Let's Talk About Racism in the Art World
Image taken at the occupation of the Brooyklyn Museum hosted by Decolonize this Place, 2018
I, along with millions of other Americans, have been watching the violence and hatred being thrust upon the Black community in horror. This is not new, and a massive cultural shift is long overdue. What strikes me about the response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the many other innocent Black lives lost in the last few weeks, in comparison to that of Eric Garner or Treyvon Martin, has been the cultural focus on unpacking the underlying systemic racism in our country. These incidents are not isolated; they are merely markers of a country built on the oppression of Black people. In sociology, this is referred to as institutional racism. While individual racism, such as an isolated hate crime or the use of a racial slur, is easy to pinpoint, to chastise, and to extinguish, institutional racism is far less perceptible. For example, white terrorists bombing a Black church in Alabama and killing five Black children is a horrific act of individual racism that will certainly generate media coverage, when, in the same city, institutional racism causes five hundred Black babies to die every year because of lack of exposure to food, shelter, and medical facilities. Racism bleeds into every institution our country upholds: education, government, religion, and, obviously, law enforcement.
For real change to occur, we must investigate the inherent racism in the institutions we interact with and work to reverse it. Even institutions that may feel unimportant or even frivolous, such as the beauty industry, are still organizations that we engage with every day, and the way they operate impacts the way our community functions. One institution that I personally engage with on a daily basis is the art world. The Art World is a pretentious phrase to describe a pretentious institution. It is the elite organization of creatives that essentially determine who gets to make a name for themselves as an artist, curator, critic, or collector. While the contemporary art world prides itself on being enlightened, in reality, it reproduces the same inequalities in regards to class, gender, and race seen in any other industry. White men fill museum boards and pump money into white-washed projects, and white artists glorify and profit off of the experiences of people of color. In the 2017 Whitney Biennial, white artist Dana Schutz received major critique for her painting entitled Open Casket, which featured an abstracted portrait of Emmett Till, a Black boy who was brutally murdered at the age of 14 in 1955. Protestors stood in front of the piece wearing shirts that read “BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE”, and many called not only for the piece’s removal from the show but for its destruction. In 2018, the Brooklyn Museum hired white curator Kristen Windmuller to oversee its collection of African art. Decolonize this Place penned a letter demanding change and staged a protest occupying the museum. One protester flung a pink banner over a balcony that read “THEY WANT THE ART, NOT THE PEOPLE.”
As our world shifts as a result of globalization and the rise of media, so will the art world. No longer is art captive inside the white walls of museums. Now, it lives on the internet. Creatives are able to brand themselves and gain followings without the assistance of gallery contracts and art fairs. With such a powerful new tool comes the chance for marginalized voices to be heard. We have the capability to upset the longstanding organization of the art world as a feedback loop for white success, and we can do so by highlighting Black artists and supporting their work with our wallets.
As a white artist myself, I acknowledge that I will never face the discrimination and boundaries placed on artists of color. This is the time to support and appreciate the Black community and to give them a platform for their voice to be heard. I’ve compiled a list of some truly incredible Black creatives, and I encourage you to engage with their work and snoop around the internet to discover more. The future of a more open, interactive, and just art world is on the horizon, and it will exist at our fingertips.
As a preface, while I am personally passionate about art, I am the first to admit that I am far from eloquent when discussing it. Thus, I recommend you defer to a more distinguished voice, that of Antwaun Sargent. Sargent is an independent writer, curator, and critic whose work is often published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, W, Vogue, and more. His book The New Black Vanguard, considers 16 young black fashion photographers and how they look at black identity. His takes on contemporary art are refreshing and thought-provoking, and the artists he profiles are at the forefront of the future of contemporary art.
https://www.antwaunsargent.com
1. Kehinde Wiley
Two Heroic Sisters of the Grassland, 2011
You may know Kehinde Wiley from his powerful depiction of Barack Obama for the National Portrait Gallery in 2017. Wiley’s paintings are traditional in form but radical in content - as he creates large-scale realistic portraits of young African American men against vibrant detailed backgrounds. His work attempts to undercut the national conception of what it means to be a Black man, painting his subjects often against delicate floral backgrounds and with preciousness and attention to detail previously only reserved for European Royal portraits.
