Félix de la Concha

Molly Bode, Dartmouth College Student Assembly President
Oil on linen
Collection of the artist

Excerpt from the interview

Félix de la Concha video- and audio-taped his portrait sessions. A brief split-screen excerpt appears below, presenting the sitter as well as the ongoing work of the artist.

Transcription: "But what’s interesting is I went on this trip to China, with all the student body presidents of the Ivy League, and I was the only female and . . . the rest were white males except for one student who was an Asian.  Who is Asian and president at Yale. But it was strange sitting there and realizing that we don’t always see the inequalities that happen in I guess placements of higher positions and the fact that all of the rest were male and a few of the colleges had never had female presidents, was kind of eye opening because I didn’t think that was something we always have to face. You know, you hear about it in the workplace, when in certain fields there aren’t a lot of women, but I didn’t realize that woman presidents of Ivy Leagues weren’t common until I showed up in China and stood next to all the other men, you know? It was also interesting because some of our debates in China were about gender equality a lot of the—well, student governments there are very different there, where they have a lot of presidents of certain colleges within a university for instance—but a lot of them, you know, were women, and I was the only one for us. So it’s weird to see that in America, in a place where a lot of us went into China saying—or not saying, but thinking—that some of our Western ideals were maybe more forward thinking than some of the ideals in other countries and seeing that inequalities still exist here in many different ways, even in student body presidents of Ivy League schools.  But I don’t think that me—while being a woman president can make me see different sides, see different issues, sometimes, it’s just as—you can say—I’m just as different as the two past presidents were. Different personalities, different characteristics, and just because I’m a woman doesn’t make me so different from them. It just happens that I am a woman; I didn’t run to be president of Student Assembly because I am a woman."

Fast-forward video of the entire portrait session

Split-screen compression of the entire two-hour portrait session into two minutes, revealing Félix de la Concha's technique.