Art History and Diversity

ART HISTORY AND DIVERSITY. Art history was slow to change. Other humanities and social science disciplines, since the political and academic upheavals of the 1960s, broadly and more rapidly incorporated issues of race, class, and gender into their curricula and scholarship. Although facing resistance, maverick art historians and those working in related fields like visual culture, ethnic, and gender studies remade the field to account for the diverse representation demanded by the social and political movements of the 1960s and beyond.

Scholars and others writing about radical political art or African American, Chicano/a, feminist, LGBTQ art, or related themes often encountered barriers, indifference, and even hostility from many traditional art historians who sought to protect the “purity” of fine art from the “muck and grime” of political conflict. Artists like Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, Käthe Kollwitz, the Mexican muralists, American Social Realists and street artists, political cartoonists, for example, when covered at all were generally marginalized by traditional art historians although venerated by the Left. Issues of war, class conflict, poverty, racism, and related social issues were often minimized or ignored.

Some mavericks had bucked the trend and paved a way for US art historians to among was UCLA art historian Albert Boime (1933-2008), who transformed the study and practice of art history in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Above all, he examined the political forces that motivated artist and collectors and thereby revealed the hidden meanings in visual production. From a socialist and psychoanalytic perspective, he viewed art history as inseparable from economics, class divisions, power structures, and racial attitudes.

Boime was best known for his magisterial four-volume “Social History of Modern Art.” He also examined––and legitimized––other visual forms including comic strips, cartoons that mainstream art historians had considered “ephemera.” He encouraged colleagues at UCLA and elsewhere to research the artworks of ethnic and racial minorities and added to the emerging tradition of scholarly inclusiveness. His UCLA colleague David Kunzle, for example, produced numerous works crossing visual analysis and popular culture, most with a decided radical political focus. Boime built on the work of European Marxist art historian Arnold Hauser and his Columbia teacher Meyer Schapiro.

Since the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s, predominately Black art historians have documented the accomplishments of Africa American artists in the United Sates. Proceeding from the pioneering work of James Porter’s Modern Negro Art in 1943, generations of Black scholars have created a huge body of distinguished work in this field. A premier figure, Samella Lewis (1924- ), trained and influenced scores of contemporary and younger art historians and visual cultural scholars. Her African Art and Artists (1979) became a standard text. Her other books, articles, journals, galleries, and films secured a epic reputation.

Contemporaries and heirs continued Lewis’s efforts. Elsa Honig Fine, David Driskell, Richard Powell, Sharon Patton, and Kellie Jones produced important works chronicling the artistic contributions of people of African descent. Deborah Willis brought Black photography into prominence. Her books highlighted the works of such iconic masters as James Van D Zee, Gordon Parks, and Roy DeCarava. A new generation of African American curators and gallery owners also brought Black artworks to a wider public.

In 2019-2020 the “Soul of a Nation” exhibition on the art of the Black Power era travelled throughout the United States. Originating in London, this transformative show featured many historical and contemporary African American artists. The exhibition encouraged audiences to reflect about the meaning of a “Black aesthetic” and the role of artists in reflecting and supporting civil rights and Black Power political movements. The landmark exhibition documented the centrality of visual artists in the Black Arts Movement.

Latinx art similarly gained high visibility in the wake of Chicano/a protests of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973, art historian Jacinto Quirarte published Mexican American Artists, a major scholarly work. A major exhibition, Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA), toured the United States 1990-1993. CARA visited ten cities and featured more than 128 works from 180 Chicano/a artists who worked in a variety of media. The exhibit included artworks from such internationally and nationally respected artists as Barbara Carrasco, Judy Baca, Yreina Cervantez, Diane Gamboa, Harry Gamboa, Jr, Rupert Garcia, Luis Jimenez, Ray Patlan, Frank Romero, and Patssi Valdez. What made it such a breakthrough was the collaboration with major museums in the United States. The exhibit opened at the Wight Art Gallery at UCLA and traveled to several other major venues. Challenging conventional aesthetic notions, on opening day, the Albuquerque Museum of Art featured a lowrider car. Above all, CARA was profoundly political. It demanded viewers to see the connections between art and politics. Not surprisingly, the exhibition caused consternation among some mainstream critics.

