Freedom Dreams: Black Artists’ Visions of the Future in Postsecondary Education Contexts

• In Event: Ecological Perspectives of Well-Being and Thriving in Higher Education Spaces

Abstract

Black artists who create public art are tasked with an impossible tension–how do you create conditions of possibility in the face of anti-Black racist contexts? College campuses, specifically, historically white institutions (HWIs) are often places where the Black imagination has had to struggle for legitimacy and presence (Kelley, 2002). Black art can confront anti-Black epistemic patterns while creating physical space for imagining Black futures.

Central Research Question
Anti-Blackness is epistemic, ideological, material, and/or spiritual violence against Black people that impacts the imagination (Benjamin, 2022). Whereas curatorial decisions in educational contexts often reflect an anti-Black social imaginary, Black art and aesthetics can create the conditions for people to cultivate healthy and life-sustaining dreams. Thus, this study will name and help dismantle anti-Black epistemic patterns that constrain the Black imagination in education by pointing to the work of Black creatives. Specifically, the researcher asks, how do Black artists' public installations pedagogically function as instruments of Black futurity in the post-secondary education context?

Methodological Approach
The researcher will employ a critical race spatial analysis (CRSA) (Velez & Solórzano, 2017). This methodological approach accounts for the function of anti-Black racism in the examination of geographic and social spaces. This approach is interested in how “structural and institutional factors divide, constrict, and construct space,” with specific attention to the role of anti-Black racism and history (p. 20). Furthermore, this approach, as a blending of critical geographic information systems (GIS) and critical race geography, will allow the researcher to examine racialized meanings of spatial features and markers (i.e., public art) and the consequences therein for the educational context.

Data Collection and Analysis
The selection of 15 contemporary public artworks/installations such as Leigh’s installation at the University of Pennsylvania and Coulter’s at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, will be sought using purposeful rather than random sampling (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). The researcher will travel to each installation/exhibit located in a post-secondary education context and conduct an aesthetic analysis. Thus, this study is concerned with how Black artists have sought to intervene in anti-Black racist contexts by reconstituting the public's relationship with Blackness and visuality. Precisely, Black artists force the public to grapple with the question, what does it mean to see through the complex positionality of Blackness and to work through the implications of Black being therein? After the initial aesthetic analysis, the researcher will interview the artists, if available, who created the public installation.

Scholarly Significance
Black aesthetics and cultural production intervene on anti-Black racist logic by striving to produce differential, otherwise ways of being by manipulating not just the essence of matter itself–it proposes an alternative way for something/someone to matter. Concomitantly, findings from this study will help senior level administrators consider the nexus of art and design and the potentialities of Black aesthetic production as mediums for racial equity. By working with Black artists and their ability to represent and affirm Black life, educational leaders can create not just anti-racist environments but life-affirming conditions for Black living in post-secondary environments.

Author

• Wilson Kwamogi Okello, Pennsylvania State University