Disassembling the Gallery: An Interview with the Art Hoe Collective
by Victoria Chiu
There’s a curious disparity in the representation of people of color and other marginalized groups in media, and it extends even into the depths of social media. On Tumblr, the most frequently shared artwork and images often reflect the “white ideal”: thin white girls riding dainty bicycles, pale willowy hands drawing paintbrushes across canvas, the whitewashing of fictional characters who were originally people of color. So, last summer, two young, queer artists of color, Mars and Jam — along with a few of their close friends — launched the Art Hoe Collective to bring more exposure to underrepresented young artists making videos, music, and visual art, and to recognize minority artists who often don’t receive credit for their work online.
The collective, which exists almost entirely online, consists of a group of artists led by a dozen young curators who post artwork, poetry, photography, and performance art to its Instagram and Tumblr accounts, which have an audience of more than thirty-seven thousand followers on Instagram and several thousand more on Tumblr, its secondary platform. The collective’s aesthetic skews toward the bold and brightly colored: Painter Justice Dwight’s pop art-esque portraits and Brooklyn White’s LP album art are prime examples of pieces that strike this chord, and the same cohesive vibe is conveyed through the work of its curators, like Anisa McGowan (shown above) and Myles Loftin. The other week, one of the founding members of the collective, Sage Adams, and I spoke about art, racism, self-cyberbullying, and squad goals while she battled pink eye in her Howard University dorm room.
Why do you think the Art Hoe Collective gained so many followers so quickly?
The Collective is a representation of those who have not found a voice in mainstream media because we’ve been purposefully kept out of the art world. The art world as it is right now is extremely elitist — art galleries and museums, especially, epitomize all the worst parts of exclusion and the shutting out of one people in favor of the raising up of another based on a single narrow definition of what is acceptable and what is not. Art is housed in an isolated sphere — it’s strange to be a minority in the art world and explore all of these concepts that are foreign to the world of high art, but completely normal to regular people of color.
At the end of the day, it’s about the narrative of art, too — stories that focus on black people, for instance, shouldn’t necessarily have to constantly harp on the fact that its main characters are black. There’s a huge gap in media that people are trying to fill with diversified characters, but by evaluating these new shows in terms of whiteness instead of regarding them as their own standalone projects, everything goes back to and supports that idea of white dominance. The Collective tries to break that down and give visibility to artists who maybe don’t want to continually focus on race — who might just want to make art they love and are proud of — but might not be able to break into that elitist world of art and media.
I’m on Tumblr a lot, myself, and it does seem that more often than not the most reblogged and shared artwork posts are usually the work of white artists…
Yes. Exactly.
…and I’m not sure why that is.
Well, it’s that whole unattainable “squad goals” thing. Think Taylor Swift, Gigi and Bella Hadid — it’s like there’s this whole thing where you, as a person of color, will never be able to break through that boundary. It’s not something that I really want to do, but that is what’s popular and it’s difficult for people on Tumblr to break out of that image and create their own content rather than circulate what’s popular: the same Eurocentric beauty standards. Like, you know the #Blackout hashtag? That’s what really changed it for me. #Blackout showed me the huge breadth of the diversity of the black community on Tumblr, so movements like that are pretty cool.
A photo posted by Submit To Arthoecoreps@gmail (@arthoecollective) on Feb 25, 2016 at 3:16pm PST
The idea for the Art Hoe Collective initially grew out of the #arthoe hashtag on Tumblr, and at the time users of color would tag their selfies and art to create an aggregate feed showcasing everyone’s art in one place, making it really conducive to discovery. But in the weeks before the Collective launched, there was some controversy online about the hashtag being appropriated by people — mostly white girls — who were hijacking the tag and undermining its existence as a tool for people of color, right?
Yeah — honestly, that was so fucking annoying. The hashtag was originally coined by rapper Babeo Baggins in one of their selfies, and then Mars, one of the founders of the Collective, started talking to me and the other curators about getting together to decide on which platform we were going to launch the Collective. While we were getting our shit together, all these white girls with expensive Fjallraven Kanken backpacks started posting selfies with squiggly lines drawn on them in the #arthoe tag and saying things like, “Oh my god, this is so cute, I want this in my life.” On the side, we were kind of taken aback by it. The tag was started by queer people of color for queer people of color, and because of that we were like, “Um. Go outside; read a book. Open a magazine. The world is your oyster, but #arthoe is for [people of color].” The Collective was the product of a reclamation of the term and a ways for us to assert that this was our space, and we were intent on staying in it. We weren’t going to give up the Collective for anyone.
