Curating consciousness

David Driskell on art and pedagogy

By Chris Thompson

David Driskell will give a public lecture August 15, at 6:30 p.m., at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art. Call (207) 879-5742.

DAVID DRISKELL: seen here in 1993, emanates a quiet power.

David Driskell is a painter, curator, collector, consultant, teacher, and the world’s leading scholar on African-American art. In 1961, with the proceeds of the sale of a Kandinsky print from his private collection, he purchased the home in Falmouth where he has spent nearly every summer since. Next week, he’ll give up a week of time in his painting studio to act as a visiting faculty member to the Maine College of Art’s MFA program.

Last week, here in Portland, he met to speak with a young woman who had recently encountered his book The Other Side of Color: The African American Collection of Camille O. and William H. Cosby, Jr, a collection of which he is curator. She told Driskell that she was extremely happy to have come into contact with this range of artists and at the same time outraged that she could have had a college art historical education without having heard of any of them.

“She said that she felt as though she had been cheated,” said Driskell, “because these artists were part of her cultural heritage, too. I was delighted by this, and also surprised. I think that this kind of passion is what is needed, not conferences and symposia, but this kind of cultural consciousness that begins by seeing that we are all at a loss when we are not aware of such work. Only then will we take the time to investigate these histories. Part of the problem is that very few people want to unlearn the received accounts, do not want to explore and make corrections.”

Driskell has long argued that those who teach art and cultural history need to engage with the difficulties of revising and rethinking the historical record so that it does not establish itself by denigrating or ignoring creative practices outside the accepted lineage of “European-based culture.” As he noted in a 1991 article, although it is agreed that this racially-based Eurocentrism is outmoded, it nevertheless holds fast in educational and cultural institutions.

“We really have to work hard for this unlearning, because there are so many ways to omit these other histories. I think it starts at the level where kids can become passionate about these things at an early stage, because then they will look for them as they go along in their development. And when they don’t see them they will ask questions.”

The Phoenix caught up with Driskell to ask questions of our own on the eve of his lecture at ICA.

 

Phoenix: In the 10 years since this article was published, do you think that progress has been made in terms of educational institutions’ adequacy to cultural diversity?

Driskell: There is still a wall that we need to climb over in order to look at the way that works of art actually filter into the marketplace. We tend to overlook that part, particularly the question of how you get from here, in the studio, to there: the museum, gallery, and so forth. We have shrouded this issue in the white male domination of the market, and therefore we haven’t dealt with the whole question of diversity, which includes the formulas of making, distributing, and consuming cultural products. Art is a service to humanity. It distinguishes us from being crass, crude, and all those other adjectives. Unfortunately we continue to use it as a criteria of exclusion. We still find ways of dehumanizing ourselves. I don’t know that art holds the answer to this problem, which is a puzzling one. To return to your question, I do think that there has been some progress, but we tend to work hard to create labels in order to show it. Yet it continues to be difficult for women, for African Americans to walk into a museum and feel satisfied by the ways in which women or African Americans are represented. From the point of view of consumption, I don’t know if we’re working hard enough.

 

Phoenix: Regarding your own practice as a painter, historian, scholar, and educator, how do you reconcile the responsibility that you have to your community, to history and its legacies, with finding time to devote yourself to dealing with your own aesthetic or scholarly questions?

Driskell: You deal with it as you go along. I come from a tradition that is somewhat different from that of other colleagues my age, who went to schools like Harvard or Yale. Mine was a tradition that did not cherish specialization. I started painting, but I also knew that if I wanted to be an effective teacher in an African American institution, I had to know ceramics, I had to know printmaking. I had to know more than art history. So, I taught art history, I did studio practice, I lectured, I curated shows. It was almost expected of one in these black institutions in the 50s and 60s in that if you didn’t do that, you didn’t really fit. On the other hand, if you went to a mainstream institution, you were out of order trying to be a printmaker and teach art history and so forth and so on. So, I guess the good part of that was that it prepared me to stretch out and not get put in a cubicle. I knew I had to do it, so I did it. I curated shows, I would write the catalogues at night, I would teach during the day, I would paint in between. I never had a routine, and I still don’t.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.