Art Show Asks: Who Are We?

“When I was 6 years old, after I’d begun first grade, I came home after school one day,” the artist writes. Though she is best known for nostalgic depictions of her Jewish family, Jill Poyourow’s text runs under a small snapshot of the artist herself as a child.

“I was standing next to an open refrigerator door which was adorned with my primary school art. Anyway, at that moment, I was overwhelmed with this desire, this one hope. I blurted it out to my mother and my infant brother and my older brother: ‘I wish I was Christian.’ ” The girl in the picture, you notice, is supposed to be looking at the camera, but isn’t. “I guess it was already obvious even to a 6-year-old that it was ‘better’ to be what ‘they’ all were.”

The picture was taken in upstate New York, in the 1960s. The artist goes on to say that she grew up to marry a WASP and live--where else?--in California, where so many come to rethink their identity.

The artist Hung Liu ended up here, too, and her art, too, is a study in the official state obsession. She writes: “Resident Alien. U.S. Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service.” The words have been painted across the top of a self-portrait done up like a massive green card. In the space marked “name,” Liu has written “Cookie, Fortune.” It’s a metaphor for that neither-nor sense that afflicts so many here. “Not Chinese,” is how Liu sees herself in the picture, “and not American.”

Or, as the native Californian Laura Alvarez terms it, “living in the border.” It is the operative condition of her “Double Agent Sirvienta” paintings. The watercolors detail the exploits of a telenovela actress who plays a maid who is actually a spy and computer hacker. The inspiration, Alvarez says, was her own upbringing as the daughter of a Mexican-born cleaning woman in Orange County.

“Double Agent Sirvienta,” she says, is the product of a life of shuttling between her home and Mexico, between school and friends’ houses, which she sometimes cleaned with her mother, between who she was and what she seemed.

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These pieces are part of a show that starts Sunday at the Skirball Cultural Center, entitled “Revealing & Concealing: Portraits & Identity.” Its topic is not, and was never intended to be, California. Barbara Gilbert, who curated the show, says she actually set out to put the museum’s own collection of Jewish-themed portraits into a more universal context. But to see the art--most of it done, coincidentally, by people who live and work here--is to get yet another version of the search that has become, next to money, the central preoccupation of this place.

It’s not a new search; “finding yourself” is the hoariest cliche on the West Coast. Nor is this the only place in America where people are hung up on identity. But in this as in so much else, California is, as that other cliche goes, America, only more so. From the new-minted subdivisions of the Central Valley to the nouveau riche ghettos of the Silicon Valley to the immigrant suburbs of the Southland, inquiring minds keep wanting to know: Who are we?

It’s a question that makes people roll their eyes in other places. Not here, though. Here, people have spent decades, now, fixating on identity. Even if they don’t know what “identity” is, they fixate. Alvarez says her doctor (a practitioner of Chinese medicine) “thinks everyone here has the same condition--they think too much.” Who am I if my skin is brown and I don’t speak Spanish? Who am I if my wife stops obeying me, the way she used to in the old country? Who am I if I’m pulling down 10 million per picture and my own parents seem uncomfortable now around me? If the only people who care are on the other side of the continent, why do I feel so sheepish about losing my religion? If my mom’s Italian and my dad’s Chinese, is it OK to date the African American boy down the street?

The preoccupation has only broadened as California has become a state with no demographic majority to boss it. More than ever, this has become a place that doesn’t give newcomers even a clue about who to be. People arrive thinking California will complete them, and all it does is reflect them, in their neither-nor splendor. And being neither-nor is harder, by far, than people think.

So we work through it. “If I’d grown up in Mexico, it would have been so easy,” laughs Alvarez. “It’s totally confusing here.” Double Agent Sirvienta’s take on the matter is at the Skirball for the public from this weekend until the end of the year.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.