Question

1. I would like you to find an expressive art that reflects what is happening in our culture today (include discussion on race, class, gender and ethnicity) analyzing the piece, performance or story.

Answer 1

Through changing perceptions, instilling ideals and transmitting interactions through space and time, art shapes culture. Studies have shown art influences the essential sense of self. Art retains what historical documents can not be based on facts: how it felt to live at a given time in a particular location. In this sense, art is communication; it enables people of various cultures and periods to interact with each other through images, sounds and stories. Art also provides a medium for social change. It can give the political or socially disenfranchised a voice. A song, film, or novel can stir up emotions in those who come across it, encouraging them to rally for change. The connection between art and the human brain has long been a concern of researchers. Art, too, has utilitarian social effects. There is a demonstrable, meaningful link between math and literacy grades of schoolchildren and their engagement with the events of drama or music. As the National Association for Art Education points out, art acts as an outlet for work for the artist. Not only does art nurture the human desire for self-expression and fulfilment, but it is also commercially viable too. Many employ the production, management and distribution of art.

Throughout the years, women have been active in the making of art, whether as creators and innovators of new modes of creative expression, supporters, dealers, sources of inspiration, or as art historians and critics of significant contributions. Women were and continue to be an important part of the art community, but despite being active in every way with the art world, many women artists have faced resistance in the conventional narrative of art history. Through having difficulties in preparation for selling their work and winning recognition, they have encountered obstacles because of gender differences.

If I mean art that has a specific identity style, formal characteristics like those of the Byzantines, the Chinese, or the Renaissance, then traditionally there is no Black or Female style in this country; there are others who claim that there is an African, formal, artistic tradition that has overcome slavery as it is in Black music. There are those who attempt to create one using African styles, but it is usually difficult to differentiate black art from any other in surveying any art show. There are several books on black art, women's art, and Latin American art, but while these books examine the work of black, female, or Latin artists, beyond choosing them because of their genetic or cultural context, most writers of these books may find no commonality, no single feature distinguishing with which to classify the art of these groups. There are Latino styles that grow out of Spanish, social-realistic and Indian types, but even here, due to so much assimilation of traditional artworld types, it is hard to identify them.

Do we mean art that has a particular substance, a particular subject matter and the associated feelings with it? Certainly, there is a unique 'Black Experience' - urban, inner-city life, southern rural life, racial inequality, alienation, rage, frustration, etc. - and definitely there are female perspectives that were not part of the artworld's conventional material, but 'outsider' artists may use the same subject matter. Should we mean the iconography and the symbols? In drawing, sculpture or, say, quilts in the 'lesser' arts? Metaphysics or traditional principles, ideology or? May context may describe itself differently.

I would argue that the art of all cultural groups and individuals is based on myth; that all attempts to categorize art, especially those based on race and gender, are cultural constructs which represent ideological agendas when articulated. Race and gender can not be the basis of an art style but, of course, social interactions induced by being black or female can shape the material of one's own art. Ethnicity can pose different issues since there are common ethnic styles that artists can use if they want to. This results in nationalistic and discriminatory conceptions of art in which each race has its own inherent characteristics, superior or inferior. In the end, this notion of race is an unpleasant and damaging idea, no matter who believes in it. Afrocentricism as an attempt to assert the supremacy of Black racial culture is therefore poorly conceived of the idea that there is a Black African art form, perhaps originating in Egypt, that can be traced back to Black American Art. It is possibly the result or at least can be associated with the degeneration of urban Black culture and a perceived need to build a network of self-respecting, identifying meaning.

The same goes for the idea that there is a female genetically influenced style, a special female sensibility that is noticeable in women's art. The concept of looking for one's origins in one's real-life experiences and establishing origins by falsifying history or genetics is different. It doesn't mean that one can't use the art forms that one's ancestors use, but that one can also use whatever sources that one likes rather than one has to or that can be hidden. The idea that American Black musicians share a shared African cultural heritage is also imaginary. However, if we disregard the divisive political distinctions that were introduced during the colonial period and the prejudicial idea of 'tribes,' Africa remains 'divided into hundreds of different nationalities and ethnic groups, of widely varying size and with significant variations in culture and values. More than 1000 languages are spoken in Africa' divided into four major groups. The main common languages, spoken by a tiny minority of government and literary elites, maybe English and French. It was only recently that literature started to appear in African languages.

