Thread by @monaeltahawy

The whiteness of the art world:

"Terms like “flesh tone” raise the question: Who does the art world think is holding the brush?" h/t @NewBlackMan thewalrus.ca/the-racist-his…

I wrote about the whiteness of the art world here, when I examined who the “everywoman” that a recently unveiled sculpture in the UK was meant to represent feministgiant.substack.com/p/for-mary-wol…

“She’s everywoman and clothes would have restricted her... she’s more or less the shape we’d all like to be.”

Who the fuck is “we” and who the fuck is the “every” in that “everywoman” and why the fuck is she young and white?

📷 Jill Mead/The Guardian

If the Guerilla Girls asked in 1984 “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” then how much longer did we have to wait for women who are not white to not just get into that museum - as artists and subjects - but to stand atop the pedestal of public art?

I call “For Mary Wollstonecraft” the sculpture “For white women”: the latest installment in a parochial feud amongst white women over who owns white feminism,in which a white artist has given shape to a slim, white “everywoman” in homage to the white feminist “Mother of Feminism”

Only a white woman can so blithely say “everywoman” in the year 2020 and offer a slim white nude as its prototype in a country with a history of imposing Victorian Christian prudishness to shame colonized people whose public nudity was used against them.

To say “everywoman” is to ignore conventional notions of beauty that are born from white European colonial legacies, that hold up white femininity as the pinnacle of beauty, that promote whiteness as default.

You can trace Maggi Hambling’s “everywoman”  directly to Wollstonecraft’s 1792 pamphlet, A Vindication on the Rights of Woman, in which she compared the plight of white, middle class women she advocated for to slavery. Wollstonecraft was an abolitionist who was unable to see that

a white middle class British woman’s life, no matter how limited by sexism, wasn’t comparable to that of enslaved Black woman. She was as guilty of what white feminists continue to be guilty of: refusing to see how race, class & gender render “everywoman” a white woman’s fantasy.

To appreciate how anemic & parochial “For Mary Wollstonecraft” is, to see how public art can wrestle with all that “Mother of Feminism” & adherents did not, see Kara Walker.

The women Walker pays homage to are the women that Wollstonecraft didn’t see. Of course a Black woman knows patriarchy is more than sexism: it is colonization,capitalism, enslavement too.Of course an artist like Walker overwhelms your gaze so that you wonder who is looking at who

When will women who are not white be considered part of “everywoman” by women who are? And when will women who are not white and skinny be the colour and shape “we all want to be?” feministgiant.substack.com/p/for-mary-wol…

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