Lunch on the Grass: Three Women Art Educators of Color

Abstract

We are three art educators, Women of Color (WoC), in higher education. In this article, we use trioethnography, a dialogic methodology, to provide context for understanding our struggles as such. We describe our challenges navigating a field (art education) that has embraced feminist scholarship, yet has historically paid little attention to how the intersections of race and gender systemically marginalizes WoC. We utilize scholarship from feminists of color, and the artwork of Black, queer, female visual artist Mickalene Thomas to counter the negation of our voices and reveal the complexity of our lived experiences to our predominately White female field. We look to intersectional feminisms to shift the art education discourse so that WoC’s matrices of oppression are considered. Ultimately, we seek to complicate the traditional feminist discourse that occurs in the art education field. Using trioethnography as a methodology allowed our recorded and transcribed dialogs to become our site of inquiry and, ultimately, become narratives of resistance in relation to dominant narratives/discourse. We offer three thematic lenses for examining our dialog: “Keeping it Real,” “Invisible Burdens,” and “Kinship Ties.” Further, we juxtapose these narratives alongside our photographic reenactment of Thomas’s artwork as a backdrop and third space for examination.

Keywords:

• art education
• arts
• Black feminist thought
• Chicana feminism
• intersectionality
• Women of Color

Acknowledgments

The authors of this article are listed alphabetically. The author order does not represent the level of contribution. All authors contributed to the conceptualization and writing of this article equally from beginning to end. For us, our decision to order the authors alphabetically emphasizes the way we value process and equity, rather than a system of power. Specifically, we define “contribution” not only as pen to paper, or research hours, but as emotional support to each other when needed, even for issues outside of this article. Those lived experiences unequivocally contributed to this article. The article was produced over months of long girlfriend to girlfriend chats via video conferences, multiple manuscript read-aloud sessions, late night and early morning text messages, and, at times, some inappropriate, off-topic voice messages. Thus, author order only represents the authors’ names, not their “contribution” to this work. In addition, we give love and thanks to Esha Janssens for the beautifully designed images of our dialog. She captured the free-flowing spirit of our conversation, and symbolically, through different shades of brown, she illustrated the diversity in our Black and Brown voices.

Notes

Notes

1 Sean Landers, “Mickalene Thomas,” BOMB Magazine, July 11, 2011. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/mickalene-thomas-1/.

2 Lynn Gailbraith and Kit Grauer, “State of the Field: Demographics and Art Teacher Education,” in Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education, edited by Elliot Eisner and Michael Day (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2004), 415–37.

3 Rachel Alicia Griffin, “Cultivating Promise and Possibility: Black Feminist Thought as an Innovative, Interdisciplinary, and International Framework,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5, no. 3 (2016): 1–9.

4 Jennifer C. Nash, “Home Truths on Intersectionality,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 23, no. 2 (2011): 225–470.

5 Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1997); Patricia Hill Collins, Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990); Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018); Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–67.

6 Joni Boyd Acuff, “Black Feminist Theory in 21st Century Art Education,” Studies in Art Education 59, no. 3 (2018): 205.

7 Patricia Hill Collins, “Black Feminist Thought as Oppositional Knowledge,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5, no. 3 (2016): 133–144; Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” 139–67; Nash, “Home Truths on Intersectionality,” 225–470; Kristin Waters, “A Journey from Willful Ignorance to Liberal Guilt to Black Feminist Thought,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5, no. 3 (2016): 108–15.

8 Lori Walkington, “How Far Have We Really Come? Black Women Faculty and Graduate Students’ Experiences in Higher Education,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 1, no. 39 (2017): 51–65.

9 Joe Norris, Richard D. Sawyer, and Darren E. Lund, Duoethnography: Dialogic Methods for Social, Health, and Educational Research (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012); Rick Breault, Raine Hackler, and Rebecca Bradley, “Seeking Rigor in the Search for Identity: A Trioethnography,” in Duoethnography: Dialogic Method for Social, Health, and Educational Research, edited by Joe Norris, Richard D. Sawyer and Darren Lund (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012), 115–36; Gloria J. Wilson and Pamela Lawton, “Critical Portraiture: Black/Women/Artists/Educator/Researchers,” Visual Arts Research 45, no. 1(2019): 83–9; Gloria J. Wilson and Sara S. Shields, “Troubling the ‘WE’ in Art Education: Slam Poetry as Subversive Duoethnography,” Journal of Social Theory in Art Education 38, no. 1 (2019).

