Race Matters in the Art World....This years Whitney Biennial is exhibiting the work of a privileged black woman named Donelle Woolford. In fact, she is the alter ego of a well established white male artist named Joe Scanlan. Many people see the arts as a place of theoretical and material experiment, free from social norms. In this narrative, its artists job to challenge social taboos, take risks, and make us think and evolve. However, the institutions and citizens of the art world itself are also strongly conditioned expressions and representations of race and class divisions- in majority of blue-chip spaces you will not miss the fact by who is shown and who is seen as audience that white wealth equals 20 times that of blacks in America and the divide is widening. In the art world POC tokenism is going strong in Obamas post racial society. When a collective of Black artists named HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? recently withdrew from the Whitney in protest, after being basically ignored by the museum and curator Michelle Grabner, Scanlan had this to say: I only want to say that the experiences I have had working on Donelle Woolford have been some of the most intellectually challenging and humanly rewarding experiences of my life, largely because it has required me to confront what I don’t know, come to grips with those limits, and work at pushing them, expanding them. Not only as a white male artist, but as a human being. That confrontation, that learning experience, continues even now as I consider the weight and force of your actions. This statement seems to invert politics from public shared space to the private realm of self-growth. It sounds like Joe Scanlan is all about expanding his territory into the unknown realm of the other. He didnt mean it this way, but it echoes the long project of white colonization. I think this is a case where the art world is thinking its avante garde, but is just out of touch.
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 16:23:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015