Jessica Hamlin

4.12 Exploring the Terrains of Art Education through the Lenses of Racialization and White Property (Paper)

Jessica Hamlin – School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, NYU, USA

Dipti Desai – School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, NYU, USA

Abstract:

School Art is a discipline that functions as a violently exclusionary space centring white heteronormative colonial epistemology and discourses. Validating seemingly neutral concepts such as self-expression, and the formalist elements and principles of design, the roots of Art Education in US public schools are deeply mired in racism and exoticization of the other. Although what constitutes art has been debated in art education in recent decades, the fact that art is implicated in processes of racialization and racism in the United States as a form of white property (Gaztambide-Fernández, Kraehe, Carpenter, 2018) is rarely discussed. Given the epistemic violence (Spivak, 2023) of art as white property: What are the ethics and responsibilities of inviting new art teachers into this violent history and current reality for the discipline of art education?

In this presentation we focus on a graduate art education class–Race, Education and the Politics of Visual Representation – a course designed as the foundational experience in a pre-certification curriculum for emerging visual art teachers in New York City. As co-facilitators we describe the problematic terrain of art as a racialized field that shapes our understanding of aesthetics, imagination, individual expression, and subjectivity and the ways the institutions such as schools, museums, and popular culture shape common sense notions of art that maintain dominant narratives of white supremacy and othering.

Our session will reflect on the evolution of this course in relation to public discourse in the United States that confronts realities of race, oppression, DEI (diversity/equity/inclusion) initiatives and connections to immigration and intersectional identity in a global context. What are the ethics and responsibilities of preparing artist educators to enter a field of practice resting on exclusionary beliefs, values and practices and what is possible when we enact more inclusive and critically multicultural practices?