Not All Art Has Color

Exploring whiteness in art exhibitions

By Kylie Heider

Recently, the conversation around representation and diversity in works of artistic expression has centered around the mediums of film and television. This concentration on forms of popular, accessible, and image-based media is deserved: There exists considerable power in image, and seeing yourself in something that you consume everyday, like television, is of substantial importance. However, there is another realm of art that is far less considered when topics of representation and diversity arise: the fine arts. It can be argued that the so-called “art-world” is among the most Euro-centric and whitewashed spaces you can think of. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? When we think about visual art—about paintings and sculpture—in the context of modern society, it is often already relegated to the tiers of the wealthy upper class. Such an assumption is in itself based on colonial preconceptions. For the most part, the study and preservation of the visual arts as it exists today is heavily steeped in the same colonialist ideals. 

It is widely acknowledged that the foremost capital of the art world in the Western Hemisphere is New York City. New York’s significance in the art world arose out of the artistic movement of abstract expressionism, a period which marks a turning point in the histories of both American and contemporary art. Today, New York City is home to about 1,500 art galleries. According to a 2016 study conducted by CUNY Guttman College, 80% of artists in those New York galleries are white. Nationally, according to the same study, 88% of gallery artists are white, and 70% of artists featured in New York galleries are men. In 2018, the New York Times reported that of all the work acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, only 11% of it was made by women. The survey doesn’t mention what percentage of those women are white. In many cases, art museums are structured around the teachings of art history, which are, of course, shaped by and for European colonial forces. 

As a student of art, the artistic “canon” is almost entirely Western. Every new movement of artistic practice is determined by a white male artist from either Europe or America, standardizing the curriculum of human expression to a certain elite group. While art by racial minorities is featured in museums like the Met or our local Minneapolis Institute of Art, it is usually a smaller collection and features work from an antiquated or ancient period. This phenomenon has been particularly present in the Native American community, as most art museums lack substantial contemporary indigenous artists, painting Native people as a fixture of the past and not present in today’s society. There is also a diversity problem in the curation and collection of Native art. For example, in 2018, the Met curated an exhibition of over 100 pieces of Native art primarily acquired from the private collections of wealthy white New York philanthropists and decided to show it alongside the white American artworks of the likes of John Singer Sargent, a decision that reeks of the disingenuous stamp of “white approval.” Furthermore, the Met failed to consult with the tribal nations whom the artworks were taken from, who later denounced the exhibit, with the executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs saying that most of the items on view are not works of art, but “ceremonial or funerary objects that belong with their original communities and could only have ended up in a private collection through trafficking and looting.” 

The misrepresentation or lack of representation of racial minorities in art galleries and museums ultimately stems from a fundamental misgiving of humanity on the part of the oppressor, a poisoned appendage of the colonial systems which rule the world. Art is meant to be a reflection of the boundlessness of the human spirit, transcendent of class and race. It’s time that art, and its galleries, imitate the lives it stems from.