Abstract
With the goal of uncovering how Black Americans come to understand and situate themselves as participators in the Western art world, this chapter uncovers the experiences of three artists whose lives have been influenced by a multitude of factors impacting their decisions in navigating an arts participation identity. Anchored by a commitment to solidify a position within a hegemonic art world, these artists skillfully facilitate their participatory movements alongside the pervasiveness of a legacy of exclusion and misrepresentation. I outline the utility of three artmaking strategies used by these artists as a means of calibrating their aspirational decisions. What is revealed in their narratives is an awareness of a racialized self, set against the problematics of participation within the world of visual art.
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Notes
- 1.
The terminology used to characterize individuals in my dissertation study included African American, Black, and Black American. I acknowledge the variance in terminology as well as the fact that members of each of these groups may prefer to be called by another designation (for commentary, see Nieto, 1992). Certainly, the use of varying terms and the lack of consistency in the use of terms among publications make the process of writing about and discussing race more arduous. I have also chosen to give equal importance and consistency to racial designation of Black (American), signified by the use of uppercase lettering; according to the APA Publication Manual, 6th edition, racial and ethnic groups are designated by proper nouns and are capitalized.
- 2.
The participants in my study consisted of two high school art teachers and one middle school art teacher. Each taught in a public school setting for more than 20 years and maintained an active artmaking/presenting schedule.
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Wilson, G.J. (2018). Navigating “Crooked Rooms”: Intersections of Race and Arts Participation. In: Kraehe, A., Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Carpenter II, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65256-6_23
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