Can art offer a way of understanding slavery, oppression and racial injustice?
Maya Harakawa believes so, and she’s showing her students the power of art as a tool of perception and interpretation in her second-year course Black Art in North America.
Starting in the 17th century with the transatlantic slave trade and spanning over 300 years to the Black Lives Matter movement, students explore the aesthetic qualities of art and the careers of Black artists alongside of the history of anti-Black racism in North America.
“We look at the way art helps us understand what it means to resist oppression, and how art can open up our horizons to understand the complexity of that, and to see resistance in many different unexpected forms,” says Harakawa, an assistant professor with the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Department of Art History.
Harakawa says the subject matter can be sensitive, and the class discussions are sometimes challenging, but they always end up rewarding and enriching.
“I'm not a Black person myself, so I take my approach to the course material very seriously,” she says. “I want to empower students to have difficult conversations around art with me, rather than dictating the terms of these conversations myself. That's the power of art — it allows us to have certain types of conversations that we might not otherwise have.”
The class studies various art forms such as paintings, pottery, sculpture and photography as well as crafts that may not have been intended to be art but have become so.
Art like that created by David Drake (1800-1870s) — an American potter who lived in Edgefield, South Carolina. He spent most of his life enslaved but became free at the end of the Civil War.
He produced alkaline-glazed stoneware jugs between the 1820s and the 1870s designed to store grain and other foods. Often signing his pieces with "Dave," he is recognized as the first enslaved potter to inscribe his work, though there is speculation that he may have included hidden abolitionist messages in the pots.
“We’re thinking about what constitutes art within the context of slavery, which opens up all sorts of questions about what constitutes art and who gets to be an artist,” says Harakawa.
For Raniya Khan, a member of Trinity College, and a fourth-year student double majoring in history and political science, looking at Black art during slavery expanded her definition of artistry.
“It requires us to really reconsider what we analyze and refer to as art because it's not likely to be a conventional western notion of brush on canvas type paintings,” she says.
“Like the silhouette of Flora, or the quilts enslaved people may have made for themselves or others — they are not hung up in the Louvre, but they still represent artistic expression and resilience in the face of white, colonial and capitalist oppression.”
While she’s enjoying learning about all the artists, Khan has a particular affinity to the Harlem Renaissance — a cultural, social and artistic explosion that took place in the 1920s and 1930s.
Fueled by migration which brought many African Americans to northern cities for new opportunities, the movement celebrated Black culture and identity through literature, music and visual arts. It also gave a platform to Black voices, challenged racial stereotypes, and forged a new sense of Black pride.
“The art emerging from this time-period was extremely influential in not only reflecting but actively constructing a new Black identity,” says Khan.
And within this period, she’s especially fond of the photos of James Van Der Zee (1886 –1983) — an American photographer best known for his portraits of Black New Yorkers.
“His photos represent this unique Black glamour, beauty, style, and creativity as well as agency and resistance,” says Khan. “Van Der Zee was Marcus Garvey's personal photographer, and in his images of him you can see how Black radical ideologies manifested themselves, especially in the way Garvey dressed.”
Moving from photos to print, one of the last artists Harakawa covers is Alexandra Bell, whose art rose to prominence during the Black Lives Matter movement. Her "Counternarratives" collection critiques racial bias in media.
Focusing on the 2014 murder of Michael Brown — considered one of the major events that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement — Bell examined the coverage of this murder in the New York Times. Those articles became her canvas, and she used them to highlight the ways in which racial bias was influencing the newspaper’s reporting.
“She's erasing, redacting and then creating new versions of these news articles that she thinks highlight what's really at the crux of the story: the humanity of Michael Brown, which is being taken away in the way that the Times covered his murder,” says Harakawa.
“Then she made her new versions into giant posters that she displayed in public places. So it's also a commentary on how information circulates, and the purported neutrality and authority of the news.”
While artists like Bell use art to highlight the ongoing oppression of Black people in North America, Harakawa stresses that some of the most talked about Black art is celebratory in nature.
“This history of Blackness in North America is not solely a history of suffering,” she says. “If we only look at it from a view of oppression we're missing so much about the vibrancy of Black life, which is ultimately what the course should be about, and what art helps us see.”
For Khan, the course has certainly opened her mind as to what art is, and the doors it can open.
“This course has really challenged my previous assumptions about the importance of art history,” she says. “I've always known art to be a significant cultural driving force to many revolutionary struggles throughout history. Black art history in America is exceptional to other forms of art history however, and this is something I never considered.”
“Art allows us to understand bigger historical questions or processes,” says Harakawa. “In this class we don't study art just to understand art for its own sake. We believe that it says something about the time period in which it was made. Or, better yet, that it can help us ask new questions about historical periods we think we already know.
“Art history is not just the development of artistic production, it’s the dynamic relationship between artistic practice and historical change.”