10 Breault, Hackler, and Bradley, “Seeking Rigor in the Search for Identity: A Trioethnography,” 115–136.

11 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994).

12 Thomas, E. Barone, “Using the Narrative Text as an Occasion for Conspiracy,” in Qualitative Inquiry in Education, edited by Elliot Eisner and Alan Peshkin (New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 1990), 305–26.

13 Norris, Sawyer, and Lund, Duoethnography: Dialogic Methods for Social, Health, and Educational Research; Robert. E. Rinehart and Kerry Earl, “Auto-, Duo- and Collaborative-Ethnographies: ‘Caring’ in an Audit Culture Climate,” Qualitative Research Journal 16, no. 3 (2016): 210–24.

14 Norris, Sawyer, and Lund, Duoethnography: Dialogic Methods for Social, Health, and Educational Research, 9.

15 William Pinar, “Currere: Toward Reconceptualization.” in Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists (Berkley, CA: McCutchan, 1975); William Pinar, “The Method of Currere: Essays in Curriculum Theory 1972–1992,” in Autobiography, Politics and Sexuality, edited by William Pinar (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1994), 19–27.

16 Norris, Sawyer, and Lund, Duoethnography: Dialogic Methods for Social, Health, and Educational Research, 13.

17 John L. Jackson, Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 17.

18 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 2.

19 Jackson, Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity.

20 Melissa Crum, personal communication to authors, 2018.

21 Jackson, Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity.

22 Laura Quiros and Beverly Araujo Dawson, “The Color Paradigm: The Impact of Colorism on the Racial Identity and Identification of Latinas,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 23, no. 3 (2013): 288. doi:10.1080/10911359.2012.740342.

23 Ibid., 293.

24 Vanessa López, “The Hyphen Goes Where? Four Stories of the Dual-Culture Experience in the Art Classroom,” Art Education 62, no. 5 (2009): 19–24.

25 Quiros and Araujo Dawson, “The Color Paradigm: The Impact of Colorism on the Racial Identity and Identification of Latinas,” 287–97.

26 Walkington, “How Far Have We Really Come? Black Women Faculty and Graduate Students’ Experiences in Higher Education,” 51–65.

27 Ibid., 54.

28 Sarah Gibbard Cook, “Black Women’s Dilemma: Be Real or Be Ignored,” Women in Higher Education 22, no. 4 (2013): 19. doi:10.1002/whe.10446.

29 Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower.

30 Walkington, “How Far Have We Really Come? Black Women Faculty and Graduate Students’ Experiences in Higher Education,” 54.

31 Sheila T. Gregory, “Black faculty women in the academy: History, status, and future,” Journal of Negro Education 70, no. 3 (2001): 136.

32 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009).

33 Walkington, “How Far Have We Really Come? Black Women Faculty and Graduate Students’ Experiences in Higher Education,” 51–65.

34 Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis, “In Search of Discourse and Critique/s that Center the Art of Black Women Artists,” in Black Feminist Cultural Criticism, edited by Jacqueline Bobo (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 147.

35 Tammy L. Henderson, Andrea G. Hunter, and Gladys J. Hildreth, “Outsiders Within the Academy: Strategies for Resistance and Mentoring African American Women,” Michigan Family Review 14, no. 1 (2010).

36 Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 300.

37 Gregory, “Black Faculty Women in the Academy: History, Status, and Future,” 124–38.

38 Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, “The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 39 (2017): 231. http://www.jstor.org/stable/90007882.

39 Andrew J. Fuligni and Sara Pedersen, “Family Obligation and the Transition to Young Adulthood,” Developmental Psychology 38 (2002): 856–68; Andrew J. Fuligni, Vivian Tseng, and May Lam, “Attitudes Toward Family Obligations among American Adolescents from Asian, Latin American, and European backgrounds,” Child Development 70 (1999): 1030–44.

40 Fuligni and Pedersen, “Family Obligation and the Transition to Young Adulthood,” 856.

41 Gregory, “Black Faculty Women in the Academy: History, Status, and Future,” 124–38.

42 Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, “The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments,” 229.

