Exploring Afrofuturism in AP African American Studies
11th March 2024 · 0 Comments
By Josie Abugov
Contributing Writer
(Veritenews.org) — Gathered in an auditorium at the New Orleans Museum of Art, a crowd of high school students gazed at an image of the Kenyan American multimedia artist Wangechi Mutu. In the photo, Mutu is standing with her arms loosely crossed, near one of her otherworldly sculptures – a reclining figure covered in knobs, with feathered hands and face – and two gold-framed, European figurative paintings.
“What do you notice about the image?” asked Kristin DiGioia, an education staffer at the museum.
The students observed Mutu’s confident body language, and how her Afrofuturist style was juxtaposed against the European canon in the image. Mutu’s humble but confident stance conveys power, DiGioia prompted. In other words, as one of the students remarked: “She know she ate.”
The visual analysis exercise was part of a Tuesday (March 5) field trip gathering 175 high school students from across south Louisiana to engage with the museum’s “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” exhibition, which runs through July and includes Mutu’s sculptures, paintings and films. Most of those students are currently taking an Advanced Placement class in African American studies, a pilot course run by the College Board that is in its second year.
Some of those students attend Baton Rouge Magnet High School, one of 60 schools nationwide that first piloted AP African American Studies last year. Now, 13,000 students in 700 schools across the country are engaging with course themes from “resistance and resilience” to the “intersections of identity.” That includes students at Frederick Douglass High School in New Orleans and other schools across southeast Louisiana, some of whom were also at the museum.
The pilot course gives students the opportunity to study political and art history they may have only studied briefly in classes like AP United States History or AP Art History. The course is broken into four units, beginning with early East and West African history and spanning through the ideas behind Afrofuturism, a movement that blends “Black experiences of the past with Afrocentric visions of a technologically advanced future.” Mutu herself has been a prominent figure in Afrofuturism.
Featured across the world, Mutu’s paintings, films and sculptures draw from East African folklore and mythology while gesturing towards uncanny futures. In 2019, her sculptures became the first to fill the niches outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art building in New York City. Now, viewers can see the bronze female figures in the Besthoff Sculpture Garden at NOMA.
As museum staffers explained the themes and motifs in Mutu’s work – the female form, the natural world, dystopias and utopias – the students asked questions and gave their own perspectives on Afrofuturism and the legacies of colonialism. The students then chatted with Mutu herself, who video-called all the way from Nairobi.
During her question-and-answer session with students, Mutu discussed Afrofuturism, explaining how her love of both science fiction and the natural world inform her art. A couple students wanted to learn more about a statement Mutu had previously made about what she hopes audiences will get out of her work: “A little laugh and a little scare.”
“I come from a place that is a post-colonial and post-apocalyptic land,” Mutu said. Despite these histories of violence, Mutu understands the African imagination as constantly looking forward, “adapting, evolving, changing, sharing, and mixing,” she said.
Emmitt Glynn III, who teaches the new course at Baton Rouge Magnet High School, had looked at images from Mutu’s exhibit with his students before the museum visit. But seeing the art in person was a deeply thought-provoking experience, he said.
“She uses the female body as the central theme in telling the story of history, anthropology, environmental science, as well as politics, in her art,” he said. “It’s just incredible.”
The exploration of varied themes in Mutu’s work dovetails with a central aim of the new advanced placement class. The first course goal in the 2024-2025 framework is to “apply lenses from multiple disciplines to evaluate key concepts, historical developments, and processes that have shaped Black experiences and debates.” Redell Hearn, the chief educator at NOMA, said it’s important to ensure that young minds have various frameworks to understand the world.
Republican politicians nationwide, including Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, have attacked the new course, and the College Board subsequently amended the curriculum after the Florida Department of Education blocked the class from being taught. In Louisiana, lawmakers haven’t limited the teaching of AP African American Studies. But some conservative officials, including Gov. Jeff Landry, have voiced disdain over classroom curricula they describe as “woke.”
Sharyd Bello is a sophomore taking AP African American Studies at St. Amant High School in Ascension Parish. Bello said she finds the course challenging, especially because it’s her first Advanced Placement class. She hadn’t thought about enrolling until a faculty member told her that the class would broaden her perspective on the history, culture and hardships of the Black diaspora.
“It just really makes you see the real stuff that happened and not all the lies that everybody has been told throughout history,” Allie Breaux, a tenth-grader at St. Amant, said.
For Glynn, who has taught for three decades, the new course reminded him why he got into the profession to begin with.
“I’ve always taught within my classes aspects or segments of African American history,” Glynn said. “But to have a full course, a full yearlong course that was so in-depth – that has been just so exhilarating. It recharged my teaching career.”
Glynn has even adapted the course for adults who did not have the chance to take a course in African American Studies when they were in high school. Once a week, about 60 people gather informally at a local church in Baton Rouge to study Black history, art, and political movements. One of Glynn’s adult students is 80 years old, he said.
Glynn said he’s noticed students having “lightbulb” moments in class and heard from parents that their teens are reflecting on the course material through conversations at home: “As a teacher, that made me feel like I climbed Mount Everest, because that’s what you want — to translate those ideas outside of the classroom space and into daily life,” he said.
This article originally published in the March 11, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
