AC Discussion | Given All This: Collective Institutional Futures
Throughout 2021, Amplify’s Alternate Currents Working Group addressed issues surrounding the future of for- and non-profit arts and cultural institutions broadly conceived, their position within the communities that support them, and the shared cultural logic from which colonialism and museums emerged. They created work in response that interrogates institutional frameworks by proposing a shared set of values around artists’ relationships with institutions, cultural labor as care, and reorienting settler narratives to better understand Omaha as an Indigenous place. We collected their projects in a publication titled, Given All This: Collective Institutional Futures and had an in depth conversation over Zoom on January 18th to talk more about where we’ve been, how we’ve changed, and what the future might hold.
Watch the full conversation, or read through the transcript below to find links to additional resources, and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Title of Discussion: Given All This: Collective Institutional Futures
Panelist 1: Corson Androski, Panelist 2: Katie Bettin, Panelist 3: Jody Boyer
Panelist 4: Allegra Hangen, Panelist 5: Ilaamen Pelshaw, Panelist 6: Jared Packard, Panelist 7: Lillian Snortland
Moderator: Annika Johnson
Date of Discussion: January 18th, 2022
List of Acronyms: [CA] = Corson Androski; [KB] = Katie Bettin; [JB] = Jody Boyer; [AH] = Allegra Hangen; [IP] = Ilaamen Pelshaw; [JP] = Jared Packard; [LS] = Lillian Snortland; [AJ] = Annika Johnson; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser
Transcript
[PF] Welcome everybody. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started. It’s great to have you all here for tonight’s Alternate Currents panel discussion and the official book launch of Given All This: Collective Institutional Futures with members of our 2021 Alternate Currents Working Group. Special thanks to the Sherwood Foundation whose support makes programs like Alternate Currents possible.
My name is Peter and I’m the program director at Amplify Arts. For anyone who’s new to Amplify, our mission is to support unity, progress, and innovation in the cultural sector and Alternate Currents is a program that helps us do that by providing context for national and international conversations in the arts with responses from people working at the ground level. We do that in a few different ways--the Alternate Currents blog, this bi-monthly discussion series, and a collaborative artist working group that helps to shape the program.
In 2021, our AC Working Group dedicated the year to investigating the idea of “Institutional Futures.” Tonight’s discussion is in many ways a culmination of that investigation. In this context, we dealt with institutions of all sizes but mostly looked at private nonprofits like art museums. During our monthly sessions, the group discussed questions around and made work in response to institutional critique, arts economies, organizational hierarchies, cultural labor, and museum collections. Interestingly, our conversations pretty quickly moved away from institutional frameworks and toward a shared set of values around the relationships between artists and cultural institutions, the ethics of progress, and understanding Omaha as an Indigenous place.
Amplify’s positionality in these discussions as a nonprofit organization that directly benefits from the racial and ecological injustices that line the pockets of many who support arts nonprofits is complicated and fraught with unanswered questions. Our goal with this artist working group specifically was to listen, learn, and better understand how we might more meaningfully support the decentralization of wealth and power in the cultural sector to envision our institutions as more equitable, more just, and more transparent places. No easy answers. No nicely packaged solutions, but still a real gift came in the form of each group member’s work and the contributions they made to our first Alternate Currents publication titled, Given All This: Collective Institutional Futures.
We’ll talk more about those contributions shortly, but first, I’d like to introduce Annika Johnson, our co-facilitator for this program, who will be guiding tonight’s conversation with this terrific panel of artists and thinkers. I’m going to quickly introduce them to you as well. In alphabetical order, we have (and if you wouldn’t mind giving a wave so we can put faces to names, that would be wonderful) Corson Androski, Katie Bettin, Jody Boyer, Allegra Hangen, Lex JonAe, Jared Packard, Ilaamen Pelshaw, Sarah Rowe, and Lillian Snortland.
They will be in conversation with each other for 40 or 45 minutes before we open the floor to questions, but please feel free to use Q&A or chat at any point during the discussion.
I also want to mention that a video and transcript of tonight’s discussion with links to additional articles and more resources will be posted to the Alternate Currents Blog in a couple weeks so you can revisit it there, leave your thoughts in the comments section and help us keep this conversation going. Go to our website anytime--amplify arts.org--and click on the Alternate Currents tab to read, watch, and listen to more conversations like this one.
Thank you all again for being here. We really appreciate your support and participation in critical discussions like this and with that, I will pass it over to Annika.