The only probable popular form of culture may be the combined religions of Christianity and Islam, definitely not originally African. The theory of an Afrocentric unifying culture is no more real than the theory of Eurocentric unifying culture. The contrasting colours and jampacked and jelly-tightened compositions, illustrated by Jeff Donaldson's Africobra and Douglas' African-American aesthetic can be found in the Asante and Masai fabrics but not in Botswana too. The artists who say these aesthetics can not trace their origins back to the Asante or the Masai. All artists want recognition, to be remembered, to find their origins, but the attempt to construct a black or a female image does not result in cultural experience or conventional forms of art, but as a rejection and invisibility compensation. Esthetic disparity arguments support anxiety, a fear of competing. The arts of all cultural groups are founded on the assumption that there are certain 'true' forms of creating things, but any effort to enforce such forms on artists, to determine the validity, the accuracy, the 'price' of their artwork by the degree to which they demonstrate these characteristics is more a means of coercion than a matter of 'solidarity' demonstrating.

Many minority artists feel free to borrow from any sources of form or subject matter, not just those who are limited to their own heritage. While most concerned with Black issues, the great artist, Romaire Bearden, used whatever fascinated him, types of European, Asian as well as African and American art. Successful Black Mainstream singer, in the early 70s, Sam Gilliam told Black students. Historically, however, as a result of racial discrimination in this country over the last century, many successful black artists who painted in traditional styles were never acknowledged, were driven into exile in Europe and in the 20th century, women, whose work was just like everyone else's, who had previously been acknowledged, vanished from the literature of art. A lot of revisionist art history was published in the early 70s, claiming that black and female artists had existed, that they were as good as anyone else, or if they weren't, it was because they weren't able to obtain the art education they wanted and didn't have the requisite resources. As late as 1988, it was important to prove that while traditional American historians and commentators had overlooked them, artists of Latin and Hispanic American origin made significant contributions to the mainstream history of modern American art. Not all ethnic artists who wanted to become part of the mainstream felt they had to portray what is done by typical white people. Minorities had unique experiences of their own which they thought were appropriate material for their work.

Blacks, like Bearden, concentrated on rural southern experiences and urban experiences in Harlem, Jacob Lawrence on rural southern experiences, slavery and abolition, more contemporary artists, civil rights, black rage, even revolt. Women tried to make art unavailable to men about the reality of giving birth, bringing up children, relationships with men and other personal experiences. Hispanics had a history of presenting family life, culture, and political causes. Such kinds of issues give the notion of a 'quest for roots' one kind of meaning. It is a quest, an examination of, the actual encounters of one's own life in one's own culture. There is a long African tradition of sculpture, metalworking and weaving, sculpture making was largely suppressed during slavery, but slave masters used wood and metalworking skills. Some folk customs have persisted in fabric design and jewellery making. Black artists sought to become mainstream American artists in the years following Emancipation. They learned, as they were permitted to paint the same subject matter at mainstream art schools, using the same methods and designs, and with white patrons' financial help. Virulent white prejudice forced many of them to become ex-pats.

In the 20s, Jim Crow America in the post-WWI era, the arts were evidently the only field not proscribed. This was the time of the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey. African American artists' first major exhibition of works went on display at the International House in 1928. During the Depression, the WPA funded many musicians. Why does anyone want to be an artist, minority or not anyway? Some people who are going to be artists have a desire to make images, an urge to make shapes, a need to convey emotions, thoughts, ideas etc. Art making is a means of self-realization. This is a way to explore, to create, to render one's personality noticeable. Creating art is also one of the very few ways one has to examine one's inner self and to show one's view of the outer world and society. However, for others, art is a way to vent one's indignation at society, one's frustration at being unseen, or intentionally removed from it. Some artists claim that art is a way to transform society.

It's believed that living an artist's life would give you the ability to fulfil such needs as no 9-5 work would. Particularly for a minority artist, the life of an artist seems to offer the freedom to be oneself, an open universe, the root and model for the 'alternate style of life.' Where one can stay and work with someone else who feels like you. Of course, few people go into the art world to make money; instead, artists make money to make art. Why does one know there's an 'art world' out there where one would be able to do these things? Many people grow up in a society where they see and make art; most don't. Making art, especially paintings, has little significance in most American cultures. The vision for the fine arts is typically Eurocentric. It is based on the notion that painting and sculpture is the 'most noble representation of the soul of a country,' the country being white, Western European, of course. We have been considered to be the highest artistic accomplishment, the product of the finest artists. This excludes the crafts and practical, communication and common arts, or degrades them. Some white mainstream kids could learn about the Fine Arts during museum visits, take art appreciation classes, or look at coffee table art books, but while the Fine Arts had a high cultural significance, art-making was seen as a very suspicious practice and definitely no way to make a living. But most American artists were males who came out of the white, middle-class setting even without the parents' support. Nevertheless, Africans were not considered to have the 'civilization' needed by Fine Art and those who sought to render Fine Art was rejected by both Black and White alike.