What were some of your experiences within visual arts courses? How would you describe your training?

“I definitely got a lot of the concepts down pat, in terms of thinking about tonal value and drawing and composition and, and perspective. And so there was a lot of sort of, in-class sessions as well as outside class sessions, where we were on the quad and trying to learn about perspective. So it was definitely sort of a foundational understanding of art. There were a number of homework assignments, where we had to sort of copy masters, which is like a thing that every visual arts person has to do at some point in their career. We were really confined to the artists books, and catalogs that were in the art library. And…looking back on it now, I realized that there weren’t many books for me to choose from, that did not reflect sort of Euro-American, Western conventions of drawing. And then a lot of the assignments were sort of expressed as needing to be of a masterwork. And so master connotes to ‘men’ at least European old masters, you need to copy those drawings. And so that was just a very interesting way to sort of approach drawing, which I think nowadays, you can draw quite literally anything, but to come at it from a very Europeanized way of and method of practice was very interesting.”

– Anonymous

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.

“That was my hardest class at Bowdoin. Okay. And I’m talking about not in the Visual Arts department. I’m talking about at Bowdoin. Like in my four years, that was one of my, I had two hard hard courses, Psychology, which took me out. And Drawing. Drawing 1 was one of my hardest courses. And you know what? It wasn’t hard. Because I wasn’t a hard worker. I’m a very hard worker. But like I said, I prefaced it already…I am not a drawer. I don’t know how to draw when I went to that class. It’s just, it really is, it’s a little traumatizing seriously, because, you know, I consider myself an artist, because that’s what I do I make art, right. But when I went into that class, I was like, this is just craziness.”

-Amani Hite ’20

Can you recall the demographics of students in the courses you took under the art department? If yes, what were they, and did this impact you at all?

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.

“Oh, 100% people interact with your work so differently, once they know it’s you, once they see you walk into a room. This is why I used to always, after that comment, I mentioned in the last question about the student, saying, Oh, I love Amie’s work, or, let’s go towards Amie’s work. And they assumed it was my work because I had a Black student in it. Ever since then, I always kept up with the tradition of in my photo classes, I wouldn’t put up my work the night before, or like, I just didn’t let people see my work. Because it was this idea of being like, you know what, how so much…. people are always bringing their own implicit bias when they’re observing work, especially our work.”

-Amie Sillah ’20

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.

“Yeah, mostly white. I’m trying to remember a specifically the group that I graduated with, of which I’m still very close, strange enough, there was like 12 of us, and at least half are still are still producing work”

-Shaun Leonardo ’01

“In most of the classes I took, I was the only black person both in Visual Art and Art History. And that that was a little weird. And I say that it’s weird because as a black person, I think I bring a different worldview to the class than you would if it was just a class of white students. And so I can remember us talking in our American art class, about George Catlin’s paintings of Native American people. And someone… this still irks me to this day, some white student was basically saying Catlin is doing, you know, the Lord’s work, he is, you know, uplifting these communities by depicting them before they die out. [Catlin’s] holding them to high esteem and regard. And Professor Byrd looks and she goes, Okay, any other perspectives that anyone wants to share? … How about you? And I said, I’m so glad you asked. Catlin is racist. Like, you can’t, you can’t use literal red paint to capture a Native American. And that in itself is just atrocious. And so I unpacked that for the class, and analyzes it for the class to explain how this work is actually running counter to what this white student thought it was doing. And everyone in the class just like, Hmm, I haven’t heard that before. I didn’t think about that. But I guess when you come from a community that has suffered injustices, you have no choice but to consider that other things are at play. And so I felt like in a lot of my classes, I was that person whose opinion ran counter to everyone else. And so I felt the need to like, over-explain, or over support my analyses.”

-Anonymous

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.

“Until [Destiny] declared, I was the only black visual arts major and Black woman like Black woman, Black person. There were only like seven or eight of us. And I was the only major. And yeah, it was just it was really, it was it was rough. It was tough. Yeah, it was really tough. Because for some reason, I don’t know why it was just so white… just the whole department just so white. Goodness gracious. And, and that’s okay. It’s okay. You know, we go to PWI, like, I expect, you know, there to be a bunch of Black people in the class in my classes but, goodness, gracious. Um, and it’s crazy, because most of my classes, there were at least there was at least one Black person. But even still, they weren’t a major.”

-Amani Hite ’20

Thinking about your training throughout Bowdoin, have you ever struggled with capturing black and brown bodies?

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.

