Reflecting on Reconstructing Practice
ICYMI
On July 13 and 14, over 100 participants came to Art Center’s campus in Pasadena for Reconstructing Practice to explore the ways artists, designers, and technologists approach and enact anti-racist practices in a variety of settings: from academia to museums, to communities of practice, to neighborhoods.
Reconstructing Practice was a convening designed to provide a series of opportunities for young creators — of color, especially — to engage with and through art, design, media and/or technology. The program featured 16 sessions in which speakers and participants shared their work and reflections through generative workshops, critical discussions, personal storytelling, collective making, and group listening. Selected participants also filled the gallery with work that celebrates and examines the complexity and breadth of racialized identities, critiques art and design education, and materializes the ties between art and activism.
Over the next few days, we’ll share a series of excerpts from Reflecting on Reconstructing Practice: Toward an Anti-Racist Art & Design Field, a collection of.. you guessed it, reflections on our first conference.
To start, here’s some background on our motivations as organizers and the origins of Reconstructing Practice.
James Baldwin famously insisted on his right to “criticize America perpetually” precisely because of his love for the nation of his birth (Notes of a Native Son, 9). When we chose to study at Art Center, inspired by an admiration and respect for the potential of this institution’s promise of education, we became part of it as patrons and as community members. Over the last year, we have struggled to find ways to challenge our institution from our position within it: As students, we are at once a part of the college, apart from it, invested in it, beneficiaries of it, and beholden to it. In this way, we look to Baldwin as our positioning motivates us to critique the College, hold it accountable, and leave it better than we found it.
When we first started organizing Antiracist Classroom events, we had two primary objectives: First, to create spaces for students, especially students of color, to find fellowship in ways that made it a little easier to tolerate the daily traumas of existing in a white institution. Second, we sought to hold the institution accountable for addressing inherently racist, white supremacist practices and infrastructures and push it to evolve toward an explicitly anti-racist future. This former objective quickly took precedence over the latter.
In retrospect, Reconstructing Practice represents an attempt to approach both objectives with more intentionality. The event was borne equally of strategic interests like building community within and beyond Art Center, and endowing participants with the room and conditions to think, create, and produce work contrary to the traditional white western canon. In a way, too, this event demanded that we publicly acknowledge the uncomfortable existence that our own institutional home foists on students of color and encouraged us to create a temporal and physical space in which we could enjoy the fullness of our own humanity and practice. At Reconstructing Practice, participants found a community of shared interest and space to which they could bring their entire selves. In this setting, we could bypass any debate about whether racism is a veritable issue, one that exists or warrants examination in the context of design or higher education. Instead, we could direct our attention toward how the spaces, practices, and pedagogies where art and design take place can and should evolve in service of an anti-racist future.
Our critiques of design education, especially, come from a recognition that our college — like many others — is home to an ingrained set of academic and administrative systems that are rooted in and reified by racism.
Often, our institution’s proximity to industry and role as a creative hub are called on as if they shield us from being obligated to critically examine race and power in the ways we operate. In a sense, what we hoped to achieve with this event, as a first step, was to call to attention to this myth of educational neutrality — or more broadly, the fiction of neutrality in art, design, and technology — and the ways in which it allows racism to persist. Beyond highlighting oppressive dimensions of these systems, our intent throughout the year and in organizing Reconstructing Practice was to begin envisioning, articulating, and modeling a liberatory future for art and design education and practice.
It is almost artfully ironic that within an institution with such expertise in vividly imagining the physical, material, and experiential futures that define the products we consume and the technologies with which we interact, it seems virtually impossible to acknowledge — let alone reimagine — the nature of administrative policies, ways of interacting with students, and other institutional frameworks derived from a deliberately white supremacist imaginary of American higher education, the commercial landscapes into which many graduates matriculate, and corporate workplaces where many faculty members hone their credentials to teach.
