3 artists pushing back against colonialism by using the tools of their colonizers

Hi guys! I'm Professor Lise (not really a professor) and this is Art 101 (not really a class). We're here to go on a deep dive of an idea, an artwork, or a story from the art world that's controversial, inexplicable or just plain weird.

Today on Art 101, we're going to talk about what happens when artists use the tools of colonialism to push back against their colonizers.

In the image above is a lady wearing a batik dress and shooting cherry blossoms out of a gun. It's by a British artist named Yinka Shonibare CBE (that means Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). What do the dress and the gun mean? Both are souvenirs of colonialism.

Yinka Shonibare was born in London and raised in Nigeria, and he moved back to England where he went to art school. In a lot of his works, you'll see people dressed in these batik fabrics. These are patterns that people have often considered as generally "African." Why'd we think that? Because the history of colonialism is insidious and has often given us some bad intel.

But Shonibare's pointing at the actual history of the fabric, which is not actually African at all. It was inspired by designs in Dutch Indonesia, produced in England and then sold back to West African colonized lands. By the 1960s, it had become not only known as an "African" looking fabric, it was actually considered a symbol of African independence and culture — by Africans!

By inserting it into his sculptures, Shonibare uses his art to wake us up to some of the things we don't know about colonialism and to challenge some of the things we think we do.

Canada has its own long history of colonialism. Kent Monkman, a Cree Canadian painter, has taken on this history using a language we might be familiar with: massive paintings that usually feature political, biblical or historical events. You know the kind — they might depict the French Revolution, or a raft lost at sea.

Monkman turns this genre on its head in the most disturbing ways, like in "The Scoop," his painting from 2018. The colours and the arrangement of figures mimic the huge paintings we're used to seeing. But what's actually happening on the canvas is something much more terrible: the kidnapping of Indigenous children from their parents and their homes to be taken to residential school where they were cut off from their language, culture and families.

By making this work, Kent Monkman uses a form of painting that's usually state-sanctioned and that usually celebrates colonial triumph to expose the evil reality of colonialism.

Brian Jungen is another artist who's used unusual methods to point to the history of colonialism, commodification and culture. His sculptures look like intricate masks from the northwest coast of Canada. They have faces, eyes, even real hair — but closer up, you find out they are made out of Nike Air Jordans. Jungen says his art fights against "the trap of racial pigeon-holing" while it makes references to racism, cultural stereotypes and even the sweatshops in which mass market products often get made.

One of the best services art can do is take a simple idea and make it nuanced, or make a complicated idea something we can get our minds around — or our feelings.

And then there's "Primitivism."

Remember Picasso? His "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" from 1907 was based on a series of Iberian masks he saw at a museum. Picasso's love of them was part of a pretty insidious way of seeing art of other cultures — African, Asian, Near Eastern — as "primitive," made by people who were less connected to technology and more connected to nature, sexuality, even violence.

This way that many white Europeans saw the cultures they were busy colonizing made its way into all kinds of art before and after Picasso. And because part of the way we learn about culture is from art, ideas of primitivism or about myths about other cultures sort of sneakily made their way into the minds of generations of art viewers. Art is a trickstery little game that way.

Jungen, Shonibare, Monkman — these artists all make works that question narratives of colonialism, racism and misunderstanding or appropriation of other cultures in a way a textbook just can't. And by doing so, they give us a chance to change how we take in and how we question history.

See you next time for more Art 101!