As part of my Art Education college class, I'll be writing a journal in response to selected readings and works of art. Today I'll be responding to Personal Culture, Complexities of Identity by Beverly Daniel Tatum, and a magazine article on the artist Frank Buffalo Hyde by Wolf Schneider.
While each focused on slightly different concepts, all three articles worked within a framework lying at the intersection between identity development, diversity, social justice, and visual art. Hyde's artwork is a good representation of the idea in broad strokes; as someone of Native American descent, he depicts images related to oppression against natives by Western society in order to unveil their ongoing status as subordinate in modern culture and hopefully spark discussion. Imagery of the buffalo in particular, with interpretations ranging from hamburgers to Buffalo Bill, is exploited for the full extent of its possible meanings.
The other two articles contextualize the connections between identity formation, social justice, and art and the interplay between the multiplicity of identity and the process of "othering". In any case where easily identifiable diversity occurs, dominant and subordinate groups emerge. In most cases, members of a dominant group tend to view themselves in normative terms, not including their membership in the dominant group as an important part of their identity, whereas members of subordinate groups tend to be much more aware of the fact, as well as the conscious and unconscious discrimination which continues to leave them prone to othering. This explains their common focus on issues of diversity within works of art.
I found this to be a very useful framework for looking at issues diverse groups face and how to approach social justice with respect to those problems. The emphasis on images and identity at first seemed a bit too encompassing, but after rereading it's intriguing to see how these articles all tie together with the concept of self portrait, or self image. By viewing through this lens--that is, viewing the damage incurred to a given individual's self-image--we can see the acute yet often painful effects that marginalization can have on a person.
