By Angelina Nunez
The University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities Dean Stephanie Shonekan brought together a group of panelists to discuss the effects of racist iconography and the importance of contextualization in art on Wednesday.
The panel followed an early October incident in which UMD’s club tennis team was indefinitely suspended after members distributed an image of an altered version of Maryland’s state flag showcasing Ku Klux Klan hoods to other universities’ tennis teams, including Howard University, a historically Black institution. The club’s members are under investigation for the incident.
“As soon as I saw it, I had a visceral response,” Shonekan said. “But what it did was that it really raised questions about where we are with anti-black racism … Why does [the symbol] have such sustained impact on a society beyond the borders of the University of Maryland? So I gathered my colleagues here to help us think about this.”
The image originated in a 2017 article by Benjamin Jancewicz highlighting the Maryland state flag’s connection to the Confederacy. Jancewicz created the image to help showcase that point.
During the Civil War, Confederates represented themselves with the red and white sections of the flag, while the Union Army represented themselves with the yellow and black sections. The two were only combined to represent the state after the war.
Jancewicz said that, without the context of the article, the altered flag no longer represented the state’s Confederate roots.
“I made that illustration for this article, to show people what the Maryland flag already represents. Out of the article it is just a Maryland flag with Klan hoods on it, and that is what the Howard players saw. I’m sick about how it was used,” Jancewicz wrote in an excerpt added to his article, responding to the incident.
During Wednesday’s panel, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, a panelist and UMD associate professor of American studies, discussed the importance of contextualizing that image.
“We know that it was taken out of that context and circulated in what appears to me to be a sort of a gesture of anti-Black antagonism,” Bruce said.
“You had to go and see his words to contextualize it,” added panelist Will Mosley, a UMD assistant professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. “I’m really, really sad for the original artist, because I would hate for somebody to take my work and kind of demonize it in a way that is actually against the very people I want it to be used for.”
Emily Springer, a panelist and UMD graduate student pursuing a master of fine arts, talked about the challenges artists face when their work can be misinterpreted or used for purposes that differ from the original intention during the discussion. However, she also emphasized the viewer’s responsibility to engage critically with the art they encounter.
“When you’re an artist, you sometimes don’t have control of how your art is taken and what it’s used for, or if it’s appropriated,” Springer said. “It circles back to your responsibility as a viewer to look at these images, think about the history of them, research the history about them [and] have conversations with people about it.”
Before wrapping up the panel, Shonekan left the attendees and fellow panelists with a question to think about.
“If [the image] had gone to Georgetown, George Mason … would this have been a news story?” Shonekan asked.
Featured image: Stephanie Shonekan, the Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, introduces the panelists of the ARHU Pop Up Discussion: On Racism and Racist Iconography on Oct. 28.
Photo by Josh Hananel