Grant Kester Reading

I found this weeks reading was easy for me to relate to. As an artist and as a black female, it’s always been hard to get my point across or to feel heard. When community representation was brought up this quote stood out to me the most. “The other common response is a fetishization of authenticity in which only those artists who can claim an integral connection to a given community are allowed the ethical mandate to work with or represent it. But how do we define integral community membership?” As Grant Kester spoke on, violence erupts everytime in communities when they feel that their individual voice isn’t heard. I think as a black women people think we feel the same way about everything. I disagree. While most black women feel strongly about certain things, that doesn’t mean we relate to everything. Art to me is freedom of expression about all subject matters. I think it’s important for people to not always look at race as a binding factor. We are all so different, with different morals, backgrounds, personalities, that if we all thought the same we would be one black person, or one white person.

It was also hard for me to see museums as an elite art industry because now a day, museums have the work of artists all over. And sometimes in museums I don’t like the art people would back then consider “elite”. I think it’s boring and simple. To me the most fascinating art comes from people who have had a story, that didn’t get everything they want and have no sense of reality. If I had to choose to observe an art form from a blessed, rich, “elite” individual or a person who has been struggling with AIDS, my attention would be on that person. Dark pasts give people the substance and depth that makes art appealing in my opinion.