Art, Curation and Racial Healing at Spelman College

In the summer of 2020, when social media users and some corporations posted black squares to protest George Floyd’s murder, Amanda Williams, a Chicago-based visual artist, decided to make a different statement. 

Inspired by the squares, she created a series of paintings that challenge perceptions of race and identity. 

Five years later, Spelman College in Atlanta is using Williams’s art, among others, for a different discussion surrounding ideas of Black identity. Last month, the college’s Museum of Fine Art unveiled “We Say What Black This Is,” which not only showcases the paintings but uses them to inspire conversations about racial healing.

Dr. Cheryl Finley, an art historian and director of Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective, and Karen Lowe, Spelman’s curator in residence, co-taught the course, “Special Topics: Amanda Williams.”

By centering Black artists, the course matters for Spelman students “in terms of how they see themselves and understand the multiple roles that are available to them in the larger art ecosystem,” says Finley. 

“It enabled us to work closely with students, to teach them about the artist’s practice,” she says. “Also to visit with Amanda Williams in Chicago, where she’s based, to go to her studio, to also go to some of her public artworks. To see those and to understand the impetus behind them.” 

The event that inspired Williams’ series of paintings happened on June 2, 2020, as protests over the murders of Floyd, Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbury rocketed around the world. 

Dubbed Blackout Tuesday, some businesses, including music streaming services, joined social media users in placing black squares over their Instagram feeds, or used them instead of profile photos. But Blackout Tuesday was more of a fad than a protest, and quickly faded. 

“Amanda was pushing back against that — that social-media moment,” Finley says. The protest supposedly was against police brutality, she says, “so she started to make these abstract paintings.”

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Blackout Tuesday “actually exposed them, these institutions, for their lack of awareness and their lack of understanding” of what Blackness is, Finley says. The paintings, she says, demonstrate how those institutions “actually have not done their part in thinking about, ‘What kind of conversation might our institution have?’ or ‘What kind of exhibition might our institution have if we were to have a curatorial staff that looks like the city in which the institution is based?’”

“Pause and Reflect”

In the course, students were allowed to choose a work of art that spoke to them and write a didactic text, which not only allowed them to learn the importance of art interpretation but fostered a personal connection to the work.

Robyn Simpson, a Spelman senior and art history major, says the course offered a measure of reflection and healing. 

“Art can be a moment to pause and reflect in times when we are highly motivated in our capitalistic society to be continuously working without taking a pause,” she says. “Resistance is taking that time to pause and reflect, which art is a huge part of it and that’s where my mind has been residing lately when it comes to art and Black art.”

In the present moment, U.S. politics “are regressing, by decades and decades,” Simpson says. “So art being there to push more boundaries and push norms is a way to counteract that. I’m not saying it’s going to solve any problem by any means, but pushing against it instead of just being washed away in the wave of regression is super important.”

UPDATE: This article has been updated to correct Cheryl Finley’s position, include Karen Lowe and properly identify Robyn Simpson.