{"id":289,"date":"2013-07-24T07:30:18","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T14:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=289"},"modified":"2013-07-25T04:51:16","modified_gmt":"2013-07-25T11:51:16","slug":"the-artistic-history-of-part-of-a-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2013\/07\/the-artistic-history-of-part-of-a-nation.html","title":{"rendered":"The Artistic History of (Part of) a Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\""Young<\/a>

“Young Woman with Peonies” by Frederic Bazille, 1870.<\/p><\/div>\n

My daughter arrives to live with me in eight days, as my bi-coastal family reaches the end of phase one of our West-to-East transition<\/a> and enters phase 2, aka the phase where Cici lives with me and my husband begins his months of being childless after 5 months of being a single dad.\u00a0 I am excited and terrified at the upcoming changes, but most of all I am looking forward to having her around, being able to snuggle with her and give her hugs and talk with her when I want\u2014and the logistics of single-parenting a child while my husband, Seth, completes his Fulbright research in Brazil will sort themselves out.<\/p>\n

I have been, these past months, more and more preoccupied with how my daughter might end up seeing the world.\u00a0 I think that not having her here with me has paradoxically allowed me the distance to imagine in more detail some version of her experience in the world, which would have been at least somewhat closed to me had I had to stay caught up (as I will soon) in the minutiae of day-to-day fatherhood.\u00a0 This preoccupation, as I have written here before<\/a>, was one of the primary motivators for my new and sustained interest in issues of diversity, access and equity in representation of art (my daughter is bi-racial, and I am not).\u00a0 My preoccupation has woven back and forth in a variety of directions over these past months, especially on the heels of the publication of the Arts Diversity Index<\/a> report. \u00a0As I continue to work with staff at Americans for the Arts to build out a comprehensive program to help local arts agencies and arts institutions interrogate what it means to diversify, what it means to be engaged in community conversation and development, and how we as an overall arts field can do a better job of representing the viewpoints and histories of our entire nation, how my daughter will see her history in the art of our day-to-day experience has preoccupied me.\u00a0 All the arts, all the people.<\/p>\n

In that spirit, and because when I sit at home on the weekends without my husband and daughter around I often find myself getting either antsy or depressed, I took a trip in mid-May to the National Gallery of Art.\u00a0 I had been a few weeks before, on the tail of seeing Permanent Collection<\/i>, about which I have written before<\/a>, and found myself preoccupied with the (lack of) representation of people of color in the art.\u00a0 So I headed out to conduct a little survey\u2014I decided to count representations of non-white people in the paintings and sculptures, just to see.<\/p>\n

Before going further, I need to lay out the caveats that (1) this was not an exact exercise, and it is entirely possible that my counts will be slightly off both because I missed something and because I was making personal judgments on the race of the people in the paintings and (2) my examination was limited to the permanent galleries of the non-contemporary-art building (the National has 2 buildings, one devoted to classical art and sculpture and the other to contemporary art) and so did not take into account temporary exhibitions.\u00a0 The Chinese porcelain gallery in the museum was also sectioned off on the day I was there for some reason, so I wasn\u2019t able to visit those pieces, which likely would have increased my count.<\/p>\n

But even with that said, as I whisked through the galleries, marking representations in pen on the little paper map they give you at the entrance, I was surprised.<\/p>\n

By my count:<\/p>\n