Transcript:
Hello and welcome everybody to the yo is this racist podcast. My name is Fabian Rodriguez. And today I’ll be diving into the topic of art in specific African American art in specific paintings. I myself love art and paintings, and I’m sure many of you do as well. Unfortunately, since the beginning of my youth in all my art classes growing up, I realized something that was pretty disappointing. And that’s that there isn’t a lot of African American artists that are talked about in mainstream media or in the classroom. Of course, you have the likes of Da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, even or Warhol, but you think about it, and all those are just white men. I feel like if you were to even ask, like the common person name five paintings by African American artists, it’d be quite a task for most people, honestly. And this just shows how under-acknowledged African Americans are here in our world. And this is due to our history of likely bias against African American artists.
Looking at a study, it turns out, in 18 major museums throughout the US major museums throughout the US there’s 85%, white, in terms of percentage of paintings 87% male and 1.2% of the share belongs to African Americans. Now, I’m not a statistician by any means. But I say that this is definitely wavering on the side of racist.
Now, there are many factors that go into this outlandish number but i’d like start at the bottom level. And that really starts at a young age inside of the school’s African Americans are more likely to live in school districts that are underfunded, and this is and due to this underfunding in the schools, their education just isn’t as good as it could be in a more privileged area that has all their fruits just handed to them. This really encompasses the term systemic justice, where there are systems in place to keep minorities stuck in a place of smaller power. I feel like these systems are hard to notice. It’s it’s not blatant racism that has being spoken, and can be seen, but more of a behind the scenes reasons as to why these people are at a disadvantage. The second reason for this disparity in the art world is the system in place that keeps our powerful. A strong driver of what makes a piece of art famous is its demand for ownership.
Very elite, wealthy people are willing to spend boatloads of cash for famous pieces of art
DaVinci’s Salvator Mundi painting sold for $450 million.
That’s a lot. It really is a simple economics supply and demand formula.
The people who judge are the wealthy elites, and if they have biases against African Americans, and they don’t want to buy from them, then museum owners are not willing to display their art for the world’s enjoy.
Art has an extraordinary way of creating emotion and having an impact on society. And when a small percent of African Americans have the opportunity to do that, it is a problem or is meant to be something that is beautiful to look at, or thought provoking. And the music museum system currently says African American art does not do this, when that is just simply highly unlikely.
As a result of this injustice, African Americans are not appreciated for the art that they bring into this world, which has a major influence on what we see as influential figures.
I think that it is especially crucial that at a young age that were exposed to African Americans who make a good impact and can serve as role models. Like I’m sure some of the other famous artists are for some people. Now let’s talk more about the museum system. So within the museum system, curators are the people work for museums who ultimately do their little research and decide which
art is to go within a museum. And in the US, only 5% of curators are African Americans, in comparison to a 14% of population in the US in 2019.
This definitely leads to the measly 1.4% Share factor, which should be tenfold if they wanted to match that 14% total population.
I don’t know guys, maybe I am a statistician.
The image of something definitely has the possibility to sway one psychology. And throughout history, paintings have been banned or promoted to push narratives.
I think mostly about during the Renaissance era, during the Reformation, where art was used by the Protestant versus the Catholic Church to push strong ideals.
With the current Black Lives Matter movement occurring, there is no secret that there is being push for a change. If I were a museum or a director, my response to the Black Lives Matter protests would be to include more black artworks in my museum, without making it some kind of special event or token, sometimes you’ll see in museums there’s little sections or parts of the museum that exclusively feature African American art. And the reason I feel this isn’t very good, because it’s almost used as a token, like look here, I have a black painting in my museum, when it’s really just for show it be more proper to push for these artworks, which deserve the praise to be placed in more of the spotlight areas of the museum. And when I’m vetting for the patrons for sale, i would include these artworks and push them more heavily, so that they can have a chance at that important influence and power that these other paintings have. A lot of times in the art world, why art that looks like what you would usually see in many museums is considered fine art.
But once you add any other kind of ethnicity into the mix, the painting involved, it seems to become another genre classified as cultural art, which is a barrier to what is considered fine art.
And specifically, I think of portraits. And this is huge, because if you were to just do a quick Google search of fine art, you’ll see plenty portraits of white people. But once it’s a portrait of a black person or any other ethnicity, it’s now considered a cultural art piece. This just doesn’t sit right with me and seems a little off.
Now, something that you guys listening can do to help promote black art is to actively. Learn about some of these artists and some of the most prominent modern figures in
the likes of Jean Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Jacob Lawrence and Kerry James Marshall.
It’s important that you look at these artworks and all African Americans art works with the lens of fine art. So making my final judgment on whether I think this situation that has been curated is racist, I’d say yes. And when taking the barriers of entry into account, I would definitely say that the underexposure of African American art is racist due to systemic injustice. Because with such low representation, the numbers just don’t add up at the National Gallery of Art out of 153,623 art works.
Guess how many 968 artworks are by black artists. This is minuscule. And it’s important that we keep the elite patrons and museums accountable for this disparity since art has such a important meaning for society.
It is necessary to have good African American role models for our youth not only so that they can see that they can do it too, but so that the privileged can also see that someone different than them did something amazing.
So I push and hope that you guys are able to do your part for a better future.
All right.
Thanks guys I hope you enjoyed listening thanks for tuning in Have a good one