[AJ] Thanks so much for joining us tonight. This is really a wonderful group of artists and I think you're in for a treat. I wish that you all had this in your hands. Like Peter said, you can get your copy in a number of places including Amplify Arts’ website. We were just talking as we were preparing for this panel about how nice it is to see the product of your artistic labors in a published format. So, I hope all of the group members here feel really proud of what they worked on this year.
I'm Annika. I co-facilitated this group. I wear many hats. One of those hats is that I curate the Native American art collection at Joslyn Art Museum, but I also love working with artists. Having discussions around how we as artists, cultural workers, and curators can engage with with our place, with our communities, etc. is one of the pleasures of co-facilitating a working group like this and so is witnessing how those conversations evolve over the course of the year. When Peter and I were initially thinking of the theme “institutional futures” (there's a different theme for each working group), we began the conversation with this group with a reading about capital ”I,” capital “C” institutional critique, which is broadly an artistic practice of critiquing museums and galleries that began in the 1960s. It's really shifted over the decades, but the group took the conversation in directions that related to their work. They showed that their practices, their interests didn't really lie with capital “I” institutions necessarily, but rather in collectivity and thinking about institutional structures, how community can organize, forms of organizing, healing, and collaboration. This is really reflected in the title of the publication. Peter's going to bring up some images here so you can see the design.
“Institutional” is crossed out and changed to “Collective Futures,” which really encapsulates the group's thinking. Like I said, each year the group contributes to a final project. All 10 members of our working group were given 10 pages to do whatever they want. We organized the project into three overlapping themes. The first is called, “Who Needs Who the Most” and it's about reimagining artists’ relationships with institutions or with organizations. We have a section called, “The Labor of Care,” which is about our capacity to propose regenerative modes of artistic production. The final part is called, “This Land” and it's about reorienting settler narratives to better understand Omaha as an Indigenous place. Hopefully that gives you a sense of the publication.
I think I’ll kick off the discussion with a question. We opened our first session of the year last January with a prompt: “Imagine you walk into a museum, a gallery, a classroom, an urban farm in 2050. What does it look like?” After thinking about this and investigating the ins and outs of cultural institutions, non-profits, and grassroots organizations this year, I want to hear from all of you more about how your relationships to cultural institutions have changed.
[JP] This is kind of a hard one for me because I wish it could be a more dramatic change. We started this conversation, this year of dialogue, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, and Covid. There was such a cultural upheaval and new things being demanded of institutions, which is why this cohort was so helpful while thinking through some of those things. I entered with maybe a more naive, or a very optimistic view of coming out with some kind of tangible change or a course of action we could embark upon. The reality is that things have been shifted in a much more subtle way and I don't know that my relationship to institutions has changed very dramatically. What I can say is that they seem to be more permeable or not quite as monolithic as I once thought they were. I think that's because we did some great readings around how to critique institutions and how collective action might work. That's been my perspective and I'm really curious to hear some of my cohorts’ take on that.
[AH] Before we connected, I was actually doing some writing about this prompt. I completely agree with you, Jared. When I came into this group, I was expecting to have this revelatory moment where I'm like, “Oh my god, this is how we can change institutions!” It's great to have that idealism, but I don't think change happens that way. What I am seeing is that large cultural institutions are much more nuanced. I think it's through our conversations, and the readings that we've done, and the studio visits that the opaque image of a cultural institution doesn't feel so opaque to me anymore. I'm talking with you guys who also work in cultural institutions, who are artists thinking about these things, and it's given me a lot of insight into the behind the scenes aspects of it all. I feel like I'm seeing cultural institutions, large cultural institutions I should say, because smaller ones are a bit more transparent already, but I'm starting to see them as more nuanced. I'm seeing the workers behind that institution, rather than the institution’s facade.
[AJ] Those are great responses. It is subtle and nuanced and I appreciate that honesty. I'm wondering about the rest of you, and Katie in particular, you were thinking about urban farms throughout your project and weren't necessarily working with museums or large-scale institutions. I'd be curious to hear how your relationship changed to the kinds of organizations that you were working with. Did you have a similar experience?
[KB] Yeah, and I apologize if my eyes shift over. I did try to write out my thoughts previously. As I approached the year, coming into it, one of the questions on the application was asked about our thoughts on the state of museums currently. I was like, “Shoot, I gotta go talk to someone. I haven't been to a museum in so long.” So, I did and what they shared with me was really influential in my application. It opened my eyes to a lot of dots that I didn't even know were connected.
