People of Color in European Art History

  1. Hume’s claim that no non-Whites had contributed to civilization or the arts was taken as established fact. Jews and Catholics or Protestants, depending on who was doing the writing, were also suspect, but, as Popkin (1973) states, it was particularly “people of color [who] just did not have the right things going on in their heads to qualify as man in the philosophical sense” (p. 250).

    Although overt here, today this sort of thinking is covertly embedded in much of what has been called elitist aesthetic and art education theory.

    Why did racism, egocentrism, ethnocentrism, and Eurocentrism develop?
    Why were European explanations of human diversity evaluative and not neutral? Why could educators such as Clarke and Zerffi write what they did?
    Popkin (1973) posits that because Europeans had given up Biblical humanism (the conviction that everyone was made in the image of God) and because naturalistic explanations of human nature allowed for normative evaluation and the economics of slavery, colonization, and gold could be justified:

    “And to nobody’s surprise, the theorizers … managed to find that people with "wrong,"or "inferior"mental properties just happened to have the wrong skin color, or the wrong religious beliefs and practices. In finding this out, the philosophers and natural philosophers were not being aberrational; they were acting as the theoreticians for a major stream of thought [e.g., aesthetic theory] that was transforming the universalistic conception of man into a view of the gradations of mankind, a transformation that could justify what was occurring. (Popkin, 1973, p. 254)”

    And, it could justify what happened in art education, too.
    It is not my purpose in this paper to present rationalizations for the past; however, I believe that we need to understand the past in order to embrace the future. The future for art education in a pluralist society requires art educators who are knowledgeable about and sensitive to students’ differing cultural backgrounds, values, and traditions.

    I believe that we need art educators who demonstrate respect for cultures and backgrounds different from their own and acknowledge that all groups can produce and define cultural artifacts that are “excellent” and that in all cultures “art"exists for rather similar reasons. We need art teachers who provide a classroom atmosphere in which students’ cultures are recognized, shared, and respected. We need art educators who will develop culturally appropriate curricula materials to supplement those whose treatment of different cultural groups is limited or biased.

    We need art educators who will give students an opportunity to explore what they do not know or understand about the arts of other cultures. We need learning and teaching to operate in both directions and to involve parents and other community members as experts and resource people in classroom activities.

    As Shapson (1990) states, "Attempts to implement new curriculum and innovative teaching for multicultural education are fragile. The efforts of committed educators and other stakeholders stand vulnerable to political pressures” (p. 213). As I have shown in this paper, we are also vulnerable to powerful and ingrained traditions in art education. We all need to examine our own beliefs and values so that we can effect change in the ways we teach art.
    The Origins of Racism in the Public School Art Curriculum
    F. Graeme Chalmers
    Studies in Art Education, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Spring, 1992), pp. 134-143
    Published by: National Art Education Association
    Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1320895
    [access limited]

    2. Tagged:  article   quotes   Art History   Art Education   Historiography   racism   originas 

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