“My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic artist.”
– Ana Mendieta, feminist performance artist/photographer, 1948-1985
During my senior year at RISD I started using porcelain to make my ongoing series of pregnant figures and felt that I had finally got the look I wanted using weighty, grog filled, translucent white clay with dark brown slip in the spaces between the coils and balls. The figures grew to look like they were heavily tattooed, to have both male and female parts and to have faces that combined the calm face of Buddha with the extreme anger of demons that protected him in so many sculptures. I could not have put any of these referents into words. One day the head of the ceramics department peaked into the studio and stared at me building one of these figures. In shock he croaked “It has balls!” He walked away and refused to enter the studio again when I was there. He did try to get someone to talk sense to me. First, he sent in the only woman in the sculpture department, Mags H., a master’s student and TA from Wales. She walked in, looked at my work and told me that ‘earth mothers’ had already ‘been done’ 10,000 years ago, that it was ‘derivative.’ I did call my pieces earth mothers because that’s what others called them, but I knew that label was not quite right without knowing why. I had not figured out that if a teacher liked your work, you were culturally ‘referring’ to great art traditions, but if they didn’t, you were ‘derivative.’ When teachers used words like ‘derivative’ I knew it was time to tune out, which was what I did. But then Mags said something that got my attention. She said that the one piece that I thought was the best of the series reminded her of the Hottentot Venus which was a stuffed African woman she saw in the Paris Museum of Natural History. Instead of being a hermaphrodite with both male and female genitals, my piece could be read as having large female genitals like the Africans. I was speechless. There was an actual human-being stuffed with other animals in a museum? I did not know to label my physical repulsion as a humane response to the violent dehumanization of an African woman as racism and sexism. I just knew that what Mags said made me feel sick to my stomach and that it was NOT going to change what I was making.
Forty-five years later, I met Mags at the opening of an artists’ foundation in Lanesville, in a place where my son had played and that had entered my dreams when we lived there. I told her this story, assuming that she was as clueless back then about racism and sexism as I was. I imagined that it was difficult to be the only woman, only a student, and a foreign student at that in the testosterone laden sculpture department of that long ago day. When I told her the story, she replied that she was glad she could be a part of my growth process. Her tone felt dismissive. I wondered if she understood what I was trying to say, maybe not very clearly, about the oppressive emotional impact of judging my work through such a violent racist and sexist lens.
Recently, the Rhode Island School of Design announced changes to their curriculum based on demands from their students and staff of color. That was an improvement – they now have students and staff of color to make demands. I was surprised, however, how angry I was remembering how the school’s racist curriculum was used to oppress me, a white woman. How much more difficult it must have been for the few students of color 50 years ago? We all had to take a two-year course called “Western Arts and Ideas”, with weekly slide shows taking us through the ‘canon’ of ‘great art’ from classical Greece through the European Renaissance and on to Modernism. The required text for both years was Janson’s History of Art: the Western Tradition. I wondered if all references to pre-historical or historical art by women, by people of color, by any one from a culture other than ‘western’, were dismissed as ‘derivative’ during crits throughout the school because they were not included in that book. How many students had been told condescendingly, “That has already been done”? How many of those students were, like me, given low grades, steered into other schools, into art education, or out of school all together? Were they limited to selling their work for low prices in shops and fairs that sold ‘crafts’? On the other hand, there were definitely students who were inspired by ‘western art’, defined as ‘fine art’ made by white men, consistently rewarded for their ‘referents’ to ‘our cultural’ heritage. Were they given better grades because they were ‘building’ on the ‘creativity of the masters’? Were they steered into more prestigious departments and given scholarships to continue their education in master’s programs or fellowships? They certainly were rewarded by the art world with higher prices for their paintings and sculpture sold in galleries and shown in art museums. I did not have the courage nor the knowledge back then to challenge all that, as did Ana Mendieta who could proudly speak of her work as in the tradition of Neolithic artists.