Offering 1: Curating a Feminist of Color Pedagogy of Adornment

• In Event: Adorning Futures: Embodied Aesthetics as Lived Curricula for Unforgetting and Futuring Education

Abstract

This offering centers one Black girl’s photographs which were part of the Girl and Femme of Color (GFOC) curated gallery exhibition that was part of an arts-and community-based research project. The photographs feature two Black girls, one doing the other’s hair, touching up her lip gloss, adorning her in the intimate, spectacularly quotidian ways that sisters (biological and found) do. This paper will explore the ways that these photographs and the GFOC curatorial work highlight that GFOC adornment—of self and other—serve as a radical feminist of color pedagogy.

Across a year, five GFOC engaged radical curation (Author, forthcoming; Whittle, 2019) to produce a gallery exhibition of GFOC art exploring educational justice. The curators developed and wrote a call for GFOC artists, collected art, and held both in person and virtual galleries that used GFOC arts to communicate their visions of GFOC-centered education and their critiques of existing systems. Through ongoing dialogic analysis (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014) and multimodal memoing by the curators and myself, as well as additional multimodal (Bazerman, 2006; Turner & Griffin, 2020), and arts-based analysis, including collaging and arts-making (Tian, 2024; Leavy, 2023) as a way to crystalize (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2008) meaning in a way that tapped into multiple ways of knowing, in particular, embodiment, creativity, relationality and emotion, alongside the typically sanctioned logics of academia.

Through this process of curation and arts-based research, a salient theme arose: adornment and aesthetics, both personal and community, mattered in the ways that GFOC learn and teach. In rebellion against the deficitization and trivialization of feminized practices of doing makeup, nails, and hair, putting together an outfit, wearing jewelry, etc., the curators and artists explained—at times, through aesthetic practices themselves—that for GFOC, adornment practices arise from raced-gendered-cultured traditions of what what Zora Neale Hurston (1934) might describe as the “will to adorn,” a desire to use ornamentation to “satisfy the soul of its creator” (n.p.). The GFOC curators and artists reflected that aesthetic and adornment practices create opportunities for GFOC to be spectacular, wayward, and in refusal of conformity and captivity (Hartman, 2019); to care for one’s self and each other, creating homeplace (hooks, 1990); to assert freeness and partake in world creation around that freeness (Author 2, 2023); to conjure ancestral legacies, memories, and knowledges (Eshun, 2022; Martin, 2022). In the face of continually limited understandings of who GFOC are and what they need and desire in educational spaces, this work firmly places GFOC multiple creative knowledges (Anzaldúa 2009) and theories as necessary correctives to violent school structures, policies, and research that refuse to acknowledge their multilayered and complex visioning that arises when the fullness of their knowing is recognized and places at the fore of our work to transform the pernicious mistruths and limited understandings of GFOC. This work highlights why arts matter at a practical, theoretical, and methodological level, particularly when it comes to considering the fullness of GFOC whose multiple knowledges are systematically ignored at all levels of research, practice, and policy (Author 2 & Colleague, 2024).

Author

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut