(M)Othering Like Us

Abstract

Black artist-activist Parker Bright’s three-day protest of white artist Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial ignited a debate concerning “historical witnessing” versus “cultural appropriation,” artistic freedom and freedom of speech, and institutional agency in affording socioeconomic value to white artists over artists of colour. While intended to evoke an empathetic response “across race,” Schutz’s painterly reproduction of the iconic photograph of 14-year-old murdered Black boy Emmett Till perpetuates and participates in white violence on Black life. Schutz’s own response—“I don’t know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother”—suggested an empathetic connection with Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, whereby abstract notions of heteronormatively defined white motherhood transcend the reality of everyday Black and Brown life. Schutz’s claim resonates with a statement made by Robin Kahn, a white artist whose installation-performance Dining at Refugee Camps (2012) at dOCUMENTA13 relocated a community of Sahrawi women exiled to the Tindouf Refugee Camps in Algeria since 1975 to Kassel, Germany, as “a symbol of peaceful refuge.” Kahn identifies as a “mom of color” (her adoptive daughter is African American), suggesting a universal/izing point of reference to the refugees that elides the disparity in privilege and precarity. Schutz and Kahn deploy white feminist—in particular, white motherhood—tropes to deemphasize damage done to Black and Brown people that the artists’ work reproduces. This article is about the cultural collateral white motherhood assumes in its own gendered, racialized, and economic privilege (as well as the assumption thereof within the space of academic publishing and in the article itself). It is also about the broader response in the artistic community, primarily from artists of colour, who literally and figuratively stand between the viewer and artwork.