Art (World) and Racism
Quotas and token gestures
“Not until the white people who now hold the power in the art world scrutinize their own motives and attitudes toward people of color will it be possible to unlearn racism. This realization raises a number of crucial questions: Who are the patrons of art, the museum board members, the collectors? Who is the audience for high culture? Who is allowed to interpret culture? Who is asked to make fundamental policy decisions? Who sets the priorities?” — Maurice Berger
Despite signs of change, many of the fundamental structures that keep people of colour out of the art world still remain in place. African Americans are absent from historical art collections in some of the world’s largest museums, galleries and major auctions. It is only recently that those institutions have begun to seriously consider that their collections should better reflect the demographics of their communities. As author and social activist Bell Hooks (b. 1952) wrote in the May 1989 issue of Artforum, which is still as relevant today, “If much of the recent work on race grows out of a sincere commitment to cultural transformation, then there is a serious need for immediate and persistent self-critique”. Following the killing of George Floyd on 25 May by Police in Minneapolis, a Kaws Companion sculpture and other works of art were looted from 5Art Gallery in Los Angeles. All that remained was a graffitied message that read “fuck white art” on the building’s exterior. The gallery which represents a wide array of international pop and “urban” artists, according to its website, and features works by Banksy (b. 1974), Invader (b. 1969), Takashi Murakami (b. 1962), and Jeff Koons (b. 1955), posted a story to Instagram detailing the looting as it happened.
The caption on 5Art’s Instagram post about the looting reads: “What a sad day! We are so much against what happened to George Floyd. But this affected our employees [sic] and the artists that had nothing to do with this. Thanks to everyone who helped us today. Please send over every footage you have.” Offering little more than lip service to the larger systematic issue at play, the “but” is essentially a de facto defence of white privilege in the art world. The suggestion is that the taking of a black life by police is insignificant when considered against an act of looting by a protester. Many of those commenting on the post were critical of the destruction of private property in the context of what had started as peaceful protest; the focus should instead be on the continued loss of black lives at the hands of white police officers that led to the situation, the undue force used against protesters (pepper spraying children and identified journalists and firing paint rounds and rubber bullets at unarmed civilians in their homes) or the loss of liberty if Trump acts on his promise of mobilizing the military.
“A man was lynched yesterday”, flag (2015) by Dread Scott
Crowds protesting the killing of George Floyd
Since the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic closed galleries and museums across the United States in March, the art world’s manifesto-like call to arms has been that society needs the arts “now more than ever”. Yet there had been an almost radio silence about the protests from an industry keen to spout a diatribe about art’s relevance; it was almost as if the looted Kaws sculpture was the impetus for individuals in the art world to speak out. “The video of the Kaws being taken from a gallery — maybe nature is healing,” wrote the art critic Antwaun Sargent on Twitter, adding that “the silence of the contemporary art world, who have spent the last few months claiming art is essential, haven’t done much of anything to show they are on the side of the protestors, justice”. While the art world has not totally ignored issues of race and the interests of people of colour, a week after protesters took to the streets — a unified voice for equal rights, an end to racism and police brutality — many of the largest museums and institutions remained slow to comment. Some commercial galleries made gestures of solidarity and activism, reposting links to petitions, bail funds and immigration bonds for individuals arrested for protesting police brutality. Others shared images of political works and quotes by black artists they represent, or in some cases the work of activist artists, of which there are many, including the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement Patrisse Cullors (b. 1984), Betye Saar (b. 1926) and, in particular, images of Dread Scott’s (b. 1965) A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday (2015); a simple banner, printed with the eponymous words, made in response to the murder of Walter Scott, an unarmed 50-year-old black man, who was shot in the back and killed by a white police officer during a routine traffic stop.
