The Golden Age, an ongoing project from Tucson artist Alanna Airitam, has a clear premise at its foundation. In her words, Airitam tells us she began this series “out of a desperate need to see people who look like me represented in fine art.” She once spoke at an opening featuring her work about seeing a young African American girl standing before Amy Sherald’s remarkable portrait of Michelle Obama in the National Portrait Gallery. In front of this larger-than-life artwork, the girl asked aloud if Obama was a queen. Seeing the wonder of a little girl before the painted grandeur of our former First Lady, Airitam was struck by the beauty of the moment but also the sad realization that empowered representation of black identity is still all too rare.

The nature of beauty is alluring and deceptive, common and elusive. Taking the idea of celebrating beauty and black identity into her own artwork, Airitam investigates how our prevailing histories have generally been written and interpreted by dominant cultural forces, namely white people. Make that white men, if we are being honest. European art history has overtly minimized, and otherized, minority voices and cultures. Indeed, this country’s original sins of slavery and colonization are the foundation upon which the power structures of America currently rest. This is the breech into which Airitam wades with her beautiful The Golden Age portraits, and the work is a fresh, and necessary, correction to an art historical injustice.

Because the artist’s guiding intention is to emulate the Dutch Realist painters whom she credits for inspiring this series, Airitam renders her subjects in a formal and classical manner, replete with rich colors, bathed in warm light, and adorned by beautiful sprays of fruits and flowers. The 17th century Dutch portraits which inspired these works were so life-like they might be mistaken for photography. Conversely, Airitam’s carefully controlled photographic works are crafted to convincingly resemble paintings.

Building her work out from that of European masters is not an arbitrary stylistic decision. There is a dark vein of Eurocentric traditions in the art world that has held sway over the broader cultural landscape for centuries now. Until relatively recently, our supposedly vanguard museums offered varied European definitions of high culture to their generally homogenous audiences. Put more simply, museums designed after the European model were formally constructed as white spaces. Even today, as leading arts organizations style themselves as authentically progressive, representation-forward allies to BIPOC voices, they are struggling to decolonize collections built upon generational wealth and, historically, within a white supremacist power structure. 

Acknowledging such a cultural wound, Airitam often speaks about how powerful it might be for a young person of color to see this work in gilded frames alongside the timeless works of European masters. The idea of the arts being an open and inclusive world could be a powerful tonic for a child, when the prevailing histories they are taught have long been reinforcing a doctrine of oppression. The symbols Airitam embeds in these works represent strength, creativity, acceptance, and abundance and are profoundly intentional, designed to counter a history of negative representations.

Her choice of materials, channeling the formal but idealized techniques of Dutch masterworks, could present a unique challenge for an artist. Because the medium of photography lends itself to hyper-specific illustration, the idea of emulating the more celebrated medium of painting has prompted an array of strategies from contemporary artists. Many photographers, in the pursuit of “painterly” work, have set out to deconstruct their too-sharp images through diffusion, attempting to draw out the emotional content, and hoping to diminish the “realness” of a too-literal medium. In Airitam’s case, she renders her subjects crisply, lights them subtly, but the physical works are quite different than what one might expect when viewed online as luminous images. Airitam has subverted the photographic nature of her prints, by applying a deep layer of resin or by brushing varnish across them, allowing surface imperfections and the organic feel of brush strokes, strategies which lend a maker’s touch to the actual objects. Further, her choices in presentation set up different associations as well, sometimes indulgent, ornate frames are used, echoing traditional settings of high culture and high ceilings, and sometimes brushed, welded steel frames are used, suggesting these contemporary works are about strength and resilience. 

The artist draws further historical connections in this series, by conceiving many of her subjects as saints, naming them after streets and landmarks in Harlem, i.e. Saint Monroe, Saint Lenox, and Saint Minton. The Harlem Renaissance describes a golden age of African American intellectual, economic and artistic accomplishment, as well as radical independence from and an essential challenge to the pervasive racism and oppression prevalent throughout America in the early 20th century. And Saint Sugar Hill, takes her name from the neighborhood and the poetry of Langston Hughes, one of the leading voices in the Harlem Renaissance.

In this moment, while we are seeing the curtain pulled back, yet again, on systemic racism, educators and academia are being forced to reckon with issues related to decades of negative practices. Systems are not innocent, and there is bias everywhere from academic testing to general curriculum. Photojournalism, as a profession with a steady but tense relationship to activism, is asking questions about its own best practices. The fine art industrial complex—namely museums and galleries—are busy attempting to right the essential wrong of having whitewashed art history since the beginning. These ivory tower organizations, at least those that are aware of their own complicity, are beginning to cultivate support for, and lift up artists of color and to recognize, even repudiate their own histories built upon generations of oppression and stolen wealth.

Placed into this context, Airitam’s pursuit of beauty becomes a radical gesture. While the artist sets out to create a flattering depiction of her subjects, these individuals are presented as iconic figures, sublime characters, just arrived to broker a conversation that has historically excluded people of color. The power of the artist’s message, then, is not its refinement but its redress of the persisting imbalance of representation everywhere. The Golden Age asks uncomfortable questions for the larger art world and directly, beautifully, answers those questions at the same time. 

This article first appeared in Issue 15, The Fiction Issue.