Whitey Honors Zebulian Vance

This Whitey performance was part of a 2019 event, Revolve: Now at the Asheville Art Museum.

Maybe it was too easy to focus on the giant phallic symbol built by the Lost Cause confederates to honor the slave-owning, civil war general and two time North Carolina mayor Zebulian Vance. 

I was assigned a window overlooking Pack Square with a window framing the towering symbols of white power. The Vance Monument is part of the urban landscape in Asheville, located in the center of downtown at the edge of Pack Square, a meeting place, a point of reference. 

My character, Whitey, is intended to make obvious the construction and maintenance of whiteness. I started this project in 2007 and since then Whitey has performed in many places for various reasons.

Whitey is intended to signal the absurd, mash up of cultural appropriation, racial invention, and blindness created and maintained as a way to maintain class and labor divisions in our exploitative economic system.

For Whitey Honors Vance Whitey wore a pure white dress with an enormous bustle and Kente cloth belt to signal the 19th Century European scramble for Africa, a MAGA necklace, and a large “Indian” head-dress - created by and for non-native people as a costume, over an Imperial white wig. She carries a gold plated money gun to shoot at the crowd dollar bills with Zebulian Vances face as a simultaneous act of violence and capitalist love.