Thinking about food justice nonprofits, I know that I have come to a better understanding of how nonprofits, big or small, are connected to a string of funding. It just gets bigger and it gets bigger and it compounds and that makes it important to be critical nonprofits regardless of size. When I think of what I’m taking away from this experience, I know the way I approach relationships with institutions and people has changed. People make up institutions. That is something I have come to know by personal experience, but it has also been reiterated in the readings and discussions we've had. Movements and outcomes, be they positive or negative, are because of people. I definitely don't feel afraid to challenge relationships and I'm not mad about that outcome. I'm excited for it. I think growth will come from it.
[AJ] That's great. I just want to underscore the point you just made, Katie that people make up institutions. I think that was at the core of a lot of our conversations about workers’ rights and the grassroots. Ilaamen, Lilly, Jody, Corson, do you have things you want to add about this shift?
[IP] For me, the relationship with organizations was huge. Being from Guatemala, I have always loved museums. We don't have large museums down there, so I think somehow I have idealized the mission of a museum and maybe thought that the best way for an artist to really know that they have succeeded is to be in a museum. Now, reading about all the complicated relationships and all that is behind the scenes and the hard things about some large organizations, really made me think differently about art and the impact an artist can have. You don't need to be in a huge museum to produce good work or to be an artist. In fact, if you focus more on your community and how your art can provide some voice or some connection between people, that is even more important; much more important than the ego boost of having your art in a huge institution. It was very enriching for me to hear from everybody. Don't get me wrong, it would be amazing to have your art in a museum, but hopefully uh the whole system, the disparities that exist in the arts right now will change too. Hopefully, it will be more open for more artists. It kind of burst the bubble of what I thought originally of museums in general. It was very deep for me to hear from you all this year.
[AJ] That's fantastic. What you described is a huge shift from seeing an art institution as a force that's somehow essential to validating your practice. Taking that out of the equation of what you do and why you do it is foundational. Jody, Corson, Lilly, would you like to add anything?
[LS] I can hop in. I think that the greatest change for me has been on a person-to-person relationship basis. For me, it took a turn into thinking about why people think the way they do at a very fundamental level, the psychology of that, and really peeling back as many layers as I could. That's frankly where you're going to find decolonization, in the very act of how we make decisions and why we make decisions. I work in the nonprofit sphere and I've worked in a lot of different cultural institutions and this year in particular has reminded me of the pride and ego in institutions and their desperation to exist and thrive as financial entities. They live in a scarcity mindset which then gets transferred to the people who work there. It becomes a cycle that perpetuates itself.
Working in those situations, I've been trying to think more about humility and trying to be humble about the institution itself. We need to humble ourselves as workers and also humble the institution quite a bit, large cultural institutions especially, and play with the ethical friction of being imperfect. Everywhere I work seems afraid of admitting that we are imperfect or admitting fault or making concessions, but as far as I'm concerned, that is where the power is. Change is made when we live in that space and continue to work in that space. That's where I've landed and where I'm trying to stay for now. I don't think we will get rid of these institutions and the all or nothing, throw the baby out with the bathwater way of thinking leads to us staying the same, in a lot of ways. We're afraid if we don't have the answer, the perfect fix, that we can't do it. If it's not perfect, there's no point. I think that means we just stay in one place and it's an excuse to stay the same.
[AJ] Those are all good points and they really came across in the work that you contributed to the publication. All of the group members contributed writing or images in different ways but Lilly, I wanted to quote you. You contributed a poem that reads, “Nothing is stagnant. We are all people of hopes and wishes.” I think that really draws out a bit of what you're saying. With that, I want to dive into the publication more and give you all a chance to talk about your projects. How did the work that you contributed to the publication question, queer, or consider alternatives to institutional frameworks?
[IP] In my case, I did several pages of comics and thought about how the comic or cartoons are usually made for people and for communities and as a kind of communication that’s not elite. So, I wanted to use a format that institutions usually don't. It was more like a funny way to help us think about how we can change how we view each other and respect and value each other as equals. That is when change really happens. Often we just check a box when we try to be more inclusive. What is the minimum that I can do so people think I’m doing the work? But, at the end of the day, the work needs to be done very deep down. If you don't really think that everybody is equal and that everybody deserves your respect, no matter what you do to mask your colonialist mentality, it will come up. So, it was in a funny way just to say when people change, institutions will start changing.
[AJ] I love your contribution and that you provided more of a visual and narrative format. When Peter and I shared the layout of the book with the group, the group’s reaction was, “It looks too clean.” Jared responded by contributing messy, lively, handwritten introductions for each of the projects to engage with that format of the book as a way of questioning institutions.
