Collaboration explores identity through the lens of visual strategy

In February 2022, the Worcester Art Museum will open Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity, an expansive exhibition co-curated by Nancy Kathryn Burns, Stoddard Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at WAM, and Toby Sisson, Associate Professor and Program Director of Studio Art at Clark University. In conjunction with the exhibition, they developed and co-taught a virtual course at Clark this past spring, immersing undergraduates in the artistic process and creative response around what is arguably the most central issue facing our society today. Toby Sisson talked with access magazine about how the course came to be; this article is based on that interview.

In the summer of 2020, while social unrest erupted across the country following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and issues of race rose to the fore of our national consciousness, Nancy Kathryn Burns at WAM was in the process of organizing an exhibition that would show how artists use different visual strategies—text, pattern, juxtaposition, and seriality—to express the complex concepts of race, ethnicity, and identity. Serendipitously, Burns contacted Toby Sisson at Clark University about collaborating on the project just as Sisson was working on revamping an existing course, “Contemporary Directions,” to incorporate diversity and inclusion into the curriculum. “As Nancy was looking at various formal elements that artists have used to address these issues, teasing out compositional threads that connect the artists, I was thinking, ‘How can I make this part of my own practice?’” she said. Burns and Sisson spent the rest of 2020 planning the course and how to integrate it into the exhibition they curated together. Thirteen Clark students, from a variety of majors, took the virtual course, which ran in the spring semester of 2021—with perfect attendance. One student, living in China at the time, had to log into the Zoom class at 1:30 a.m. and never missed a session. Because the classes were held remotely due to COVID-19, artists from around the country and museum professionals could attend as guest lecturers. This allowed students to interact with individuals working in the field and have conversations about a variety of topics. “This was actually a benefit of Zoom,” Sisson said. “We had guest artists of international stature, including Nyeema Morgan in Chicago and Layla Ali in Western Mass, who wouldn’t have been able to visit an in-person class.” The course was structured with two projects in which the students were asked to examine their own feelings around identity by responding to two different objects that will be shown in the upcoming exhibition at WAM. Students chose from a selection of works on the exhibition checklist, researched the artists, then created their own works of art in response and wrote corresponding labels. “Young people are much more open to and accepting of identities over a broad range of ideas,” Sisson said, adding that this sensitivity was reflected in their personal response works. She gave as an example a student who responded to a photograph by artist LaToya Ruby Frazier depicting her fraught relationship with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. The student related to the family tension depicted in Frazier’s image because of similar dynamics in his own relationship with a family member that developed during the pandemic. According to Sisson, students responded deeply to the works and conversations around the idea of identity. “They could say, there’s an artist who doesn’t share my lived experience but is addressing a topic that I can relate to,” she explained. At the same time the students, Burns, and Sisson were delving into the profoundly personal ideas of identity, race-related events were unfolding across the country in real time. “We were talking about current issues while protests were happening in the real world. That was exciting and inspiring for all of us,” said Sisson. “Art has intrinsic value, and it includes beauty, celebration, protest,” she explains. “That happens because artists use devices with emotional power, like color and contrast. I wanted the students to understand that, to understand artists’ language, how art takes form.” When Us Them We | Race Ethnicity Identity opens in February 2022, the student response works will be displayed in a space adjacent to the exhibition, allowing visitors to see for themselves the power of that language.

This exhibition is organized by the Worcester Art Museum in partnership with, and with support from, Clark University. Early support has been provided by Marlene and David Persky, Michael and Kristy Beauvais, Eve Griliches, and Sara Shields and Bruce Fishbein. This project is also funded in part by the John M. Nelson Fund and the Hall and Kate Peterson Fund. Related programming is supported by the Amelia and Robert H. Haley Memorial Lecture Fund and Spear Fund for Public Programs.