Cultural visibility in our sights: ArtPrize Eight brings chance to listen to other cultures through art
As we anticipate the eighth year of ArtPrize, Grand Rapids’s largest annual public art event, it will be worthwhile to consider the relationship between art values, venues, and cultural authority.
Some of my favorite works of contemporary art are those which address the complicated relationship between artistic representation, cultural values, and institutional authority. An example that comes to mind is American artist Fred Wilson’s installation “Guarded View.” This work from 1991 presented a row of security guard uniforms, from four New York museums, on headless mannequins.
The installation, rooted in Wilson’s college experience of working as a gallery guard, puts on display people who are always present in the museum but always invisible. The necks and hands of the mannequins are brown but even without that cue, the further subtext of the installation asks: who is invisible in the museum or art gallery? Wilson describes his experiences as a viewer in the museum, recognizing that he and the museum guards and cleaning staff were generally the only people of color present. Those who decided what would be on display, who set the artistic agenda of the museum or gallery, were white.
Visibility and invisibility, cultural ownership, and agency: these are powerful themes in Wilson’s work. They are also present in local artist and curator Monroe O’Bryant’s practice.
Last year, O’Bryant explained to my art history students that he posted prominent signs explaining that what was going on was a staged photo shoot, any time he was filming his provocative series “Realistic Neglects.” The work went on to win the notice of jurors and won for his category in last year’s ArtPrize competition.
Despite the obvious signs, though, passersby called security and the police.
“They saw the toy guns before they saw my camera,” he said wryly. “We learned how to work real fast after that.”
Wilson has also had similar experiences, where viewers look at him and do not see an artist. He has capitalized on this bias and incorporated it into his practice. O’Bryant, on the other hand, has focused on the under-recognized stories, including the power of artistic storytelling itself within his own African American community. He uses his exposure within the art world to bring these stories to a broader audience.
Like all public art, ArtPrize acts as a lightning rod for what a community expects from art and culture more generally. ArtPrize is tailored perfectly to the 21st century capitalist democracy we inhabit. In the capitalist marketplace, our buying power reflects our values and we reiterate our values through our consumption. ArtPrize voters have unprecedented access to the formerly closed system of the art world, replacing the control of curators and critics to award thousands of dollars to artists through our social mediated choices of artworks.
However, we must face the fact that our consumption is generally based on our comfort and entertainment rather than our desire to be challenged or educated. Thus our values translate into our votes, resulting in a preference, for most of us, for imagery that looks and feels like us, in venues with which we are familiar. Every year we find no shortage of submissions by minority artists. Yet the entries that win the popular vote are consistently by artists who represent majority culture positions and values. Pakistani-American artist Anila Quayyum Agha’s “Intersections” in 2014 was a very rare exception to this pattern.
The Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM), the venue hosting Agha in 2014, along with DeVos Place Convention Center, have each stood out as notably inclusive ArtPrize venues. Last year GRAM curator Ron Platt’s selections traversed feminist, transgender, African American, Latino, First Nations, Middle Eastern, Hindu and Buddhist identities and cultures, including O’Bryant’s “Realistic Neglects,” the recipient of the Juried 2-Dimensional Award. Eddie T.L. Tadlock at DeVos Place has consistently curated artists and entries from a wide range of perspectives including disabled artists, veterans, and many other minority cultures. One of the outstanding artists he exhibited in 2015 was Paul R. Collins Diversity Award winning painter Shawn Michael Warren whose monumental history painting, “In A Promised Land,” told the story of the 1921 Tulsa race riot.
Even more necessary to the Grand Rapids cultural scene are venues operating under minority ownership and organization. For its size, Grand Rapids can boast an active artistic culture; yet there are very few public cultural institutions or art venues here owned or managed by minority groups. As a result, our arts scene lacks a sense of minority cultural agency. In other words, our arts scene most generally caters to a mainstream constituency.
Perhaps the most explicit example of the ArtPrize winner demonstrating the identity of the majority culture was the 2011 First Place Popular Vote winner, “Crucifixion” by Mia Tavonatti. Tavonatti exhibited a mosaic portrayal of a fair-skinned, blond Jesus Christ on the cross. This popular representation upheld ideals of the divine human in the most Caucasian, male, Christian, cis-gender, and able-bodied terms imaginable.
On the other hand, in the history of ArtPrize, only a very small handful of works by artists of color have achieved the top 10 in the public vote categories. Even fewer works in the top public votes have represented people of color, women, disabled people, or LGBT people. One of the telling exceptions was the winner of the 2014 two-dimensional public vote by Gretchen Lauer, “Outcry,” a photo realist painting of an Asian girl weeping. The description identified her as a victim of sex trafficking. There is no question that sex trafficking is one of the great evils of the global capitalist economy. Yet unfortunately the painting, by a Caucasian artist, upheld the majority culture presumption of people of color as disempowered victims, rather than persons fully capable of telling their own stories on their own terms.
Happily, this fall promises several local venues that have the potential to move our public art culture toward more authentic expressions by people from minority groups.
The Grand Rapids African American Museum and Archives (GRAAMA) is a long-overdue addition to the cultural institutions in this city, and will open a temporary office and store on the Monroe Mall.
At 912 Grandville Avenue, an arts collective called Cultura Collective, curated by Steffanie Rosalez, will incorporate all art forms, from photography and painting to dance, fashion, and music, to celebrate the Latino and African American perspectives of the city’s West Side.
Veterans Memorial Park will once again feature the [Hero Stories] of Fashion Has Heart with designs by U.S. veterans.
And at City Hall, Monroe O’Bryant curates The Relics of Storytellers in conjunction with the African American Heritage Festival. All of these venues, and hopefully more, will give the ArtPrize viewing public the opportunity to shift their cultural center of gravity by encountering the authentic voices of persons who live and work outside the mainstream.
Historically, the greatest moments of cultural change—the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, for example—have occurred when persons from minority cultures have been able to enact change and express themselves on their own terms. Their efforts produced a more civilized society for us all as a result.
The power of the arts is this: they enable us to encounter someone else’s perspective, to hear the voices of another neighborhood, to see another community. The beauty of ArtPrize in Grand Rapids is that we have the opportunity to deeply engage such encounters each fall. This fall, don’t miss the chance to visit places where a culture and experience that’s visibly different from our own is honored and flourishes.
