Mary Graham’s "Value Test: Brown Paper"

2022

Graham uses paper bags to address colorism among women.

Mary Graham (b. 2000) is a multidisciplinary artist who explores community and ancestral history. Value Test: Brown Paper is an exhibition that examines colorism and how it affects African American women. Colorism, a term coined by Alice Walker in 1982, is a form of discrimination that gives preferential treatment to lighter-skinned people within a racial group.  

Graham’s title and imagery reference the paper bag test, a 20th-century discriminatory practice in the African American community in which a person’s skin tone would be compared to a brown paper bag. Those with skin darker than the bag were discriminated against. Using paper bags as a canvas, Graham paints portraits of Black women’s faces. As viewers confront these portraits, the work invites them to think about their own assumptions and the history of color-based discrimination.