De-Colonizing

ABSTRACTS

Session Chair: Lauren DeLand, the Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta

Dr. Mycah Brazelton-Braxton, Postdoctoral Fellow, Getty Research Institute

brazeltonbraxton01@fas.harvard.edu

“Rejecting the Primitivizing Gaze: Katsura Yuki’s Drawings of Ubangi-Shari”

In 1958 Katsura Yuki, a prominent avant-garde painter, travelled to the present-day Central

African Republic in search of artistic epiphany. As this paper will convey, she succeeded—but

on dramatically different terms than she expected. The experience of the primitivizing gaze of

French colonists in the region, turned just as easily on Katsura herself as on the Ubangi-Shari

people, prompted Katsura to abruptly change her practice and mindset. Her experience of racial objectification and the colonists’ orientalist attitudes directed her to reject the same behavior in herself and to find shared experience with the colonial subjects. Katsura’s narrative of her travels repeatedly alternates between adopting and rejecting this primitivizing gaze when looking at African people, an effort at resistance that is best expressed in the tension between her drawings and photographs.

This paper emphasizes the importance of Katsura’s drawings in her effort to transform her own gaze. Katsura utilized the unique qualities of drawing for investigation and reimagination as she conceived of a new approach that would evade these structures of racial hierarchy. During her time in Ubangi-Shari, Katsura sketched numerous individuals as seated portraits, emphasizing their subjectivity and individuality. This paper will compare these with her photographs, noting their touristic and ethnographic quality, in sharp contrast to Katsura’s refusal to interpret these individuals as primitives in her drawings. It closes by examining how Katsura’s empathetic and individualizing drawing in Ubangi-Shari were key to her later representation of intimate racial tension in her 1963 illustrations of James Baldwin’s Another Country.

Dr. Anna Chisholm, Minneapolis College of Art and Design

chis0022@umn.edu

“Decolonizing Practices in the work of Fred Wilson”

Over last decade, art history and humanities departments in universities and colleges are responding to calls to “decolonize their curriculum.” Art history associations have sent out surveys and questionnaires to curators, artists, and scholars asking them to respond to these calls and clarify the state of the discipline. There is contentious debate amongst scholars and practitioners about what “decolonization” means for a discipline rooted in imperialism and colonialist impulses. How can we reimagine art historical inquiry and education in a way that is self-reflexive, critical, and employs the visual to dismantle civic and structural inequalities? Through a presentation of my own research and methodology, I want to discuss what I think “decolonization” could mean for art history. By offering a couple of close readings of installations by contemporary African American artist Fred Wilson, I want to show how we can engage in decolonization practices through works of art, and how that “thinking through the visual” can inform art historical methodology. I am interested in how we might conceive of artistic practice, such as Wilson’s, as an alternative historical methodology and how art historians can employ this model in their own writing and research. I do not intend to be proscriptive and I am not offering a formula or solution--each professor, class, discipline, and department must find their own approach and have their own reckoning.

Katherine Feldkamp, Research Assistant, Saint Louis Art Museum

feldkampkatherine@gmail.com

"Displaying Controversial Images: A Study of Orientalism in Art Museums in the United Kingdom"

As contemporary society grapples with issues of representation, diversity, and

discrimination, museums are expected to address these problems. In doing so, many

institutions must contend with the controversial nature of some of their artworks. Nineteenth-

century Orientalism in Western painting is among this difficult material. Due to its often

racist depictions of various ethnicities from the Middle East and North Africa, its connections

with imperialism, and its overt sexualization of women, Orientalism presents a serious

interpretive challenge. Unfortunately, there is little scholarship on this issue to guide curators.

This research seeks to answer the question of how museum professionals in the

United Kingdom display and interpret Orientalist paintings. Current methods of exhibiting

this genre were examined by researching best practices in museology and observing exhibits

at Leighton House Museum, National Galleries Scotland, Tate Britain, the Victoria and

Albert Museum, the Wallace Collection, and The Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. These

institutions were chosen for the breadth of their Orientalist material, the nature of the

institution itself, and the museum’s previous examinations of Orientalism. Ultimately, the

study finds the display and interpretation of this material is determined by the remit of the art

museum as well as where the painting is shown.