Welcome to the Department of Visual Arts

Visual Arts Department Statement Affirming Black Lives

We, the faculty and staff of the Visual Arts Department, affirm Black lives. The long history of state-sanctioned murder, violence, discrimination, and oppression of Black people in the United States – and elsewhere – has been ignored for too long. We are appalled by, and condemn the recent murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and too many other Black people by police and vigilantes. We mourn for them and for our broken society. 

We acknowledge that structural racism exists in federal and state institutions, including, but not limited to establishments dedicated to education, such as our own. As art historians and artists we understand the power and importance of images. We therefore acknowledge the urgency to do more to counter the images of anti-Blackness and the under-representation of Black voices that pervade our society and classrooms. Furthermore, we understand that the history of art is steeped in a Eurocentric perspective, and we vehemently reject the notion of European, or Western superiority over other cultures. Likewise, we reject the colonial ideologies and violence that led to the creation of the institution of the museum, whose galleries are filled with plunder from colonized peoples.

Now is the time for change. As a community of artists and scholars, this is an opportune time to include anti-racism in our work and our pedagogy.

The Visual Arts Department is committed to:

• Shining light in our classrooms and in our work on issues of racial inequality, injustice, and violence.
• Assessing our curriculum to address disciplinary silences, erasures, and institutional racism, and to foreground inclusion equity, and social justice
• Diversifying the faculty and hiring colleagues from racially underrepresented groups.
• Collaborating with, and supporting Black students and faculty and staff colleagues to make systemic changes on campus that make and sustain CSU Fullerton pro-Black spaces.
• Continuing to support anti-racist events and initiatives from our colleagues in the Institute of Black Intellectual Innovation, African American Studies, and other departments who specialize in African American, and cross-coalitional knowledge production.
• Collaborating with, and supporting the Institute of Black Intellectual Innovation, whose mission is to “...establish and institutionalize the support and inclusion of Black people, culture, creative arts, and intellectual history at California State University, Fullerton and throughout Orange County.” 
• Supporting our faculty to create spaces of healing for our students, faculty and staff who are experiencing racialized trauma and pain.
• Encouraging Art majors to incorporate electives from African American Studies.
• Supporting the Ethnic Studies degree graduation requirement on our campus and the CSU system.
• Calling out both subtle and explicit White supremacy and racism on our campus, at all levels of the university.
• Encouraging commitment to social justice and anti-racist pedagogy, praxis, and politics as a department.
• Holding university faculty and leaders accountable who speak “diversity and inclusion” but who often fail to support students or faculty of color in concrete ways. 

The Visual Arts Department will not enable a culture of white supremacy. Black lives matter. 

*Select items in the bulleted list of action items are borrowed with permission from the statement published by the CSUF’s Chicana and Chicano Studies Department.