Making Space: The Fight for Anti-Racism in Art Galleries
It is no secret that art galleries and museums have been historically accessible only to white people. The feminist female art group Guerilla Girls has been devoted to fighting sexism and racism in the art world since 1985. One of their pieces reads, “Only 4 commercial galleries in N.Y. show black women. Only 1 shows more than 1.” Although this was written decades ago, it is a sobering reminder of who is typically allowed into the gallery space. It is a space that continues to be dominated by and directed at white individuals. However, the current climate of anti-racist change is forcing the art world to address its own representational shortcomings. The question becomes, how can artists and curators alike ensure that artwork is anti-racist and presented in a way that doesn’t come across as tokenism or as an educational tool to serve the needs of a white audience?
Christina Knight, an assistant professor of visual studies at Haverford College, echoed this uncertainty in her field during her speech as a panelist at the October 2 conference Toward an Anti-Racist Art History hosted by the Society for Contemporary Art Historians. The panelists commented on scholarship’s move toward a greater awakening and reimagining of the discipline. On Knight’s part, she believes deeply in the necessity of empowering everyday, local people to be the architects of change, especially since the pathway is unclear. Knight asked, “How can we find ways to train a kind of view sensitive to [imbalanced] power dynamics and that seeks to address it?” She offered the idea that the study of the visual should center marginalized perspectives.
An attempt at discovering the answers to these questions can be seen within Tufts. The Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) Curator of Exhibitions and Programs, Abigail Satinsky, discussed the many hurdles behind making the galleries at both the Medford and SMFA campuses welcoming and accessible to all, especially with an entirely white exhibition staff. In an email, Satinsky stated, “We at the Tufts University Art Galleries are in the process of taking concrete steps for structural change towards being an anti-racist institution.” This includes the creation of a student advisory group “to ensure student voice, feedback and outreach on campus,” as well as a joint faculty and community advisory board. Satinsky added, “[W]e are conducting a university-wide audit of all artworks on view in public spaces and in our collection to ensure that representation on campus includes both BIPOC subjects and works by BIPOC artists.”
When asked about the measures curators specifically can take to make gallery spaces more welcoming to a wider audience, she replied that within the scope of one’s curatorial vision, it is essential to work with the artist to ensure that the vision is meaningful to them as well. There must be a deep and rich relationship with the artist, rather than just extracting the material as the curator sees fit.
Looking towards the future, Satinsky expressed excitement about a number of new initiatives that underscore TUAG’s current commitment to making the galleries an “accessible and known space” and working with the duality of being both a publicly and internally faced institution. Currently, she is co-curating an exhibit that will run from January – April 2022 on both the SMFA and Medford campuses entitled “Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities,” which will feature a number of contemporary Central American artists who will be invited to help shape the scope and structure of the exhibition’s narrative. Satinsky described the exhibit as focusing “on the seminal 1980s activist organization, Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America, and its legacy in the present.” The goal, in Satinsky’s words, is “[a]sking critical questions as to what artists can do in solidarity and in response to struggles happening across the world, this exhibition will focus on collaborations, dialogue and direct solidarity between North American and Central American artists.”
TUAG is also in the process of developing a land acknowledgement to hold itself accountable for the legacy of settler colonialism tied up onTufts’ land. This will include developing various programs to ensure that the land acknowledgement is not an empty gesture. Community partnerships will exist within each project to ensure that exhibitions are a meaningful tool for all and not just befitting a whitewashed narrative. This is a change that can be seen as directly responding to criticism that TUAG faced for a lack of community input on a fall 2019 exhibit entitled “BAM” by the artist Sanford Biggers. Some students felt, as demonstrated by the Tufts Observer opinion piece, “Make Space for Black Joy,” that the exhibit came across as showing a one-sided depiction of Black pain and trauma with no mention of Black joy.
Similar to the discourse occurring within gallery spaces, conversation has opened in the Art History discipline acknowledging the lack of representation in an effort to work towards change. Ellen Y. Tani, an art historian, curator, and critic based in Washington, DC, acknowledged at the Toward an Anti-Racist Art History conference that her field is “still understanding how to show works of artists without collapsing [their] interpretations about racial identification in ways that actually uphold some of the racial and racist systems.” Encouragingly, she viewed the evolving realm of art history as a new set of opportunities to engage with objects in order to incite a new type of discomfort. This artistic discomfort will force viewers to acknowledge their own privileges and biases.
In regards to the field of architecture, Ana Maria León, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, spoke about grappling with the discipline’s tradition of tokenism—that is, naming buildings after a figure or event and then moving on. Like in art, architects must pivot away from just checking the boxes of diversity without seeking to include those whom they are trying to honor.
This year, after the murder of George Floyd, a number of architectural historians including León, as well as art historians, architects, and urbanists resumed work on a reading list called SPACE/RACE, a digital resource originally curated in response to the 2017 white supremecist rally in Charlottesville. In a statement at the beginning of their resource document, the collaborators wrote, “We have assembled a series of readings on how race and racism are constructed with spatial means, and on how in turn space can be shaped by racism.” They have also created a similar project focused on the interactions between art and gender, entitled SPACE/GENDER, as well as a project on art and the body entitled SPACE/BODY. These comprehensive lists are available for the public to use as tools to learn how to reclaim art and make safe, welcoming spaces for people of color.
New initiatives across artistic disciplines, like community input, close artist collaborations, university-wide audits, and continued reflection, are necessary steps in the right direction toward a radical change in the art world. Such progressive measures within galleries and academia can potentially provide the long-needed space for an anti-racist consumption of art.