Myths, Home and Self-Portraiture

Brandon Ramdayal
Professors Caçoilo and Cherow-O’Leary
Imagery, Identity, and Culture
Myths, Home and Self-Portraiture



The Newark Museum is home to two exhibits that explore the themes of identity, home, personal narrative and mythology. Those exhibits are Wendy Red Star’s A Scratch on The Earth and Kambui Olujimi’s Skywriters & Constellations. Wendy Red Star’s exhibit is an exploration of her Native American heritage. She explores this in a variety of ways in the exhibit. One significant method she used was a timeline that ranged from the 1800s to the present day. This was an interesting illustration because if you look closely at the timeline, you'll see Wendy Red Star’s annotations on the timeline which gives the timeline a more personal touch as she points out important figures in her life and her culture. Based on the timeline, the narrative that can be established here is how her heritage evolved over the years through the help of her ancestors and family. It is also evident that Wendy Red Star embraces her culture and strongly identifies with it. For some people, they tend to lose their identity with their culture and heritage and assimilate to an American way of life. This clearly isn't the case for Red Star. In the “Four Seasons” part of the exhibit, she uses a variety of colors to illustrate the seasons and it's different natures. She also features different animals in each season which help show how each season transitions to the other. Finally, one part of A Scratch of The Earth that was significant to me was the tent or sweat lodge that was at the center of the space. In this part, you are able to lie down and be transported to different regions of the world. This offered a new perspective of how the world can be seen in different ways.

Transitioning to Kambui Olujimi’s Skywriters & Constellations, this artwork or show was something that was completely out of the ordinary. Skywriters is a collage of time and space projected onto the Planetarium’s dome. Constellations, a related series of 12 lithographic prints, introduces visitors to many of the characters, creatures, and key events in Olujimi’s mythic narrative. Both the short and prints are drawn from Olujimi's novella, Wayward North (2010). This artwork can be directly linked to mythology based on its use of constellations, which can be linked to Ancient Greek and Roman mythology.

Based on these two artworks, there is a lot of inspiration that I feel could be extremely useful in creating my self portrait. Some elements I feel would be most beneficial in my self portrait would be reflecting on my heritage, similar to Wendy Red Star’s where she wrote little anecdotes and annotations on the portraits of her ancestors. Using stories of my childhood and my heritage explaining why my family chose to come to America, their struggles with adapting to the culture, and my personal journey to find my true identity would also be helpful in my project. Incorporating mythic elements would be something that I would be interested in doing, Olujimi's constellations is a good example of what I would be interested in using.