With renewed calls for racial justice, many arts institutions seek to “do good” in support of Black Lives Matter and other movements to end systemic racism. Commonly considered liberal bastions, the arts are nonetheless strongly associated with white privilege and elite status. Nowhere is this truer than in the arts education pipeline. In this lecture, Dr. Amelia M. Kraehe discusses white liberalism as an ideological stance that masks racism in contemporary K-20 arts education before introducing abolitionism as a contemporary praxis grounded in a Black radical tradition to move the arts beyond gestures of goodwill and toward racial justice.
Workshop:
“Creative Abolitionism: A Contemporary Praxis” Dr. Amelia M. Kraehe facilitates a workshop on creative abolitionist strategies to grapple with racism in and through the arts.
Bio:
Dr. Amelia M. Kraehe is Associate Professor of Art and Visual Culture Education and Co-director of Racial Justice Studio at The University of Arizona and co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education. Her scholarship, teaching, and public engagement focus on how the arts and arts education can challenge, but also reinforce, systems of inequality. She explores this seeming contradiction by investigating the ways in which the arts, as both
a disciplinary discourse and as creative cultural practices, mediate social movements, ideological formation and transformation, identity and agency. Her forthcoming book is Race and Art Education (Davis Publications). https://art. arizona.edu/people/directory/akraehe/
