J.C. Lenochan At Real Art Ways

In the old days, the predominant attitude in a classroom was that the teacher knew everything and the students should keep quiet and learn what they were told. But times have changed.

“We live in a time when we can redefine that. I don’t believe in autonomy. It’s rooted in ethnocentrism, in the context of what we learn in the classroom,” J.C. Lenochan says. “I don’t think it’s concerned about cultural awareness.”

Lenochan’s work, up now in an exhibit at Real Art Ways in Hartford, tackles what he refers to as this “cantankerous” issue: the country’s history of white-centric educational norms. Lenochan uses art to form “a critique of pedagogical structures in the sense of cultural bias, senses of otherness and racial fabrications.”

The central piece in the “unfinished business: gettin’ school’d” show is an installation of a scribble-filled chalkboard and children’s school desks hanging from the ceiling, over a pile of detritus that speaks of the nonwhite experience: books by Richard Wright and Pearl S. Buck, books on “A History of Indian Policy” and “Orientalism,” an Al Jolson album, copies of Jet and Essence magazines and many items relating to boxing.

“The desks are a metaphor for an object to decolonize,” Lenochan said. “What have I personally had to deconstruct or unlearn from my experience in the classroom? How does that relate to everyone else in this country’s experience in the classroom?”

Two other series fill the gallery. Several “book sculptures” are made of books with racial themes cemented together. The funniest is “An Encyclopedia of Western History” pierced by five Indian arrows.

“Books are vessels of memory. They are objects of inclusion, too. I am very interested in subverting and re-creating meaning,” he said.

Lenochan’s photographs show a wall filled with books, with people (all of them him) in the foreground. In every picture, Lenochan is wearing something over his face: a glove, a donkey head, an elephant head, a mask. He particularly likes the donkey.

“There is a quote, ‘a man without cultural knowledge is like a donkey with books on its back,'” he said.

“UNFINISHED BUSINESS: GETTIN’ SCHOOL’D” will be at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St. in Hartford, until Sept. 18. www.realartways.org.