Queering Whiteness

Searching For Inspiration (2025) by Ben Miller

Recently, a fellow artist and friend of mine mentioned that he may quit making art for a while, citing that his status as a white male artist left him with nothing valuable to say at this moment. I responded with a gently suppressed frustration, because much of his art in the past had read as an either conscious or unconscious discussion of white masculinity in all its contradictions and dangers, something I found challenged me by viewing. My first instinct was to ask him why he wouldn’t just make art about exactly that. If this was the hang-up preventing him from pursuing his passion, why would he not confront the hurdle head-on, and trouble the status of white men in contemporary art from his privileged position? Why was he leaving the responsibility of dismantling whiteness to artists of color?

In her writing, Whiteness Must Undo Itself to Make Way for the Truly Radical Turn in Contemporary Culture, Xaviera Simmons replied to the 2019 Whitney Biennial’s public response. She noted that there was a general sense of dissatisfaction and critique about the exhibition, primarily coming from white art critics, who labeled it “not radical enough”. Simmons notes that the impetus for her writing comes from being a contemporary artist in the United States, where citizenship is tied to the cultural and literal construction of racial caste systems used for oppression. This fact remains formative in shaping how we navigate life in America today, especially in how art critics respond to American sites of cultural production like the Whitney Biennial. 

Simmons’ critique mainly dissects white arts writers' dissatisfaction with the lack of “radicalness” in the 2019 Whitney Biennale. In response to this, she raises a question and proposes a call to action. First, she begs us to ask whose bodies the weight of this burden of radical art-making is being put on. The writers she addresses are primarily writing about artists of color.  Simmons proposes that these writers are demanding radical art making nearly exclusively from individuals historically oppressed and disenfranchised by the West’s racial caste system, i.e. people of color. Second, she proposes that rather than placing this burden exclusively on these people, those others who are privileged in this racial caste system should take on the bulk of the risk of radicality and part with and/or spend their privilege for the sake of this radicality.

The white writers that Simmons addresses may have something to learn from Derek Conrad Murray’s understanding of Post-Black-Art. In Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity after Civil Rights, Murray identifies the idea that the Black Arts Movement of the early twenty-first century marked an inseparability between “black collective romance” and “frustration with a black collective sensibility”, going on to say that these two build upon one another to produce an “aesthetic flow that keeps moving and changing”. Margo Natalie Crawford in Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. (Urbana, Chicago Springfield, 2017), expands on this, saying that “The black post-blackness of the twenty-first century is most nuanced when it troubles blackness without worrying about the loss of blackness.” How might white artists and writers who take Simmons’ advice to dismantle their own privilege trouble whiteness without worrying about the loss of whiteness? How might they change whiteness with the same fluidity as black artists queering blackness?

There are many concerns about the loss of whiteness in contemporary art, no matter how disguised they may be. Take, for example, in 1999 when former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani demanded public outrage against an artist showing in the Brooklyn Museum, whom he claimed had created an artwork by “throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary”. (Roediger, 2021) The artwork did not have elephant dung “thrown” at it, but rather ornately placed, and Giuliani had completely side-stepped West African cultural reverence for elephant dung, and the fact that the artist who created it was of West African (Nigerian) descent. It seems to me that Giuliani was not truly concerned with disrespect to the Catholic religion (had he been, he may have done more investigation into the background of the work), but rather that he was concerned with the loss of whiteness in art institutions. 

How might white artists and writers who take Simmons' advice to dismantle their own privilege trouble whiteness without worrying about the loss of whiteness and maybe more expansively, the loss of self? It appears crucial that white artists and arts writers stop placing the full burden of radical art making on non-white bodies, and put effort towards this radical artmaking themselves, necessarily interrogating their own whiteness in the process. 

This is not to say that white artists should abandon their specific interests, say womanhood, natural beauty, or material. Rather, consider if white artists were to think with a criticality that has already been and continues to be articulated with respect to Blackness in movements such as the Black Arts Movement and concepts such as  “Black Post-Blackness” about their position in this “art world” and in their daily lives. I imagine that these topics would naturally and necessarily fold themselves into their art practice, as it does for countless artists of color, who do not have the privilege of ignoring said positionality.

Derek Conrad Murray. Queering Post-Black Art. 2019.

Margo Natalie Crawford. Black Post-Blackness : The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. Urbana, Illinois, University Of Illinois Press, 2017.

Roediger, Dave. “Smear Campaign: Giuliani, the Holy Virgin Mary, and the Critical Study of Whiteness.” University of California Press, 2021, www.ucpress.edu/blog-posts/54273-smear-campaign-giuliani-the-holy-virgin-mary-and-the-critical-study-of-whiteness. Accessed 11 Nov. 2025.

Simmons, Xaviera. “Whiteness Must Undo Itself to Make Way for the Truly Radical Turn in Contemporary Culture.” The Art Newspaper - International Art News and Events, 2 July 2019, www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/07/02/whiteness-must-undo-itself-to-make-way-for-the-truly-radical-turn-in-contemporary-culture. Accessed 17 Nov. 2025.