Re: Being an Art School Dropout & “The Right People”

In the movie 'Mona Lisa Smile’, there’s a scene where Julia Robert’s character Kathryn Watson is showing the Wellesley girls slides in class and asks, “Is this art?”

A student informs her that,“ Art isn’t art until someone says it is”.

Kathryn exclaims, “It’s art!”

To which the student replies, “The RIGHT People”.

Kathryn asks, “And who are they?”

In hindsight, art school wasn’t going to work for me.

Not because I couldn’t keep up.

Not because I wasn’t serious.

And not because I lacked talent.

I made it into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago at seventeen with a portfolio I built in a second-semester senior ceramics class, where my teacher , Ms.Z—the only art teacher I’ve ever had, let me take supplies home and paint without grading my imagination. She didn’t shape me. She didn’t interrogate me. She gave me materials and got out of the way.

That’s how I got in.

My first year, during a critique, a TA kept asking me whether a material choice I made was “arbitrary.”

She asked it more than once.

Was it arbitrary?

Was it arbitrary?

What she meant was: Explain yourself in my language.

What she wanted was:

Perform uncertainty so I can guide you.

What I said was:

“I chose it because it looked good.”

And we stared at each other.

That wasn’t anti-intellectual. It was aesthetic sovereignty. Plenty of white male artists have built entire careers on intuition. When they say “it felt right,” it’s genius. When I said it, it required interrogation.

That was the first time I understood that art school wasn’t about art.

It was about legibility.

In another class, assigned reading included ‘White Teacher’ by Vivian Gussin Paley.

I was preparing to go into art education. I was serious about teaching. I wanted to be excellent.

Instead of Black pedagogical theory, instead of community-rooted education models, instead of structural critique, we were assigned a book about a white woman processing racism in a predominantly white school.

I said what it felt like: white saviorism.

Not to be disruptive.

Not to be edgy.

But because that was structurally what it was.

The room didn’t want analysis. It wanted comfort.

That was the second time I understood that art school wasn’t about rigor.

It was about centering white awakening as intellectual labor.

Years later, during a nanny agency interview for an agency that specifically wanted candidates with an art background, I was asked:

“Who are your favorite artists?”

I said Kadir Nelson, Hebru Brantley, and Bridget Riley.

Two Black men and a woman known for perceptual abstraction.

I knew immediately that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

They wanted Rembrandt.

They wanted Rubens.

They wanted canonical European reverence.

The question wasn’t about taste. It was about obedience.

It was a ritual.

Name the gods correctly and you’re safe.

But I have never been interested in ritual worship.

I’ve stood in the archives at the Art Institute of Chicago and handled Andy Warhol prints. I’ve stared at silkscreens in galleries and understood the precision of CMYK layering, the alignment, the process obsession.

I love process. I love systems. I love repetition that builds something real.

But loving process does not mean worshiping outcome.

Warhol was inventive for his moment. That doesn’t mean he must remain untouchable forever.

At some point, institutions stopped asking:

“Is this still saying something?”

And started asking:

“How do we preserve its importance?”

That’s when canon becomes embalming.

The Louvre heists fascinate me for the same reason.

People say “follow the money.”

I think: follow the art.

What was taken?

What was elevated?

What was frozen in time as universal?

What never got to age?

Museums preserve empire logic as culture.

And we’re supposed to revere it indefinitely.

I don’t feel bad about being an art school dropout.

I never have— because it’s not as if I left my ‘skills’ behind, forgotten on a rack in a Columbus building studio.

I never needed an institution to authorize my mind.

I was raised in parallel education; community college classes in middle school, advisory councils, Upward Bound, industry exposure. School wasn’t where I learned to think. It was where I learned how systems contain.

By the time I reached art school, I already knew:

Creativity cannot be graded without distortion.

Authority is often performance.

Canon is curated by power.

I was never going to worship it.

I didn’t drop out because I failed. I left because I don’t confuse proximity to prestige with artistic integrity.

Institutions reward legibility.

They reward specialization.

They reward reverence.

I synthesize.

I translate.

I move.

And I was never going to be comfortable inside a system built to canonize permanence.