Seniors Raquel Santizo ’19, Anu Asaolu ’19, and Juliana Villa ’19 said they created the show, which opened last Thursday evening, to celebrate female students of color at Bowdoin and increase their visibility on campus.
At the Lamarche Gallery, portraits of female students cover each wall, some posing alone and some with friends. Visitors can also put on headphones and listen as student participants respond to questions about race, beauty, and self-esteem.
Part of the original inspiration for the project came out of a paper that Santizo, a gender, sexuality, and women’s studies and neuroscience double major, wrote for a class on feminist theory during her sophomore year. “I was researching the hook-up culture and the relationship of women of color to it," she said. "I found two main themes: one of women feeling hyper-visible due to being exoticized, and the other of feeling invisible due to not meeting Eurocentric standards of beauty.”
From the photographers to the participants to the curators, this is a show made by and for women of color. “That was very intentional,” Juliana Villa said. “At Bowdoin, it’s really rare to find spaces for just people of color or women of color. So having and making that community was really important to us.”
Asaolu also emphasized how important the process was in achieving the show’s goals. With assistance from the Sexuality, Women, and Gender Center, the three seniors organized a three-hour long photo shoot earlier in February. Forty students, up from twenty-five at the inaugural women-of-color photo shoot in 2017, dropped by to have their picture taken, reflect as a community, and “to actively and intentionally celebrate their beauty,” the organizers said.
In particular, it meant a lot to the organizers that a significant number of first-year students came to the photo shoot. Photographer Camille Farradas ’19 said, “I would have loved to have had that space and guidance when I was a first year starting out here. It was really powerful to see underclass students having a good time.”
Many of the stories that first-years shared were improvements from the perspective of participating juniors and seniors. Asaolu said she was reassured to hear “a lot of positive experiences that were so different from” her own experience in 2015.