Maurice Berger, a critic, curator, and historian who devoted his career to addressing race relations in contemporary art, died on 23 March from complications related to Covid-19. In 2004 he organized White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art at the International Centre of Photography in New York, which considered how whiteness, white skin, white privilege, and even questions about what constitutes whiteness — alter one’s perception of photography. (Nancy Burson showed a 2001 series of pictures for which she had sought out subjects that thought they looked like Jesus (all five were white men) and placed them alongside images of black, Hispanic, and Asian sitters, and Berger included a 1976 series by Cindy Sherman for which the artist posed in blackface.) Berger, who was white, spent a lifetime being conscious of how race determines opportunities, attitudes and much more, in his own life and in society at large. His writing exploring those influences was blunt and provocative. There was, for instance, “Are Art Museums Racist?”, a landmark essay, now considered Berger’s most famous piece of writing, which first appeared in a 1990 issue of Art in America. “Art museums,” he wrote, “have for the most part behaved like many other businesses in this country — they have sought to preserve the narrow interests of their upper-class patrons and clientele.” Who were, of course, mostly white. The piece was written at a time when white curators and white-led institutions were increasingly making attempts at racial inclusivity: putting works by one or two artists of colour in group shows, or mounting occasional exhibitions focused on race. “Not until white people who now hold power in the art world scrutinize their own motives and attitudes toward people of colour will it be possible to unlearn racism,” Berger wrote.
Behind the Myth of Benevolence (2014) by Titus Kaphar, an iconic portrait of Thomas Jefferson is being peeled away from the canvas to reveal a portrait of an enslaved black woman
Kehinde Wiley and Barack Obama at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC
Art historian Judith Wilson has called the art world “one of the last bastions of white supremacy-by-exclusion”. Berger agrees that the museum is “one of America’s most racially biased cultural institutions”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (“MoMA”) hosts approximately 40 exhibitions a year — in the past ten years only eight of those exhibitions focused on African American artists. At the National Gallery of Art, there are 986 works by black artists out of the 153,621 total works. As recently as 1992, a proposed tour of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) retrospective was cancelled when no other museums came forward to take it. In 2017 Basquiat’s Untitled (1982) sold for $110.5m at Sotheby’s New York, which represented not only a record for the artist himself, but also a record for any work by an American artist at auction, and the second-highest price ever achieved for a contemporary work at auction. Yet, despite such landmark moments, art from African perspectives still doesn’t hold an equal footing on the global stage.
Such favourable figures and statistics merely add to a collective false sense of equality, and reinforce the trap of consensus in the art world; the perception of progress is buoyed by a handful of important exhibitions, a very slight increase in the number of acquisitions and the occasional headline auction price. Since 2008, just 2.37 percent of all acquisitions and gifts and 7.6 percent of all exhibitions at 30 prominent American museums have been of work by African American artists, according to a joint investigation by In Other Words and artnet News. This is particularly concerning at a time when African Americans comprise more than 12 percent of the US population and are producing some of the most visually compelling and socially relevant works: from Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) and Amy Sherald’s (b. 1973) blockbuster portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama (which nearly doubled the attendance of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC in 2018) to Martin Puryear (b. 1941) (the second consecutive African American artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale) who’s objects and public installations — in wood, stone, tar, wire, and various metals — are an intriguing marriage of minimalist logic and traditional craft. Without institutional buy-in, progress can be slow, but some of America’s oldest museums are gaining ground on areas in which they have traditionally lagged behind; in a frank admission, MoMA posted a wall text to accompany its 2018 exhibition of African American portrait photographs from the mid-twentieth century. “The museum has until recently acquired few likenesses of African Americans,” the label read. Acquisitions made between 2015 and 2017 “are part of an initiative, long overdue, to build such a collection.” Max Hollein, director of the Met, says he is working to diversify the collections and exhibitions at the museum; which inherently involves rewriting art history in a way that includes all cultures. “To look back and look at what may have been overlooked, and what may have not been properly appreciated, what may have been misunderstood” is important, Hollein says.
Material shifts are necessary to rebuild not only a more inclusive art world, but a less oppressive society. Artist Howardena Pindell (b. 1943) — who was one of the first black curators at MoMA — has noted that “boards of art museums, publishers of art magazines and books and owners of galleries rarely hire people of colour in policy-making positions … [so that] the task of cultural interpretation … is usually related ‘to people of European descent,’ as if their perspective was universal.” This is extremely problematic as so many European American critics’ background knowledge is inadequate to the task of discussing work by artists of colour. These challenges are not, of course, confined to the art world. “We would similarly ‘be surprised’ by the findings in many other industries that would no doubt show equivalently disproportionate statistics — which just speaks to the vastness of the issue,” says Valentino Carlotti, the global head of business development at Sotheby’s.
