Contemporary Artists on Racism, Sexism, & Ableism
From Dr. Karen Keifer-Boyd
Art is pedagogical when encounters with the art generate ideas, reflection, critique, questions, and dialogue. In this fifth and final weekly post for the October 2018 series, I focus on contemporary art and facilitation strategies to inspire critical and creative visual thinking on racism, sexism, and ableism.
My selection of art comes from a one-day pop-up exhibition titled Overlap: The Warp and Weft of Intersectionality to be held at the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State on November 2, 2018. Martha Wilson and I curated a show of works on paper from the Palmer’s collection. We focused on works that explore female subjectivity intersected with race, class, sexuality, among other identities.
Martha Wilson (b. 1947) is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past four decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. Artist Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace—a nonprofit in 1976—dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of performance, artists’ books, and other ephemeral art forms.
Kimberlé Crenshaw describes intersectionality as “a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage” convergence such as how racial stereotypes compounded with gender stereotypes deepen injustice toward, for example. Black girls. Art is pedagogical when the study of the histories of intersectional discrimination brings understanding and teaches ways to intervene to erode systems of oppression. As Crenshaw states, “you can’t change outcomes without understanding how they come about.”
Yolanda López’s Woman's Work Is Never Done
I met Yolanda López in the 1980s in Oregon through her sister, Anna Lee Lively, who joined some of the activist work I was doing at the time. Yolanda López participated in activism in California through her art, and is one of the best-known artists of the Chicano art movement. López's experiences informed her art, which ranges from posters to portraiture and the Virgin of Guadalupe series, an investigation of the Virgin of Guadalupe as an influential female icon, to her more recent installations and videos such as Images of Mexicans in the Media. Her media series, Cactus Hearts/Barbed Wire Dreams, is comprised of numerous installations, including Things I Never Told My Son About Being a Mexican. This installation explores identity, assimilation, and cultural change. Identity is not a self-contained unit, rather identity is constructed from relationships between people, their histories, and contemporary contexts. López has consistently challenged predominant modes of Latina/o/x representation. She proposes new models of gender, racial, and cultural identity.
Her project, Woman's Work Is Never Done, includes a series of prints, as well as the installation The Nanny, which explores the invisibility of immigrant women as domestic workers. The installation was showcased in the 1994 San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art’s exhibition “Mirror, Mirror…Gender Roles and the Historical Significance of Beauty.” Martha Wilson and I selected the 20 x 20 inch silkscreen, Homenaje a Dolores Huerta, from Women’s Work Is Never Done series, 1995 for the November 2, 2018 pop-up exhibition. Dolores Huerta co-founded, with César Chávez, the Union of United Field Workers. Huerta raised her voice and built coalitions to achieve legal protections and a better standard of living for agricultural workers. In 1998, President Bill Clinton honored her with the Eleanor Roosevelt Prize for Human Rights and in 2012 President Barack Obama granted her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I began writing this blog entry on the subway train on my way to the Brooklyn Museum on October 28, 2018, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the curators at the Brooklyn Museum included Homenaje a Dolores Huerta in their exhibition, Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection.
As López wrote in 2008 (Women’s Work is Never Done, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco):
“Growing up in San Diego, ten minutes from the Mexican/U.S. international border amid a family with a cast of characters suitable for any Gregory Nava script, my family spoke English and Mexico City Spanish in equal measure. Victoria Fuentes Castillo, my grandma, tried to teach me civility. However it was her critical and wry conversation that interested me the most. My beautiful and meticulously groomed mother, Margaret, worked in the basement of the Grant Hotel and several French laundries as a presser. In 1978 she designed and created for me a contemporary Guadalupe gown, based on a Calvin Klein disco dress pattern. Indelibly I learned from her the sacredness of a union picket line.”
Yolanda López further stated:
“It is important for us to be visually literate; it is a survival skill. The media is what passes for culture in contemporary U.S. society, and it is extremely powerful. It is crucial that we systematically explore the cultural mis-definition of Mexicans and Latin Americans that is presented in the media.”
Founded in 2007, The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) represents more than two million women, many of whom are immigrants and women of color. NDWA states: “We are the women who care for this country. We are Black, we are women of color, we are immigrants. Behind closed doors we face harassment, abuse, and discrimination. We are uniting with women everywhere so that all workplaces are safe and dignified.”
The conditions of the workplace compounded with the disparity of wages must be understood from an intersectional perspective to change the discriminatory system. For example, in 2018 in the United States, Black women working full-time earn 63 cents for each dollar paid for work by a White man. White women earn 79 cents for every dollar made by a White man. “Latinas and Native American women, experience a gap that is even larger, making 54 cents and 57 cents per dollar, respectively.” “According to the US Census Bureau, 54 million Americans have a disability, and people with severe disabilities working full time earn approximately $1,000 less per month than non-disabled workers. Meanwhile, 13.3 million people with disabilities between the ages 16 and 64 have experienced difficulty finding employment in the first place because of their disability” (Houlis, April 16, 2018).
What are five distinctly different ways to interpret a women’s work is never done?
Find images of women working. What are they doing? What are the social conditions that may have led to such work? Is the work valued and by whom? What impact does the work have on the social fabric that connects people? How is sexism, racism, and/or ableism challenged or manifested in the images of women working?
-KKB