It’s been my experience that viewing art that empowers, versus art that dehumanizes you/representations of "you", is a difference that can be felt immediately & viscerally.
Part of why I post European art is because most Americans have been physiologically trained to value that art style or origin (through education, media exposure, and cultural contexts given), but to devalue representations of people of color.
It’s been my observation that this either resolves or creates a conflict in the viewer, and which of those it does depends on who the viewer is.
Seeing a positive and (in this context) valuable representation of a person who is not white creates a conflict in a white viewer only if they’ve built their entire sense of self and identity in the idea that ONLY white people can have value, history, dignity, and other traits they associate with these artworks. This is an identity and value system based entirely in exclusion, and who is NOT allowed to “claim” what they view as “cultural accomplishment.”
However, for someone who is living the conflict of wanting to value your identity as a person of color, BUT is surrounded by white supremacist values and representation, seeing an artwork like this:
might help to resolve an existing conflict between valuing the self, and living in a culture that only values a particular art style and a specific manner of presenting it.
Certainly this conflict doesn’t exist for everyone, but I know that it did for me. Also, this work is certainly Eurocentric, and it truly gladdens me that more and more people are looking outside the sphere of European and Eurocentric art and creating art archives like East Is Everywhere, which centers Asia and the Middle East, other ways of viewing early modern and classical antiquity global cultures or intercultural interactions in the work of Dr Caitlin R Green, and focus on interdisciplinary diversity and individual perspectives at the margins of the field at The Medieval Middle.
Art has always affected my life, the way I feel about myself, and the society I live in. Researching and looking for artworks that might fall outside the narrative my culture has pushed onto me has been incredibly freeing and inspiring to me personally, and it’s my hope this information can find its way into the hands of anyone who might be able to benefit from it.