Similarly, Asian American art history came into its own in the aftermath of the political struggles of the 1960s. Art history departments traditionally included specialists in the art of China, Japan, Korea, and, more recently Cambodia and Vietnam. Few, however, focused on Asian American artists. In 2008, editors Gordon Chang, Mark Johnson, and Paul Karlstrom published Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970. The first comprehensive history, the book includes essays by leading scholars and more than 400 reproductions from painters, sculptors, printmakers, textile artists, photographers, and ceramicists. The publication of Asian American Art accompanied an exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

The scholarship on Native American art has traditionally rested with anthropologists, who treated it less as art than as “primitive” expressions. In the wake of the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which included the militant American Indian Movement (AIM), scholars began a major reassessment of traditional forms. They studied and curated basketry. beadwork, ceramics, dolls, totem poles, altars, and many other forms influenced by tribal customs, some centuries old.

Many contemporary scholars now avoid the arbitrary distinction between “fine arts” and “crafts.” They also underscore the differences between the art of indigenous peoples and the works often hastily produced for the tourist market. The 2004 opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian marked a new status accorded to Native American art and culture. Scholars took especial notice of the ways the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016-2017 generated substantial artistic activity, including the production of banners and posters.

For many decades, art historians lived with a stunning contradiction: the vast majority of its teachers and scholars were men, while a large majority of its students were women. And for generations, these teachers and scholars accepted male artists as their primary subjects of study. This paradox inspired art historian Linda Nochlin to write “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In that essay, published first in 1971 and soon a landmark work of scholarship, she explored the sexist assumptions embedded in the title.

The women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s changed everything. Women and men scholars alike began examining the hidden heritage of female artists over the centuries and encouraged the development of a vibrant feminist art movement. Red Diaper-baby Judy Chicago pioneered a program at Fresno State College in California that contested the major principles of modernism and formalism routinely taught in art schools throughout the nation. The new feminist curriculum offered new materials and new techniques, and, above all, it negated the male-dominated criteria of artistic excellence and replaced them with feminist theory, art history and pedagogy.

Moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, Chicago collaborated closely with Miriam Shapiro in developing the Feminist Art Program in 1971 at the California Institute for the Arts. The instructors encouraged students to be assertive about their gender identities, to work collectively, and to boldly use body imagery in their artwork. Subversive and playful, their pedagogy seemed threatening to conventional art teachers and scholars in that it tapped the “female experience” for representation.

Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” a collaborative project from 1974 to 1979, served as the iconic example of this artistic phenomenon and made women’s history its centerpiece. The production of this massive construction involved more than 400 hundred people, many of whom went on to distinguished artistic careers. “The Dinner Party,” a triangular table with sculpted porcelain plates and needlework, set with thirty-nine place settings, provocatively uses vaginal imagery to represent women of history.

Feminist art continued to develop institutional form, notably in Southern California. Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Brettevile, and Arlene Raven opened The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, a feminist art center that featured women’s productions from 1973 to 1991. The organizers curated numerous exhibitions and performance art presentations, including many politically charged events.

Likewise, the gay liberation movement gave rise to widespread recognition of Queer artists who had been previously ignored or even persecuted. Nevertheless, art history programs were slow to follow through in terms of curriculum and pedagogy. Queer theorists housed in art departments were even rarer than historians. This lag was the focal point of the major symposium on “Queering Art History” convened at New York University. By 2006 New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art had opened, giving institutional presence to LGBTQ art.

Few academic fields, including art history, addressed issues of people with disabilities. In 2017, scholars Ann Millett-Gallant and Elizabeth Howie published the first interdisciplinary and art history volume that incorporated both a focus on historical figures addressing disability issues and early twenty-first century artists who took up this theme in their creative work. For example, Keri Watson published an essay about documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who in 1933 photographed residents of a New York state institution for the “epileptic and feeble-minded.” But few art historians explored this area in depth.

A similar situation prevailed for a distinctive genre of contemporary art: prison art. Nicole Fleetwood is a rare scholar exploring this area. Her Marking Time documents how inmates, present and former, in the carceral system, use meager supplies under harsh conditions to produce bold, powerful artworks. In Connecticut, in 2019, the Community Partners in Action Prison Arts Program staged a successful exhibition that prompted the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum to follow up with “How Art Changed the Prison,” incorporating works from nearly thirty years. If neglected by the academy, prison art found scholars and historians among community activists engaged in incarceration reform.

Chang, Gordon, Mark Johnson, and Paul Karlstrom. Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Fleetwood, Nicole. Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020.

Griswold del Castillo, Richard, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yabro-Beiarano, editors. Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation. Wight Art Gallery, 1991.

Hammond, Harmony. Lesbian Art in America. New York: Rizzoli, 2000.

Lewis, Samella. African American Art and Artists (updated). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Millett-Gallant, Ann and Elizabeth Howie, editors. Disability and Art History. London: Routledge, 2017.

Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Artists. New York: Avon Books, 1982.