Professor brings American history into view through art

Museum studies is one of the most popular humanities fields, situating visual art within the cultural and historical contexts in which it emerges. Franklin College of Arts and Sciences assistant professor Tracey Johnson takes the disciplines one step further, showing how art as an educational tool influences culture and history. 

"The popular front and cultural front periods of the 1930's influenced the pedagogy of Harlem Renaissance-generation artists in ways that continued to have impacts decades later," Johnson said. "The artist Augusta Savage, for example, taught the painters Norman Lewis and Jacob Lawrence, who would both become much more well-known using the same type of pedagogy she used and it kept going for multiple generations."

The model Savage put forward is the subject of Johnson's first book, currently underway: Black Arts Democracy – How Art Education Advanced Black New York, 1929-1993.

"It's focused on Black artists in New York City after the Harlem Renaissance using art as a vehicle towards black liberation," she said. "Not just the aesthetic principles or benefits, which are obviously really important, but how they used visual art as a way to fill in for the failures of the state when it comes to Black people in Harlem at this time, as a means of education, therapy, job training, and many other things."

In the third year of her faculty appointment in the Franklin College split between the department of history and the Institute for African American Studies, Johnson teaches a course on art and activism in the United States, another on African American Women's history as well as the introductory course on African American Studies, AFAM 2000. In fall 2024, she taught a graduate-level readings course on African American history and the course Black Skin/White Walls: African Americans in the Museum, which supports the Interdisciplinary Certificate Program in Museum Studies.

"A lot of students want classes like that, and museum studies is steadily growing at UGA," she says.

With Johnson as a guide, the undiscovered corners of American history, especially American art as it informs art education, can resonate in the context of museums.

"I write about the efforts of black artists and women artists of all races, who also have this issue, of getting their work into the museum," she said. "I see that as a part of this educational project because when you go to a museum you're learning. And when there's a major institution like the Whitney Museum of American Art without any African American art, it's blocking off a whole part of history."

Johnson says that as artists work to add to the historical cultural narrative of the museum, museum holdings and its stories become richer as they become more whole.

"There are so many projects – whether grassroots efforts, teaching one-on-one, prison arts programs, or just including Black art collecting and Black art collectors, because they become in some ways the harbingers of arts culture," she said.

According to Johnson, museums aren't always seen as welcoming spaces, even by students in her museum studies class. "It can make you self-conscious," she said. "So, I talk about Black art collectors who allow people in the neighborhood to come and meet Black artists, look at their art work, become more acquainted and more at ease."

Growing up near Washington, D.C., Johnson herself originally considered a museum career. But after college she decided in favor of a Ph.D. "I decided to get my doctorate and just write about artists," said Johnson, who worked at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers during graduate school and the New-York Historical Society Center for Women's History.

"l like the museum work that I did then and integrating it into my classes now," Johnson said. She has students in her museum studies course create a museum exhibition as their yearend project.

"I think a lot of students are visual learners, and they are especially conversant with it because of social media. And even for young people, they are very politically active," she said. "UGA students are intellectually curious and I find my art and activism class really resonates with them."

Image: Photo of Tracey Johnson by Dorthy Kozlowski/UGA