Teaching Race

Teaching race in any classroom is hard.  It's a fraught subject, based on how we see ourselves and how others see us, and how we use that knowledge of ourselves and others.  I consistently walk into this section aware that I am a white woman and that most of my students are visibly other ethnicities and races.  Race suddenly looms larger than it should in the dynamic of the classroom because I am not just the teacher but the Caucasian teacher, asking questions and demanding answers of my students, my Black and Latino students.  We begin with the lights on, a rarity in an art history classroom.  But I want them to be able to see me as we discuss the power differences in self-identifying vs. being labeled, in prejudice vs. racism, the idea of stereotypes and their cultural resonances.  

Often, I've been teaching a chronological survey so they see Henry Ossawa Tanner with American Realist/Impressionists like Eakins and Homer; we talk about Jacob Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance.  I started there today (at least briefly as this is a contemporary art topics class).  What strikes me though about Tanner is that his awareness of self is well within the artistic mainstream of Impressionism--gentle bonding genre scene of an old man teaching banjo to a boy in the idiom of light and shadow and loose brushstrokes.  I think it's important to see Tanner as trying very hard to be the man his White colleagues think he can't be, the man who feels compelled to leave the US for the greener-grass of France.  I moved on to Lawrence, who in the 1940s Migration Series, sees somewhat more openly the utopian longing of the move North, the racism both within the established Northern Black communities and the race riots sparked with Whites in cities like St. Louis.  Lawrence has a self awareness that was new and is important.

But part of me wanted to shock them into talking so I started with Carrie Mae Weems and the series, "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried," 1995.  Appropriation is a theme we've been discussing so this was important. Made for Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz in 1850 to "prove" the racial inferiority of Blacks, they are "scientific" daguerreotypes that denied the personhood of these slaves.  Weems frames them within another image--an African woman--at the beginning and end to suggest heritage lost and mourned.  

My students looked at this image from the series:

They acknowledged the visual of the ropy scars from beatings but had no context at all for the words.  They did not know who Duke Ellington was; a few had heard of Billie Holiday.  None of them knew what the "strange fruit" was.  So I played the song and spoke the lyrics.  (Hurrah for YouTube).

We moved from there to David Hammons, an artist I almost never have time to teach but this is a special topics class.  Plus, he's rarely (if ever?) represented in survey books because of the largely political nature of his work.  We started with the seminal work, "Spade with Chains" from 1973.

They eventually got around to working on farms and chains of slavery.  They had seen no African masks so the connections there were ones I needed to make for them.  But they also had never heard the word "spade" in its derogatory meaning.  (So I made the computer users look it up in the Urban Dictionary.)  Age matters--when I was a kid, "spade" was still recognized; anecdotally, I suspect these kids are far more inured to variations on nigger, which was so pejorative when I was a kid that I never heard it, much less from my father in his own prejudices and jokes.

Finally, we ended today's class with Hammons' piece "In the Hood", from the Fresh Hell exhibit in 2010 (a piece which I have since learned dates back to the 1990s).

 For them, they jumped quickly to the Grim Reaper--faceless, deathly.  I asked them if it reminded them of the news and Trayvon Martin, seeing it now.  It seemed so fresh in my mind, and so much an evocation of the complications of race in America, with an African-American victim, an Hispanic-American perpetrator, concealed carry/stand your ground laws (and the economic class issues that drive them).

And about half the class looked at me blankly.  A few knew who I was speaking of and filled the rest in and we went on (actually, we stopped with this image but will come back to race on Friday).

Are they forced to reinvent their racial identities anew because they cannot see where they have grown from?  If my students don't know the history of race besides "the Civil War ended slavery" and "Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for desegregation", are they condemned to repeat the pain and sting of racism?  How can they not know the history happening around them, at this moment?  This is their lived context.  These events will be for them the Rodney King of the 1990s, the Willie Horton of the 1980s and 1970s, Eldridge Cleaver of the 1950s/60s.  When do they move from living in the moment to looking back at the moment to understanding the chain of moments?  When does living the history make it something other than just "OLD" and "A LONG TIME AGO"?

And this is why, every year, despite my own discomfort, despite my own frustration with what they don't know, I teach this material again.  Because we need--as Americans--to see how our countrymen see history, the country, the world.  (By the way, on Friday, we'll also talk about Asian-Americans and Native Americans and contemporary imagery.)

The Business of Art Museums

I don't know doodly-squat about business and running a museum but two stories recently came to my attention about museum buildings that really highlight the difficulties of preserving cultural patrimony in this age of tough economics.

In Cologne, Germany, there was a thriving and quite large Jewish community.  The community even weathered Crusader massacres in 1096 and Plague retaliation in 1349, and limped along until the advent of the Nazis.  A rich trove of many different artifacts has been uncovered and lies unacknowledged and unused in storage.  There's a dig in the city, where a new museum was proposed in 2007, but the general feeling is that Cologne is too broke to build a museum and that there's a sufficiently big Jewish museum in Berlin (250 miles away).  The museum is proposed at $64 million ($50+million euros); building a modern facility is undoubtedly expensive.  No denying that there are other places to spend that money.  Are there better causes?  Depends on your values, doesn't it?  It's a tough question as the AP story highlights--there's a solid number of people signing a petition against it.  But it seems to me that the placing of a fake bomb/suitcase and the carving of swastikas are also an indication that those who do not know the past are condemned to making ignorant and hateful statements until history smacks them upside the head.  If it were me on the committee, I'd seriously look into scaling back plans, seeing if we could find a locale to overhaul or build smaller/differently to get some of the collection into public exposure.  There might be a balance that could be achieved in this difficult economic climate that doesn't mean all or nothing for both history and services.

Here in the US, MoMA has bought the locale next door, the former American Folk Art Museum at 45 W. 53rd St. (link to NY Times article, pay wall may apply).  The museum building was a big deal--designed by talented and ambitious architects (Tod Williams and Billie Tsien) and opened after the 9/11 attacks.  But it was doomed--the museum borrowed $32 million for the expansion to this site.  I've not been to the new site, though know folks who have and have said lovely things about the American Folk Museum.  We can look back now to the bubbles that burst in construction, NYC, non-profits, tourist trade; we can be pleased that MoMA has the ability/resources to make use of the site.  We can also wonder why MoMA will raze the building and rebuild in its own signature metal and glass; is branding so important that the satellite extension needs to look like the rest of the buildingS?  Would there be a better use of the money?  Again, depends on your values.  I have to feel like there could be museum uses that respected the architecture of the building (especially since it meets museum needs; this doesn't need to be a major new use renovation).  I have to feel that there could be ways to spend less money but the pockets of MoMA are very deep.  Director Glenn Lowry suggests that they could put in another restaurant and shop on the ground floor--because maybe that is our cultural patrimony: look at the art and then buy a cheap reproduction on a coffee mug to take home.

Added 4/11, after the initial post: Hrag Vartanian over at Hyperallergic  also reflects on the MoMA purchase, with less flattering things to say about the Folk Art building in general but raising the question of buildings themselves as part of our cultural heritage.