Age of Reason
Intaglio on German Etching Paper and Silk
"Age of Reason" is a series that identifies the end of a fragment of innocence in a child’s life as he begins to become increasingly aware of racism and the gender-identity pressures of growing up as a black male in the United States. Blue Brains (2015) assembles images of Albert Einstein’s brain, historic engravings, and MRI imaging to investigate anatomical relationships to consciousness and intelligence. The skulls are appropriated from Samuel G. Morton’s Crania Americana, in which he characterizes the different races based on cranial capacity, and argues that the skull size is a measure of intelligence. His theories, as well as the idea of polygenesis (that the races were created as distinct species by God), have impacted the racially hierarchical tendencies present in science and medicine ever since.
