Elizabeth Manekin: Art & Visual Literacy

Photograph by Michael Langston

Head of University Programs & Academic Projects Elizabeth Manekin is revealing new ways of seeing and experiencing the world through art at the Ackland.

Through the principles of visual literacy, Elizabeth works imparting observational skills while cultivating greater capacity for empathy and imagination.

How are you implicating art as a lens to understand or communicate?

At the Ackland, we almost always begin with the question: “What do you see?” It’s a democratic question, not asking what you know, or really even what you think. But it’s also one with concrete answers. Someone might see something you didn’t, but usually, what’s there is there. 

Take, for example, this painting in our collection.

Hale Woodruff, Landscape (Mississippi Soil Erosion), c. 1944

the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ackland Fund, 2013.6

What do you see? Describe the color, the brushstrokes, the way it’s organized. Seriously, do it! If you’re immediately compelled to respond with adjectives -- it looks chaotic, gloomy, destructive -- take a step back. What do you see that makes you say that? 

After you’ve looked, I might tell you that Hale Woodruff painted this in the early 1940s inspired by a roadtrip through the American south. He was a prominent African-American artist and had just received a grant to document social injustices there. This painting is called Landscape (Mississippi Soil Erosion). Knowing that, what new observations or questions come to mind? 

After discussing that, we could splinter off in different directions. If you were in a history class discussing the great migration, I might veer the conversation towards readings you’d done about the Black experience and the move North. If you were in a nutrition class discussing food access, the conversation would take a different track. A neuroscience class discussing how our eyes perceive movement would go another direction entirely.

 A goal of your work has been increasing visual literacy. What does this mean, to see, and what is the significance of this concept?

Visual literacy is the ability to interpret and analyze images -- to “read” them, like you’d read a book. Take a novel: there’s a plot, but also the way the story is told. The same is true of images: both ‘what’ and ‘how’ are important questions in understanding it fully. This is true inside and outside of the art museum. Being able to read and interpret visual sources cultivates our capacity to see and think more expansively about the world around us.

What does it mean to see? I think to see is to perceive the thing you’re looking at. Visual literacy is important here because it keeps us honest and holds us accountable to what’s in front of us. What visual evidence backs up our thoughts, assumptions, and interpretations? How do we map the space between what’s there and what is our response to it? 

Can We Talk About Race? is an annual collaboration between the Ackland & UNC School of Medicine. How are race and medicine inherently connected? 

This is not my expertise, at all, but one of the best things about my job is that I’m constantly learning from and collaborating with colleagues across the University. We work with UNC’s medical school in a range of ways, from using art to finetune students’ observational skills to strengthening their communication and teamwork. For the past three years, we’ve collaborated on an initiative called Can We Talk About Race? where we look at works of art that deal with racialized identities and use them as catalysts to discuss race and medicine. I’ve learned a lot.

Race and medicine are connected in so many ways. From forced sterilizations to experimental treatments, Black and Brown people and their bodies have long been exploited in the name of science and Western medicine. There are also quieter forms of implicit bias in healthcare - widely reported instances of higher mortality rates in Black mothers, for example. There are massive public health consequences to the environmental injustices that disproportionately affect communities of color. The list is long, structural, and behavioral.

Is there an advantage in using art to facilitate discussion?

Yes! Though it is important that you use good art, deliberately chosen for the conversation at hand.

Art can tangle visual facts with the subjective emotions they inspire. Using art as a catalyst for conversations about race forces students to engage with emotions and assumptions, untangling what is objectively there with how they interpret it. This highlights their own perspective, and reveals how their interpretation can be so different from their classmates. It’s an important step in cultivating empathy and cultural understanding. Many conversations about race and medicine are about stats, numbers. Those are really important, but race is a culturally constructed category, not a scientific one, and it’s essential to dive into the realm of culture, feeling, and experience as well. 

Because so much of art is complex and open to interpretation, is there particular or greater importance in finding a question or an answer?

I’m not sure about this one. I think process is important, and I’m usually more interested in questions than answers. But people look at art for different reasons.

Having said that, I don’t agree when people say “there are no wrong answers in art.” I actually think it does a disservice to artists when we say things like that. There are wrong answers, but there can be multiple right answers, too. I think it’s an important distinction, and really important for students (and all of us) to be able to hold that kind of nuance and ambiguity. 

Who are your favorite artists?

I have different kinds of favorites, and it can depend on the day.

There is art I love looking at / living with and there is art that provokes and challenges me. Those categories are not mutually exclusive, but my answers are different for what I’d want in my house and what I’d want to use to teach all the time.

For beauty, I’m usually drawn to color and light. Artists that come to mind are Henri Matisse, Helen Frankenthaler, any Song dynasty celadon, Fukami Sueharu, James Turrell, Mark Rothko, Tara Donovan. For harder stuff that’s still remarkably poetic, I’d say Anselm Kiefer and Glenn Ligon.

There are many, many more.