Check Out Tiffany Barber’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tiffany Barber.

Hi Tiffany, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I have maintained a bi-coastal portfolio career in the arts for twenty-five years. I’ve moved from professional concert dance to arts administration and nonprofit management to grant writing to academia. I’m currently Assistant Professor of African American Art at UCLA, and I regularly publish arts criticism and curate exhibitions outside of my full-time job, The thread that ties my portfolio career together is my enduring interest in creative expression, which first started at home.

My mother’s drawings and paintings of Black female figures were my first encounters with Black art and its histories. Like most artists, my mother studied the masters. But having come of age in the 1970s during the Black Arts Movement, she longed for figures and a canon that reflected her own experiences and identity. The Black Arts Movement was the creative sibling to the Black Power Movement. Through activism and art, proponents of the Black Arts Movement promoted Black power and pride and created their own institutions. This ethos influenced my mother’s artmaking, and she infused her work and her parenting with aspirational narratives about the right and wrong ways to picture and perform Blackness.

I, myself, don’t draw or paint or sculpt. I dance, and my training in classical ballet and modern continues to influence my work. While pursuing my BFA at Fordham University and The Ailey School, I began to question aspirational representations of the Black body. These formative moments taught me that lived experiences inform our encounters with art. They also taught me that looking closely at art objects and the sociocultural contexts from which they spring can spur new ideas about the world, political possibility, and contemporary life.

Wanting to explore intellectual work beyond the body led me to Los Angeles. I worked full time in student affairs at LMU and went to graduate school at USC at night. This time in my life was incredibly fruitful, and it really propelled me to where I am now. While finishing my Master’s degree, I transitioned from working in student affairs to working in the Metro Art Department. At the time I was also interning at LAXART (now called The Brick) at the original location in Culver City. During this time I also became involved with an artist-driven neighborhood redevelopment project in Watts. At all three, I worked with some of the most prominent contemporary artists and curators in LA like Mark Bradford, Kori Newkirk, Edgar Arceneaux, Alan Nakagawa, Pilar Tompkins, Naima Keith, Chelo Montoya, Bill Kelley, and more. So being back in Culver City and teaching at UCLA is a full circle moment for me.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The biggest obstacles to living and working in a sprawling metropolis like LA are affordability, building and maintaining community, and TRAFFIC lol! The city’s arts landscape, much like the rest of the country right now, is facing some real material challenges when it comes to fundraising and patronage–from artists to grassroots organizations to major museums. But I’m heartened by the way LA’s smaller arts organizations are banding together. Forming partnerships and labor unions are key to sharing and distributing resources more evenly so LA’s arts community can continue to thrive.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I just published my first book and have been on a world tour at different venues in the US and Europe, with cities in Senegal and South Africa coming soon, talking about the timely ideas I explore in its pages. Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation charts a new genealogy of Black women’s art that exposes the unfinished project of racial and gender empowerment in the twenty-first century. I also have two exhibitions opening in the fall: The Flesh of the Forest at Oxy Arts here in LA in August and Data Consciousness: Reframing Blackness in Contemporary Print at the Print Center New York. Lots to look forward to!

Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
Artists of the Black world are making some of the most compelling art of our time–from memes to monuments–and more people than ever before are engaged with their creative output. This is even more evident when it comes to Black women artists. Yet narrow ideas about art and representation as well as racial and gender solidarity continue to constrain historically marginalized artists. How does the increased visibility of Black women in the arts and culture sector impact how we understand history? In times of sociopolitical upheaval, what do we expect Black women and their art to do? How do we desire and imagine art as a vehicle for transformation and change against the backdrop of fatigue and disenchantment with racial, gender, and class progress in the US and abroad? These are questions I think we’ll continue to confront now and in the decades to come given where we are politically.

Contact Info:

• Website: www,tiffanyebarber.com
• Instagram: @tiffanyebarber

Image Credits
Jawara King