The killing of George Floyd at the hands of police on May 25, 2020, sparked a wave of protests around the world. Floyd’s death, as well as the deaths this year of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery and too many others, underscored the essential work of activists for racial justice and swelled their ranks through the summer and beyond.
“These historic moments of collective unrest and ideological shifts remind us how necessary art is,” said Estrella Esquilín, artist, School of Art alumna, and program manager for ASU’s National Accelerator Program for Cultural Innovation. “Visual art in particular acknowledges what words sometimes fail to describe.”
BIPOC School of Art students, faculty and alumni have been seeing and acknowledging what’s going on around us for decades, including the fact that they are still underrepresented in their fields. In a letter to the Herberger Institute community June 1, Dean Tepper reaffirmed the Institute’s commitment to uplifting and amplifying the voices of students, faculty and staff of color and to dismantling the culture that allows systemic racism to flourish. He wrote, “We recognize that we have not always gotten it right, but we will set a firm foundation to build a better practice of equity in all we do moving forward.”
That foundation would include, later that summer, the appointment of Professor Melita Belgrave as Herberger Institute’s new associate dean for Cultural Access and Inclusion and the establishment of a Core Equity Team with members drawn from across the Institute.
Featured here is the very necessary art of Mia B. Adams, Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Estrella Esquilín, three Black Herberger Institute alums who explicitly address issues of social justice and systemic racism in their work.
