Against a Sharp White Background

Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) Small Version 1, oil stick on paper, 28.75” x 16” (1991) by Glenn Ligon quoting the words of Zora Neale Hurston

Conceptual artist Glenn Ligon made a number of text-based works featuring a phrase from a Zora Neale Hurston essay, which reads, “I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background.”

In the wake of the white supremacist terrorist attack in Buffalo, I am thinking about the sharp white background.

In the art world, whiteness is the organizing principle around which the whole establishment is built. It allows white cis heterosexual male artists (and art professionals) to express themselves however they wish. Everyone else is required to navigate around facets of their identity.

For BIPOC artists on an academic track, it begins in art school. Aram Han Sifuentes, an artist and adjunct professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago—a majority white institution—says, “When [my BIPOC students] express enthusiasm for their own cultures in their work, [they] are told they are fetishizing their cultures. Questions of self-appropriation and self-fetishizing come predominantly from white professors and peers critiquing the ethics of the work as if the artists were white themselves and questioning if they truly have access to that culture.”¹

Sifuentes’s students often report to her that they fear being put in a box of a certain identity, which is done for the convenience of white gatekeepers. At the same time, she notes, “The irony is that the labels depend on the whims of the art world and art philanthropy. Art about politics and identity is sometimes in fashion and sometimes out of fashion. The financial conditions of artists and the opportunities available to them are impacted by these whims.”

In other words: use your identity in your art, but don’t use it too much or in ways that make us uncomfortable. And get ready not to use it at all if we decide we don’t want to pay for the packaging anymore.

Curator, art historian, and cultural critic Dr. Kelli Morgan writes, “From the founding of the nation’s first art museums to the establishment of American art as an academic discipline and the development of curatorial practices around American ‘fine art,’ museums in this country and the collections they house have existed as material extensions of systems founded upon genocide and slavery, maintained by various practices of marginalization, omission, and erasure.” She continues, “Ask a few museum professionals—particularly those from BIPOC communities—if they feel genuinely and fully supported by their institutions when they try to correct this erasure through programming, the reinstallation of permanent galleries, or traveling exhibitions. I expect the number would be close to zero.”²

A lot of lip service is being given to the idea of making these changes. But in doing equity work with predominantly white art institutions, I’ve learned that when asked to examine white supremacy and the way that it functions at the institutional level, the majority of white folks in decision-making positions become at best dismissive, resistant, or defensive, and at worst actively hostile.

Art institutions are failing to address white supremacy (and the larger and more powerful they are, the more radically they’re failing). It’s the job of people like me—and other art and culture writers, reporters, journalists, and cultural critics—to continue holding them to account for these institutional failures. But white supremacy operates at all strata of the art world, just as it does in society: on the systems level, the institutional level, and the individual level. The only hope of eradicating it is to address all three.

Today, just for today, I want to talk about our responsibilities at the individual level. And just for today, I'm speaking to white artists specifically (though I’ve listed resources and action steps at the bottom of this page for everyone).

In an article about the need for white artists to address white supremacy, writer Angela Pelster-Wiebe (who is white) says, “When white art that is meant to address white supremacy fails,³ the reason most often given for that failure is that the white artist hasn’t taken the time to listen to the groups they imagined they were advocating for.” She goes on to say, “This…doesn’t get at what seems to me to be the underlying problem at hand: white artists often fail at this work because they haven’t centered themselves within the violence of their own whiteness. Had any of them placed themselves in the position of the aggressor instead of the victim, and then asked themselves what it means to inherit the violent history of being born white, I imagine some different kinds of art might have been made.”

In order to be able to address white supremacy in our work, though, we have to address it in our lives.

I’m seeing some people online conflate acts of white supremacist terrorism—associated with the political Right—with white supremacy. In fact, white supremacy has no political affiliation. As white people, we live and breathe inside of its comforts.⁴ Every single one of us. Those comforts are, by design, invisible to us. They can only be fully seen and understood from the outside—against the sharp white background—by people to whom they are not afforded.

One of the difficult truths that we, as white people, need to embrace is that no matter how hard we try, no matter how hard we work to unlearn what we’ve been taught, we will never truly see. We will never completely understand. And that’s not a reason not to try. In fact, it’s the exact reason we must.

What does this look like? It looks like learning things about ourselves that we will not like at all. It looks like our feelings taking a backseat to our behaviors. It looks like our Black friends calling us out about something, and our first thoughts being about their experience and perspective instead of focusing on our intentions. It looks like acknowledging how difficult it might be for them to share those experiences or perspectives with us, instead of how difficult it is for us to hear them.

We must confront the history of what we’ve inherited and the ways that it plays out in each of our lives to our own advantage and to the disadvantage of others. We must look—I mean really look—at the ways that we participate in the status quo and specifically avoid taking the necessary steps to change it. If you’re anything like me, you won’t like what you see. But keep doing it anyway.

To be an artist is to tell the truth. And in order to tell the truth about the world, we must first be willing to confront the truth about ourselves.

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Here are actions that you can take today:

Organize! (this one’s for white folks)

Sign up for an info session happening on Tuesday, May 17, 2022 7-8 pm ET (4-7pm PT), led by Showing Up For Racial Justice and their partners on the ground in Buffalo to hear about how you can plug into the work of fighting white supremacy. The org’s mission:

“As white people, our role is to out-organize the Right in white communities by bringing massive numbers of white people into multiracial movements for justice.”

Offer direct support to Black-led and Black-owned organizations in and around Buffalo:

Rooted in Love

Colored Girls Bike Too

Feed Buffalo

BLRR Buffalo

WNY Mobile Ops

Donate to families affected by the Buffalo mass shooting:

Verified fundraisers

Sign a petition

Sign this petition, led by Color of Change, to tell your cable providers to stop carrying Fox News, which promotes replacement theory⁵ and white nationalism, emboldening white domestic terrorists. You can also contact your cable providers directly or give them a good talking to on social media.

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1. From her article “How Internalized White Supremacy Manifests for My BIPOC Students in Art School”

2. From her article “To Bear Witness: Real Talk about White Supremacy in Art Museums Today,” which is a master class. If you read one thing today, let this be it.

3. She gives the examples of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket and Sam Durant’s installation Scaffold.

4. Even when our lives are hard. Even when we face poverty, mental illness, disability, grief, loss, uncertainty, and unthinkable hardship, those comforts and protections are still there in ways we cannot see. (They don’t make our lives easy in every instance, but the way we know they exist is that without them, our lives would be appreciably harder.)

5. You may hear talk about the fact that replacement theory has its roots in antisemitism, which is true. And, in this way, antisemitism and anti-Blackness are linked by white nationalism. But it is important, when we are having a conversation about anti-Black violence, not to distract or derail that conversation with issues facing another community. This type of distraction is symptomatic of centering whiteness.