Moving Hands

At this point, I when I think about my future career, I think it’d be cool to be involved in a program with the goal of increasing access to art so that minorities who are usually denied access for reasons like class or disabilities can participate in art. I’m interested in three primary areas: (A) providing a fuller picture of art history, (B) teaching people how to analyze the art that contemporary culture produces, and (C) giving people the tools to create art of their own. Personally, I think that all of these can work in synergy to create a larger impact than any one of them alone.

I am going to do a series of this issue because it’s too big for one blog post. I’ll start with art history.

The Two Fridas by Frida Kahlo

In popular culture, the canon of Great Art revolves around dead white men: Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo, etc. Unless one is actually studying art history in college, it is rare to hear about people like Artemisia Gentileschi or Jasper Johns.

In fact, when the contributions of minority populations are not ignored, they are outright ridiculed. Just consider the fact that needlework, a traditionally female medium, is seen as less important than painting; similarly, ancient African art is considered more “primitive” than ancient Greek art.

This refusal to give credit to minorities is pretty important. By doing this, the dominant culture drills the idea into our heads that minorities have never contributed anything of value to the world. This easily turns into a message that marginalized people are inherently less valuable than others.

When I was a senior in high school, I took AP Art History.¹ Before this course, I’d only heard about Dead White Male artists. I also definitely remember feeling like an outcast in a small town in the Rockies. I was queer, and I was deaf. Not exactly a winning combination in such a conservative monoculture.

In AP Art History, I read about Frida Kahlo and I was intrigued, so I watched the biopic about her. I’m gonna be honest right here – cineastes and art historians tend to turn their noses up at Frida for reasons that are pretty valid, but when I first saw it, I felt a little less alone. The message that I took away from the film at that point in my life was that Frida Kahlo had taken her experiences with chronic pain, sexuality, and gender and transformed all of it into something meaningful instead of letting it ruin her life. That was something that I really admired, and I think it’s pretty important to see that type of portrayal instead of another “Broken Disabled Person” or “Queer Kills Self or is Murdered” narrative.

Although I admired Kahlo, what really helped me feel less alone was reading about even more artists. We used a pretty liberal art history textbook, so I also read about other people who had had experiences of being marginalized. It’s not just the Dead White Men who created meaningful art – there are so many different groups of people who became artists to express their experiences. Historically speaking, it’s almost like there is this whole extended family that our parents didn’t tell us about because they were queer, or the wrong religion, or the wrong nationality.

That’s why I think it is important to give people a more complete idea of art history: it lets people know that they are not alone, historically speaking. Reconnecting people with artists from their community’s past is the first step in building up collective self-esteem; likewise, teaching people about artists who do not look like them helps them develop empathy for others.

1. By the way, when I say that it’s important to teach people about art history, I’m not necessarily talking about formal education in the form of AP courses or college courses. Those can be very useful, but I think that education should be more accessible than it currently is. [↩]