SAIC Event Focuses on Students and Faculty’s Work Regarding Histories of Art and Design Therapy
SAIC's cover image for their virtual event series, "Decolonizing Art History: Research Under Lockdown," features Malangatana Ngwenya's artwork The Last Judgement, 1961. (Photo/Malangatana Ngwenya)
The School at the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) hosted an event series that lasted from September until early December titled “Decolonizing Art History: Research Under Lockdown” featuring various aspects of art history.
Throughout the event series, topics regarding different aspects of art history were discussed. The series began with Nora Taylor’s lecture titled “Nikhil Chopra: Decolonizing the Met Through Performance.” She read and discussed the paper she had written on the subject.
Later in the series, on Nov. 12, various students and faculty members from the Art History Department of SAIC held a lecture titled “Art and Design Therapy: Activist Histories.” The event was hosted by both Bess Williamson, an associate professor in art history theory at the SAIC, and Leiah Gipson, an assistant professor and the Program Director of the Master of Arts in the Art Therapy and Counseling program at the SAIC.
Bess Williamson focuses her lecture on the Black and feminist histories of design and care and the seeking of alternative histories of design.
“Women were trained in professional design skills, including drafting and spatial planning, selection and adaptation of technologies, and other aspects of managing people and things,” says Williamson.
Williamson continues, “As early as the 1920s, occupational therapists and home economists devised means of participatory and customized designs simultaneously adopting tools of scientific precision, and stressing the need to adapt them to a variety of people and stressing the need to adapt them to a variety of people and circumstances.”
Her project not only focuses on the definitions of the world of design, but it aims to talk about the professional fields with design histories that heavily include women, especially women of color and disabled women.
Williamson states that people were making spaces for those with disabilities, decades before laws like the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 were passed.
According to the National Park Services, various disability advocacy groups were dedicated to making life easier for those with disabilities. For example, in 1950, several of these groups came together to form the National Association for R*tarded Children (NARC). By the end of the decade, NARC had thousands, many of which were parents. Those parents were searching and advocating for alternative forms of care and education.
Williamson states, “The feminist history of design, too, has often focused on gender as an area of sharp distinction between producers and consumers. White men depicted as makers and planners, white women as shoppers and users, occasionally tastemakers or mediators.”
This history tends to not include Black women and other women of color as either producers or users of design. Despite recent efforts for equity and diversity, Williamson says that disability is rarely a demographic within design professions.
Williamson finishes her lecture by urging the scales of home economics to provide a history that accurately addresses the “care of its star.”
If anyone wants to view any of the lectures for themselves, they should email either Nicolay Duque-Robayo or Sophie Buchmueller.