The outdoor exhibition, Identity isn’t a Monolith, explores how site-specific places and cultures shape identities. Through the spatial development of our surroundings and the way we interpret them, we begin to understand the places we are embedded into. This helps to form our own identities and our relationship to space. Our identities as humans aren’t monolithic because of place and place identity, and stereotypes negate this polylith idea. Holding this exhibit in an outdoor public space underscores the relationship of site, landscape, and identity.
On another related level, all the work in the exhibition also addresses the dissonance between lived experience of ethnicities in contrast to stereotypes that are projected onto them by dominant society and media. As the locational scale of these works travel from very specific Athens, California to very broad America, they each are one ingredient in the pot that contributes to the ongoing battle for equality in America. The way that these works contribute to that battle is to display true ethnicities and cultures in site specific areas in order to show that although our identities and origins are different, we are still human and deserve the same rights and privileges like anyone else.