Mark Wittig
Artist Statement
The lived experience of learning differences is the primary subject matter for my creative research. As a youth, I attended the Child Study Center for three years, a school in a teaching hospital, where I became intrigued with educational research. I am inspired to create artwork that comment on the history of education and question the prevailing culture which devalue fluencies and skills outside prevailing norms.
With this project, Structures that Transformed Education, I am creating a typological study of the history of education to highlight the variations and similarities in educational systems in the United States of America. I am photographing historic school structures that played a role in changing education in America. Many of the school buildings that I have photographed are associated with events that both led to and followed the U.S. Supreme Court decision in: Brown vs Board of Education that in 1954 overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public education in the United States of America.
The purpose of photographing these properties is to highlight these historic structures that best exemplify and illustrate the historical movement to provide for a racially nondiscriminatory education for all. While the African American segregation within the school systems anchors this narrative, these photographs integrates the school desegregation struggles of Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Chicano/Latino Americans.
This study thus considers the school desegregation struggles of the communities of color together and separately as dictated by the historical record. Therefore, included in my photographs are schools that were designed to provide segregated education for Caucasians, and schools that were designed to provide segregated education for African Americans, Indigenous People, and People of Color. School desegregation has always been an important part of the ongoing struggle for educational freedom in America.
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