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Asking for Racial Diversity in the Arts: A Playbook
How to counter all those tired excuses for a lack of inclusion
Want to ask for more diversity in the arts? Here are the most common excuses you’ll hear.
Excuse #1: There aren’t enough artists of color to showcase.
Repeat after me: creatives of color exist. And they need help navigating this white-majority world.
Artists of color are underrepresented and underfunded. Oftentimes, an artist of color is looking for a more welcoming venue. Putting out a call directly to artists of color and making sure artists of color actually see the call will easily solve this problem. This may involve consulting with some POC artists you do know on the best avenues. For example, some minority artists may look for opportunities in their local communities as well as on the national scale. You may have to go to them and be genuine about the approach.
With that being said, it may feel like artists of color are hard to find. To my knowledge, I was the only black student at the USC Roski School of Art and Design of any program. I minored in digital media there. And there was a very small handful of non-white students. I could count my non-white classmates on my fingers.