2. Kara Walker
Slaughter of the Innocents, 2016
Kara Walker is a contemporary painter, print-maker, installation artist, and, most notably, a silhouettist. Walker explores the harsh intersection of gender, sexuality, and race through her iconic silhouetted figure installations. This traditionally Victorian medium is deployed to showcase the physical and sexual violence inflicted on Black people throughout history. The resulting work is painful and beautiful.
http://www.karawalkerstudio.com
3. Joshua Johnston
Unknown, N.D.
Joshua Johnston is the earliest documented professional African-American painter. He was active in Baltimore during the late eighteenth century and, while his background remains a mystery, there is evidence pointing to the fact that he was a former slave. His work predominantly consisted of portraits of the white slave-holding elite of Baltimore.
4. Jerrell Gibbs
Elle es, 2019
Jerrell Gibbs’ paintings are charming, intimate, and immersive. His work retraces family memories while also investigating the everyday experience of the African-American diaspora. He paints his subjects with the care and delicacy of real, personal intimacy, and to view his work is to know him.
5. Glenn Ligon
Untitled, 1992
Glenn Ligon is one of the pioneers of the Conceptual art movement, known for his use of text painting - a genre featuring written word on canvas - to challenge social constructions of race, gender, and sexuality. He came into the public eye in the 1990s when he stenciled selections from African American literature in stark black letters on white backgrounds. Since then, he has shifted to an array of experimental mediums, but his focus remains on the complexities of identity.
http://www.glennligonstudio.com
6. Deana Lawson
Soweto Queen, 2018
Deana Lawson refers to the subjects of her photographs as “her family”, though she is not related to any of them by blood. Lawson is in no way a documentarian; she stages her photographs the way one would stage a still life painting. Her work portrays Black bodies in a way that is intimate, yet also confrontational. Zadie Smith describes her work in a much more poignant and beautiful way here.
https://www.sikkemajenkinsco.com/deana-lawson
7. Amy Sherald
Precious Jewels by the Sea, 2019
Amy Sherald is the artist behind Michelle Obama’s National Portrait. Her work investigates the idea of identity and how we perform ours in the context of social and cultural expectations. The most iconic feature of her paintings is her use of grayscale for skin tone, confronting the idea of color-as-race.
8. Tyler Mitchell
I’m Doing Pretty Hood in my Pink Polo, 2019
Tyler Mitchell is a wunderkind among the youngest photographers to ever shoot the cover of Vogue (at age 23). Mitchell disrupted the conventional career path of a fashion photographer, getting his start by shooting music videos for up-and-coming artists like Kevin Abstract when he was still a freshman at film school. While his commercial career is astounding, I recommend taking a look at his series I’m Doing Pretty Hood in My Pink Polo, which explores modern black masculinity.
9. Solange Knowles
A Seat at the Table Performance, 2017
While many know Knowles as the weirder, younger sister to Queen B, she is a far cry from a pop star. Knowles is inspired by the grungey and shocking Fluxus era of contemporary art, and thus presents her music through this lens. Her most masterful piece to date was her first performance of her album A Seat at The Table, which she presented in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum with 75 other black performers. In this moment, Knowles transformed the historically racially and financially exclusive Modernist temple, both physically and metaphorically white, into a masterpiece.
10. Recho Omondi
Recho Omondi in OMONDI
Recho Omondi is a fashion powerhouse. Her brand, OMONDI, releases one romnantic, perfected collection a year, because she believes a designer should have the time to sit at a sewing machine and truly create. However, Omondi is not only a designer; she is also a critic. Her podcast The Cutting Room Floor, lends her cheeky and candid voice to analyzing the fashion world and the culture surrounding it.
https://www.notjustalabel.com/omondi