Terri Weissman
Associate Professor, Art History
and Associate Director, School of Art and Design
Water is essential for life and human dignity. But when it becomes toxic to the point of injuring and debilitating populations, when it is poisonous to drink and dangerous to use—as was the case recently in Flint, Michigan—then water behaves more like a weapon than a life support. A tool, wielded by those who have access to clean resources, against those who do not. Similarly, when water rushes powerfully through fire hoses aimed at people instead of flames, when it is used—as during Civil Rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963—to knock people down, silence their voices, and wash them away, well then again, water behaves more like a weapon than a life support. In both of these examples, one through internal consumption the other through outward physical attack, water renders bodies immobile and de-capacitated. This presentation will examine events like the Flint Water Crisis and the hosing of Civil Rights protestors in conjunction with a series of artistic interventions, including LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographic series Flint is Family (2016), which documents mothers dealing with and managing the disaster in Flint; Charles Moore’s documentary images from Birmingham (1963), and Theaster Gates’s An Epitaph for Civil Rights (2011).
Terri Weissman teaches modern and contemporary art history, the history of photography, and the history of design; she holds an affiliated appointment in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory. She is the author of several books about photography that focus on the relationship between documentary images, political action, and global and local impacts.