Activism

Dioramas and Representations of Native Culture

Uplifting Truth through Making

Empathic Looking

Dawoud Bey’s Harlem, U.S.A. series, 1975–1979

The Faithful, 2008

Corita Kent’s G O greatest show of worth, 1968

Inspiration from Corita Kent

Sister Corita Kent & Chicano/a Art in Los Angeles

With Flag Day this past weekend, I am celebrating the work of American artist Faith Ringgold. For over half a century, Ringgold’s depictions of her experience as a Black woman in the United States have challenged predominantly White narratives of national unity, equality, justice, and representation. The flag as it relates to these narratives appears often in Ringgold’s work. In 1970, she and other fellow artists were arrested for their participation in the “People’s flag show,” an exhibition at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park mounted in protest against repressive and nationalist flag desecration laws. In more recent work, Ringgold’s flags address other aspects of civil freedoms in the United States. Freedom Flag Story #3 from 2003 is from a series of flag drawings made after 9/11. About this work Ringgold remarked “[I want to] mark this place in our history so that we can comprehend what it would be like to lose the rather fragile freedoms that we do have.” In this moment, I am learning from the ways in which artists and activists challenge national symbols. As more truths of racial injustices are voiced and repeated, what symbols accurately reflect American liberty and justice? Is it time to reevaluate and revise our symbols?

Objects and images are evidence. They reveal the struggles and joys of our past and present. They help us to write histories—and rewrite those histories when we get things wrong. They tell us that injustice is not new. Police brutality is not new. Racism is not new. White supremacy and white complicity are not new. Progress has happened, but progress has been slow, uneven, and way too small. An Associated Press photograph from the August 1963 March on Washington shows protestors marching with a casket and banners with slogans like “We Demand an End to Bias Now!” 1963 should not look or feel so eerily familiar. We need to make more progress. Let’s educate ourselves: understanding our past allows us to understand our present and to then build the just future we need and deserve. Examining objects and images as evidence is vital to self-education, but it must continue beyond social media. The next book on my anti-racist reading list is So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. What’s on yours?

When I saw Jeffrey Gibson’s piece I’M GONNA TRY JUST A LITTLE BIT HARDER, I thought about the rural upstate community where I live and the protests calling for change.

It is easy for white people, myself included, to take advantage of our privilege by ignoring systemic racism even while believing in the need for racial equity. It is clear that believing is not enough. Action is required.

I love where I live. So acting on my beliefs means I have a responsibility to make sure all individuals feel welcome and safe in my community.⁠

So I commit to trying harder by: 1. continuing to educate myself so I can be better prepared for challenging conversations and 2. forming partnerships within my community to push back against intolerance.

I know these efforts will be difficult and ongoing, but the only way I could fail is not to try.

As confederate monuments are torn down around the United States, some worry this erases history. Holding a nation accountable for its harmful past is a direct response to long histories of white supremacy and Eurocentrism. Depictions of Jesus Christ, for example, with porcelain-white skin have created a mass collective consciousness that allows for an alternate history that disavows the reality that he’s a Middle Eastern man. Centuries of these white-washed images permeate Western society. Acts of subversion disrupt such accepted alternate histories, and one can read Titus Kaphar’s tar-covered Jesus and Biblical saints as both subversive and revolutionary. His use of tar challenges the deficiency of black and brown skin in the art historical canon in much the same way that current efforts in the United States and Europe to confront relics of past atrocities challenge accepted histories. The issue isn’t about erasing or correcting history. It’s about acknowledging that history is dynamic and complex; thus, the need to revisit and reinterpret the past is ongoing.

The late nineteenth-century United States saw a series of transformational political and social milestones: the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the collapse of the Confederacy and end of the Civil War, and the rise of feminist and abolitionist movements. The impacts of these shifts on Black lives, however, were negligible and uneven. Black women in particular were subject to perpetual violence post-emancipation and were forcefully excluded from social movements that claimed to fight for equality. In Kara Walker’s Scene 18 from The Emancipation Approximation, the contrasting colors of the silhouette and placement of the two figures remind me of white women’s ascendance within mainstream feminist movements that deny the value of BIPOC voices. During this current cultural moment of widespread awareness of systemic anti-Black racism, intersectionality in feminist activism is consequential; white women, myself included, must center the voices of Black women, nonbinary folks, and queer activists before our own. Personally, I can harness my platform as a white student at a predominantly white institution and as an intern at the Tang Museum to share the work of BIPOC artists and activists; simultaneously, I must call attention to the ways in which such spaces (higher education and art institutions) perpetuate racism.

“It’s the mark of the hand that placed them there and is simultaneously eroding them away,” says artist Michael Joo. Joo presents us with a tricky scenario: The more often these delicate African crane legs (made of graphite and urethane) are displayed, the more they erode. That being said, the less they’re displayed, the fewer people are exposed to the lessons Joo is trying to spread. We’ve been having some challenging and imperative conversations about race and identity in our Black Theater class at Skidmore, but I think the same sentiment holds. While these discussions can easily fall apart at the seams, what’s more important is the fact that we’re being exposed to them and all of the teachings that they carry.