[JP] Yeah, I'll take that as an intro, especially because my project was about introductions. I was interested in how institutions became framing devices and how they uplift or bury our own histories, our own stories that we tell about ourselves. I was thinking about the essential components of a book and one of them is an introduction, a framing device. I made these drawing writings with charcoal on paper as short descriptions. They function in a similar way to a book introduction or the vinyl text in an exhibition. Each of my fellow peers in the cohort very generously gave me permission to do this, so thank you. I was using charcoal, so the materiality became really important to me. It would brush away and leave words that are kind of illegible in spots. I'm interested in the friction between this insistence on creating authority and power through language by giving something meaning and purpose and direction, by giving it an introduction, and the way it's actually conveyed as sometimes illegible or sometimes not totally clear. Maybe you have to read it two or three times. I think that that kind of friction is really interesting and exciting and part of the challenge of the broader conversations we're having about institutions.
[AJ] Jody, I'd be curious to hear from you because you played a pretty critical role in the group in terms of using different teaching tools. We were on Zoom for most of these sessions and Jody brought in tools to organize our ideas to think in a visual way. Your contribution to the book is about gathering sources and I'd love to hear about bringing those resources together.
[JB] I don't have a copy of the book, so you'll have to hold up the sections. I tried to use my pages as a way of creating a resource center in the book by adding QR codes. Two of them link to some nonprofit organizations that are focused on different economic models and moving towards more collective economic models, and the last one is a Padlet for the group members, or anyone who has the book, to add resources about dismantling colonial ideologies, scarcity ideologies, and begin to think differently about how they want to live their lives. On the last page of my section, I included a package of seeds that I nurtured over four months in my garden. It was a really interesting phenomena to start with a single package of seeds and then end up with I think nearly 10,000 seeds from one package of seed that I grew in my backyard. It was such a beautiful metaphor for the abundance that is in our world when we allow it to be there and when we allow it to be shared with others. So, I wanted to share those seeds as a gesture. If everyone who has a book goes and grows that package of seeds, then multiple generations of abundance that come from that act. That's what I felt like the experience was of being part of this working group, planting a lot of seeds and seeing how the changes in our thinking will move us forward as artists and people.
[AJ] That's great. I am now just making that connection to the seed packet. I love that it closes the book because, as all of you have articulated, this is really the beginning of a discussion and planting the seeds of new directions in your practices.
[KB] I ended up interviewing a lot of people and honestly, not enough people. I need to talk to more people because this conversation's not over. I don't want it to be over. I think there's still a lot to be said and a lot to understand. I took a compilation of questions I came up with and reached out to people I know who are associated with food and food production, education, cooking, etc. in Omaha. I wanted to take the pulse of what everyone was thinking about. I have my own personal thoughts about nonprofits and food production and food justice and how that comes off in ways that seem really inefficient and unconnected. So, those are my thoughts. I reached out to other people and realized I wasn't alone. They were really long conversations and challenging to have, but I am really thankful that, in this project, I was able to bring in more thoughts and minds. I don't know what I would have produced this on my own because I don't think I fully understand where we're at or how we should move forward. I know I have ideas that come and go but really, when it comes down to it, there might never be a conclusion to this work. The answer is not going to come from one person, especially where food and food systems are concerned because it affects us all.
When you ask people what a food system is, everyone's answer is different. It gets complicated. I do fully believe after this project that food is something that can take care of us all as humans and as a planet. I'm really appreciative to everyone who engaged with me in this project and I learned so much interacting with community. There's so much to learn.
[AJ] I think you touched on something that we all thought about in the group. There isn't one answer. The answers need to come through conversation and you started those conversations in your project, which was really fantastic. There's not necessarily a road map or an overarching structure for all of the different ways that organizations and individuals work with food, but you started the conversation.
I want to shift to another question that circles back to the initial question we posed to in working group: You're in 2050 and you walk into a cultural institution or you work with a cultural organization. What does it look like? What are some ways in which cultural institutions can shift to be more transparent, more equitable, and more inclusive?
