Dr. Melanee C. Harvey envisions the role of the Black art educator today as one who develops students who are critically examining the museum and providing “groundbreaking, provocative cultural interpretation” of images they see in the world around them, she says.
“It almost feels like we’re back in that period of the Black Arts Movement where we really are having to develop a curriculum that prepares our students to speak up and be not only engaging, but be influencers in the discourse,” she adds.
The assistant professor of art history at Howard University admits that her interest in art history and teaching in higher education have developed side-by-side as she steadily traversed the intellectual landscapes of Spelman College and Boston University.
“Spelman did an amazing job in terms of their curriculum in leading me to see a lot of the holes that needed to be filled,” she says. “There were a lot of stories in African-American art, and even the contribution of African-American artists to American art, that had not been told yet.”
The scholar’s culturally immersive upbringing in Ohio and Washington, D.C., coupled with mentorship and instructional development through the United Negro College Fund/Mellon Mays Fellowship Program and the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers led her to explore the alternative spaces that African-Americans learn about aesthetics. Particularly, she thought about those finding their way to the Black church every Sunday.
“So really documenting the Black church not only as a political, socioeconomic space of agency and activism but also a place where African-American philosophy and aesthetics is really shaped as well,” Harvey says.
Harvey’s work similarly examines Black churches in the contemporary moment – how they are depicted on Instagram or other social media sites, for instance – and explores how history is continuously being shaped through art and institutions such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).