“That was a real problem. Photographically, less so in drawing, because of you know, that the facility of charcoal was something I was rather good, good in. But certainly oil and acrylic paint application, there is a method for capturing the complexity and density of black and brown skin that the professor and I gave wasn’t even part of the conversation. And so I can distinctly remember, it was around the Minstrel piece, as a matter of fact, where I went to Julie, while actually, I was in the library, looking for representations of black skin, because I was like, I needed to find a clue of how to apply to how to mix the paint really, it was about there was less about the application was more about the mixing of the paint. And the values like how do you capture the values underneath to paint right, you know, so like, you have to lay down the value first before mixing the color. And I was like, I knew I was lost. I also could not Oh my God, that’s me. I couldn’t recall like being completely baffled by how light hits black skin. And this is after like spending quite a bit of time looking at myself and painting self-portraits. But in the minstrel portrait, I was looking at like a chocolate color. I was like I like to so the way that light would be cast across that type of very rich black was like a completely you know, completely dump out the inexperienced to me, and Julie McGee came over, and helped me reference specific artists.”

-Shaun Leonardo ’01

Shaun Leonardo Self-Portrait (minstrel) 2001 acrylic on canvas Gift of Shaun Leonardo. Class of 2001, Julie L. McGee, Class of 1982 and Rodney D. Moore in Honor of David C. Driskell, Honorand 1989 2020.15

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.

“I was just thinking about like, like, my drawing class, even drawing like a Black body, like I’m drawing a black woman, a curvy black woman. But I’m going off of drawing her based on the, the white, like, not less curvy, not curvy at all white model that we use, like, I couldn’t even draw, oh my gosh, I didn’t even know how to draw black hair. I did not know how to draw black hair. When I did my self-portrait. I’m going, I literally put my straight wig on, because I did not know how to draw my hair.”

-Amani Hite ’20

“So I can remember in Painting 1, for example, there was a self-portrait assignment, we had been talking about color and color theory and blending colors to get the intended effect, yada, yada, okay. Um, and I had, I naively thought that you know, I could definitely shade my skin tone to make some realistic reflection of that, because I understand tone. I understand how to turn it from grayscale, or color to grayscale. What I did not understand, and what I did not feel equipped to do was to turn a set of colors given to you by the manufacturer of these paints, into the color of your skin. And so it was easier, I think, for the fair/white complected students to figure that out. Because in class, he’d say, like, Oh, you need to use this yellow, and then a little bit of that red and a little bit of white, done. And they could sort of get their peachy color. For me, when I would ask it was like, Hmm, well, I think you need to use some green here, maybe some blue, you’ve got a different type of warmth to your skin or coldness to your skin. And maybe just try that out, see what happens. And it just came across as more experimental, rather than here is how you can approach this. And so at the point where I made my self-portrait, mine fell flat visually, I was rendered very flat, very cartoonish, I’d say because the dimensionality of my skin was not replicated in that painting”

-Anonymous

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.

“…by nature of black, my photography discriminates against the darks and favors the lights, which I think to be a black artist capturing black skin is a very neat, interesting medium to be in. Because I’m inherently using film that will always discriminate against a darkness in a picture, like, the darker the area you’re photographing, the less detail you have. And so I work in the reverse, where How do I get rich, sharp detail in the darkness…”

– Amie Sillah ’20

Would you say that there is a Black representation within the art department?

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.

“Absolutely not. I don’t think there’s Black representation in the art department. I mean, there are no Black professors in the art department. I don’t really think that you know, I’ve really learned about many black artists, I think literally the only Black artists, the only Black photographer that everyone talks about Carrie Mae Weems because she is Carrie Mae Weems.”

– Amie Sillah ’20

Click the audio clip for a reading of the text below.

“This Real like subconscious understanding, like, Oh, I have to find this coursework myself, I need to be able to. And listen, if I’m going to be straight up with you, there was probably like this underlying, added to I had this underlying attitude of discomfort, if not insult, that all of the artists that were being projected to me as important were white. And there seemed there was that I, you know, even at that young age, and I likely wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time. But I knew that there was something missing innately. And, you know, I do recall, particularly in the art history, in art history, just like feeling, I think insulted is the word. And I can say that, while still claiming a deep appreciation for the, for the deep dive that I took into the practices of like Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, you know, be these artists that, to this day, I emulate and look up to because of my training and classical drawing, which is, which still finds its way into my work. But I could just know that, you know, it was my life experience that was not being reflected in the program.”

-Shaun Leonardo ’01

The next section will turn to look at the theoretical frameworks that guide my honors project. Please click the link below to read the next section, Building upon Culturally Relevant Teaching & Critical Race Art History.