Sheila Pree Bright confronts stereotypes, beauty standards in her work

Being the first woman to win the Santa Fe Prize- now the Center Prize -  should have been a great moment in the life of Sheila Pree Bright. To her surprise the accomplishment brought Bright face to face with the bigoted beliefs she confronts in much of her work. Bright won the 2006 Santa Fe Prize for her “Invisible Suburbia” collection, a collection of photographs taken inside the homes of affluent Black Americas. But instead of demystifying a part of Black culture Bright felt went unexamined, she found herself defending that it even existed.

“They looked at the photos and would say things like 'It doesn’t look like any Black house we have seen,'” She recalls. “So I finally said to them ‘What do you want to see watermelon, fried chicken and collard greens?’ ” Bright’s effort to show diversity within the Black community was met with criticism and skepticism from educated artists, art historians and critics who all were all masters of their craft. Despite the reactions from her peers, Bright took home the prize, but the experience stained her memory.

“It showed me what they think about us. We have the negative stereotype, but we’re so much more than that....we’re diverse,” Bright explains. “I wanted to show the diversity of the African-American community.”

Bright has made of career of confronting stereotypes and challenging the perception of American social ideals. Her collection of photos titled “Plastic Bodies” examines the standard of beauty in America and the often traumatic ways in which woman attempt to achieve unrealistic beauty standards.

“I was looking at women of color and started researching about how black woman feel about their bodies,” Bright says. “ I started to look at the Hottentot Venus and started to look at the ideal western body. I was looking  at Lil’ Kim calling herself a Barbie doll.”

What Bright found as she began to research and photograph black woman was more shocking then she could have ever imagined. Society has an image of what we want to show people outwardly with our personal branding says Bright, and that spawned the idea to blend the authentic with the fake. 

“I was showing Barbie dolls with human body parts, but you didn’t know which part was real,” Bright explains. “The point is Barbie has become human and humans have become plastic. We live in a world where we don’t know what’s real and what’s not.”