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Description
Drawing from decolonial theories, I explore the history of art education in the Dominican Republic in the first half of the 20th century. I examine how racial hierarchies were activated in art classes in school through the romanticization of the countryside and the mystification of children’s material culture. A distorted use of rural imagery served to advance the elite’s narrative of White Dominican identity and to normalize a racial imaginary that negated the country’s African heritage. I analyze how national and global discourses that coupled modernity with Whiteness encouraged aesthetic preferences that permeated children’s visual culture and national art. I contend that, because children’s art and play conjure images of innocence, the exhibition of children’s material culture was utilized to naturalize the absence of a Black heritage. This article builds on recent scholarship that underscores the need to diversify art education histories.
Publication Title
Studies in Art Education
Publication Date
2024
DOI
10.1080/00393541.2024.2390331
Disciplines
Art Education
Recommended Citation
Rodriguez Suero, Felix V., "Negated Identities in Dominican Art Education" (2024). Faculty Publications – Wonsook Kim School of Art. 6.
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/fpwksoa/6
Comments
First published in Studies in Art Education (2024): https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2024.2390331
This article was published open access thanks to an agreement between Milner Library and Taylor & Francis.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.