Lesson #1: A Scrapbook/Journal-Create an ongoing personal repository for ideas, reflection and information.
Students and teacher keep a journal/scrapbook. By providing a non-threatening and secure environment, students are encouraged to participate in discussions. In addition to the discussion, a scrapbook/journal provides an outlet for a more personal, private expression. It also serves as a place to collect a variety of materials from drawings, magazine graphics to hand-outs, definitions, questions, comments, ideas, reflections, and concerns that can be shared with others. It also provides the students and teacher with a useful documentation of their process and evolution during the course of the unit.
Lesson #2: Stereotype Defined-Create a definition and rubric for identifying and interpreting stereotype.
Through class discussion, students write a definition of stereotype and begin to practice applying the stereotype definition to examples from everyday life: personal experience, television, advertising, school text books, comic books, art, and film. After creating their own definitions, students can refer to a standard dictionary such as the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language as a point of comparison. They would find stereotype defined as: “a conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image.” Or they might consult The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia and find: “stereotype, a prejudicial notion or set of notions a person uses to define members of an ethnic or other social group outside one’s own direct experience.” The class will develop a rubric from which they will be able to decode art and film and to analyze and reflect upon stereotype. The opening exercise in this lesson, which utilizes occupation descriptions as a first glimpse at stereotype, is also an icebreaker for the students since it is highly interactive. It sets the tone of friendly reciprocity in the search for knowledge.
Lesson #3: The One and Only Me, A Self-Portrait-Interpret meaning in a portrait and express unique, individual qualities through a self-portrait.
The use of symbols and keys in art is introduced. An artist must employ certain clues-body language, objects, color, symbols and setting to create a portrait which reveals the nature and character of the subject. Examples by well-known artists are used. It is important to provide an array of examples drawing on artists and portrait subjects of diverse cultures and heritage. From this point, students consider the problem of their own depiction, collecting and then selecting clues which communicate their individuality. Students must determine if they are choosing clues which are stereotypes or clues which truly demonstrate their identity. They must also spend time looking at their own image and contemplating and contrasting media’s often superficial image VS their own image. Through creation of the montage of images it is realized that a person is a complex entity. Madison Avenue, Hollywood and teachers for instance have ideas about youths. Now, with students in control of their own representation, what kind of statement is made?
Lesson #4: Get a Life! Rewriting and Redrawing the Lives of Well-Known Stereotype Characters in Advertising-Undo a familiar stereotype.
Having seized control of their own images, students move into another type of territory, that of racial stereotype and a derogatory image with a long history. This lesson demonstrates how Betye Saar and Faith Ringgold, two contemporary African American artists have transformed one of the most used racial stereotypes, the mammy-like Aunt Jemima.
Bogle describes this stereotype as an overweight and disagreeable character, emerging in the 1914 comedy,
Coon Town Suffragettes
:
“Mammy’s offshoot is the aunt jemima, sometime derogatorily referred to as ‘handkerchief head.’ Often aunt jemimas are toms blessed with religion or mammies who wedge themselves into the dominant white culture. Generally they are sweet, jolly and good tempered-a bit more polite than mammy and certainly never as headstrong. The maids in the Mae West films of the 1930’s fit snugly into this category.” (Bogle 9)
Film excerpts or stills could be used to illustrate how the mammy character was portrayed in film, making the connection between mammy and Aunt Jemima. Pictures of mammy/Aunt Jemima collectibles or statuettes also illustrate the point.
The mammy as Aunt Jemima, was the advertising strategy of a cake flour company which appropriated the character figurehead from a vaudeville act in 1889. The company hired a ‘spokesservant’ to promote their product at the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. “The new product was a success and so was its spokesservant. For many years [Nancy] Green toured the country promoting Aunt Jemima cake flour, until she died in an automobile accident in 1923 at the age of eighty-nine.” (Goings 28) Not only did the company hire Ms. Green and later others to personify their product’s namesake, but they further endowed this mythic stereotype with several versions of a biography and legend used in advertising campaigns. Aunt Jemima, the tale goes, was the jolly, happy former slave from the Higbee Plantation who was visited by her former master, Colonel Higbee for whom she dishes up plates of steaming pancakes. He buys her recipe so everyone can enjoy her delicious pancakes. (Goings 28-31)
An appropriated, recontextualized and transformed Aunt Jemima character speaks with a new voice to contemporary viewers through artists Betye Saar and Faith Ringgold in different ways. Saar uses her to make a political statement and Ringgold rewrites her biography.
