Critical Race Art History
1. Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Garry Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1995) 2. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) Art history need not examine race, and much of the scholarship proceeds without any acknowledgement of it. If one is attuned to the presence of racial thought, as I am as a black person, then one finds that race is pervasive in narratives about art and visual representation. Critical race art history (CRAH) is a discourse in formation. It acknowledges the role that race has played in culture ever since a biologically grounded concept of human difference coalesced during the early modern period. Racialism (understood as the acceptance of racial essentialism, but not necessarily racial antipathy) has a significant bearing on our cultural ideals, including notions of who is good, what is beautiful, and what has value. Drawing on the insights of social, feminist, and queer histories of art, CRAH aims to understand how race affects how we view the creation, content, and reception of visual objects. How does race matter when pursuing an artistic education? when patrons award commissions? when artists decide on their subjects and formal strategies? when artists seek venues for exhibiting their work? when audiences view the works chosen for display? when collectors acquire works? and when works are admitted to the canon? CRAH draws on several intellectual currents critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and African diaspora studies that have attested to race's importance for the West. Critical race studies gained traction in the 1980s and 1990s, building on the legal scholarship from figures like Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Patricia Williams, who established critical race theory.1 They demonstrated how thoroughly race was enmeshed in the conceptual fabric of the American nationstate, detailing how our governing institutions perpetuate systems of racial hegemony. From this perspective, historical phenomena like European and American imperialism, colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade generated racial ideology and social structures that determine the lives of people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, irrespective of personal racial beliefs. Just as critical race theory revolutionized the social sciences, the 1992 publication of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark galvanized cultural studies. Reinterpreting canonical literary texts that we rely on as touchstones of American identity, Morrison illustrated how Africanism racial blackness in the public imagination operates as a seminal trope in American cultural production.2 When it comes to art, this would entail seeing and discussing Euro Americans as racial subjects and considering how concepts of blackness, present or not in the visual field, were necessary for the construction of an American subjectivity. In addition to the numerous images of George Washington with his slaves such as John Trumbull's 1780 portrait that beg for a critical race interpretation, others like Gilbert Stuart's Gibbs Channing Avery portrait (1795) could be read as exemplars of ideal whiteness, even in the absence of other racial subjects. Such traits are usually presented as general norms, whereas in fact they would not have been associated with nonwhites. The slippage between visual position and social position becomes evident when Euro American cultural norms are shown to be contingent. CRAH perceives images as a visual form of power. In his 1998 study White, the film scholar Richard Dyer used Morrison's insights to uncover the formation of a visual strategy in which whiteness is a construct designed to mask and naturalize its visibility and omnipresence. The field of cinema studies has led the way in analyzing race in the realm of visual Camara Dia Holloway