Rationale
As art educators, we are often drawn to a “traditional” western canon of art, imagining that it is race neutral. This canon is commonly viewed as the gold standard of fine art. Public monuments and within museums across the country, art and the artists featured are often drawn exclusively from European and white American artistic traditions and genres. The traditional western canon of artists that I was taught in K-12 included Van Gogh, Picasso, Calder, Hopper, Warhol, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Matisse, and many more. Teaching about these artists remains important, however, excluding Black artists and other artists of color sends a powerful message. And it's not a good one.
Colorblind racism operates in the practice of art education because of the artists and the subject art educators typically choose to teach and not to teach. “Colorblindness” is the idea that ignoring or overlooking racial and ethnic differences promotes racial harmony. However, colorblindness does just the opposite as it “reinforces whiteness as the unmarked norm against which differences are measured” (Lipsitz). The colorblind and race neutral methods recreates imbalance of power that are internalized as truth. When teaching students of color exclusively about art made by and for white people, it creates an environment that is not only insensitive, but reinforces systems of power. Teaching narrowly and not explaining context is a disservice to white students as well. Colorblind teaching assumes that white students would not be drawn to this contextual way of thinking. White students benefit from being taught to recognize and to feel personally involved in dismantling systemic oppression and responsible for racial justice. Centering race and culturally relevant pedagogy is critical to this project because it facilitates critical conversations about race and socially engaged artmaking with students and dismantle the passive way we sometimes expect students to mimic works of art instead of having a dialogue with the work from an inquiry lens.
This unit, designed for an elementary art education curriculum, teaches students about the role public Confederate monuments, and other monuments across the country, play in promoting white supremacy and systemic racism. I developed this unit curriculum because anti-racist teaching and pedagogy has taken renewed importance amidst all of the recent national uprising and resistance. This unit allows students to explore counter narratives created by contemporary artists of color that dismantle unequal control of power and therefore facilitating the end of racist ideas of superiority.
For many decades, the defense of Confederate statues was a defense rooted in the disavowal of race and racial power. Confederate statutes were meant to designate a specific chapter of important regional and national history, allegedly free of racial meaning in general and white supremacist commitments in particular. Yet this unit shows that that this disavowal was masking very clear racialized relations of power.
The rationale for teaching with and through Confederate monuments is clear. The unit allows students to reflect on art making and art-viewing practices through local history, culture, and the built environment. In addition, the unit demonstrates the role of art, culture, and the built environment in producing and maintaining racial hierarchy and producing new visions of justice.
In the state and national standards for 4th and 5th grade visual arts, there are strands that address cultural context, analysis, judgement and aesthetics. These strands are ripe for teaching about race and racism as it exists within art history and visual culture. This unit teaches students to identify ways that works of art from popular culture reflect the past and influence the present, and how the criteria used to assess the value of art may vary over time and from one culture to another.
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