Saar’s Aunt Jemima takes the form of a small (11 3/4x8x2 3/4 inches) but extremely powerful, mixed media shadow box entitled, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” [1972]. Much has been written on this piece.
It is described by Peter Clothier as “the stereotype of every(white)man’s good-natured servant was armed with a grenade and rifle.” (Clothier 22) For many years prior to making this artwork, Saar collected a variety of items including defamatory images of African Americans. “Among other things she [Saar] collected were images of blacks-the derogatory stereotypes which white Americans had used to objectify a guilt and fear whose roots reached back to the origin of the country’s wealth and power.” (Clothier 20-23) Lippard describes Saar’s use of these items in the late 1960s as “homeopathic.” Carefully utilizing measured doses of appropriated stereotypes in her work, Saar was able to use the stereotype against itself and against the racism which produced it. (Lippard 233)
Using a sophisticated compositional/art historical analysis of “The Liberation of aunt Jemima,” Lippard shows: ‘There are three levels of imagery and Aunt Jemimas here. The wallpaper is a Warhol-like grid of the ‘modern’ Jemima; the front plane is an antique stereotype in which a grinning woman holds and equally unattractive fat white baby casually under one arm; and in the middle, between past and present, stands a black, no-nonsense jemima with a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other. Saar has used the overall format of an altarpiece as a continued reference to the spirituality necessary to maintain the life force.” (Lippard 234) By comparison, Leslie Sills, children’s art writer describes the same art work for a youth audience. “Betye took pancake box labels showing Aunt Jemima’s face and pasted them like wallpaper on the inside back of a box. In front, she placed an Aunt Jemima doll holding a miniature broom and toy pistol in one hand and a toy rifle and hand grenade in the other. In front of the doll there is a postcard showing an Aunt Jemima carrying a crying white infant. A clenched black fist, the emblem of the Black Power movement, covers her skirt. The work is a strong warning: violence can erupt when people are not treated as human beings.” (Sills [1993] 37)
Faith Ringgold is best known for a genre of art she created, the story quilt. Sewn and painted on cloth, text panels recount stories and visual images move in a linear and at times not so linear path. The narrative, sequential quality of these works can be thought to bridge the gap between traditional visual art and film. In 1982 she began a story quilt dedicated to Aunt Jemima. Reproductions of the story quilt “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima” are not readily available, therefore, this lengthy description appears unedited.
With this quilt, entitled ‘Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima,’ Ringgold’s intention was to re-tell the story of the ‘most maligned black female stereotype and reveal the true story never told before.’ The quilt consists of 56 squares and combines frontal images of three-quarter length figures, squares of traditional quilting, and a narrative text which is fully integrated into the overall design. The story is a contemporary folk tale, written in traditional black dialect. It transforms the stereotype of Aunt Jemima into Jemima Blakey, a successful business woman, and tells her story and that of her family, parents husband, children, and grandchildren. The narrative combines elements of folk lore and anecdote with the African and West Indian Dilemma Tale, traditions Ringgold has absorbed from her mother’s storytelling. It mixes black and white people (Jemima’s son, ‘Lil Rufus . . . married a while gal, name a Margo he picked up in Germany, of all places, during the Korean War’). But, unlike traditional folk tales that use stock characters which are morally absolute, Ringgold’s tale does not make absolute judgments: all blacks are not good and all whites are not bad. Thus it questions our preconceptions. It also does not reach a clear conclusion. Rather it leaves us with a question to puzzle over as Dilemma Tales do. The heroine and her husband, Big Rufus, die in a fatal car accident ‘on the way to open they restaurant.’ Their good son, ‘Lil Rufus brought they bodies back to Harlem and give ‘em an African Funeral-Praise God!’ But their daughter and her husband that evil ‘ole Ugly man Dr. Jones,’ and ‘them worthless chirrun of hers’ got Jemima’s house and restaurant business in New Orleans. And the story concludes: ‘Now who’s afraid of Aunt Jemima? (Gouma-Peterson 23)
Utilizing Faith Ringgold’s example of rewriting a stereotypical character’s life as a story quilt, students do the same, identifying and then unraveling a myth, and then trying to rebuild a story which is not predictable or peopled with stereotypes.
