Spoken words writing and images originate in social and cultural contexts and so are fraught
with meanings are vehicles of values and norms. They inevitably also demarcate boundaries
serving to class people as members of groups or outsiders. This adds to the urgency of the
question of what can in fact be said and shown and who or what determines those limits. The
present catalog addresses these concerns through a survey of eminent art of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. The works gathered in it speak to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion
to categorizations and the narratives that were created to sustain them. And they remind us
that these phenomena are human-made which is also to say susceptible to change-that we share
responsibility for them.
