Feminist Exhibitionism: When the Women's Studies Professor Is a Curator

Abstract

While teaching Alice Walker's classic 1974 essay Search of Our Mothers' Gardens in my Introduction to Women's Studies courses, have for the past nine years supplemented it by showing an excerpt from a filmed documentary. This 1992 British-made documentary about Walker features readings from her work, dramatizations of scenes from the novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, historical footage from the civil rights era in the United States, and commentary by various talking heads, such as Gloria Steinem and the late Barbara Christian. But most important, it relies on interviews with Walker herself, portions of which are intercut throughout. In the section of the documentary that show in class-the segment devoted to the creation and impact of the central argument of Search of Our Mothers' Gardens-Walker's on-camera presence is particularly arresting and inspiring, as she talks about the unacknowledged artistry of poor African American women in the rural South. Yet every year, present this powerful feminist statement to my classes with some hesitation and misgivings. Why? Because the students both see and hear Walker accompanying her celebration of the arts of women of color with the following slam: I don't like museums, which is a very white Western notion of what you do with art, because it takes it out of context of life, and think for many indigenous people, earth people, you create beautiful things because beauty is all around you. mean, what else would you do? (Shaw 1992). For me, Walker's words pose a dilemma. want my students to take Walker's perspective seriously; yet don't want them to dismiss out-ofhand either the achievements or the potential of museums and other institutional exhibition spaces, such as those in university galleries and libraries, as sites for doing feminist and anti-racist work. On the contrary, would like them to consider such established spaces as opportunities for feminist pedagogy and outreach, not merely as irredeemable symbols of elitism. Indeed, would like my students to feel equally inspired and challenged by the alternative point-of-view of African American women artists such as the sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, who has exhibited in libraries such as the Main Public Library in Las Vegas, Nevada, using community-based galleries as though they were museums, on the principle that Making my work available . . . where it is accessible to Black working people is very important to me (LaDuke 1992, 138).