Culturs TV sits down to talk with Grace Stamps, a multicultural artist that gets her inspiration for her pieces from her struggle to truly discover her identity.
Self-identifying as black, Stamps has African American, Caucasian, and Native American racial backgrounds. Growing up in a predominantly white community in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Stamps didn’t find many people with liminal identities like herself.
Stamps said she has always identified as black because it’s what people told her she was. In America, if you have one drop of black, you’re black.
“It’s difficult because people have a lot of expectations about how you should act based on your culture,” Stamps explains.
In exploring her identity, her freshman year of college she decided to write an essay about “being gray” a phrase she coined that explains her feelings of belonging in between two cultures. The essay also explored issues of colorism and racism that she’s witnessed around her.
When it was time to choose her next art series, three years later, she uncovered her “Gray” essay and decided to explore her identity even more through art.
“If I can’t determine my own culture, then I’m just going to visually create one.” Stamps found her own culture in this art series on “being gray.”
In the second video of this three-part series, Culturs will take a look at Stamps’ artwork and what it means to her.
