A Jeanne Site
A Jeanne Site
Art as a Way of Knowing
Jacob Lawrence's Firewood #55
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Latest update: April 7, 2000
Faculty on the Site.
Firewood # 55 had been the topic of discussion in Love 1A earlier that morning. Students who had been in the earlier discussion were following up by returning the the Firewood # 55, and before I even realized it, everyone in the class was talking about Jacob Lawrence's painting. People were helping each other locate the painting, because it is at the National Museum of American Art, and I could not create a link directly to the painting. You have to do a search of the site to locate it, and many of you are spoiled by the many direct links on Dear Habermas. I was delighted to see you helping each other, and to see that you were expanding your knowledge of using the Internet. So I settled happily for moving our discussion to the painting.
Along the way you all registered surprise when I said that I would show you how it linked to statistics. That told me that you haven't fully assimilated yet how very much statistics permeates our everyday lives, so this was a good chance to catch you unawares, and help you to see that. It also gave me a chance to do some of my magic work, since most of you were convinced this couldn't be done.
Most of you experimented with the museum site. And you also explored some of the other museum sites I had put up on the Pass or Prepared? on Jacob Lawrence. And most of you encountered Jacob Lawrence's work for the first time. I think that's criminal on our part for not having brought it to you in your lower division work, but I'm glad we discovered our crime of omission in time to correct it. I noticed that several of you began to check out the Studio Museum in Harlem. That's a new site, with new directors. There isn't nearly enough up on their Web site yet, but watch it as it grows. E-mail them, so they'll know that we in California want them to share with us, since we can't get to the actual museum.
Jesse Wilder knew of Jacob Lawrence, and was engrossed with discovering how much he could find on the Web. Jamaal Johnson and Brian Ford discovered that the Web is more than just SPSS, and that they can find subjects that really matter to them on Dear Habermas, and follow that route to understanding statistics. Nuru Mohammed is well versed on the computer, so that I found him on the index of the museum, checking out all of Jacob Lawrence's work there. Ask him to share that with you, if you want to explore more. Joe Harris and Claudia Barroso also went on to explore others of Jacob Lawrence's works. Dolores Barnett had been off printing something, so that she had missed our move to the Lawrence file. Donna Woods stopped on our way upstairs to show Donna how to access Firewood # 55. And we all learned that Donna's machine just refused to access the painting, when all the other machines had no problem. I still don't know why that happened.
As we began the discussion, Donna told me that the brilliant purple I love in Firewood # 55 is called cerulean blue. And Donna and I shared the joy we see in Jacob Lawrence's use of that color. We contrasted the joy with the isolation we also saw. Even though there is a woman, laundry up, a plough, an axe, and firewood, the scene feels isolated. Poverty, hard work, struggle contrast with the joy of the colors, leading us to the conclusion that we could analyze some of Jacob Lawrence's work by contrasting the number of indicators of joy and the number of indicators of poverty and struggle. A couple of students, I've forgotten who, told us that during the days of the underground railroad messages were often sent to escaping slaves about whether it was safe to come or not by the patterns on the sheets or quilts hung out on the clothesline. And sure enough, there is a pattern in the sheet or quilt.
Early in the discussion we also recalled that I had introduced Jacob Lawrence as a Black artist. I don't normally think of artists as Black or White. So we pondered why I had done that in this case. Chrecian Scott's response to the Mind-Candy I put up on William H. Johnson, Black Artist, at the National Museum of American Art, caused me to recognize that many of you had not been exposed to African American art. Chrecian liked the piece on William H. Johnson and asked for more. I responded by putting up the piece on Jacob Lawrence. I began to realize that your liberal arts education needed to include more African American Art and more art from other cultures. Thus, race and ethnicity became a variable with respect to artists. Donna Woods immediately recognized that we could compare the percentage of Black artists in our American museums to the percentage of white artists, the percentage of female to male artists, and that in such statistics we can find evidence of the difficulties Black artists have in getting to a level of acceptance that means inclusion in a museum's collections.
Enrique Pena saw another kind of analysis, more typical of his previous art classes. We could look at a series of Jacob Lawrence's paintings and see how his art has evolved over time. To do that, we might quantify the proportion of his paintings that give the feeling of isolation, that give a celebratory feeling, that move to abstract form, etc.
