Ansel Adams
“Half Dome, Merced River, Winter, Yosemite National Park, California,” ca. 1838.
Last week, Yale University Art Gallery fellow and PhD candidate LaTanya Autry joined Chris Brubeck, NHSO’s current artist in residence, to discuss several monumental photos by Ansel Adams, whose work has captivated Brubeck for several years.
The photographs are stunning, even in their original size. Sheer rock faces jut out to greet the viewer. Large, unrollable boulders at Manzanar refuse to let the viewer completely enter the image. Sand dunes take on new elegance as they flirt with symbolism and nonrepresentation. But what interested me more about the lecture was the way Autry introduced them: as inherently political texts, fascinating to her as a social art historian.
Here’s a dirty little secret. I studied art history through my MA, and it’s easy to become socially disengaged after hours of research in the library. Really, really easy.
Contributed Photo
Autry.
It’s possible to be a compassionate and open scholar, with work geared toward public history and the public itself. But the academy doesn’t always smile on it, and if public work takes burgeoning academics away from peer-reviewed publishing opportunities, they just about frown. So I was curious to know exactly what she meant by socially engaged, and how her practice was applied outside of the university. On Friday, we sat down in her cozy York Street office to get to the bottom of her practice.
Lucy Gellman: Let’s start at the beginning. For you, what does it mean to be a socially conscious or socially motivated art historian?
LaTanya Autry: It’s just about keeping it real. Keeping connections with my own upbringing, using what I learn in graduate school to help everyday people, regular folks. I’m interested in going past the academy, I want to teach not just students, but anyone who is interested in visual culture and art … it should be for everybody.
LG: Okay. So how do you see the academy in its current iteration?
LA: There are some programs that encourage students to be publicly active, to be publicly engaged … but that’s rare. Especially knowing programs in art history, it is not a common orientation or typical for students to want to be connected to other people. Especially in terms of using what they’re learning in PhD programs and applying that in broad ways … really not the attitude, and I think that’s unfortunate.
Ansel Adams
“Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California,” 1944.
LG: And do you see that — your place as a graduate student, but also a museum fellow — tying into your responsibility to straddle academic and public worlds or spheres? Sometimes I almost feel like the two are butting heads with each other.
LA: Definitely!… I enjoy interacting with the public. I think a lot of time what happens is [academic] departments say “Well, we have these talks, and the public is welcome to come to it,” but do we actually try to get people to come? Usually we don’t. If you really want to get people to come to our events, you should be bringing those events to people, for instance local libraries, instead of expecting them to show up on a campus and a lecture hall. It’s on the academic’s terms … in our house, in our yard. There are rules in place, certain codes of behavior, and they [academics] don’t encourage people from the outside to be in dialogue with students.
LG: I think that we’ve seen that in New Haven — if an institution says the door is open, that doesn’t specifically mean people will come. How are you engaging the public? How are you trying to fight what you’re seeing?
LA: You have to build bridges, and listen to people, work with them. I’ve learned that through my own graduate research — I’m studying how people memorialize lynching violence across the country, and what I’ve found is that a lot of these memorial practices … a lot of times, they’re coming out of local communities and activist groups. They don’t come from an art orientation. Some people I know wouldn’t even study this material, they think “well, if it isn’t an artist, it’s not art.” But most artistic practices and especially memorial are not specifically done by artists.
Going out and interviewing people on site … I found that people aren’t necessarily open to answering questions from me as a researcher. I found that people sometimes are reluctant to even talk to someone who is a PhD student, there was this feeling of “oh, she’s an art historian, she’s going to come in and judge our work and then write negative things about it and then she’s out of here.” That was a problem, and I try to do my research [now] in a way that’s more collaborative…. I try to share with people, to have a dialogue, and to give back to people. I feel like I should be giving that research back to them. I wanted to get out of that silo of researching people as subjects.
LG: We’re in this weird place here, then — this inherently academic institution that should serve a very public role and is learning to slowly. You’re working on a show of photography right now; as a curator, do you see yourself redefining what art history is a little bit?
LA: I hope so. I encourage students and researchers to go that route as well. I went to this conference in October, and someone put out the idea of working publicly itself as a process. There’s always this attitude of “I work with the public.” No — we need to think of our work as public. It’s a process.
LG: When Adams published Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail in 1936, it wasn’t supposed to have this political connotation … at least, that’s what he said … but it did. Do you see a lot of the things you’re working with, even those devoid of inherent political meaning, as political texts? Is that how you’ve started viewing your world?
LA: Definitely. Of course! People need to get past having one mindset of what images mean, it’s not just what artists intended or what they say that they think it means. I hope people understand by now that there are multiple players; like the book Viewers Make Meaning. People need to get out of the artist’s head … there are so many people involved. Ansel Adams‘ work really was political … it’s political and socially oriented. It always was.
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Yale, to its credit, offers a wide range of events and resources such as the YUAG to the public free of charge. Yet my experience is that the overwhelming majority of the folks who attend are middle-aged or older white folk (my demographic, FWIW). Part of this is a function of economic realities; retirees can attend a gallery talk scheduled at 12:30 while most working people can't. But I think that Yale can and should do a better job at reaching out to the broader community.