[AH] I've been thinking about this a lot. For me, it comes down to having a real genuine, non-pretentious relationship with the community. I feel like right now, a lot of larger institutions have their own mission statement that's this forward-facing thing of who they are and what they do. A lot of times, it doesn’t actually respond to the community or what the community needs. It's sort of inventing a community that doesn't actually exist. Even saying, “This is what the community needs and we're going to address these things,” at the end of the day, they’re addressing what their donors want or what is expected of an institution at that scale. Really listening to and responding to the needs of the community is the most tangible thing I can think of, whether it's a large institution or a smaller institution. I feel like the smaller institutions that do exist right now are doing that. I know there are multiple organizations–I want to get away from the word institution–in Omaha that are doing exactly that and they do care deeply for communities. They respond to community needs and we can see that. That works out really nicely. Everyone's served in that situation, both the institution and the people.
[JP] To build off of that, Allegra, I can't remember which of my fellow panelists made the comment about the ego of the institution, but there's something inherent in the ego and the operations of art institutions which really depends on a pedigreed tastemaker who's making decisions about where budgets are being allocated and who's getting platformed. That operational setup of these institutions is very much at odds with what you're talking about Allegra, in terms of listening to communities. That's the ego thing. We need to challenge the ego of cultural institutions and learn how to effectively deauthorize those who have held power historically in those institutions and those who intentionally, or unintentionally, end up being the gatekeepers of authority.
[AH] And when it comes to authority and opportunities, those opportunities tend to go to certain people who can bring that money back, you know. It becomes a not so great cycle.
[LS] To add to that, I think that there is a fear of letting outside people have control of what goes on inside the walls of an organization. Some will have outside curators come in, for example.i Putting those sorts of programs in place is a really good start, but even that can be like pulling teeth. Giving over any amount of ownership to an outside group and allowing them the freedom within an institution or an organization's space to do what they want, is tied, I think, to land ownership. A lot of my project was thinking about how we started from a really, really bad place with all these cultural institutions being claiming land, taking land that wasn't theirs, claiming their cultural authority and legitimacy. I say “legitimacy” with very big air quotes. That is how colonialism works. You legitimize something with the cultural capital to say, “This is mine. We deserve this space. I get to control it.” That instinct is how we got into this boat. I think slowly dismantling that is important. I work in fundraising and I really believe that most people in fundraising need to learn abolitionist theory and they need to learn decolonization theory. People teach this stuff. We have no framework for applying that to our work until we go out and learn it. That's my two cents. That's what I've been thinking about lately.
[PF] Can you talk more about that, Lilly? What would an abolitionist framework in the context of nonprofit development look like?
[LS] I'm still learning, but personally Ii've found that everything is a lot more interconnected than one would think. There tends to be a separation between forward thinking social movements and art institutions. It doesn't make sense that they be disconnected. I've learned something every time I read a book about pushing boundaries and social change in this, and other contexts, not just cultural institutions. Abolitionist theory is a good foundation for me, personally. It might not be for everybody, necessarily, but I think that that abolitionist theory helped me think about how to detangle a lot of what I believed to be true about how society should be arranged. There's also so much good literature out right now. I think it's being simplified in a way that is very applicable to a lot of people's lives.
[PF] I appreciate you bringing that up. Speaking of interconnectedness, I wanted to ask Corson, who was also a member of 2020’s working group, if they could talk about any connections between what we discussed in 2020– issues around ecological justice–and what we talked about in 2021, institutional futures.
[CA] That's a really good question. Let me think back a little bit. A big touchstone for me last year was Kyle Powys Whyte’s work on the philosophy of climate change and thinking about why settler society continues to fail so spectacularly in addressing this collective problem. Doing historical work and thinking about how social institutions were structured differently in Indigenous nations and theories of institutional change, he makes the point that we focus on this very much as a problem of climate change being a singular crisis. He talks about it actually being more broadly a problem of our society not having the capacity to address change because this is, in the grand scheme of things, just one of many apocalypses that humankind has been through and the issue now is not that climate change is fundamentally, definitely worse, but that social institutions are not um accountable to the people they're meant to serve.
This is a point that Allegra just made a couple minutes that translates really, really well to thinking about arts institutions, both in their failure to be accountable to the people that they intend to serve–the people who their land was extracted from, who cultural artifacts and the current work is extracted from–and also their general failure in their capacity to change. Maybe one of the biggest things that has changed for me, thinking about museums for the last year, is rethinking their promise of stability as being their ultimate good and as giving them the justification to own and control such a huge portion of the world's cultural works. You know, the promise is that museums are too big to fail; they are unchanging; they can care for this work over time, make it last forever, and control and display it forever. As soon as you introduce a critical decolonial perspective to that, it's really easy to see how that's not the ultimate good in every case. There is work that was never meant to be shown.
