85% White: A Jacket for Artist A Data Visualization highlighting the lack of Ethnic diversity in artists whose works are featured in United States Art Museums.
My artifact is representative of the ethnicities of artists in US art museums according to a 2019 study. It is a white jacket with black accents. The black represents the totality of the artist of color whose works are featured in United States art museums. I chose not to distract from the visualization's central message by not assigning distinct colors to each non-white ethnicity. All artists who are not white are represented with black fabric, and each ethnicity is given a different pattern to separate the groups. I thought this would sharpen the contrast between the starkness of the white plain and highlight how infrequently artists of color work are featured in art museums.
Creating what I'm calling the White Jacket was a way to combine two forms of artistic activism: fashion and quiltmaking.
I started this project knowing that I wanted to make a quilted jacket. I have never owned a handmade quilt, I made one for my grandmother before this project, but I have a great love for them. Quilts can be many things: warm and comforting, grand pieces of textile art, or commentary on society and social justice issues. Clothing has often been used as social commentary or to garner attention for a particular movement.
Wearing your politics is probably one of the quickest ways to alienate or attract like-minded individuals. This jacket is a bit stealthier than say a “Make America Great Again” cap, but it carries more weight because its messaging is based on facts.
The construction of the White Jacket was two parts: first the development and crafting of the quilt and second the implementation of the Bog Jacket pattern by theSewSew.
I chose the jacket pattern before I designed the quilt top. I knew I needed to design something that yielded a 60”x 36” quilt based on the fabric requirements for the jacket pattern. I got ahead of myself a few times in the making process but the one that had the largest opportunity to nullify the impact of my final piece was my original quilt design. I spent several days playing around with the abundance of white space and few colors trying to create something I liked. After rereading the Bog Jacket instructions, I realized that my original quilt design put a lot of pivotal information in places that would be cut from the quilt in the construction of the jacket. I redesigned the quilt top to support my visualization and to work within the means of the sewing pattern I planned to use.
My final quilt design has 240, 3” squares in total. For the sake of time like-squares that repeated in a single row were combined into longer strips. I will refer to the original total number of squares when talking about the different demographics and their representation on the quilt. 75% or 180 of the squares are white to represent the prevalence of white male artists in US art museums. 10% or 24 of the squares are white with a patterned design to represent the white women who are featured in US art museums. 9% or 22 of the 240 squares represent Asian artists. 2.8% of the quilt squares represent Hispanic/Latinx artists or 7 squares, the 1.2% of Black/African American artists have 3 squares, and 4 squares represent the 1.5% of artists that have other ethnicities.
I chose to separate the 10% of white women from the 85% of white artists because I had the information and so few women have works in US art museums, only 12.6%. I chose to use a white patterned fabric in the hope that it would not distract from the message of the visualization, that the work of white artists is more likely to be found in US museums.
The Bog Jacket pattern by theSewSew is a minimal waste sewing pattern. Minimal waste was particularly important for this project as all the information on the quilt directly reflected the number of artists in US art museums. Losing too many segments would make the visualization an inaccurate representation of the dataset. Many of the sections excised in the creation of the jacket were the squares representing white men with a few cuts to the squares representing white women, and Asian artists. These are the three largest demographics in the US art museums. I considered repurposing the scraps as pockets or embellishments to try to maintain the integrity of the visualization but decided not to. The dominance of white male artists in museums is glaringly obvious and part of the solution is implementing strategies to diversify museums at all levels. That would mean creating more spaces for artists of color and female-identifying artists to thrive and share their work, as well as, prioritizing the employment of people of color in leadership positions in museums.
Cutting away from the majority and prioritizing the preservation of the artist in the minority is a metaphor for the systemic change needed to regulate the imbalance of artists in art museums in this country.
The White Jacket is made to my measurements, an homage to the black women whose works won't be found in American art museums.
Samone Jacobs