Joe Harris spoke of how much the painting reminded him of where he came from, of what it had been like in the South of his memories. Nicolette David and Jesse Wilder told us of their reading of the file on Oliver's Violent Social World of Black Men. They assumed that Oliver was white. Only afterwards did they begin to reflect on how structurally violent such an assumption was. Adam Kefalianos spoke of life as a white in a primarily Black community, and said that he had experienced discrimination in a reverse pattern. Joe Harris deepened our understanding of this internalization of structural violence by telling a story from his early days in the armed services. A Black soldier threatened to fight with a much smaller white soldier, who was mildly terrified, of both the violence and of the overwhelming size of the Black. Joe protected the young white man, and the moment of violence passed with no harm. Years later, the father of the young white man found Joe, and thanked him profusely for having protected his son. Joe interpreted this story to explain that Adam was right, that when you have lived in a structurally violent environment you internalize the violence, and then project that same violent behavior onto others.
Nechelle Williams spoke of the need for parental values to insist upon the respectful and fair treatment of all people. Joe supported that, and I was pleased that we were developing a deeper sense of the need for public discourse, of the need to discuss the issues so that we can see them more clearly, see their many facets and include all those facets in our measurements, beginning to see variable as complex. I was enormously gratified when Joe said, "We need more discussions like this." Yes, Joe, we do. I think Habermas, and probably Marcuse, would agree. And I think Marcuse would appreciate that Jacob Lawrence's Firewood # 55 had started the whole discussion.
But it didn't end there. Gilda Ortiz added that she saw in Firewood # 55, particularly in the open doors that I had seen as a lack of privacy, a welcoming, a warmth, a reflection of the closeness of the Black community in its social bonding. She sees African Americans as very close and very supportive of one another. There was an immediate response by Nicolette David that that was probably not the case, and that she perceived the Mexican American community as having that close bonding because they seem to manage to live together happily in crowded corners, which she did not believe to be true of Blacks. Together they realized that their cultures did not mean happiness in sharing close quarters, but that they chose, even demanded more personal space as soon as they could manage it. Yes, Joe, we need more discussions like this.
We then spoke briefly of spurious relationships, relationships that look like they exist, but that don't really, when you look at the underlying causes. Both Nicolette and Gilda were reminding us that what looked to outsiders like close social bonds were, in fact, adaptations to trying circumstances. And those adaptations disappear as the groups manage to acquire more space and power. Again, we see how important our perceptions are to how we measure social variables, and to the adequacy of the conclusions we draw.
Throughout the whole discussion, we became increasingly aware of how we were recoding our perceptions of analyses and conclusions we thought were solidly in place. You could almost see us each goiing back to the Jacob Lawrence painting we had left in the lab, and recoding remembered facts to check our conclusions. The statistical overview matters, but in these discussions we realize the import of local narrative to making sense of the overview.
In the few remaining minutes I spoke of the need not to compartmentalize and categorize competence (Marcuse). We need to examine the importance of what is being said across courses, across disciplines, and in real life. I reminded us of the fact that gender works as profoundly as race to exclude artists and others from traditional success structures, like inclusion in a museum. I added a link to a Black woman in the early 20th century, whose success as an academic and as a political leader was astounding. She was the only one recorded, of course. And then I reminded us all of convict criminology, and of John Irwin's recounting of how his very best friends are ex-felons. Every group forms bonds, and those bonds we have shared in hardship are, indeed, strong bonds.
In this regard, Jacob Lawrence's firewood # 55 had reminded me that despite the horrors of slavery and plantations, there was joy, there is joy, that comes from the human bonding. The ex-felons' expression of the bonds they have built with each other reflects that same mixture of joy in the social bonds, even in face of adversity. I am reminded of a counselor's descriptions of her escape through professional training out of the working class and into the professional class. She describes the lack of freedom, the control exercised over women, the paucity of choices in jobs, the demands for incessant work and waiting on others. She was so anxious to achieve her freedom, as she looks back she no longer sees the joy. And there is joy. Having moved on, we forget the moments of joy we knew while we were working to achieve. Joe commented on the extent to which he has seen that happen with people he grew up with. Working to move on absorbs us; we suppress the good things, for they must not hold us back. And then we forget them. Paintings like Firewood # 55 bring back our awareness of the joy that is always mixed with the struggle. Discussions of art can help us see that we have completely forgotten to measure one piece of the puzzle. Such discussions, and the awareness they bring, can make us far better statisticians.