Celebrating World Art Day 2021
Not only is World Art Day a great way to celebrate the creative spirit, but it is also a reminder that the creative spirit connects and communicates that which cannot always be said. The arts — be it visual, musical, or performative — invite the opportunities to engage in discussions, examine norms, and see the unseen.
I am fortunate to have a life filled with art. While my arts training has been as a musician, my humble exposure to visual arts has significantly impacted the questions I ask and how I see and interact with the world.
Thinking I would check out an art class in grad school, I chose Critical Theory in Museum Studies because it worked best with my schedule. Based on the title alone, it is clear now I had no idea what I was getting myself into. When I struggled just in that first week to get through some assigned readings by Michel Foucault, I thought this is not for me. Pleading to drop the class, my graduate advisor refused. So surviving with a passing grade was my only option. Eventually, the course morphed from something daunting to intrigue. What I would learn would be invaluable and something I reflect on often. Ultimately, this class showed me how visual art tells us stories about each other and how grouping them in varied arrangements can tell a broader story — historically and politically. And what questions we all should be asking to understand the stories they do tell, the people they represent, and the people who make them.
Art makes me ask, “who decides what is art?” It also urges me to ask the follow-up question, “who decides who decides what is art?” Answers to these questions get at the heart of power and policy. The answers to these questions only begin to take shape in introductory courses such as Music Appreciation or Art Appreciation. In reality, there’s so much more to be learned.
Later in my journey as a music student, I would discover Fanny Mendelssohn. Sister to the famous Felix Mendelssohn, she was a composer in her own right. Thanks to the researchers who discovered the F in F. Mendelssohn was for Fanny not Felix. She wrote many pieces once attributed to her brother. The Mendelssohn story would be the first of many painful stories representing this cultural pattern.
Fast forward ten years and enrolled in another seminar course titled, Museum as Medium, we investigated the construction and communication of national, cultural, and community identities. We unpacked the diverse definitions of heritage where material culture is exhibited and organized. The narratives expressed in this study suggest particular interpretations of history and values made by those “deciders.” All one needs to do is look at the galleries’ ceilings — especially the Apollo Gallery — in the Louvre to get a sense of the power and control in heritage storytelling. And in case you were wondering, Foucault was most certainly back on the reading list.
Today has me thinking about the opportunity to highlight artists who might not have received the recognition they deserve during their lifetimes. Some have shaped photography or pushed creative boundaries. Others are experiencing a bit more credit thanks to the resurgence in the retrospective. Not until writing this story would I discover Rosa Bonheur was an artist and not a place on the Seine where you and I could sip rosé all day. Considered a “New Woman” of the 19th century, Bonheur was encouraged by her father and mother, an artist and piano teacher in their own right, respectively.
Planting the seed to write this story was an interview on NPR with the pianist Lara Downes I heard while taking one of my must-get-out-of-the-house-because-of-COVID walks. She and the host discussed Florence Price’s symphonic works, and admittedly, I do not recall ever learning about any 20th-century African-American women composers during my undergraduate or post-graduate studies. I was overjoyed to listen to this interview.
World Art Day is an excellent moment to course-correct and elevate those artists whose works currently lie dormant or possibly lost forever.
Happy World Art Day!
