And Now a Return to Ourselves: Working toward an Ancestor Reverence Pedagogy

Abstract

Abstract:The narratives, knowledges, and representations in the canon of fine art practice often proclaim to introduce students to new ways of making in environments steeped with criticality. This discourse fails to include Indigenous and embodied knowledges as part of their canons. This erasure is normalized and rarely questioned, and it reproduces an imperial, aesthetic arrogance. Traditional fine art pedagogies must expand. Social media provides multitudes of examples of the increasing awareness and reclaiming of ancestral traditions in efforts to heal colonial trauma. African and other Indigenous aesthetics are then often co-opted, packaged, marketed, sold to the public. The majority of these initial processes are often conducted by artists who work in the commercial arena. This article opens inquiries of fine art pedagogy and processes that disrupt, problematize, challenge, and transform its colonial educational model by employing decolonial knowledges. This article shares a five-step pedagogical process as a working example of how we can intentionally teach ritual in a fine arts institution while orienting ourselves against the epistemic violence of cultural appropriation often featured in the work produced by fine art students. The urge to separate indigeneity and marginalized identities from their histories and geographies is situated at the heart of modernity, a territory designating which knowledges are legitimate, legible, and visible. Using decolonial love as the framework for an ancestor reverence pedagogy, this article does not provide an answer but instead offers an embodied approach from the margins of rejection to resist the hegemony of fine art pedagogy.