Remembering Waterbearers: Archiving Black Women Art Educators' Stories

Abstract

This study explored narratives of becoming and being art educators, as told by three Black women in the field of art education, centering their personal and professional experiences. Considering the lack of culturally-specific narratives within the history of art education, the analysis of their narratives offers knowledge about their intersectional experiences and what it means to occupy this subject position of Black woman art educator. In thinking about who has the authority in the depiction of people, Black women and their knowledge have often been marginalized or erased from histories. Considering the nature of Black women’s subjugation and how knowledge is constructed about the history of the field, I view Black women as waterbearers (invoking Lorna Simpson’s 1986 artwork), who hold both master narratives from the dominant cultural group in addition to their own. As these art educators share their life experiences, they offer knowledge where they have to oppose master narratives imposed upon them in order to care for themselves and other Black women. Engaging in the active process of remembering, I, as the researcher, share their stories, asserting the importance of re-presenting their narratives on their terms. Using Black feminisms as the theoretical framework, the analysis revealed barriers to the profession and how Black women navigate them in the pursuit of becoming and being art educators. This study’s use of Black feminist visual-based narrative inquiry offers a qualitative and arts-based approach to critically examine and creatively present their experiences from a self-defined standpoint. This study centers the life experiences of three Black women art educators working in various spaces (an elementary school, art museum, and higher education) in the United States, highlighting one particular time period (one story) in each woman’s life that contributed to career trajectory. The emergent discoveries from the study advocate for conceptually and methodologically rethinking the engagement with the history of art education and Black women’s narratives. These discoveries prompt additional considerations working toward expanded archival futures for Black women art educators.