Seeing Beauty in Difference

Seeing Beauty in Difference

Juliette Harris

Hampton University Museum

The Seeing Beauty in Difference project draws from visual arts insights and resources to improve people’s lives in a way that is usually not articulated and addressed by an art publication ─  in a way, moreover, that largely goes unaddressed in society.  In the book, Beautiful Ugly, South African cultural studies scholar Sarah Nutall describes the basic problem that we seek to address: “…it is the ugly which has so often been the sign under which the African has been read.”  

The perceived ugliness of the African appearance underlies a long history of aesthetic bias in the West.  While the perception of African ugliness has been challenged and, with varying degrees of success, offset by highly visible black male figures in entertainment, athletics, the professions, business and politics, it still governs how black women are perceived by others and how black women perceive themselves.

The “adaptive challenge” that we face is to augment the IRAAA+ webzine’s core mission to cover the visual arts with two new components designed to address a paradoxical social problem that has no obvious solutions.  The two new components will be interactive web platforms on, and from, which visual artists and arts professionals will: 1) grapple with how to formulate a more pluralistic philosophy of personal beauty; 2) figure out how to promote healing for women who have been adversely affected by a singular, aesthetic hegemony; 3) develop ways to implement pluralistic beauty strategies; and 4) promote public awareness about this problem and approaches to resolving it.  

Seeing Beauty in Difference can serve as a model for resolving comparable problems related to the aesthetics of physical difference that impact other populations.

Today, the standard perception of black feminine beauty is based on a diminution of the Africoid aspects of black women’s physical features. The most immediate consequence of this perception range from the delusion to the frustration of prototypically African-looking women trying to achieve a beauty that is impossible for them.  This perception, in varying degrees, affects black women who have a combination of African features and other features. The paradoxical aspect of the problem is that it is a problem confounded by the diversity of the physical features of African Diaspora people.  African-descended people range from African to Caucasian in appearance and this broad range of appearance complicates the development of a self-affirming African American feminine aesthetic.  

Our vision for the success of the initiative is (1) to unpack the confounding dimensions of the paradox and develop an aesthetic philosophy for black people who conceive of themselves as a racially-identified group and yet who have broadly-ranging physical characteristics. This aesthetic manifesto would be formulated from an intergenerational conversation between art experts and the broader population. The manifesto would be both assertive and flexible and amendable in its development of aesthetic principles that augment the European classical aesthetic definitions of beauty (fineness of facial features and hair texture, regular proportions, symmetry, fair complexion) with more contemporary and pluralistic definitions that can be applied to African characteristics such as broad noses, full lips, kinky hair and deeply pigmented skin. (2) Show the psychological havoc that the traditional Western aesthetic hegemony has wreaked on people from non-Western cultures  (3) Demonstrate how a more inclusive aesthetic can be implemented, and encourage its implementation, and (4) Reach influential, non-black professionals whose thinking and clients would be exposed to the aesthetic manifesto and jumpstart further discussion among us. These non-black stakeholders include people such as the University of Pennsylvania women studies professor who, in contributing to Sarah Nutall’s Beautiful Ugly anthology, described two black, South African women in this way: “They are not, in my view, pretty.”  She was referring to the women in the photo that is shown on this page.

According to a broader aesthetic, these young women are very striking looking. The hair of the woman on the left has an extraordinary texture (especially, from a sculptural point of view) and the darker-skinned woman on the right is gorgeous, despite the duress that she was suffering when the photo was taken.  

Our project is called “Seeing Beauty in Difference.” If successful, it can serve as a model for similar projects directed towards women in other racial and ethnic groups and to all people who are identified  by categories of difference such as “older” and “disabled.”


The assumption that the IRAAA must cover art for art’s sake and not have a social outreach dimension as part of its mission and business plan also is being overturned by the demonstrated success (in terms of profitability, public relations and publicity) of socially responsible businesses.

The assumption that we should maintain a laser-like focus on fine art also is called in to question by the dissolving boundaries between the fine arts, craft arts and digital arts and the rise of “conceptual art” which can take any form.  Art, after all, can be anything done with originality and skillful technique.  The art of seeing one’s own body as a personal work of art in progress corresponds to larger trends in the art world of basing exhibitions on personal themes such as fashion and hair.  
 
Seeing Beauty in Difference also questions the assumption of that the application of the visual arts as a social tool is an outworn approach from the “Black Consciousness” era. This era produced a propagandistic, populist art of fine sistas with big ‘fros, dashiki-clad brothas with raised fists and romanticized scenes of the African motherland, and discouraged more individualistic expression on the part of black artists. The high tech, innovation-oriented, hip-hop influenced, and globalistic ethos of these times is shaping a new aesthetic sensibility, and calling the ‘70s movement into question.  We recognize that the art applied to social issues affecting black people and similarly-situated others will emanate in part from this new sensibility and also from an art appreciation not derived from a doctrinaire, propagandistic ideology.


The bold new direction that we imagine for the IRAAA is the Seeing Beauty in Difference