Visual Art as a Racemaking Technology: Implications for Education

Abstract

Visual arts education must outline a defensible vision for our discipline that acknowledges the arts are White property. In this article, I argue that visual art itself should be recognized as a racializing technology contributing to the production and ranking of human difference. I show how a previous iteration of visual arts education—visual culture art education—also called into question the role of visual art in producing the cultural superiority of the Enlightenment subject, who was key to the historical emergence of whiteness itself. However, this approach to art education was more concerned with the political ontology of the image rather than the human. Drawing on Al-An deSouza’s studio practice, negotiated refusal, I begin to outline a vision for visual arts education that recognizes the arts as White property, and yet does not give up on either fine art or the human.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Laura Trafí-Prats, Dónal O’Donoghue, and jt Eisenhauer Richardson for their contributions to this article through our participation in a panel at the 2021 Art Education Research Institute Symposium. Thank you to Albert Stabler for his provocation to consider the erasure drawing by Robert Rauschenberg in this analysis. Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments that allowed me to strengthen this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Grace Hong attributes this term to Hortense Spillers. However, Spillers wrote “significant exception” not “structuring exception.” So, I am attributing these words to Hong and not Spillers (see Spillers, 2003, p. 224).