How to Become a Digital Griot
Protecting Black Art from Digital Surveillance & Erasure
In 1837, a French painter was commissioned to paint a photograph of four people; the three wealthy white children of a New Orleans banker, and behind them, one enslaved Black teenager. The Black child, named Bélizaire, stood leaning against a tree and would soon vanish from the image completely. Around the turn of the 20th century, Bélizaire was painted over, leaving only the three white children visible and causing many to wonder what happened to the painting. Theories circulate about the overpainting with speculations that the slave owner who bought him got mad at Bélizaire and had him painted over, or a descendant of the slave owning family was responsible for the covering. However, the full truth may remain unknown forever.
Through efforts made in 2005 and 2021 by painting conservators after the painting was sold by the museum, Bélizaire finally reemerged from the shadows. In the nearly 200 years since the original painting was created, Black people have endured continuous erasure, narrative distortion, and loss of agency in visual art landscapes.
Erasure in the Digital Sphere
Contemporarily, the digital age presents unique threats of Black art erasure which endanger collective diasporic memory and necessitate a communal embrace of Black art preservation in order to evade digital surveillance and erasure.
The proliferation of generative AI in recent years enables the rampant censorship and whitewashing of Black art, diluting a digital archive that once housed Black stories intact with their historical contexts and original artist intentions.
In 2024, an art piece which depicted a group of Black women sitting calmly as they watched a city burn went viral on twitter. However, a Black artist named Na’vi Robbins came forward, expressing that the art was a hollowed AI generated copy of her original piece titled, “Sometimes, ‘I told you so’ just ain’t enough.” Her original painting represented Black women’s exasperation from feeling ignored and disregarded after yet another election cycle. The painting’s expropriation was an ironic enactment of the very silencing that Robbins symbolized in her original piece.
This theft was not an isolated incident, occurring frequently and causing material impacts for Black artists including loss of intellectual property and significant financial loss.
When trained on Black art, generative AI produces hollowed products which mimic elements of visual style while stripping the art of its necessary sociopolitical context. In such, this process sanitizes Black expression for mass consumption by extracting Black aesthetics while neutralizing Black resistance.
Becoming Protectors of Black Art
A critical detail in the uncovering of Bélizaire’s image is that when the painting was initially sold to the museum, they were informed there was an enslaved person hidden beneath layers of paint, yet they chose to not restore it, leaving him obscured for decades. It was individuals who cared about reinstating his image who set him free. This underscores a crucial truth: we must take the liberation and protection of Black art into our own hands, rather than rely on institutions.
When speaking about her creative methodology, multi-media artist Faith Ringgold proclaimed “You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it.”
In this effort, as stewards of Black art, we can think of ourselves as griots for the preservation of Black expression in a digital sphere characterized by the progressive devaluation of human creativity, and the quick disposal of media that people actually connect with. Despite this fleeting nature of modern art consumption, contemporary Black art should be appreciated in real time as meaningful contributions to the historical record.
How to Become A Digital Griot
Traditional West African griots are keepers of memory, recorders of current events, historians, teachers, and more. There's a West African proverb which states, ‘"To lose a griot, the elders say, is like watching a library burn.” To take up the mantle of being a griot is to hold the deep belief that Black stories are worth creating, sharing, and remembering.
The first thing one must do in order to become what we can think of as a “digital griot” is to recognize the historical significance of black art preservation. Digital archives and library resources have ample materials to explore how Black art has been historically erased while examining its crucial role as a form of resistance and political expression within Black liberation movements. Some accessible resources for furthering Black art history education include: “Reading Black Art” at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Museum of African American Art and Culture, and “Reframing Art History” at Smarthistory.
Recognizing the Afrodiasporic emphasis of the collective over the individual, as well as the griot’s role as a teacher, we must ensure this information is widely shared amongst our communities. Accessible educational events include in-person and online teach-ins, webinars, reading rooms, documentary screenings, and workshops. Partnering with community initiatives like grassroots organizations, libraries, and recreation centers is a great way to further platform these educational hubs.
Fostering autonomous record-keeping is another integral step to the protection of Black art. Individuals can create independent, community-based archives that document and preserve Black art, protecting it from the neglect and misuse prevalent in mainstream institutions. Getting started with archival work doesn’t have to be intimidating; it can be started by connecting with family and friends to open a shared collection of your art, whether made by you or collected throughout your life.
Independent archival work also includes keeping record of Black art making in real time, before erasure and co-option. Such documentation involves embracing analog documentation and creating digital records of art with the artist’s original intention on display. We must also be proactive in the protection of art from AI exploitation by using digital AI-shielding tools like Glaze or Nightshade.
As generative AI rapidly expands, ingratiating itself into the visual media of our time, it is more important than ever that we bolster real artists and their shared stories. In whatever capacity you are able to, we urge you to support Black art, whether it be through buying or resharing, attending in-person and digital events, and denouncing generative AI when you see it. Even more specifically, persistently championing the creatives in your community is necessary in ensuring the authentic memory of your own environment is preserved.
A century ago, a Black child named Bélizaire was silently erased from history. In the hundred years since, the suppression of Black art has only continued, taking on new forms through the decades. It’s imperative that we resist the narrative of generative AI’s inevitability. Just like our ancestors, who faced similar messages about the inevitability of their silencing but still forged paths to protect their artistic expression, it is up to us to do the same. In our rejection of the centuries-long relegation of Blackness to the periphery, we shift the axis of the world towards our creations, our pain, our expression.
In a 1998 interview, Toni Morrison said, “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. Claimed it as central and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”
