page_title: Joe Scanlan (artist)
section_title: Donelle Woolford
hierarchical_section_title: Joe Scanlan (artist) / Devised Theatre / Donelle Woolford
caption_attribution_description: An image of performer Jennifer Kidwell and producer Joe Scanlan answering questions following their performance of Donelle Woolford: Dick's Last Stand, at MOCAD, Detroit
context_page_description: Joe Scanlan is an American artist and educator.
context_section_description: In 2007, after several years of developing the character, Scanlan held auditions and then hired two professionally trained female actors, Jennifer Kidwell and Abigail Ramsay, to play the role of an emerging black female artist named Donelle Woolford. As part of the back story and set design for the character, Scanlan made a body of abstract collage works reminiscent of Cubism. The curtain went up, so to speak, in a show titled Donelle Woolford: A Narrative by Joe Scanlan at Chez Valentin, Paris, in 2007. Subsequent stagings involved performances within the larger project that took place in New York, Chicago, London, and Vienna. In a Bomb interview with Jeremy Sigler in 2010, Scanlan discussed the role the actors had played in the project to that point, saying that 
  "Jenn [Kidwell] sees it as a political gesture, a kind of territorial claiming of a type of behavior black artists supposedly aren't allowed to have. But I also think it is a political gesture aimed somewhat at me, a refusal to speak on my behalf. Abigail Ramsay, on the other hand, plays Donelle in a rather sunny persona who is willing to talk to anyone in a charming, slightly overly enthusiastic, young artist sort of way. Though she is quite amenable as an actor, Abigail's Donelle is the type of person that many denizens of the art world find annoying, so her characterization is also a kind of statement."
  In a later iteration of the project Woolford transformed into another art world mood and archetype: the "mid-career artist." As a book and exhibition that premiered in Paris in 2012, Dick Jokes was a play on Richard Prince's joke paintings and included a national comedy tour based on a stand-up routine by Richard Pryor. The project was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, stirring controversy which culminated in the decision of the Yams Collective to withdraw from the Biennial. In Dick's Last Stand (2014), Kidwell played Woolford reenacting a Richard Pryor segment censored from his short-lived 1977 network television show. "See, white folks take everything from me," intones Donelle Woolford in character as Richard Pryor at The Kitchen in New York. Staged as part of Donelle Woolford's participation in the Whitney Biennial, Scanlan and Kidwell's appropriation of Pryor's material was intended to align two "dicks" conceptually: Pryor and the artist Richard Prince.
caption: Jennifer Kidwell and Joe Scanlan respond to questions after their staging of Donelle Woolford: Dick's Last Stand, at MOCAD, Detroit, in February 2014.
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