The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (the Center) has announced its 2021–2022 academic year appointments. They include Lowery Stokes Sims, Museum of Arts and Design (emerita), as Kress-Beinecke Professor; Huey Copeland of University of Pennsylvania as Andrew W. Mellon Professor; Aruna D'Souza of Williamstown, Massachusetts, as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor; and Richard J. Powell of Duke University as the 71st A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts.
The question for news organizations is whether it is worth the inevitable backlash, and whether it may need to be packaged with other context, similar to how CBS handled the Allen interview.
“If someone is there being interviewed, they’re given a kind of legitimacy just by the fact that they’re being interviewed on a big newscast,” art critic Aruna D’Souza said of the Woody Allen interview in the segment that ran on CBS.
As Cosby considers a public comeback, it’s a concern news outlets can’t take lightly.
The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has given Rabkin Prizes of $50,000 each to eight visual art journalists: Aruna D’Souza (MA); John Yau (NYC); Raquel Gutierrez (AZ); Jarrett Earnest (Brooklyn); Mark Lamster (TX); Yinka Elujoba (Brooklyn); Jennifer Huberdeau (MA); and Jasmine Weber (Brooklyn).
This year’s winning journalists publish regularly in The Brooklyn Rail; Hyperallergic; Art News; the New York Times; Paris Review; Harper’s; Artforum; BOMB; Art in America; 4 Columns; Them; National Public Radio; Gumbo; the Los Angeles Times; PUBLIC; the Berkshire Eagle; the Wall Street Journal, the Dallas Morning News; Glasstire and more.
Jurors for this fifth cycle of awards were: Melissa Harris, Aperture Foundation editor-at-large and professor at Columbia University, School of Journalism and Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Mary Louise Schumacher was the chief art critic of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for eighteen years. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University addressing changes in art journalism across the nation. Her research on the state of arts criticism in America is soon to be released as a feature length documentary film.
CBS News, March 28 2021, 10:15 am
But to some, like art critic Aruna D'Souza, any reckoning is long overdue. "I think that lots of artists are terrible people, because being an artist allowed for a kind of latitude of behavior that included things that today we find really offensive," she said.
By Jerry Saltz. October 1, 2020
That’s when I saw two tweets by critic Aruna D’Souza that stopped me in my tracks. The first pointed out that Darby English (of the “cowardly” quote) has an influential role at the Hauser & Wirth Institute, where he serves on the advisory board. The second that this international megagallery “represents the Guston estate, and the Guston catalogue raisonné is being done under the auspices of the research center.” (Someone countered that the catalog is being done under the auspices of the Guston Foundation. Either way, Hauser & Wirth represents the estate.) D’Souza added that “4 white curators [and] 12 out of 14 non-Black contributors (one of whom is Dana Schutz), may not be the best people to frame his work at this moment. Yes we may need a Guston show, but not ANY Guston show.” She could have added that all four of the museum directors are white. I completely agreed with her when she told ARTnews that the idea that Guston’s Klan paintings “is work that’s important to see now and all museums have to do is educate audiences [about] why looking at KKK figures is good for them is terribly paternalistic and condescending. At this point, more than ever, it’s important not to tell Black audiences what they should be looking at, but asking them what they want to see.” Amen.
There have, however, been some who are not entirely opposed to the postponement of the Guston show. Critic Aruna D’Souza, who has written extensively on protests at museums led by Black artists and activists, said that, while she likes Guston’s work, other exhibitions may be better fitted to the moment than a Guston one organized by four white curators.
“I don’t know how Black audiences will react to Guston’s paintings—I suspect, since there’s no unified or univocal Black audience, there will be many different reactions,” she said. “But the idea that this is work that’s important to see now and all museums have to do is educate audiences [about] why looking at KKK figures is good for them is terribly paternalistic and condescending. At this point, more than ever, it’s important not to tell Black audiences what they should be looking at, but asking them what they want to see.”
The postponement will hold significance, she said, but only if it is remedied in a productive way. “This postponement is only meaningful and legitimate if it is genuinely tied to a real reckoning with their own institutional make-up and structures,” D’Souza continued. “If we see Philip Guston replaced by Morris Louis or something like that, then we’ll know it was actually institutional cowardice that led to the decision to postpone.”
By Dushko Petrovich. July 28, 2020
Few faculty have the expertise to teach a truly global class on their own, so a common solution has been team-teaching, with several voices replacing the lone lecturer onstage. Though born of necessity, several people I spoke with saw this polyphonic structure as a symbolic improvement too. As critic and former art historian Aruna D’Souza put it, it gets rid of the “old man tells you everything you need to know” model of teaching.
Aruna D’Souza, the author of “Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts,” said in an interview that Mr. Garrels’s remark “wasn’t just a slip of the tongue.”
His message, she said, was: “‘Don’t worry, we can keep collecting men, too. Things aren’t going to change that much.’”
“Gary Garrels’s comment,” she continued, “was upsetting because he was making it explicit, whiteness will still be at the center of the institution.”
The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program has announced the 2019 recipients of its annual grants, numbering 19 in all, for a total of $680,000 toward the completion of new writing projects.
Los Angeles Times, November 9 2018
It is the best of times and it is the worst of times. A time in which the “whitelash” to multiculturalism is becoming increasingly violent. But also a period in which art and culture present a more inclusive alternative to the executive orders emerging from the White House.
“As long as culture keeps producing these moments, where actual debate can happen without devolving, it becomes a sort of proxy,” says art critic Aruna D’Souza, author of “Whitewalling: Art, Race, & Protest in 3 Acts.” “Those conversations become proxies for conversations we can’t have elsewhere.”
By Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang, New York Times, July 5, 2019
“The problem is not that these critics lack some essential connection with the work of artists of color,” the art critic Aruna D’Souza said in an interview. “It’s that many of them simply are not familiar with the intellectual, conceptual and artistic ideas that underlie the work.”
New York Times, August 22, 2018
As Ms. D’Souza points out in an accompanying publication, “Dialectics of Isolation” was purposefully heterogeneous, a celebration of difference. This gave it a dynamism that carries through into the present, prompting the viewer to seek out connections among the artworks.
Photo: Janet Henry, “The Studio Visit” (1982) in the show “Dialectics of Entanglement: Do We Exist Together?” at A.I.R. Gallery
“It's a problem with how we teach and practice art history — that we want to carve out that space of art as a sort of autonomous realm," said Aruna D'Souza, author of "Whitewalling: Art, Race and Protest in 3 Acts."
"There can be no fiction of the autonomous realm anymore. We have to see everything we're doing as part of this vast structure that upholds a continuing oppression of Black people and people of color," D'Souza added.