As a child growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s artist Jack Whitten (1939-2018) — now celebrated as one of the most influential and vital artists of his generation — was not allowed inside his segregated local museum in Birmingham, Alabama; the late artist was awarded the 2015 National Medal of Arts by President Obama and has since been the subject of a major exhibition at the Met Breuer in New York, aptly titled, Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963–2017. “We owe it to Americans to reflect them because we owe it to accurate history,” says Kim Sajet, director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. “I’m not interested in only having a museum for some people.” While many majority museums have instituted minority internship programmes encouraging young people of colour to enter the arts, more needs to be done to correct the problem of institutional racism. African Americans and other people of colour have to be given positions of influence and allowed to speak to their own experience for the art world to change. As Lowery Sims, associate curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, observed in conversation with Berger, “Art history was not a career that black middle-class children were taught to aspire to. For one, the Eurocentrism of art history often made it irrelevant to black college students who never heard African American culture discussed in art history classes. Museums — the major conduit for teaching young people about art — were not always accessible to blacks.”
We’re weeks into protests, but decades into reports of systematised violence against black people. The art world — which often presents itself as a beacon of hope and open-mindedness — must be far more vigilant in the ways it remains complicit in racist structures and cease simply parroting black people’s words in times of trauma. In the US, where there has been at attempt by white people to share mainstream cultural venues with African Americas and other people of colour (this is most apparent in music, dance, literature and theatre) the visual arts have been slow to make any significant change; the art world’s frustrating indifference to people of colour has resulted in the exclusion or misrepresentation of both veteran black artists and the so-called “MFA generation” of younger African American artists. Race discrimination, according to Berger, is why established African American artists like Romare Bearden (1911-1988), Al Loving (1935-2005) and Faith Ringgold (b. 1930) (to name but a few) have been kept from the “super-star status available to white artists of equal (or less than equal) talent,” and why accomplished black artists like Pat Ward Williams (b. 1948) have had more trouble finding gallery representation than white artists of equal stature.
In recent years, as a result of hyperpartisan politics, the thinly veiled face of polite society is falling away. One of those polite forms is, of course, the predominantly white art world, where African American artists continue to be side-lined. “The art world will state that all white exhibitions, year after year… are not a reflection of racism,” Pindell wrote in 1987. “The lie or denial is cloaked in phrases such as ‘artistic choice’ or ‘artistic quality’ when the pattern reveals a different intent.” It shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of those at the receiving end of prejudice to bring such issues to light. Bigotry often reveals itself in spaces of privilege, where problematic opinions go unchecked, due to the pretence of social niceties or blithe complicity. If these issues are going to be exposed and dismantled, then people with advantages have to change and speak up. They must actively commit to disassembling our part in an inherently racist system and listen to those who experience its weight; by not speaking out against racism it places the onus on the part of those who are marginalized.
Galleries and museums must go beyond mere quotas and token gestures and increase their commitment to organizing exhibitions that address the underlying resistance of the art world to people of colour and exploring and ultimately embracing cultural and social differences. Jennifer Tosch, founder of Black Heritage Tours, told USA Today that people of colour have been excluded from the ranks of fine artists in America and viewed only as “objects of observation”. Black people, Morton says, have shied away from art because it was dominated by the white elite and wasn’t considered a field where black families could make a living. “When you look in the museums and don’t see yourself represented in the galleries … it never even occurs to you that that’s even for you. There’s a message implanted in your mind that you don’t belong here.” Entrenched systems of power and influence contribute to institutional racism that impedes any significant change of status quo. There have been episodic efforts to institute change; in the late 1980’s and early ‘90s the multiculturalism movement put pressure on museums to diversify both their personnel and programs. Those efforts were “naive,” Naomi Beckwith, a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, told Sotheby’s. “There was this idea that if we all come together in a melting pot, it will naturally create an egalitarian society. But people can’t just appear; they need to be given power.”
This is only achievable through a fundamental shift in the way we think and talk about race — a discourse which must begin with self-examination. Only in that way can white people begin to address their own problematic attitudes to people of colour. “Historically, what curators have been asked to do is follow a particular storyline — and then when things fall outside that, they are rendered invisible,” Beckwith says. But the stories of African American artists “don’t just belong to the bodies that hold the narrative. These stories belong to culture. It is a way of seeing the world.” One of Berger’s goals in being outspoken about issues of race was to get others, especially white people, to examine and discuss their attitudes. “White folks rarely talk about these things either among themselves or with their friends of colour,” he told The Burlington Free Press in Vermont in 2004. “It isn’t part of the social contract, and I think it has to become part of the social contract.” As Berger put it, “there is no ‘white’ culture—unless you mean Wonder Bread and television game shows.”