehi said.
The goal of Uduehi’s exhibit is to start a discussion about why people are taught to call each other black or white.
“When did we learn to call this person black skin and this person white skin? That person has a name,” Uduehi said. “That person is a Mister. His name is John. Not black person, not white person. And even if we are to call the person black person or white person, what type of white? What type of black? All white people are not the same color, all black people are not the same color,” he said.
This message is directed towards the youth. Adults have already made up their mind and very few will change, Uduehi said. After the exhibit is complete in December, Uduehi will create a lesson plan that will help teachers guide their students to redirect and retrain their visual perception of color.
Through this exhibit, Uduehi said he hopes to show others that there is more to each individual than their skin color.
“If I was to address you by color I will be wrong,” he said. “Then I’m grouping you into the whole concept of black and white.”
