"Public Editor: Alexandra Bell Highlights Bias in the News and Rewrites Racist Headlines," by Victoria L. Valentine, Culture Type
AT THE END OF FEBRUARY, the Whitney Museum of American Art announced 75 artists selected to participate in the Among them is Alexandra Bell, an artist with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Rather than using her journalism degree to report the news, Bell is harnessing her media literacy skills to consume and critique it. The multidisciplinary artist focuses on the front page design of newspapers, primarily The New York Times. She highlights headlines that are not fit to print and points out bias in image selection, layout decisions, and narrative details.
Similar to a newsroom editor, she marks up the pages, then recreates and enlarges them, and posts her work in public—displaying it side-by-side with the originals. The series is called Counternarratives. The works give viewers the opportunity to compare and contrast the visual messaging and problematic portrayals.
“I think everything is about race,” Bell says in a Mediastorm video about her work (below). “Black communities, gay communities, immigrant communities, feel a lot of media representations to be inadequate, biased. There’s a lot of reporting around police violence and black men and I realized a lot of the arguments that we were having were about depictions. I started to wonder how different would it be if I swapped images or if I changed some of the text. And so that was the first time I physically started playing around with the words.”
“I think everything is about race. Black communities, gay communities, immigrant communities, feel a lot of media representations to be inadequate, biased.” — Alexandra Bell
During the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil, the front page of the Times carried the headline with a huge photograph of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt accompanying the story. The photo caption reported Bolt won the gold medal in the men’s 200-meter dash and directed readers to a story about his achievement in the B section.
Nonetheless, the nation’s paper of record published a headline about a fabricated robbery and instead of depicting the white swimmers, including Ryan Lochte, who were implicated, it featured an unrelated image of a black man, fueling stereotypes about black men and crime, while limiting the negative exposure of the white men.
In her reinterpretation, Bell replaced the image of Bolt with one of Lochte and rewrote the headline adding a reference to “White American Swimmers.”
“There’s no way if the track team had done that they wouldn’t have been on the front page” she says in the video.
Bell has also questioned the representation of Mike Brown, the black teenager killed in 2014 by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., and 2017 coverage of the white nationalist torch march and subsequent violence in Charlottesville, Va.
“I’m 35. I’ve never seen a torch rally,” the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based artist says in the video. “Like this is some shit I feel like I would read about in a book.”
Bell has pasted up the images from her Counternarratives series on building facades in Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. The work has also been displayed at MoMA PS1, We Buy Gold, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Atlanta Contemporary, and the 鶹Ӱ Museum of Art. Her work has also been presented at the (ICP). She won a from ICP and is a 2018 Soros Equality Fellow.
“This isn’t a grammar exercise,” Bells says in the video. “I’m really trying to see if I can disrupt subliminal messaging about who should valued.” CT
The at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, N.Y., is May 17-Sept. 22, 2019.