Artist-in-Residence

S.A. Bachman

A long banner that reads, "Are You Telling Yourself a Little White Lie?" It shows images of a doll, rows of modern standardized housing, a white family gathering for a portrait, and a girl wearing a tutu.
S. A. Bachman, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Are You Telling Yourself a Little White Lie?, 1988. Halftone photographic silkscreen pigment on nylon, 60 x 144 inches. Edition of 5. Photo credit: Constance Mensh.

S.A. Bachman is an artist, activist, and educator who combines visual culture with direct action to challenge capitalism, colonialism, and carceral systems. Her interdisciplinary work often takes the form of photomontage, projection, moving image, and print. 

During her 1988 FWM residency, Bachman developed a confrontational project to address representations of women and white privilege in both mass media and in the makeup of Philadelphia neighborhoods. Using halftone techniques, she composed an edition of banners featuring aspirational images of middle-class standardized housing, the nuclear family, innocent girlhood, and the idealized womanhood of dolls. The artist’s titular question, Are You Telling Yourself a Little White Lie?, sandwiches this imagery, critiquing whiteness as the default embodiment of American virtue and signaling pervasive exclusion on the basis of race. In this reframing, the residue of Jim Crow is neither exclusive to the American South nor relegated to the past, but a tacit and ongoing social contract adopted across the country. 

Bachman displayed the series of banners at three locations across Philadelphia in 1988: Fleisher Art Memorial at 7th and Catherine Streets, Germantown Friends School on Coulter Street, and the Bourse Building at 4th and Market Streets. Three public forums examining racial divisions in Philadelphia were convened during the time the banners were publicly displayed.

Art

From the Archive

A white woman stands over a large table in an art studio. She is working on arranging various black and white pictures in a composition. In the background, two other artists stands over a table ironing.

A banner stretches across a residential street in Philadelphia. Trees hang overhead.

Artist Bio

Born 1957, Colombus, OH. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 

S.A. Bachman is an artist, activist, and co-founder of THINK AGAIN and LOUDER THAN WORDS, artist collectives that mobilize creative practice for public intervention and political resistance. Bachman’s work has been exhibited at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA and Philadelphia, PA; and the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA. Her work is held in public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; and the New York Public Library, NY. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and New England Foundation for the Arts. Her photographs and interventionist projects have been published in books including Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies, Graphic Agitation 2, and Peace Signs: The Anti-War Movement Illustrated. THINK AGAIN’s early work is documented in the monograph, A Brief History of Outrage. Bachman has held teaching positions at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston MA; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA.