Living Histories: Global Conversations in Art Education

By Intellect Books

Living Histories is a collection of new scholarship that explores histories of art education through a series of international contexts. The first truly international text highlighting histories of art education, with contributions from over 30 scholars based in 18 countries.

Art education holds an important role in promoting historical awareness of the multiple relations that connect pedagogic inquiry with culture, heritage, place and identity, locally and globally. To keep pace with the movements of art and society, Garnet and Sinner consider that art education requires more inclusive and holistic versions of history from transnational perspectives that break down barriers and cross borders in the pursuit of more informed and diverse understandings of the field. The broad focus of this edited collection is to provide both new perspectives of art education from around the world, and to introduce transnationalism into the field as a way to conceptualize the entanglements of historical research in our globalized age. Transnational histories of art education focus on the linkages and flows that shift focus away from the nation-state to other transnational actors such as individuals, communities, institutions and/or organizations. 

Contributions from scholars and educators based and working in Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, India, Iran, Japan, Malta, South Africa, Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, UK, USA and Zimbabwe.

Includes chapters that adapt an approach of ‘artwork histories’ to explore the legacies of art education as an anticipatory mode of historical thinking and practice across the visual arts and sites of art education. The book offers an opportunity for authentic engagement and intellectual risk, which includes the rejection of ‘correct’ interpretations of historical problems. As active agents, art education historians are not passive collectors of the past, but engaged in new ways of doing history predicated on cultivating stories that move beyond representation to attend to aesthetic dimensions that bridge historiography, material culture, oral history, art history and teacher education. Living Histories provides an interpretation of historical thinking and consciousness through the interrelations of time and space to provoke critical and creative practices in education.

This is the latest book in the Artwork Scholarship series, which aims to invite debate on, and provide an essential resource for transnational scholars engaged in, creative research involving visual, literary and performative arts. 

With contributors from 18 countries, this book will have a substantial international readership among art educators and those interested in the history of art education, primarily in universities and colleges. It will also be particularly useful for graduate students.

It will also appeal to scholars in arts education more broadly - music education, dance education, theatre education scholars, cultural and art historians, art theorists, international educators, and curators.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jul 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789385656

Book preview

Introduction

Dustin Garnet

Anita Sinner

This collection offers a series of thoughtful, invigorating and provocative conversations with international scholars in pursuit of more equitable, diverse and inclusive understandings of the histories of art education. Inspired by the intellectual mentorship of Graeme Chalmers, this book embraces an urgency to bring forward encounters of art education as living histories, recognizing the importance of conceptualizing history as an expression of multiplicity, and as movements that break down traditional barriers in our field of study. Moving with and beyond western historicity, we present new possibilities for providing comprehensive accounts that serve as a call for action and innovation. Now is the time for art education to unsettle and take up overlooked challenges, and we advocate for opportunities to correct the historical record by inviting readers to share in these conversations, in relation to their stories and their histories.

Informed by Munslow (2010), we embrace an ‘anticipatory mode of thinking-with’ historical dispositions in this book, guided by the concept of ‘artwork history’ (p. 183). Artwork histories in this case include but are not limited to aspects of Munslow's thesis, expanding key tenets to art education that recognize the vitality of critical, experimental and reflective wayfinding, alongside artful perspectives that bring forward differing degrees and latitudes with, in and through ethical interventions, materiality, relationality, self-consciousness, irony and even skepticism in accounts that are continually turning, much like ‘a story without a centre’ (Smith, 2018, p. 844). Munslow's advocacy for such ‘new histories’ draws out our entanglements in the exchange of visual art, pedagogy, space, time and beings (human and non-human). Our ‘situated worldings’ invite artists, researchers and teachers to unfold the poetics of difficult histories, to attend to the tensionality that the silences in art education has long-produced, where ‘it matters which stories tell stories as a practice of caring and thinking’ (Haraway, 2016, pp. 50, 37).

As historian Daniel Woolf (2019) has argued, ‘mainstream historiography [has] ignored the agency of the peoples subordinated in the expansion of Europe since the fifteenth century, and failed to take note of them in historical writing’ (p. 270). As a result, art education holds an important role in promoting historical awareness that connects pedagogic inquiry with culture and heritage, place and identity, locally and globally. ‘New histories’ decouple history and the past, and reject the notion of a singular ‘true’ history, or metanarrative (Munslow, 2015), moving towards what Seixas (2017) describes as coherent and interwoven historical approaches, in an effort to evoke critical and creative practices in education.

Histories in art education are drawing on more experimental approaches, attending to the affect and sensorial, to social engagement in communities of inquiry and to the co-creation of histories that are mindful of rhetorical, visual, textual and performative devices. Our evaluative standpoints are no longer linear or fixed, but always becoming in the curation of when is the historical moment. Such inquiry is fluid, and our response-ability to the conditions of history increasingly active, deliberative and speculative in turn. Perhaps as Massumi (2017) suggests, ‘the job of art’ in this context is ‘to distill the aesthetic dimension belonging to every event into an event in itself’, as a mechanism of making history with sensitivity as rigorous integrity (p. 81). Distinctive voices broaden horizons of form and content, and open possibilities concerning how and why moving beyond facts and events in descriptive histories enmesh geographies of self-in-relation, within the porous nature of historical consciousness to connect matter and mattering (see e.g., Grever & Adriaansen, 2019).

Living a historical life, as Ruin (2019) argues, is ‘enacted in the existential temporal space of past, present, and future’, contingent on an atmosphere of becoming with acts and actions, in effect, a praxis that reorients art education to confront the past and respond with creative practices as truth claims, reverberating with beautifully robust and vigorous artwork scholarship that demands social justice and strengthens critical engagement (p. 801). In the process, we create the conditions for the history of art education ‘as a form of cultural criticism’ (Munslow, 2010, p. 6). If we proceed in with a standpoint that ‘history is never a neutral domain, but an always contested ethical-political space shared between the dead and the living’, how we negotiate, entwine and correct our view of the past as a field is paramount, and the responsibility of all conscientious art educators, as we too ‘become history’ (Ruin, 2019, p. 807).

Alongside these scholars and our contributors, we begin to imagine international histories of art education that expand ‘the experiences and perspectives of individuals who might otherwise linger in the shadows of more prominent figures or become veiled from history’ (Bolin & Kantawala, 2017, p. 17). Art education historian Mary Ann Stankiewicz (2009) was among the first scholars to investigate ‘a comprehensive international history of visual arts education’ (p. 13). This research ‘provided an overview, not a detailed portrait of the landscape’ (p. 13) and mapped ‘visual art education history in terms of the formation and transmission of capital – human capital, cultural capital, social capital, and economic capital’ (Stankiewicz, 2007, p. 8). Drawing on various scholars from the fields of history and art education, Stankiewicz (2007) speculated on different ways international histories could be framed, including ‘historical periods, geopolitical entities, nationalism, networks of international influences, topics, or themes, (...) geographical, political scheme[s]’, and framing an international history of art education ‘in relation to forming or maintaining national identity’, or put another way, to ‘map the complex web of influences from Western to the Pacific Rim and tricontinental countries’ (p. 7). Stankiewicz (2009) also addressed her positionality, noting she brought ‘[a] … North American perspective to the task’ (p. 2), and that her ‘framework privileges Western, developed nations’ (see Stankiewicz, 2007, p. 8). Stankiewicz's writing offered a point of departure and suggests multiple future trajectories that have laid the foundation for what O'Donoghue (2021) describes as ‘engaging conversations’. Such work reminds us that there are multiple historical perspectives yet to be explored, expressed and exchanged. As historians and art educators, we continually make choices concerning events, interpretations and methods of storying, and despite the completeness of evidence, sophistication of theories and complexity of methods, history is an authoring process that can embrace difference differently. The author's choices ‘contribute to the artifice of narrative as a true representation of the past’, and this feature is precisely the quality living histories brings to the fore (Booth, 2012, p. 568).

In this case, three knowledge clusters of Exploring the Politics of Space and Place, In Relation to Communities of Practice and Sharing Possibilities and Propositions form the architecture of this book, connecting more than 30 authors from 18 countries worldwide who share their accounts through multiple forms of historical debate, archival research and creative expressions that invoke stories, visual essays and poetic interludes. Each section closes with an artistic mode of inquiry to further stretch the forms of historical renderings in ways that push the boundaries of living histories. These conversations are formed around notions of histories as movement, and responsive renderings, as each offers entry points that resist typical classification, and instead express domains shaped by equity (politics of space and place); diversity (in relation to communities of practice); and inclusivity (sharing possibilities and propositions). Blending theory–practice and embracing the pulse of relationality as a historical disposition in this way has been a cornerstone of our own historical inquiries and in large part, the genesis of this project, grounded in values and beliefs that bring us again to Graeme Chalmers, and issues and topics of cultural pluralism, social justice and scholarly responsibility to effect change (see Garnet, 2020, 2017, 2016; Garnet & Sinner, 2019; Sinner, 2006, 2013).

In our first section, Joni Boyd Acuff and Sharbreon Plummer advocate for a compelling critical lens of Black Feminist Material Culture (BFMC) as a site of resistance to historical domination in art and education, and as a way forward for current and future Black scholars. With the Venice Biennale as the impetus for critique, Raphael Vella challenges metanarratives and Eurocentric assumptions, advancing the urgent need to decolonize knowledge across our field. Felix Rodriguez interrogates art education history in the Dominican Republic, focusing on how curriculum and textbooks of the 1990's reflect transnational interests that redirected the culture of teaching and learning. In the case study of a school in one of the poorest areas of Brazil, Leisa Sasso documents how art is an essential political and pedagogical tool in the daily lives of students facing social inequality and extreme violence, and how art can bring hope for tomorrow. From Australia, Julia Morris maps the program, Yokayi Waarbiny Wer Malayin Djin-Djin (Celebrate Art and Cultural Spirit), to demonstrate how history is lived, and how such educational experiences support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Nick Stanley offers commentary on the evolution of LGBTQ+ issues, drawing on Great Britain and American art education. Stanley advocates for a queer approach as ‘one of the most powerful devices available to art educators and all pluralists today seeking a means to engender diversity’. Rolf Laven closes the section with a graphic-novel interlude about the legacy of Viennese art educator Franz Čížek, a pioneer of pedagogic reforms who continues to influence the field today. In recent decades, graphic novels have entered academia, receiving critical acclaim in journals and institutionalized by museums and libraries. As well, universities across the world have introduced specialized art and art education courses on comics, and art historians have begun to conduct research on the content and medium of comics. It is our honour to include this form of historical research in this international collection of histories.

We then shift our conversation to Antonija Balić Šimrak and Marijana Županić Benić, who explore the influence of European art theory in early childhood art education in Croatia, and how those connections have been vital to the development of visual arts education curriculum over the past 100 years. Hana Stehlíková Babyrádová offers her perspective on ten historic domains of Czech art education and discusses changes in how children perceive, receive and render art today. In a proposition of what education can be, for whom and why, María Victoria Mejía and Susana Vargas Mejía highlight innovative ways of rethinking visual art curriculum and instruction in the 25-year history of a private Columbian learning institution, the Colegio Campestre San Diego, where an alternate curriculum is based on the arts and the environment. Attwell Mamvuto and his colleagues interrogate different government mandates as critical benchmarks in higher education in Zimbabwean art education, drawing on the past to meet future trajectories, competences and skills valued in the twenty-first century. Elly Yazdanpanah and Siavash Farkhak offer a co-created conversation about art education in Iran through Elly's story of becoming an art educator, in relation to discourses that inform socio-cultural contexts inside and outside the academy over the past century, and how art education serves as a platform of activism and change. Jim Daichendt's contribution explores object biographies through a chronicle of one particular street poster entitled FO$$IL FOOL (2015), which was originally created as a painting by the artist Robbie Conal. Daichendt postulates that an art object can morph through a series of lives and the biography of this particular street poster can help art educators understand our relationship to ephemeral artworks and how meaning is actively constructed outside an institutional venue. To conclude our second conversation, Robert Nellis shares a compelling poetic interlude. With a backdrop of nature, Nellis calls into question how one thinks about history, how one can tell it, and what one believes of it.

In our third conversational strand, Sharing Possibilities and Propositions, we begin with a personal story of inquiry. Enid Zimmerman recounts how her engagement in archives availed potential pitfalls in a digital age, and why more rigorous verification of historical resources must always be at the forefront of our work. Juuso Tervo then presents an illuminating discussion that traces the influence of Greek antiquity in western culture, specifically in public schools in Finland and the United States. Tervo explores the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to draw out how such entanglements offer insights to transnational visual art histories today. In an exemplary transnational study, Kazuyo Nakamura and her colleagues address the impact of John Dewey's educational perspectives on Japan and China in the twentieth century, and how in a contemporary intellectual exchange, their team and students continue to reframe art education for global citizenship through cross-cultural collaborative action research. Bringing us to the eastern Caribbean, Marsha Pearce speculates on the ways we can imagine the past through her engagement with the neglected narrative of Patricia Ismond, the champion and founder of the Department of Creative and Festival Arts at the University of the West Indies in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Hyunji Kwon offers a reflection on how mediating the sensations of trauma through oral history, among other strategies, tethers together narratives across generations and continents, in her exploration of her story and the story of Armenian artist, Ara Oshagan. And on a meditative note, Pallawi Sinha charts the life story of Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, an Indian art historian, philosopher and ‘universal man’ whose pursuit of art, nature and philosophy in the context of postcolonial, post-humanist education brings us to rethink yoga in relation to ancient Indian principles and theory of the arts. We conclude with a visual-poetic essay by María-Isabel Moreno-Montoro and María Martínez-Morales, which showcases a collective artistic event involving 76 people in a small town in Spain. In ‘Hacer camino’ (Make way), they asked participants to walk together and trace the path of their life in the community through their histories, their values and beliefs, and their artistic practices.

Based on this collection, we may draw a number of potential routes for living histories in art education. As active agents, art education historians are not restricted to being passive collectors of the past, but instead are dynamically engaged in new ways of doing history predicated on cultivating stories that move beyond representation, to attend to aesthetic dimensions that bridge historiography, material culture, oral history, art history and teacher education. This edited collection provides an interpretation of ‘historical thinking and historical consciousness’ (Seixas, 2017) through the interrelations of time (past, present, future) and space (geographic location, orientation, connectivity beyond borders), in ways that recognize and re-examine ‘the meaning of the historical discourses associated with the history of art education’ (Komatsu, 2017, p. 226).

It is in these dynamic, richly textured and nuanced conversations that we begin to imagine international histories of art education that enlarge our thinking-with by offering ‘the possibility of reimagining the scope of the historiography of art education through extended networks, endlessly provisional and relational, but equally rich and fascinating’ (Adams et al., 2017, p. 186). These chapters indeed set the stage and the ‘contexts for the cultural legacies and histories of art and design education [that] still need articulating’ (Adams et al., 2017, p. 186), and it is our hope is that though this collection, we may initiate this conversation together.

REFERENCES

Adams, J., Bailey, R., & Walton, N. (2017). The UK National Arts Education Archive: Ideas and imaginings. iJADE, 36(2), 176–187.

Bolin, P. E., & Kantawala, A. (2017). A past forward. In P. E. Bolin & A. Kantawala (Eds.), Revitalizing history: Recognizing the struggles, lives, and achievements of African American and women art educators (pp. 17–24). Vernon Press.

Booth, D. (2012). Seven (1 + 6) surfing stories: The practice of authoring. Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 16(4), 565–585.

Garnet, D. (2016). Affinity and interpretation in oral histories of art education. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 40(4), 389–402.

Garnet, D. (2017). Historying the past: Revisiting new histories in art education. Studies in Art Education- Special issue: Histories and Historical Research in Visual Arts Education, 58(1), 39–50.

Garnet, D. (2020). Historying tragedy through an object of empathy: Hon Xuan's violin. The International Journal of Art and Design Education, 39(3), 648–662.

Garnet, D., & Sinner, A. (Eds.). (2019). Art, culture, and pedagogy: Revisiting the work of F. Graeme Chalmers. Brill.

Grever, M., & Adriaansen, R. -J. (2019). Historical consciousness: The enigma of different paradigms. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 51(6), 814–830.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

Komatsu, K. (2017). Genealogy of self-expression: A reappraisal of the history of art education in England and Japan. Paedagogica Historica, 53(3), 214–227.

Massumi, B. (2017). The principle of unrest: Activist philosophy in the expanded field. Open Humanities Press.

Munslow, A. (2010). The future of history. Palgrave Macmillan.

Munslow, A. (2015). Fiction, imagination and the fictive. In A. L. Macfie (Ed.), The fiction of history (pp. 31–39). Routledge.

O'Donoghue, D. (2021). Engaging conversations in art education [Editorial]. Studies in Art Education, 61(4), 293–297.

Ruin, H. (2019). The claim of the past: Historical consciousness as memory, haunting, and responsibility in Nietzsche and beyond. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 51(6), 798–813.

Seixas, P. (2017). A model of historical thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(6), 593–605.

Sinner, A. (2006). Sewing seams of stories: Becoming a teacher during the First World War. History of Education, 35(3), 369–404.

Sinner, A. (2013). Archival research as living inquiry: An alternate approach for research in the histories of teacher education. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 36(3), 241–251.

Smith, K. (2018). Amidst things: New histories of commodities, capital and consumption. This Historical Journal, 61(3), 841–861.

Stankiewicz, M. A. (2007). Capitalizing art education: Mapping international histories. In L. Bresler (Ed.), International handbook of research in arts education (pp. 7–38). Springer.

Stankiewicz, M. A. (2009). Constructing an international history of art education: Periods, patterns, and principles. International Journal of Arts Education, 7(1), 1–20.

Woolf, D. (2019). A concise history of history: Global historiography from antiquity to the present. Cambridge University Press.

PART 1

EXPLORING THE POLITICS OF SPACE AND PLACE

1

Artefacts of Resistance Existence: A Black Feminist Material Culture

Joni Boyd Acuff

Sharbreon Plummer

There are historical contingencies and mythological narratives associated with the inhumanity and objecthood of blackness (Fanon, 2008; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). The dominant colonial culture has always connected brown skin with the status of ‘nonbeing’ (Fanon, 2008; hooks, 1981). Identity created for the colonial subject by colonial racism intended to (and successfully did) breed self-contempt (Appiah, 1990), particularly for enslaved African females (L. G. Collins, 2002). Consider the case of Saartjie Baartman, a young Khoisan woman from South Africa whose Black body was put on exhibition in circuses and laboratories around Europe from 1810 to 1815. Baartman's body, which was the home of protruding buttocks and prominent genitalia, was dehumanized and used as ‘popular entertainment’, as well as ‘an ethnographic specimen for the scientific community’ (L. G. Collins, 2002, p. 13). Baartman is an example of how Black bodies, especially female bodies, were naturalized as caricatures and as objects to be commodified under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (Acuff & Carlisle-Kletchka, 2020; P. H. Collins, 2009; hooks, 1981). The psychological burden of this is Black people's nonconsensual desire to align with whiteness, particularly the ways whiteness defines humanity, citizenship, personhood and even beauty, as Black people took to using skin lightening cream to lift the melanin from their skin. Black subjugation has been achieved and sustained through systematic sociopolitical exclusion, such as through language and economic dependency.

In the United States, intellectuals, activists and artists have conceived of national Black consciousness movements that resist and counter the historical and contemporary deficit-framing of Black people. For example, the New Negro Movement (1920s–30s), the Civil Rights Movement (1950s–60s) and the Black Lives Matter Movement (2013–present), all aimed to fight for Black humanity and Black visibility. Further movements, such as #BlackGirlMagic and #SayHerName, pay attention to the nuanced subjectivity of Black women in contemporary society. However, at what point do Black people move from resistance to existence? And what does Black existence mean without the mediation of whiteness, indeed, the resistance to whiteness? The power to explore existence without the burden of having to prove Black personhood is fundamentally important for building a sustained, nondeprecating racial identity outside of the white imaginary.

The issue of racism is not only about the systemic invisibility of blackness, but also about the systemic nonexistence of blackness when whiteness is not present to recognize it, to ‘other’ it (Fanon, 2008). In his book, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon wrote:

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, it is this other who remains the focus of his actions. His human worth and reality depend on this other and this recognition by the other. It is in this other that the meaning of his life is condensed.

(Fanon, 2008, p. 191)

However, later in this book, Fanon (2008) argued that there does not have to be reciprocal, mutual recognition between ‘subjects/man’ to exist in reality. The ‘slavemaster’ does not need to see an enslaved African as part of their reality in order for that African woman or man to exist. Believing otherwise is indicative of the internalization of white consciousness. Simply, Black people do not have to ‘be through others’ (White people).¹

In this chapter, we expound on ways people of colour in the artworld, especially in artworld histories, have been forced to ‘be through others’. Then, we engage in a nuanced investigation of Black women's work to move from a static object to a lived subject in the arts. We, two Black women in the art education field, share the ways Black women artists have confronted the historical construction of Black female objecthood via white anecdotes and stories. Finally, we name Black Feminist Material Culture (BFMC) as a tool of existence, a way to occupy space, without the mediation of whiteness or White people.

The objecthood of Black art and art histories

‘Objecthood’ in the 1950s, as Fanon (2008) referred to it, meant to only be seen as a Black body with nothing to offer the ‘civilized’ world. For Black bodies to move outside of objecthood, they must transcend the reality that the white gaze has imposed upon them – a reality in which the Black body holds no intellectual, spiritual or emotional space in the world. With this in mind, it makes sense that Black bodies have not been able to hold artistic space in the mainstream (read white) artworld. In the mainstream artworld, movement beyond objecthood has been nearly impossible for Black artists. This can be identified through the centuries of racism enacted against Black artists, specifically the long-standing rejection of their art (Cahan, 2016; Driskell, 1976; Pindell, 1988; Powell, 2003). Specifically, tools like coded language and explicit segregation have assisted in sustaining the Black artist's position as an ‘object,’ in the context of the United States.

Coded language is a tool of whiteness that has historically sustained the objecthood of Black art and Black artists. In the early 20th century, strategies such as critiquing the ‘artistic quality’ of an artwork, or claiming a curator's decision was made based on ‘artistic choice’, allowed white-led galleries and institutions to omit Black artists while saving face (Cahan, 2016; Pindell, 1988). It was very clear to Black artists that racism was packaged neatly within the words used to characterize (and reject) their work. In 2010, Bonilla-Silva called these linguistic tools ‘verbal parachutes’ (p. 54). In 1988, Pindell explained that when called out on racial discrimination against Black artists, the response from White establishments was, ‘You cannot prove racism when it comes to artistic choice’ (p. 158). As a result of the use of such rhetoric by those in power, an artistic career that resulted in wall space and monetary compensation was nearly impossible for Black artists. The ‘artistic quality’ had to be acceptable in the eyes of White curatorial staff, gallery owners, donors and board members. Using this seemingly objective language was an exercise of power (Gillborn, 1995). Dijk confirmed,

Discourse plays a prominent role in the reproduction of racism. It expresses, persuasively conveys and legitimates ethnic or racial stereotypes and prejudices among white group members and may thus form or confirm the social cognitions of other whites. This is particularly true for various forms of elite discourse, since the elites control or have preferential access to the major means of public communication, e.g., through political, media, educational, scholarly, or corporate discourse.

(Dijk, 2000, p. 307)

The narrative that Black artists’ work was subpar (or more specifically, did not align with mainstream aesthetic desire) moved effortlessly through the artworld and eventually became a master narrative, even to the public. In Pindell's (1988) article, entitled ‘Art (World) & Racism’, she describes an incident when an organizational group of non-White artists, named ‘Pests’, hung posters around New York City that read, ‘There are 11,000 artists of color in New York. Why don't you see us?’ Someone, likely a stranger on the street, responded to Pests’ proclamation by writing ‘Because you do poor work’ on the poster. Language like ‘choice’, ‘taste’ and ‘quality’ worked to make racism invisible in the artworld. Further, this language functioned just how it was intended to function, which was to perpetuate the objecthood of Black artists and their work, relegating them to the margins or excluding them altogether (Cahan, 2016; McMillan, 2015; Pindell, 1988).

In addition, the US mainstream artworld historically affirmed white supremacy, as well as the maintenance of Black objecthood, through its practices of segregating Black artists, showcasing usually 98–100 per cent White artists in mainstream art shows (Pindell, 1988). Pindell (1988) characterized the US mainstream artworld as a ‘closed nepotistic interlocking network’ that has always limited Black artists’ and other artists’ of colour ability to show and sell their work to larger audiences (p. 160). The twentieth-century practices that explicitly segregated and pushed Black artists to the margins of the mainstream artworld resulted in the ghettoising of Black artists. Ghettoising, as Pindell (1988) described it, refers to the way that Black artists were relegated to certain galleries, or even certain exhibition types: they were typecast, clumped together and homogenized on the basis of race. When a Black artist exhibited work in a city like New York or Chicago, most likely they were doing so alongside other Black artists or other artists of colour, never with White artists. Moreover, while most mainstream exhibitions that featured white artists were curated around overarching themes that connected the artwork, there was a clear lack of conceptual and thematic planning when it came to exhibitions that Black artists were featured in during the 1960s and 1970s. Plainly, their artwork was exhibited together solely because they were Black and most likely, it was in the same space, side by side because there was no other venue willing to exhibit their work. An exception to this unthematic curating came only when Black artists were called in to show their work during times of the year that emphasized cultural heritage, such as Black History Month (Pindell, 1988). The exclusionary, racist practices of White art gallery owners, collectors, curators and even artists resulted in them being able to control the narrative of what art was and was not. Thus, in the mainstream artworld Black artists maintained the position of ‘other’, object, only body, never artist. Objecthood.

The implications of the historical exclusion of Black artists in the Western mainstream artworld were vast. Particularly, White artists could (mis)represent and/or exploit Black culture without much critique or opposition. As was done in mass media through popular culture like minstrelsy (Lemons, 1977; Lott, 2013), racism was effectively normalized through visual arts. White artists would even incite racist language in their artwork with no repercussions. Stockbridge (2019) reported on a candid discussion that Howardena Pindell participated in at the Brandeis University regarding race and the arts during the late 1970s:

In 1979, [Howardena] Pindell protested White artist Donald Newman's exhibition at the SoHo gallery Artists Space, which was titled ‘The N----- Drawings’ because of the use of charcoal pigment in the artwork. Pindell signed a letter protesting the exhibition and demonstrated in front of the gallery. She described how a White woman who was a friend of the director of the gallery told the protesters, 'Who do you think you are, coming down here and telling us what to do? This is a White neighborhood!’

(Stockbridge, 2019)

Essentially, the mainstream artworld was (and in some ways still is) a safe place for whiteness to flourish; thus, the artworld became its own institution of power that ‘legitimized’ white supremacy (Fanon, 2008; Kane, 2007).

Black women's rejection of objecthood

Patricia Hill Collins (1989, 2000, 2009), one of the foremost scholars in Black feminism, introduced key actionable goals for Black women, which included their right to ‘define themselves, establish positive, multiple representations of themselves, use their cultural heritage as energy to resist daily discrimination, and confront interlocking structures of domination, such as race, gender and class oppression’ (Acuff, 2018, p. 205). The delegitimization of Black women as ‘agents of knowledge’ and producers of a shared consciousness is often enacted by dominant groups as a way to suppress deviant (i.e., non-Eurocentric masculinist) thought or any activity that threatens to destabilize the oppressor's truth. Therefore, if Black women are to claim the right to self-definition, we benefit greatly from mobilizing as a unit to theorise and implement our standpoint through an Afrocentric feminist epistemology for social change. Black Feminist Thought prioritizes the progress of Black people and our ontologies, but also creates the self-determination of women and a feminist consciousness.

The exploration of Black womanhood as a subject has been treated historically as one of marginal importance across numerous disciplines. Art, a field fraught with problematic approaches to Black visibility, is no exception. For decades, Black women artists have engaged in movements and coalition-building that push against these imbued systems of signification (Morris & Hockley, 2018). From the organizing of ‘Where We At’ in New York City in the 1960s, to Rodeo Caldonia in the 1980s, Black women artists have worked to (re)narrate their subjectivities. Fortunately, for the sake of Black women's personhood, these narratives are not always in relation to White women.

The historical analysis of Black women's artistic practices, when acknowledged, continues to serve as a site of struggle and revision. Eurocentric frameworks have sought to define Black women's experiences by what has happened to them, rather than by what has happened because of them. For centuries, configurations of blackness and Black womanhood have been mythologized through the othering of race (L. G. Collins, 2002; Fleetwood, 2011). Race served as the common denominator that signified Black as inferior and subordinate, while positioning White as superior and privileged (Mills, 1997). By hegemonic, Eurocentric Western standards, Black people as a cultural group were not supposed to claim the label of ‘artist’. However, even our ancestors identified the necessity of art in bringing ‘delight, pleasure and beauty’ into materially deprived lives (hooks, as cited in King-Hammond & Moore, 1995, p. xiii).

To embody the label of an artist is to claim making and the act of artistic creation as necessary to living and surviving. Even when presented with the label of artist or artisan, Black women's creative impetus has often been accompanied by stereotypes and overexploited tales of naive simplicity and passivity (Bobo, 2001). While suffering and survival may inform Black women's narrative, the same can be said for imagination, ingenuity and mastery. Within artistic discourse, Black women have repeatedly been compared with their White male counterparts, who are posited as markers of validation. Scholarship has implied that their work cannot stand alone as a lineage ripe for exploration and theoretical discourse. The misinterpretation, monopolization and commodification of their works have also been overshadowed by the proclamation of good intentions by white art professionals through words and actions. As a result, Black women have had to organize, both publicly and privately, to build a bridge from their location as an object to the position of embodied and empowered subject, whose presence can be seen throughout the course of history.

Being Black, a woman and an artist unapologetically disregard systems that are ‘vehemently resistant to the inclusion of Black women as vital to the cultural and intellectual fabric of the world’ (King-Hammond & Moore, 1995, p. vii). As artists, Black women have continued to document history, to reclaim the body as a site of exploration and the possibilities that art holds as a vehicle for self-expression and social justice, using traditional and ‘unconventional’ materials (L. G. Collins, 2002; Farrington, 2005; Fleetwood, 2011; King-Hammond & Moore, 1995). These practices allow Black women to step into the fullness of their being and existence without having to continuously place the countering of whiteness at the forefront of their actions. Artists such as Betye Saar and Renee Stout have demonstrated how conjuring, ritual and artmaking aid in the reclamation of the Black female body. Artist Rashida Bumbray's exploration of embodied knowing through ring shouting reminds viewers of the undeniable presence of Black women as practitioners of cultural retention. Memory can also be located within the work of artist Andrea Chung, who utilizes collage to highlight Black women's work and knowledge (e.g., midwifery) as valid and necessary points of reference for understanding our histories and contributions to society. These women are only a small portion of the diverse and expansive group of artists whose practices can benefit from assessments that are culturally and artistically equitable.

