slideshow alt-text + transcript
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Slide 1:
Homepage view of “The Precarity of White Narratives in Storytelling” displayed in bold red lettering. Featuring typewriter style text from TheoryMaking1: Retelling Black Women’s stories through art.
Slide 2:
Sepia toned “Where We At?” Photoshop poster featuring Black artists protesting in 1971 and text from the Black Artist Coalition in 1969.
Slide 3:
Photoshop image titled “White Gaze in Historical Narratives of Black Women”. The background images feature mammy, jezebel and other caricatures of Black Women. In the foreground is a brown silouhette of a Black person with a fro.
Slide 4:
Photoshopped image of Thelma Golden and Michelle Obama standing in front of the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist in Residence and featured art from the musuem.
Transcripts::
Slide 1:TheoryMaking #1: Retelling Black women's stories through art.
The standards of colonialism and whiteness back the foundation of American society and culture. This includes: our media, our school curriculums, our textbooks, our museums, and our institutions. In these spaces, Black life and being is portrayed as passive and secondary, both allowing and teaching white terrorism. The culture of white terrorism is overwhelming dominant in our society, and therefore normalized in our everyday interactions with the world around us. This normalization becomes extremely harmful when the white gaze is the most powerful force retelling history. This idea is what we have been calling white "supremacy", but even this language normalizes whiteness as superior. Historical bias leads to societal bias, and vice versa, resulting in a cycle of erasure while learning from both past and the present. Historical erasure is a form of violence and without recognizing its presence, we threaten the mental and physical health of Black people. How stories are told and the leading bias behind them have an impact beyond just the people directly affected. To live in ignorance is to live in suffering; while those suffering due to ignorance are in direct harm. It is unlikely to have predominantly white educational systems and intuitions tell the story of Black people justly. Black people must tell their own stories, in accessible ways, to formulate radical healing through knowledge and representation.
Slide 2:
Where We At?
Black Women Artists
In the world today all culture, all lirerature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. THere is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake. art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.