This lesson can be extended to include a personal narrative quilt which explores the student’s identity and life experience. Amy Ruopp describes this process based on the work of Faith Ringgold in an article, “Narrative Drawing, A Study in Personal Histories” in SchoolArts.
Lesson #5: Recontextualization Photocollage-Critically examine ideas about stereotype by recontextualizing, reversing and manipulating appropriated images.
[Robert] Colescott has transformed many of art history’s ‘sacred cows’ with a broad humor that veils rage. The pregnant wife in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnulfini wedding portrait becomes a black woman. George Washington Crossing the Delaware is replaced by his namesake Mr. Carver and a boatload of grinning black stereotypes, including Aunt Jemima again. In the 1976 ‘Homage to Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People,’ Liberty herself is led by a black drummer boy. Van Gogh’s ‘Potato Eaters’ is transported to a southern milieu in ‘Eat Dem Taters,’ and where Van Gogh’s Dutch peasants look miserably resigned, the black sharecroppers are grinning their heads off, as required. In a classic reversal, Colescott offers ‘Shirley Temple Black and Bill Robinson White,’ in which Shirley Temple and Bojangles switch races and expose the incongruity of the black and white role. (Lippard 238-9)
An informed student who has been exposed to basic art history and African American history will be able to begin to realize the controversial yet important work of the African American artist, Robert Colescott. Colescott paints crude, cartoon-like copies of famous paintings from Western art history, replacing the white characters with black characters portrayed in a stereotypical, racist style. Colescott does have a sense of humor and irony, which is a relief when viewing these very confrontation paintings which display disgusting racial stereotypes so blatantly. His modus operandi is to shock. He paintings are garishly colored, exaggerated, frightening and perverse. It would be insensitive to use examples from Colescott’s oeuvre with students without a responsible preface, intermittent explanations, and follow-up debriefing. Even with the most cautious presentation, misunderstandings may persist. Expect responses to be diverse and extreme. It is very difficult for students to use Colescott’s techniques of appropriation and manipulation of images because young people simply lack the breadth of knowledge and experience necessary. However, this important American artist is synonymous with art and stereotype and should not be omitted from a unit of this type. A simple exercise in which students select a well-known art icon such as “Mona Lisa” and color a photocopy of her with a brown complexion, contemplating the impact this painting would have had, had it been the portrait of an African woman makes an important point. The Shirley Temple/Bill Robinson paintings would be appreciated by contextualizing these actors using the film
The Littlest Rebel
.
Few resources are currently available on Robert Colescott, especially material for youths. There is a videotape,
Robert Colescott
which requires careful selection of excerpts and an article in Art in America. Since Colescott has been selected to represent the United States at the 1997 Venice Biennale, more information will soon become available.
Lesson #6: Heritage Shadow Box—Select and utilize culturally significant objects and symbols in an artwork.
Betye Saar is revisited in this lesson. Her distinctive assemblage and shadow box styles and collections of culturally significant objects are interpreted and then used as a model for student art work. Saar combines a variety of natural objects such as bone, hair, rocks, and seeds with cultural artifacts like beads, cloth, postcards, mirrors, candles and photographs. By placing them together, she creates more than a sum of the parts. Magic, fortune telling and visionary experience inform her work. These collections of materials, framed in an old window, in a box, as an altarpiece gather energy and power.
Betye Saar gives recycling a larger meaning, transforming ordinary, often discarded materials into extraordinary works of art. Reflecting the lives and spirits of many people, these materials possess an energy. Betye captures and combines their energy to create artwork charged with spiritual power. The viewer feels connected to her work whether she is using objects from Africa, Asia, Mexico, the Caribbean, or the United States. In Betye Saar’s art, all peoples, all races, are united. (Sills [1993] 43)
By examining and considering the cultural implications of objects and artifacts, students must gather, reflect, sort, and choose fragments and pieces, natural and appropriated, endowing them with meaning and power in relation to their own life experience. The resulting artwork should be a highly personal reflection of the individual’s culture and heritage assembled with sensitivity to composition and the power of the juxtaposition of objects.
The videotape,
Betye and Alison Saar: Conjure Women of the Arts
(Linda Freeman 1995) shows Saar at work and illustrates her techniques and ideas. Usually students view art as an end product. The videotape demonstrates the artistic process-brainstorming ideas, planning, creating and reflecting. It is a good model for practice. Students see that art is not just a product but the result of a process which continues with the viewer. Students can identify and reflect upon the process in which they are currently engaged.
