How Art Can Help Overcome ‘the Blind Spot Around Our Privilege Shaped Exactly Like Us’
Revisiting Art Historian Sarah Lewis’ 2019 Chautauqua Lecture
Throughout Black History Month, we’re showcasing recent programs from Chautauqua stages and online platforms that have given voice to the Black experience in America. These words and images provide critical context for the important and difficult work — and action — to which this moment calls us, to advance the cause of justice.
In 2019, it was our honor to host art historian Sarah Lewis on the Amphitheater stage for a presentation based on her “Vision & Justice” class at Harvard, continuing a week in partnership with Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center themed “Exploring Race and Culture.” The course, part of the college’s core curriculum, was inspired by the acclaimed Aperture issue of the same name, which Lewis guest edited.
Lewis began her lecture by addressing a question asked of Marsalis earlier in the week by an older audience member: “What can we do to improve this country, besides voting and donating?”
Acknowledging the civic importance of voting and donating, Lewis proposed another way citizens can advance the cause of justice: “To question what you see, why you see it, and what it means.”
“I’m going to ask you to do this because we are in an urgent, almost perilous moment,” she said. “This country has been in such moments before, yet this particular one has a distinct character. It offers near-daily reminders that the fragility of American rights has not only been secured by norms and laws, but by how we judge — how we quite literally see each other. And how we refuse to see each other.”
Picking up The Chautauquan Daily’s coverage:
Art can help overcome “the blind spot around our privilege shaped exactly like us,” Lewis said, by not only illuminating “what we already know,” but also “what we don’t know we don’t know.” This was the central question of a trip Lewis and her students took to Washington, D.C. In preparation for their visit, which included a tour of the Capitol Rotunda, Lewis showed her students a short clip in which a diverse group of Americans read an excerpt of the Declaration of Independence. The video reveals that each person gathered in that room is a living descendant of one of the original Declaration signers, all of whom were white men. It pauses on the still of these contemporary Americans positioned like their ancestors in John Trumbull’s 1818 painting “Declaration of Independence.” The image, in Lewis’ words, looks like “the world has rushed in.”
Around the time of the creation of this painting — one of the pieces currently showcased in the Rotunda — citizenship necessitated that one had to be white, male and own property.
“What is the definition of the journey between 1790, and the current day?” Lewis asked. “Has the enlargement of the idea of citizenship — of who counts and who belongs — just been a legal narrative, a series of amendments? Or has it been a cultural one?”
As an art historian, Lewis admitted her bias for the latter portrayal, and spent the remainder of her lecture arguing for culture’s role in determining the “health” of a representative democracy.
“Representative democracy has also meant measuring life through representation itself,” Lewis said. “What we put on stages becomes our collective currency to assess who we are.”
