“WHITE” - Daniel J. Martinez Museum Tag Project 1993 - 1995
Santa Monica: Robert Berman Gallery, 1995. Offset with mounted museum tag. 7 x 5 in. Very good. Item #10566
Postcard for an exhibition of Daniel J. Martinez’ Museum Tag Project, the radical 90s investigation of race in the art world.
The project exhibited the museum admission tags that Martinez originally created for the 1993 Whitney Biennial: instead of a regular admissions tag, visitors were given the artists’ custom-made tags that substituted his own words on the Whitney pins. All of Martinez tags were variations and fragments of the sentence “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white;” each tag thus consisted of phrases such as “IMAGINE,” “EVER WANTING,” “WHITE,””I CANT,” and “TO BE.”
Martinez, a former member of the Chicano art collective Asco, is a Los Angeles-based intermedia artist. He came up with the words as a response to the conditions of the society that I found myself living in ... I must have heard a million times people saying how they didn’t want to be minorities. Well, why do you think we want to be you? Why do you think that whiteness is the pinnacle of success? What happens if you [don’t] want to be white, if you categorically reject that? The only strategy that made sense to me was to flip whiteness back on itself.”
The exhibition became a major point of contention and ‘90s culture wars: “I remember even former Mayor Koch, who had a radio show, accused the museum of fascism because he said we forced people to wear badges that declared that being white was no good,” said David Ross, who was director of the Whitney at the time. This 1995 showing was the first exhibition of the tags after the Whitney exhibition. Ephemera from the project remains scarce; OCC locates no holdings of the tags or related materials as of April 2026.
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