An extract from bell hooks’s ‘Art on My Mind’

bell hooks’s Art on My Mind, reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic this week, is a collection of essays, critiques and interviews, exploring topics ranging from art in education and the home to the politics of space and imagination as a revolutionary tool. In this extract, taken from the title essay, hooks looks back on her own early experiences of the transformative power of art.

 

In high school I painted pictures that won prizes. My art teacher, a white man whom we called Mr Harold, always promoted and encouraged my work. I can still remember him praising me in front of my parents. To them art was play. It was not something real – not a way to make a living. To them I was not a talented artist because I could not draw the kind of pictures that I would now call documentary portraits. The images I painted never looked like our familiar world and therefore I could not be an artist. And even though Mr Harold told me I was an artist, I really could not believe him. I had been taught to believe that no white person in this newly desegregated high school knew anything about what black people’s real lives were all about. After all, they did not even want to teach us. How, then, could we trust what they taught? It did not matter that Mr Harold was different. It did not matter to grown folks that in his art classes he treated black students like we had a right to be there, deserved his attention and his affirmation. It did not matter to them, but it began to matter to us: We ran to his classes. We escaped there. We entered the world of color, the free world of art. And in that world we were, momentarily, whatever we wanted to be. That was my initiation. I longed to be an artist, but whenever I hinted that I might be an artist, grown folks looked at me with contempt. They told me I had to be out of my mind thinking that black folks could be artists – why, you could not eat art. Nothing folks said changed my longing to enter the world of art and be free.

Life taught me that being an artist was dangerous. The one grown black person I met who made art lived in a Chicago basement. A distant relative of my father’s, cousin Schuyler was talked about as someone who had wasted his life dreaming about art. He was lonely, sad, and broke. At least that was how folks saw him. I do not know how he saw himself, only that he loved art. He loved to talk about it. And there in the dark shadows of his basement world he initiated me into critical thinking about art and culture. Cousin Schuyler talked to me about art in a grown-up way. He said he knew I had ‘the feeling’ for art. And he chose me to be his witness: to be the one who would always remember the images. He painted pictures of naked black women, with full breasts, red lips, and big hips. Long before Paul Gauguin’s images of big-boned naked brown women found a place in my visual universe, I had been taught to hold such images close, to look at art and think about it, to keep art on my mind.

Extracted from Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks (Penguin Classics, £10.99)