Research and Final Project in Art Education

Alexis Lambrou, Chloe Rowan, Sarah Winter, and Jessica Bal

What does responsible ownership and exploration of whiteness look like? The project Heirlooms/Evidence: An Archive of Whiteness and Privilege, created and facilitated by Art + Ed students Alexis Lambrou, Chloe Rowan, Sarah Winter, and collaborator Jessica Bal, is a workshop and interactive archive investigating whiteness and privilege.   The idea of this workshop is to collect items—evidence of sorts—of privilege, and reflect on objects that signify personal lineages of whiteness. Participants are asked to interrogate whiteness at the personal and familial level. Inspired by Kerry James Marshall’s Heirlooms and Accessories project, this project uses the personal and tangible to discuss whiteness through personal history and lineage, and invites participants to consider what they have inherited from the ownership of these objects, and what values they hope to pass on. 

 For the inaugural workshops, educators facilitated a Zoom workshop of 15 people from personal networks from all over the country. Each participant brought a personal object or photograph that represents whiteness to them. Following a session with somatic exercises to orient people into their bodies, the participants broke out into groups in which they shared their objects in a story circle to open up honest conversations around whiteness. Beginning questions include: what does this object signify to you? What kind of emotions does this object elicit? What values have you inherited through the ownership of this object? What values do you want to want to pass on? 

After sharing in the story circle, participants were introduced to the concept of photomapping, as inspired by Wendy Red Star and Nigel Poor, as a way to creatively engage with personal objects and images.

In closing, participants reflected and wrote three intentions in continuing anti-racist work. Folks shared a variety of intentions: have a conversation around whiteness/privilege with a loved one, finish writing an article on whiteness in photography, and read and work through the book Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad. This was a hopeful end to the workshop, and encouraged participants to commit to this work for the long term.  Alexis, Sarah, Jess, and Chloe envision this project to keep growing. They will continue to facilitate these workshops throughout the summer, and were accepted as a workshop at Photoville Festival in September 2020. As they continue to facilitate these workshops, they would like to construct a digital archive where participants and non-participants can submit photos of their objects, evidence tags and/or photomaps. Group members hope that this digital archive, living on a website or instagram page, would inspire and challenge more white people to interrogate whiteness in their own lives.