Lesson #7: Film Evaluation/Posters-Reflect upon stereotype VS authentic film characters.
Having done five films in six years, I know for sure I cannot keep up this pace, it could kill me. The reason for this pace is simple: historically, black filmmakers have found it extremely hard to go from film to film. I didn’t want a long layoff between films. When things are clicking, ya gotta stay with it. So many of our stories are yet to be told, and I am getting a shot to tell the ones I know in films. Cinema is the most important thing in my life, and I have been given unique opportunities to have full creative control on films that I want to make. I can’t turn that down. (Lee [1991] 17)
Several examples of stereotype in early film are contrasted against the depiction of authentic characters and stories in excerpts from certain of Spike Lee’s films.
Crooklyn
(1994) is considered in its entirety and used for discussion. A character from
Crooklyn
is used as the subject of a poster. The depiction of family life as observed through the eyes of the wise, ten year old girl hero make this Lee film an appropriate choice for use with middle school students.
According to Lee, the Carmichaels, depicted in
Crooklyn
, are an ordinary family bearing similarities to his own family. The characters do not fit the stereotypes held about African Americans. On
Crooklyn
, Lee said, “I wanted to show that, despite what White America thinks, there’s at least
one
family-one family in [a] Hollywood [film] this year, anyway-where both parents are
there
, where the family’s not on welfare, the son’s aren’t rapist and muggers, and the daughters aren’t getting pregnant at the age of eight. [The Carmichaels] are a normal family who fight and fuss and love. But they are not dysfunctional.” (Hardy 111) Working within the overall theme of family, Lee sensitively weaves motifs of growth, relationships and loss. This African American family works through the same type of issues as any family. The context is African American, the message is a universal American experience.
Mr. Lee’s fond evocation of a lost time and place, the Brooklyn of the early 1970’s, becomes a means of conjuring up intense feelings of loss among his school-age characters. After meandering boisterously through much of the first half, ‘Crooklyn’ finally toughens up with the advent of a family tragedy, and shows how its principals are strengthened despite their loss. (Maslin)
The two-parent, middle class Carmichael family of ‘Crooklyn’ is conspicuously abnormal, at least among black families in American films. Despite its title, the story unfolds in a safe neighborhood where the father, Woody (Delroy Lindo), drinks Pepsi, the children play hopscotch and everyone eats healthy meals, though not without a lot of back talk about vegetables. (Maslin)
Alfre Woodard appears as Carolyn, the family’s formidable mother, and along with Mr. Lindo she helps give the material much-needed ballast. This film’s portrait of a marriage is hazily constructed, but each parent emerges as a forceful, compelling character. There’s a particular honesty in the depiction of Carolyn as both loving mother and furiously stern taskmaster; at one point she drags the children out of bed because they forgot to clean up the kitchen. That behavior may not make sense, but it feels real. (Maslin)
After
Crooklyn
is viewed and discussed by the class, students create a poster based on a character from the film. Reviewing and then utilizing the principals of poster making from slogans, lettering, illustration, symbolism, color, and emphasis, students must make a number of creative decisions and use critical analysis in order to complete the assignment effectively. Using a lesson from an art text on poster making and following a systematic, analytical poster making process is helpful for most students. Viewing and analyzing movie poster art, movie advertising and video box covers (which are very similar to movie posters), sets the expectation and helps students connect the intellectual operation and content with the visual content.
Reading
Spike Lee, Filmmaker
as an supplementary part of this lesson would fill in many gaps in the history of African American filmmaking, and the life and work of Mr. Lee.
In addition to
Crooklyn
, students will view one contemporary film or television show independently and analyze it in terms of representation of race in the characters and story by creating a poster. This final project summarizes, synthesizes and puts to the test the student’s ability to see critically and then restate using and manipulating words and images what has been seen, observed and understood about a character.
The group of lessons which comprise this unit progress in a developmental way to lay groundwork for critical thinking and reflection on the idea of identity and representation of the individual in art and film, to consider the self in relation to society, to consider others in relation to self and finally to have insight and understanding about the portrayal of people in film and art. The journal/scapbook which serve as an ongoing record and diary of the student’s and teacher’s progressive journey, along with the art work completed throughout the course of this unit are the concrete evidence that a meaningful process took place. Acknowledging, contemplating and acting upon issues addressed in class should lead to the application of these lessons in the future, to probe the deeper meaning and motivation of representation in movies and art.
