From White Liberalism to Abolitionism in Arts Institutions
With renewed calls for racial justice, many arts institutions seek to “do good” in support of Black Lives Matter and other movements to end systemic racism. Commonly considered liberal bastions, the arts are nonetheless strongly associated with white privilege and elite status. Nowhere is this truer than in the arts education pipeline. In this lecture, Amelia M. Kraehe discusses white liberalism as an ideological stance that masks racism in contemporary K-20 arts education before introducing abolitionism as a contemporary praxis grounded in a Black radical tradition to move the arts beyond gestures of goodwill and toward racial justice.
Amelia M. Kraehe is Associate Professor of Art and Visual Culture Education and Co-director of the Racial Justice Studio at the University of Arizona and coeditor of The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Her scholarship, teaching, and public engagement focus on how the arts and arts education can challenge, but also reinforce, systems of inequality. She explores this seeming contradiction by investigating the ways in which the arts, as both a disciplinary discourse and creative cultural practices, mediate social movements, ideological formation and transformation, identity and agency. Her forthcoming book is Race and Art Education (Davis Publications).
Sponsors
Francis P. Rohlen Visiting Artists Fund/College of Fine & Applied Arts
School of Art & Design Visitors Committee