As part of many months of learning within the Arts BC Pathways program, I’ve had the chance to explore readings, activities and writing activities. I’d like to share some reflections from my learnings.
One of the first things we learned was about locating ourselves in our society, organization and community. We undertook a privilege mapping exercise to understand how parts of our identity may impact our power or marginalization in the world. An example of this can be found on the Canada.ca site. This begins a process to understand how many features of our identity intertwine (intersectionality) and that people can hold both privilege and disadvantage.
From this understanding, we can begin to think about how people interact with art, produce art, view art and how our identity can influence our perspective. One of our readings was “Race-ing Art History” which I thought was a good starting point to consider “traditional” western perspective on art history and art education is full of racism, misogyny and elitism. This lecture helped me rethink museums overall, and I can’t wait to apply this learning on my next visits to art and history institutions. It really sheds light on what the Royal BC Museum is going through in renovating the First Nations section of the museum. Lots of food for thought there. My key takeaway was to ask questions and think about who defines high art, fine art, low art, and who benefits from these ideas? How does race and racism factor into our experience of art, either as a creator or as a viewer of art?
Our next reading about Shirley Cards, emphasized how racist standards impacted depictions of people, in the Kodak set of cards (used from the 1950’s to 1990’s) that depicted a white woman for the “neutral skin tone” in calibrating photo printing equipment. This version of neutral would result in incorrect colour calibration for the prints of people of colour. By the 1970’s Kodak began to make changes and by 1996, the card depicted many skin tones for calibration.
In our own artistic experience, the 1970’s “flesh” crayons and pencils have since evolved in the school supply industry, as well as our own artistic development if we do depict skin in our artwork. We now have access to a wide range of materials and influences and hopefully we have left behind the rules we learned in our early education.
Whether we know the history of art, choose to deliberately address or ignore racism, misogyny and elitism in historic works or we naturally have evolved to higher concepts in viewing and making art, I hope we benefit from the knowledge in the materials shared.
Margaret Case
Margaret Case is a member of the Gage Gallery Arts Collective.