Summer Sloane-Britt

Her dissertation explores the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) photography department, emphasizing their innovative contributions to the 1960s Black Freedom Movement. At the Institute, Summer co-curated the 2021 exhibition Cauleen Smith, H-E-L-L-O: To Do All at Once and a recent group exhibition on Chicane muralism in Los Angeles. Sloane-Britt has held positions at the Billie Holiday Theatre, the National Gallery of Art, the Grey Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

What attracted you to Occidental?

I went to a small liberal arts college for my BA, and it deeply shaped my research and interdisciplinary thinking. Small classrooms and discussion seminars pushed me in ways another school would not have. When considering places to teach, Occidental’s commitment to liberal arts education and its location in Los Angeles deeply informed my decision to apply and accept a position there.

How did you take an interest in art history, and in your specialty in particular?

I became interested in art history as a very young person, first volunteering at museums in middle school. My community growing up was full of artists and creative people, often frustrated with how historians or writers positioned their work. I decided that I didn’t want to be an artist; instead, I wanted to serve as a voice for artists, advocating for their viewpoints, relating their work to sociopolitical contexts, and honoring their distinctive journeys. Furthermore, for students, visual literacy is essential within a technological world where images circulate to reinforce, challenge, or subvert normative reality. With the proliferation of AI-generated images on social media, being able to contextualize or question the images presented to us on screens is extremely important. Asking questions about what one is looking at will only become increasingly important.

My primary area of focus examines how liberation movements and photography intersect. While conducting research in graduate school on the Black Freedom Movement’s dynamic relationship with images, I found the photographer Maria Varela’s images of cooperative farms in the rural American South. Learning about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s decision to establish a photography department and pay staff members to make images for the movement showed me images I had never previously seen. Initially, I began researching photographs of cooperative farms from the mid-twentieth century to consider the political dimensions of land ownership in the United States and how they are visualized. However, the more images I found from SNCC, the more focused I became. An important part of my current book project is the attempt to intervene in considering U.S. organizing worlds as detached from one another, instead looking for the intersections. For example, Maria Varela is a first-generation Mexican American who worked with SNCC before moving to land rights organizing in New Mexico and shared images with the United Farm Workers. The images she made were emotionally received by farmers who felt connected to one another, despite geography or having never met, through their common struggle for self-determination in the wake of American imperialism.

Can you talk about a favorite class you have taught (or are currently teaching) and what students can expect to take away from it?

My favorite class I am currently teaching is Global Modernisms. Having a classroom of students, a mix of majors and non-majors, enriches art history classes with varied perspectives. For this class, we ground our analyses around the development and establishment of nationalism, emphasizing art’s deep relationship with political ideologies. Discussing Italian Futurism’s fascist alignments in contrast with, say, Fidel Castro’s Marxist-Leninist perspective demonstrates that visual materials are not simply objects hanging in a museum. Instead, they reflect the social world in which they circulate. Yes, artists often make work that demonstrates their specific perspective, especially under modernism(s), but taking a materialist look at art’s function in society reflects that artists are workers entangled in complex political worlds. This prevents students from seeing art in a vacuum and allows them to bring their disciplines into their analyses of artists and movements.