43 Gregory, “Black Faculty Women in the Academy: History, Status, and Future,” 124–38.

44 Tiffany D. Joseph and Laura E. Hirshfield “‘Why Don’t You Get Somebody New to Do It?’ Race and Cultural Taxation in the Academy,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 123.

45 William A. Smith, Tara J. Yosso, and Daniel G. Solórzano, “Challenging Racial Battle Fatigue on Historically White Campuses: A Critical Race Examination of Race-Related Stress,” in Faculty of Color: Teaching in Predominately White Colleges and Universities, edited by Christine A. Stanley (Bolton, MA: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 299–327.

46 Ibid., 301.

47 Acuff, “Black Feminist Theory in 21st Century Art Education,” 201–14.

48 Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment; Bell Hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1990).

49 Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.

50 Ibid., 51.

51 Walkington, “How Far Have We Really Come? Black Women Faculty and Graduate Students’ Experiences in Higher Education,” 53.

52 Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, “The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments,” 232.

53 Joseph and Hirshfield “‘Why Don’t You Get Somebody New to Do It?’ Race and Cultural Taxation in the Academy,” 121–141; Walkington, “How Far Have We Really Come? Black Women Faculty and Graduate Students’ Experiences in Higher Education,” 51–65.

54 Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Performance Test of African Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 5 (1995): 797–811.

55 Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, “The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments,” 232.

56 Anzaldua, Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza.

57 Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.

58 Ashley, Patterson, Valerie Kinloch, Tanya Burkhard, Ryann Randall, and Arianna Howard, “Black Feminist Thought as Methodology: Examining Intergenerational Lived Experiences of Black Women,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5, no. 3 (2016): 58.

59 Peggy Davis, “Law as Microaggression,” Yale Law Journal 98 (1989): 1576.

60 Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, “The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments,” 230.

61 Ibid., 230.

62 Joseph and Hirshfield “‘Why Don’t You Get Somebody New to Do It?’ Race and Cultural Taxation in the Academy,” 129–30.

63 Anzaldua, Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza.

64 Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

65 Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past; Sander Gilman, “The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality.” in Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, edited by Kymberly N. Pinder (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), 119–33.

66 Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, “Black Silhouettes on White Walls: Kara Walker’s Magic Lantern,” in Body Aesthetics, edited by Sherri Irvin (Oxford University Press, 2016), 15–36.

67 Linda M. Chatters, Robert Joseph Taylor, and Rukmali Jayakody, “Fictive Kinship Relations in Black Extended Families,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 25, no. 3 (1994): 297–312; Signithia M. Fordham, “Black Students’ School Success as Related to Fictive Kinship: A Study in the Washington, DC Public School System” (PhD diss., The American University, 1987); Gloria J. Wilson, “Fictive Kinship in the Aspirations, Agency, and (Im)possible Selves of the Black American art Teacher,” Journal of Social Theory in Art Education 37, no. 1 (2017): 49–60.

68 Wilson, “Fictive Kinship in the Aspirations, Agency, and (Im)possible Selves of the Black American art Teacher,” 50.

69 Na’im, Akbar, Know Thyself (Tallahassee, FL: Mind Productions and Associates, 1998).

70 Kumea Shorter-Gooden, “Multiple Resistance Strategies: How African American Women Cope with Racism and Sexism,” Journal of Black Psychology 30, no. 3 (2004): 406–25.

71 Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.

72 Wilson, “Fictive Kinship in the Aspirations, Agency, and (Im)possible Selves of the Black American Art Teacher,” 49–60.

73 Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, Questions of Cultural Identity (London: SAGE, 1996); Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

74 Wilson, “Fictive Kinship in the Aspirations, Agency, and (Im)possible Selves of the Black American Art Teacher,” 49–60.

75 Robert Joseph Taylor, Linda M Chatters, Cheryl Burns Hardison, and Anna Riley, “Informal Social Support Networks and Subjective Well-Being among African Americans,” Journal of Black Psychology 27, no. 4 (2001): 439–63; Walkington, “How Far Have We Really Come? Black Women Faculty and Graduate Students’ Experiences in Higher Education,” 51–65.

