VIRTUAL: Learning. Life. Work.

Abstract

It is no secret that historically, art criticism has had a long tradition of tending to focus on, benefit, and center white male creative practice. By so doing, it has contributed to their hyper-visibility, sustained the myth of the white male artist as a genius, and played a crucial role in raising the rank of their work to masterpieces. More importantly, it has been instrumental in dictating to audiences what a work of art is and should look like—cementing white male creative practice and its trajectory in the art historical canon. With the advent of the feminist movement, feminists began to question and critique the canon’s erasure of women in art history. They began designing and developing strategies (through written or visual language) to think about women’s work and creative processes. Granted, most of this work was done by white female art critics who failed to address the inequalities within the feminist movement—particularly its biases towards black and brown women whose contributions to the movement were deliberately omitted. To make matters worse, when writing about black and brown women’s work, white historians’ criticism and interpretation of their work has been unable to identify how it can transcend “its intrinsic political boundaries of ‘invisibility’ to address the world” (Wallace 2016:213). To put it bluntly, it has failed to think deeply about black and brown women’s artists’ work.