Building a Community Through Performance
Performance art can seem intimidating to the casual art viewer—it even has its own history and specialized vocabulary. But what happens when artists use performance as a direct way of engaging underrepresented audiences? Can a medium often considered high art be used as a rallying cry? Several members of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts have been approaching these issues in exhibitions that reach beyond art's traditional setting in the gallery.
Danielle Abrams, Professor of the Practice at SMFA at Tufts, addresses issues of access and visibility. Her practice grew through joining communities, collaborating in an underground scene, and engaging with non-profit spaces that mixed theater, performance, literature, dance, and social activism. Raised by a white Jewish college-educated mother and a labor-class African American father in culturally-mixed Flushing, New York, Danielle learned early to navigate radically different cultural spaces. Rather than thinking of her art as purely centered in the gallery, she employed "art as a decoy for social activism"—teaching art in underfunded high schools and community colleges, working with inmates in prisons, and letting her performance characters loose in the world at large. Danielle's piece 'Rules to Follow When You Are a Really Light-Skinned Black Person' took the form of a riff on ill-defined notions of "white-blackness and black-whiteness" and, ultimately, tactics for creating systems of living in the world.
Alicia Rodriguez Alvisa, BFA '18 grew up in Cuba as the daughter of visual artists and made her way to SMFA at Tufts as an international student. When she arrived in the US she began to think of herself for the first time as a person of color. She was interested in representations of race and gender in art and explored these themes through her work as a photographer. Quickly her work started to center around her own body as a representation of her cultural background. Presenting herself as diverging from the "European standard of beauty" meant that she could reach women with different ideas about beauty, capability, and strength—creating "newer and better conversations around women-artists, race, and status." Her work blends extensive research with humor and everyday activities like hair-braiding and fitness routines to connect with the widest audience possible. Alicia began exploring performance after taking a class with Danielle. The relationship they began in the classroom led Danielle to invite Alicia to participate in STAND UP, an exhibition she co-curated at Gallery Kayafas in Boston this July.
STAND UP focused on women and non-gender conforming artists, with an emphasis on people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and immigrants as groups that disproportionately lack visibility in galleries and museum collections. Donning a muscle suit and high heels for her piece 'I Can Look Strong,' Alicia proceeded to lift weights while addressing the audience, at first conversationally, about machismo and gender stereotypes. As she unfurled a golden scroll, her talk turned to numbers like the percentage of pieces by women-artists in permanent collections, the percentage of women among gallery-represented artists, the number of women in museum directorships. Her performance ended by offering a toast to the crowd celebrating women’s voices, the voices of minorities, and a call to get involved.
Both of these artists are working toward building a broader community. Danielle explained, "Being an artist doesn't mean you’re being an artist by yourself. You have allies and you need to be an ally." These practices give us a vision of performance art reaching beyond the gallery audience, making real connections to communities, and driving social change.