Existence: Towards a Black Feminist Material Culture

Rewriting artwork histories means ensuring that we can effectively understand and support the creators who shape and inform such histories. To establish equity through reinterpretation, scholars, educators, curators and other art workers must intentionally craft systems that explore how artworks and objects can further inform our understanding(s) of those who exist outside of white, Western normativity (i.e., Black women). We believe that things – the ‘stuff’ of our lives – offer a glimpse into the narratives that Black women have scripted throughout history and the ones that have been scripted for them. If material culture is ‘the study of goods, objects and the built environment that focuses attention on consumption, trade and the intimacies of daily life’ (Corcoran Department of History, n.d.; see also Blandy & Bolin, 2018; Feldhusen, 2008), then where are Black women's lived experience and material contributions (e.g., artworks) located on that spectrum? Such a framework could exist in what we refer to as a Black Feminist Material Culture (BFMC). An emancipatory and emergent frame, BFMC can be defined as the study and interpretation of the materiality of Black womanhood as defined by and for Black women (Plummer, 2020). It demonstrates the ‘means by which Black women have been able to survive and challenge adverse forces’ (Bobo, 2001, p. 282). BFMC takes objects, from the iconic to every day, and mines them for stories of resistance, agency, imagination, self-determination and creativity. Whether presented through overtly figurative imagery, or through more symbolic interpretation, BFMC can frame more just accounts of Black women's intellectual, emotional and physical labour and social impact, informed by the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and class. In turn, we believe that these accounts can reshape approaches to framing art history and art education.

Drawing from the tenets presented by P. H. Collins (1989, 2000, 2009), BFMC first and foremost grounds objects in Black women's life stories. It is able to demonstrate what commonalities exist between Black women's experiences throughout history, in addition to what sets them apart from each other. From the earliest traces of people of African descent within the Western world to the present day, BFMC encompasses the objects and environments that paint a holistic picture of what it means to exist as a Black woman within a foreign place (such as the United States) that had to be forged into a homeland. It explores the implications of hypervisibility as indicated through the racialized markers of difference, while interrogating the simultaneous invisibility that was birthed through hegemony. Additionally, it examines the ways in which Black women have collectively developed solutions-orientated praxes in response to challenges that arise due to their racialized and gendered existence. Long before Black feminism, Black art and blackness were so categorized as such, our foremothers were implementing approaches and tactics for survival and existence. It is their wisdom and foresight that laid the foundation for the exploration of our shared consciousness.

Thus, BFMC also recognizes and affirms the position of the everyday intellectual that was (and still is) able to affect change. The everyday intellectual is an all-encompassing term that validates the work of all Black women, from the nineteenth-century abolitionists to the twenty-first-century working-class sisters, mothers and grandmothers. Each of these women contributed to a material ecosystem and cultural heritage that was able to sustain other Black women and even influence modern popular culture (despite a lack of recognition). To counter invisibility, BFMC maps how these cultural artefacts and spaces have evolved, alongside Black Feminist Thought and practice, in a dynamic way, while actively tracing the methods that Black women used to respond to manifestations of oppression that were relevant to the time in which we exist(ed). BFMC connects to other social justice issues and projects, examining how objects and practices may have been used to forge solidarity or coalitions for the sake of change and progress. At its core, this framework is centred on identifying and understanding how Black women have reinforced truth-telling and empowerment about ourselves and the world around us – especially through art. If empowerment ‘requires transforming unjust social institutions that African-American women encounter from one generation to the next’ (Collins, 2009, p. 291), then BFMC asks us to further examine the material responses to the social constructs that were supposed to silence us.

Literature that focuses on the material culture of feminism is still in need of immense development. When searching for texts that thoughtfully critique the intersections of material culture and Black women, the options lessen drastically, almost to the point of nonexistence. Australian scholars Bartlett and Henderson (2016) have presented ideas for a system of classification for feminist objects from the Women's Movement of the 1960s–70s. They assert that material culture underwent a transformation due to the shift of Western culture's