76 Walkington, “How Far Have We Really Come? Black Women Faculty and Graduate Students’ Experiences in Higher Education,” 51–65.

77 Ibid., 58.

78 Henderson, Hunter, and Hildreth. “Outsiders Within the Academy: Strategies for Resistance and Mentoring African American Women.”

79 Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974); Beverly D. Tatum, “Racial Identity Development and Relational Theory: The Case of Black Women in White Communities,” Work in Progress, no. 63 (Wellesley, MA: Stone Center Working Paper Series, 1993); Wilson, “Fictive Kinship in the Aspirations, Agency, and (Im)possible Selves of the Black American Art Teacher,” 49–60.

80 Gregory, “Black Faculty Women in the Academy: History, Status, and Future,” 124–38.

81 Alfreida Daly, Jeanette Jennings, Joyce O. Beckett, and Bogart R. Leashore, “Effective Coping Strategies of African Americans,” Social Work 40, no. 2 (1995): 240–24.

82 Gregory, “Black Faculty Women in the Academy: History, Status, and Future,” 124–38; Walkington, “How Far Have We Really Come? Black Women Faculty and Graduate Students’ Experiences in Higher Education,” 51–65.

83 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018).

84 Mickalene Thomas, “Mickalene Thomas in Conversation with Beverly Guy-Sheftall,” interview by Beverely Guy-Sheftall, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, September 13, 2018.

85 Patterson, Kinloch, Burkhard, Randall, and Howard, “Black Feminist Thought as Methodology: Examining Intergenerational Lived Experiences of Black women,” 59.

86 Wilson, “Fictive Kinship in the Aspirations, Agency, and (Im)possible Selves of the Black American Art Teacher,” 49–60.

87 Thomas, interview.

88 Davidson, “Black Silhouettes on White Walls: Kara Walker’s Magic Lantern,” 15–36.

89 Landers, “Mickalene Thomas.”

90 Henderson, Hunter, and Hildreth. “Outsiders Within the Academy: Strategies for Resistance and Mentoring African American Women.”

91 Thomas historicizes her work by acknowledging the historical art canon (Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, and Romare Bearden), yet she pushes back on the White male gaze that is so familiar in art history, and counters the objectification of the female body by constructing a Black female gaze.

92 Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment; Patterson, Kinloch, Burkhard, Randall, and Howard, “Black Feminist Thought as Methodology: Examining Intergenerational Lived Experiences of Black Women,” 55–76.

93 Audre, Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110.

94 Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, 124.

95 Shannon K. McManimon and Casey, Zachary A., “(Re)beginning and Becoming: Antiracism and Professional Development with White Practicing Teachers,” Teaching Education 29, no. 4 (2018), 399.

96 Ibid., 396.

97 Bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 35.

98 Acuff, “Black Feminist Theory in 21st Century Art Education,” 201–14.

99 Ibid.

100 Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, 106.

101 Ibid., 103.

102 Bettina Love, “We Want to Do More Than Survive,” Live streamed book talk, New York, NY: Schomburg Center for Research, March 20, 2019.

103 Ibid.

104 Gloria J. Wilson, “Construction of the Blackademic: An Arts-Based Tale in and Through Academia,” Visual Inquiry: Learning and Teaching Art 7, no. 3 (2018): 213–26; Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy, The Black Academic’s Guide to Winning Tenure without Losing your Soul (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008).

105 Gregory, “Black Faculty Women in the Academy: History, Status, and Future,” 125.

106 Nash, “Home Truths on Intersectionality,” 225–470; hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics.

107 hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 42.

108 Deborah K. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14, no. 1 (1988), 42–72.

109 Thomas, interview.

110 Gregory, “Black Faculty Women in the Academy: History, Status, and Future,” 124–38; Wilson, “Fictive Kinship in the Aspirations, Agency, and (Im)possible Selves of the Black American Art Teacher,” 49–60.

111 Thomas, interview.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joni Boyd Acuff

Joni Boyd Acuff is an Associate Professor of Arts Administration, Education & Policy at The Ohio State University.

Vanessa López

Vanessa López is a faculty member at Maryland Institute College of Art.

Gloria J. Wilson

Gloria J. Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Arts and Visual Culture Education at The University of Arizona.