Project Implicit is thrilled to introduce a collaboration with interdisciplinary artist and activist Bayeté Ross Smith to create two Implicit Association Tests based on the Race Attitudes IAT and Race Weapons IAT.
These two new tasks incorporate selected images from the artist’s photo collection “Our Kind of People” and are intended to measure the strength of associations between concepts and evaluations or stereotypes. We invite you to take a test to learn more about what associations you may have.
What is "Our Kind of People"?
“Our Kind of People" examines perception based on appearance and deconstructs how clothing, race, gender, and class signifiers affect our daily interactions and social systems. People from across the globe are dressed and styled in clothing from their own wardrobes and photographed with consistent lighting and facial expressions. The viewer then places their own cultural perceptions, including their biases, onto the image.
Who is Bayeté Ross Smith?
Bayeté Ross Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, filmmaker, and education worker, working at the intersection of photography, film & video, visual journalism, 3D objects, and new media.
His work is in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Brooklyn Museum. He has exhibited internationally with the Goethe Institute (Ghana), Foto Museum (Belgium), the Lianzhou Foto Festival (China), and America House (Ukraine), among others. His collaborative projects “Along The Way" and “Question Bridge: Black Males" have shown at the 2008 and 2012 Sundance Film Festival, respectively. His work has also been featured at the Sheffield Doc Fest and the L.A. Film Festival.
He has also created a series of public art projects with organizations such as the Jerome Foundation, BRIC Arts Media, The Amistad Center, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, the Hartford YMCA, San Francisco District Attorney’s Office amongst others. His work has been published in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic Learning, Question Bridge: Black Males in America (2015), Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), and Black: A Celebration of A Culture (2005).
Bayeté is Columbia Law School’s inaugural Artist-In-Residence, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Resident, a Creative Capital Awardee, an Art For Justice Fund Fellow, a BPMPlus Grantee, and a POV NY Times embedded mediamaker.
In addition to his creative work in art and media, Bayeté helped launch and continues to work with the Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI), a hospital and school-based violence prevention organization in Brooklyn NY that partners with Kings County Hospital. He is also a faculty member at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Bayeté lives in Harlem, New York.
If you have questions about this collaboration or the Implicit Association Tests, please contact the Project Implicit Team at collab@projectimplicit.net.