Author: Marit Dewhurst
Marit Dewhurst (she/her) is the Director of Art Education and Associate Professor of Art and Museum Education at The City College of New York. She has worked as an arts educator and program coordinator in multiple arts contexts including community centers, museums, juvenile detention centers, and international development projects. Prior to joining the faculty at CCNY, she directed The Museum of Modern Art’s free studio art programs for teens. Her research and teaching interests include social justice education, community-based art, youth empowerment, anti-racist teaching, and the role of the arts in community development. Building on her work with teen programs in museums, she co-founded and worked closely with the Museum Teen Summit, a youth-led museum advocacy group. In addition to multiple journal articles and chapters, her first book, Social Justice Art: A framework for activist art pedagogy highlights how young activist artists make art to affect their communities. Her second book, Teachers Bridging Difference: Exploring identity through art describes how educators can use art to better understand themselves and their connections with people across different sociocultural identities.
An additional note on identity
Writing and teaching about identity has taught me much about how we awkwardly bump into each other as we learn to understand, analyze, and connect with our many identities. I regularly make mistakes in my teaching (many are documented in this book). If I’m lucky, I recognize them myself or have a student or colleague point them out so I can try to readjust (thank you, thank you). But certainly many mistakes are caught in my own blind spots. I am a straight, able-bodied (for now), white, Christian-raised, cis-woman from an academically rich background, born in Michigan to rising middle-class American citizens, and living in New York City; my blind spots are admittedly large. Like many people from dominant identity groups who work toward racial, gender, and social justice, I struggle to unravel the privileges and powers given to me by a society built on oppressing people based on their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, citizenship, class, ability, and whatever other categories it can find. To engage educators in conversations about power and privilege, I too must be willing to be vulnerable, honest, and ever critical of the work we are trying to do. I try to be supportive while also holding us all—myself included—accountable to each other and to the communities with which we work. But however hard I try to be flexible, nimble, responsive, compassionate, patient, self-critical, analytical, and loving, I am, like my students, a product of the social systems that dominate our society. As I’ve tried to do in class, in writing this book I will do my best to point out my mistakes and those I try to avoid. I invite readers to shed light on any of the blind spots I’ve neglected.
