Description by Karen Rapp, Stanford University

Picket is a humorous take on the cultural demographics of Jessica Walker's hometown in Southwestern Virginia. In Walker's digitally composited image crayons are lined up to resemble a white picket fence that extends indefinitely beyond the edge of the frame. Merging a childhood object with a reference to the classic ideal of domestic life, the playful innocence of this gesture is undermined on closer examination. It then becomes apparent that the crayons are labeled with white racial slurs associated with common stereotypes of Appalachia. Forming both a protective enclosure and a barrier, the endless string of crayons points to the way stereotypes are built into the cultural landscape -- both literally and figuratively - and function as devices of distancing and othering.  

The work was greatly inspired by Richard Dyer's essay "Why Whiteness Matters" where he writes, "We (whites) will speak of, say the blackness or Chineseness of friends, neighbors, colleagues, customers, or clients, and it may be in the most genuine friendly and accepting manner, but we don't mention the whiteness of the people we know."     By drawing attention to the numerous slurs associated with Appalachia, Walker's image draws attention to the way whiteness --   though often not understood as such --is as much a cultural construction as any racially or ethnically defined identity.