Harvard history professor Sarah Lewis will deliver this Sunday's Westcott Lecture at the John Legend Theater in Springfield, exploring how visual culture and the arts shape American democracy and belonging.
Lewis, founder of the "Vision and Justice" civic initiative, generates research and programs examining what she describes as the foundational role of visual culture in America's representational democracy. Here are excerpts from an interview Lewis did with WYSO's Lee Wade before the event.
Sarah Lewis: “Creativity, the arts, is often seen as this luxury and respite from life. But what's central to all the work I do is showing the historic examples and urgent contemporary ones, like what you've just raised, how critical visuality, how critical media, how critical culture is for defining who counts and who belongs in American life. So yes, we will touch on recent politics in not only the local community in Ohio, but the national narrative that it has become. And we'll do so in a way that lets us think through the hidden and, I think, underappreciated tactics for redefining the civic imagination, namely the work of culture and the work of the arts.”
Lee Wade: The Vision and Justice initiative looks at how art shapes who we see as part of the American story. What sparked that idea for you, and why does it feel especially timely today?”
Lewis: Vision and Justice began with the publication of the aperture issue in 2016 and the Vision and Justice course at Harvard. I asked myself this question that was inspired by my grandfather, the work of Patrick Douglas, many other leaders.
What is the role of art and culture for the democratic imagination for defining who counts and who belongs? I had this prompt really given to me by my grandfather. He was in a New York City public school in the 11th grade and wanted to know why the textbooks in that year of 1926 didn't present the world around them as it was in Brooklyn, New York. And the teacher told him that African Americans in particular did nothing to merit inclusion in those textbooks.
And so he was expelled for his so-called impertinence and refusing to accept that answer. He became an artist, a visual artist, sort of a proto-candewile, like creating these genre paintings where he knew he should be able to find in those textbooks, where he presented the world as it exists fully. And he also became a jazz musician. And when I graduated from Harvard and he died, I didn't know why my grandfather had never graduated from high school.
I didn't know this story and was told. And it seemed to me that he was asking the central question as he became an artist, what is the work of being seen justly for representational democracy? What is the role of visual representation in the democratic imagination? And he really sacrificed to stand up for the answer that, yes, it matters far more than we've understood. And that prompted the journey That prompted my understanding of Frederick Douglass' speech, pictures in progress, which languished after being so carefully preserved in the Library of Congress for over 150 years, with no one really understanding what Douglass took pains to explain during the Civil War, that pictures, that images, that culture were going to be the way to correct the dehumanized gaze that was conditioned through slavery.
The crisis of regard were still in today, the near inability to see the other as just like you. He became the most photographed American man as a result, you know, putting before us an image of a self-possessed black man when the Constitution stated that, you know, we as African Americans were three fifths human beings. So I started to research the foundations of this idea and launched the initiative, which is now radial through publications and public programs and the course at Harvard, to address the historic foundations of this concept and how it emerges in contemporary life through not just artistic practice, but through political initiatives of all kinds.
Wade: What do you hope people walk away with after attending your lecture?
Lewis: “Inspired, empowered, with a call to action to address the work of art, creativity, and their own vision for imagining the more just future that we all deserve.”
The free public event takes place on Sunday, November 16, at the John Legend Theater in Springfield. Doors open at 3:30 PM.
