Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museum

This dissertation examines the radical nature of women of color's out of turn speech and presence in American contemporary art museums through the strategy known as direct address. Speaking out of Turn poses four central questions: who is allowed to speak in fine and contemporary art museums---that is, whose work is hung on gallery walls and exhibited in sites of prominence in the fine art world? How can the artistic category of direct address and the idiom 'to speak out of turn' be read alongside each other in order to produce new meaning in contemporary art discourse surrounding under-represented, under-exhibited, and under-theorized artists of color often excluded from these spaces? Does the direct address works made by women of color artists disrupt and/or challenge the practices of viewing art in contemporary art museums? And if so, how do these disruptions orient, disorient, or reorient art spectators?;Direct address is an artistic device, as well as a loose category for art that confronts the viewer. I use video installation, mixed-media performance, radical self-portraiture, and text and textual references within visual art works as central sites for exploring and analyzing direct address. Specifically, I analyze the ways Lorraine O'Grady, Adrian Piper, Shirin Neshat, Carrie Mae Weems, and Coco Fusco mobilize direct address strategies to reveal the way the art spectator is interpellated as a political subject into social structures of gender and race and to contest the power relations embedded in fine art viewing practices. It is in this context that I develop 'speaking out of turn' as a specific mobilization of direct address strategies by women of color---it is both a theory and a methodology for contextualizing and rigorously engaging their creative practices.;This dissertation demonstrates that, even as women identified artists of color have been begrudgingly accepted into the fine art world in the past several decades, they continue to be rendered invisible and voiceless even as their work is displayed. This research charts how these women use visual and sonic registers to trouble the field of vision and claim a voice. Specifically, I argue that 'voice' and 'presence' are registers of the visual, which must be examined in order to fully capture the political potential of visual art. Toward this end, I use an interdisciplinary set of approaches to explore the boundaries of direct address as an artistic strategy, in order to examine how its disruptive tendencies have reoriented art's history and display.