The Price of Admission: Race, Multiculturalism, and the Visual Arts
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History of Art
First Advisor
Ferguson, Roderick
Abstract
This dissertation examines a series of artist and exhibition case studies to investigate the contested rise of multiculturalism in the U.S. visual arts. Ranging from the early 1970s through the early 1990s, these case studies offer, on the one hand, possible versions of multiculturalism that might have been––they are lesser-known or have notably lacked scholarly attention. On the other hand, they each also build out a picture of how the uptake of multiculturalism in the museum and the academy enabled race-thinking and racism to persist in the presentation and study of art in the U.S. In the reception of these exhibitions and practices, issues of racial representation are frequently displaced onto debates about aesthetics, while debates about aesthetic form often harbor implicit and explicit forms of race-thinking. Focalizing the entanglement between the racial and the visual, the project elaborates the art field’s contributions to multiculturalism as a specifically racial paradigm.
Recommended Citation
Kang, Mia, "The Price of Admission: Race, Multiculturalism, and the Visual Arts" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1494.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1494
