Cypress College Art Gallery Presents

The Phantom Street Artist, aka Joey Krebs

Make Amerika All(–)Rite Again

Monday, April 10 – Thursday, April 20, 2023

Reception: Thursday, April 13, 6–8 pm

A collaboration of Cypress College Departments of Art, Photography, & Theatre

“I am a student of Racism in Amerika and the child of a Latina immigrant mother. I was born a bastard named Jose Luis Jaramillo. My father was called Krebs. I was re-named as an illegitimate because of data equity. My struggle to fight for my name has directed me to study the language of hegemonic racism and oppression through the development of ethnophaulisms. Derived from a combination of two Greek words: ethnos ('people') and phaulisma ('disparage'), these are ethnic or racial slurs that disparage whole groups of people.

Casta paintings are one of many aggressions perpetrated against ‘we’ as ‘the other.’ Language conceals all kinds of vulgarity. Deconstructing the languages of violence, intimidation, and control can reveal the racism and xenophobia, and take back language in defense against oppression.”

The Phantom Street Artist, aka Joey Krebs

 

Casta paintings are a source of ethnophaulisms. They were made in 18th-century New Spain (large areas of Mexico and parts of the western U.S.) to explain racial mixing in the Spanish colony to the ‘motherland.’ The paintings depict parents and their children, all categorized according to their degree of relatedness to three races: White Spaniards, Indigenous Indians, and Black Africans. Sets of casta images generally depict the same racial categories arranged in the same order. The painting on the right for instance is “#4. From Spaniard and Black, a Mulatto.”

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “the genre’s premise...was that successive generations of Spaniards and Indians resulted in a race of ‘pure’ white Spaniards, while the mixing of Spaniards and Indians with Africans led to racial degeneration.”[1]

Race was not the only characteristic that determined a family’s position in the painted hierarchy, however. Expressed via their clothes, occupations, and living spaces, class was also a factor. By intersecting race and class, categorizing ‘types,’ and presenting them in an established hierarchy, casta paintings created the impression of a society that was not only universally heterosexual and cis-gendered, but also “orderly, stable, and clearly defined.”[2]

As described by Dr. Evelina Guzauskyte however, this was far from the lived reality of New Spain, where:

“Inquisition records as well as marriage and baptism censuses provide ample examples of the hidden tensions, insulting linguistic exchanges and open physical conflicts that in reality characterized many of the relationships among the different races, castas and classes…Appeals to the court to change one’s casta to a different one, as well as complaints regarding mistaken classification, indicate that the hierarchical structure was often challenged and that social, racial, and cultural borders were frequently transgressed.” [3]

Drawing on the history of casta paintings, the history of graffiti, and his own iconic street art silhouettes, the Phantom Street Artist’s installation deconstructs words and images that were foundational to scientific racism and to its hierarchies that continue to bestow privileges on White, European, and lighter skinned people.

Invoking his Robin Hood-like character Jack, the Phantom reclaims the culture that has been hijacked by successive generations of artists, from Miguel Cabrera in the 18th, to Banksy and Shepard Fairey in the 21st. At the same time, by centering his work around an illuminated portrait of activists Ridge Gonzales and Elana Popp, the artist disrupts the fascistic order of the casta painting with an image of contemporary Latinx and LGBTQ+ family, love, and togetherness.

READ AN ESSAY ABOUT THE PHANTOM’S EARLIER WORK

NOTES

[1] Metropolitan Museum of Art, “From Spaniard and Mulatta, Morisca (De español y de mulata, morisca),” www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/719284

[2] Guzauskyte, Evelina(2009)'Fragmented Borders, Fallen Men, Bestial Women: Violence in the Casta Paintings of Eighteenth-century New Spain', Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 86:2, 175 — 204, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14753820902783977

[3] Ibid.