Vantage Point : Rosalie Favell - If only you could love me ...

In her intimate portraits, Rosalie Favell (Cree Métis, b. 1958) confronts issues of gender, sexuality, and race through the use of imagery drawn from popular culture and family photo albums. Her work "If only you could love me..." (2003) refers to Frida Kahlo's 1940 painting "Self Portrait with Cropped Hair," complicating its questions of gender and sexuality and injecting issues of mixed-race identity and historical conflict. The image calls to mind both the cutting of hair in times of mourning and historic photographs of Native American children at boarding schools, where they were dressed in suits and their long hair was cut short.

Favell's work is featured in "Vantage Point: The Contemporary Native Art Collection," on view through August 7, 2011 at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

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