There are already so many other things we have to tolerate, like white girls overdrawing their lips — somehow, that has become acceptable. But there are some things we just shouldn’t have to concede to, like the creative input and identity of marginalized people. I’m not going to flood the tag I’m a part of with stupid pictures, no matter what anyone says.
I definitely see certain individuals getting upset on social media if they see a space that’s specifically for people of color.
It’s not even just that they aren’t a part of it — they come in and, while in another’s space, demand that people of color educate them on subjects they should already be researching. The attitude is that failure on the part of a person of color to educate a white person on matters of race and intersectionality theory is somehow the responsibility of POC rather than the white community, when in reality it’s definitely not the role of the marginalized to educate the privileged. It’s not “racist” for a person of color to refuse to educate a white person on the topic of race in their own safe space. Failure to educate oneself is, to be frank, laziness.
How does the Collective deal with hateful, racist comments like that now?
On the Art Hoe Collective Instagram page, the curators just ignore it — the sorts of people making those comments obviously know what they’re coming into, so there’s really no need to bother responding. We’ll respond sometimes on our own personal Instagram pages — on my own Instagram, for example, sometimes I’ll reply because at the end of the day racist comments need to be addressed, even if the people who post them demand that you stay quiet about them.
There comes a point when resistance is the only form of communication people will understand. Take Rosa Parks — when she refused to move, when she said “I’m not moving, because this is not okay” — that was powerful. Likewise, there are some things I won’t give up on simply because they are wrong, and the Collective will never shut down just because a few loud commenters feel that a space for people of color is somehow the right place to complain about lack of inclusivity of the privileged.
A photo posted by Submit To Arthoecoreps@gmail (@arthoecollective) on Mar 3, 2016 at 2:22pm PST
I think some of that criticism, in part, comes from a misunderstanding of what the Collective really aims to do.
It tends to come across as an exclusionary factor when we say our page was made by people of color for people of color, but it really isn’t — if anything, it’s a safety precaution. And the Art Hoe Collective is not exclusive toward white people — it’s for marginalized groups, all marginalized groups, and you can most certainly be white and marginalized. If you’re a disabled white person or a queer white person, for example, what you have to say absolutely is important and relevant to the advancement of marginalized communities. But if you’re white, straight, and regular, and you’re not doing anything particularly noteworthy for marginalized people — if you’re Macklemore — then the Art Hoe Collective is not your place!
Another concept some people seem to have difficulty grasping is the idea of “seeing race”: So often the idea of “not seeing race” or being “colorblind” is touted as the solution to racial tension.
I was working with a black artist, a rapper — Rejjie Snow — and he was talking about the distinction between “seeing color” and “not seeing color”; the boundary between acknowledging difference and refusing to acknowledge it. He mentioned that differences don’t have to be negative aspects of identities — the only reason differences are seen as negative is because society has trained us all to believe that a quintessential trait of human nature is exclusion of the Other, when it really is not. It can’t be. Within our own communities we are strong and appreciative of beauty, so what is stopping us from reaching out to other communities and recognizing the strength and beauty of those people? At the same time, though, I don’t want everyone to be wearing box braids and appropriating other cultures because they’re seen as trendy. There’s a very fine line between the two and it’s very difficult to define it for individuals who are not minorities — they just don’t feel it the same way people of color do because they haven’t lived it. A lot of white people have never been told that they can’t cross certain racial or cultural lines, so it’s hard for many of them to recognize where that essential “line” really is.
A photo posted by Submit To Arthoecoreps@gmail (@arthoecollective) on Jan 21, 2016 at 12:30pm PST
What are the collective’s long-term goals?
I think we’re still trying to figure that out. The vision for the future is definitely physical: It’s definitely an offline, physical space where people can feel safe. The idea is similar to Teen Art Salon, which is a really dope place in New York — every Saturday they open up their studio space and invite people to come in and paint if, say, your parents don’t let you paint in the house. The future for the Collective would be in-person meetups where marginalized people and people of color can connect, network independently, make their own projects, and know that they don’t need the outside world and its white, supremacist, capitalist cisheteropatriarchy to dictate what they can and cannot do.
For instance, the connections with others the curators have been able to make on Tumblr — that’s what we want for all our followers. We’ve done a few meetups so far — we’ve done two, one in DC and one in New York — and we’re just trying to do some more of that. Most of our curators are in school, so the actual coordination of different events all over the country can be difficult, but ultimately we want people to meet us, realize we’re normal people, and understand that they can be their normal selves with us and still be amazing.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Top painting by Anisa Goldman, whose work can also be found on Instagram