Kimberly Drew’s book, This Is What I Know About Art, depicts her personal journey with black art and activism. She doesn’t dare to think about working in the arts until her internship at the Studio Museum where she discovers a black-and-white photograph of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. This results in her questioning why she knows of Warhol but not of Basquiat, who is a black artist. This leads her down the path of searching for other black artists and eventually creating a blog centered around black artists as a way for people to discover them and not have them erased.
Drew’s activism reminds me of the activism group Guerrilla Girls. Guerrilla Girls is a group of women wearing gorilla masks who fight for the inclusion of women and minorities in the art world. They use posters pioneering post-modern style filled with information about the problems that they are fighting. They are trying to inform people of the issues of sexism and racism. They are trying to force a change within the art world. While Drew may not be advocating for the same issues, she is advocating for a change in the art world regarding black art. Her goal is to increase the visibility of black art as she doesn’t wish for it to be forgotten.
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| Protest posters by the Guerrilla Girls |
Her journey with activism started with her internship at the Studio Museum. In The Art of Activism, it is stated “while we each have our own individual story, what we share is a transformative process that began with something deeply personal, emotional, and experiential” (Duncombe and Lambert 18). While Drew grew up visiting art spaces, it isn’t until her internship that she experiences something impactful. She realizes that there is a black world that she knows almost nothing about. It is her desire to want to know more about black art that results in her researching and discovering this lack of information. This discovery transforms her want into a need to know about black art and share what she finds. She creates a blog on Tumblr focused on art by black people. And now with her book, she is sharing her story with black art and activism.
The purpose of Drew’s blog was to leave a trace of black art. In The Art of Activism, it is stated: “as the writer Jorge Luis Borges summarized at the end of his life: "The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory” (Duncombe and Lambert 25). She notices the erasure of black art. She sees it happening in her art history classes as most of the art shown is from white people. Drew feels that black art shouldn’t be erased so she takes her knowledge on the subject and turns it into an online blog. She wants the blog to be a place with the ability to be tracked down by people searching for black art. The blog is also meant to leave a history online so that it be easily remembered.
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| Jorge Luis Borges quote |
Another moment that felt important to me is a response said to Drew by her modern and contemporary art professor. She writes that her professor told her “if you wanted to be in a classroom with other students of color then you should not have enrolled in art history classes” (Drew 27). The cause of this response was a Facebook post that she made as a result of what her professor said due to the student's reaction to The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. To put it plainly and simply, his response is racist. Whether or not he meant it to be, it is. He didn’t think anything was wrong with his words. Instead of reflecting and trying to understand the problem with what he said, he took offense to Drew’s post and told her she was the one making her classmates “uncomfortable.” He was unable to identify how white guilt dominated the conversation when it should have been a discussion about the artwork. His words also brought attention to the fact that there is a lack of colored students enrolled in art history classes. These classes are dominated by white people, both in regard to the students and the artists that are shown. This lack of acknowledgment towards colored artists may correlate to the lack of colored students in the classes as they would see it as discouraging as these artists are treated as insignificant and they may find themselves being treated the same way.
I am currently in college to be an illustrator. One way I can insert activism into my own professional aspirations is to include it within my artwork. This could be through using symbols associated with activism or drawings of activists within my work. For example, if I was drawing a background that included posters I could have the logo of Black Lives Matter on one of the posters.
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| Black Lives Matter |
Works Cited
Drew, Kimberly. This Is What I Know About Art. Penguin Young Readers Group, 2020.
Duncombe, Stephen, and Steve Lambert. The Art of Activism: Your All-purpose Guide to Making the Impossible Possible. OR Books, LLC, 2021.
https://artreview.com/artist/black-lives-matter/?year=2020
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