Thinking about museums has affected how I think about the future and what work that is totally agnostic to institutions might look like.I kind of stumbled into that with a project at the beginning of the year. It was a project that was originally a classroom exercise that could work in any room. I adapted it to work in a gallery. It's something that I could do regardless of institutional support, even though my support from Amplify was invaluable in lots of ways. I was really lucky to see someone else has done this exercise elsewhere. Dawn Rhodes, a photographer who cited that work as something that she did outdoors. The big change has been thinking less about what I’m going to make to hang in a gallery and more about how I can do good work without the certainty of having an institution that I can trust ethically to work with in the future.
[AJ] These are all lovely responses. We're coming up to eight o'clock and I wanted to give attendees one last chance to ask questions. Okay, great, a question from David:
“What was the book everyone read about the different ways to approach criticism and how did that shift their perspective?”
David, I don't know if you're referring to a specific book that the entire group read. I think there's probably a lot of individual responses to material that we worked through this year. What were some of the materials you were all looking through that really shifted your perspective?
[CA] Jared, do you have the name of that podcast offhand that you recommended about the origins of museums as collecting institutions? That was important for me.
[LS] Same for me.
[JP] Yeah, Ariella Azoulay did a podcast for Hyperallergic. To respond to David's question, we read an article on W.A.G.E., Working Artists in the Greater Economy that really stuck with me [Organizing Dark Matter: W.A.G.E. as Alternative Worker Organization]. I had been familiar with W.A.G.E. previously but this was a deep dive into the history and origins of this organization. Just a very quick synopsis for our audience who might not be familiar, W.A.G.E. an organization that establishes payment standards for arts nonprofits to compensate for cultural labor and cultural work by primarily artists. If you go to their website, they'll break down payment structures based on an organization's annual operating budget. Say your budget is five million you bring in an artist for a solo show, their calculator shows you what you should pay that artist blank. It sounds really straightforward and simple to understand, but the inertia it took to get this thing together, to maintain it, and continue operating was really formative for me in terms of understanding how generally undervalued cultural labor is. That’s one example of how collective advocacy can make a difference.
[AJ] I think that ties into a question we got from Amanda:
“Do you have any ideas about how small, informal organizations can stay connected with each other in a more active and collaborative way? Sometimes running an informal organization can be consuming. How can we form a stronger network across the city in between dispersed locations?”
That's a great question.
[AH] That's an amazing question. I don't think I have an answer, but I identify really strongly with this question. I'm constantly asking myself the same thing. We have so many new digital tools that we could use. I think staying in constant communication and having a sense of community, even if it's virtually, is important. This is why I say I don't have an answer because that, in itself, is really time consuming, especially if you're running an organization by yourself.
[KB] One of the people I interviewed made a closing recommendation about what nonprofits, especially in food justice, should do. They said, imagine if all these nonprofits were working together and, instead of chasing money separately and missions separately, worked together. How would that look? I think a lot of people are thinking about that. Their recommendation was to create a non-profit to connect non-profits. That's a whole a whole cycle and they were joking, but I agree with Allegra. Staying connected is important. Omaha is not too terribly big. It still feels manageable. I still run into people I know a lot. That’s a big part of building supportive communities too.
[AJ] We have one more question. Corson, I thought of your contribution to the publication. The question is:
“You are all focused on people, groups of people, and institutions without mention of nature. How does nature relate to your independent interests?”
I'll just show text in an image from Corson’s essay. It’s a personal essay that brings in historical photography and the exploration of place.
[CA] I do have the sense that a lot of the work we did, even thinking specifically about cultural institutions, ends up um dealing with nature quite a bit. Any food justice work obviously is concerned with land use. I think healing is concerned with nature. In work that I contributed to publication, I thought about genre as an institution. A lot of times, when we talk about the cultural institutions, we need physical buildings with people working inside collecting work, but as far as a sociological institution, this is a little more broad–anything that covers social norms. I think about something like a genre, like landscape photography, is just as rigid and powerful a structure for governing social norms as a museum is. So, that essay focuses on thinking about what it looks like to think about genre as an institution and to think about how the work we make is affected by legacies of environmental injustice. Those are a few things we could point to in the book as having made that connection.
[AJ] Absolutely. And land was really a big part of our discussions and so was talking about the history of colonization and talking about the place where we are. I think having a group of artists who have a connection to the city of Omaha, who have a connection to place, the people here, the land here, who are thinking about the history of this place was really fruitful. Even though we were on Zoom for most of our meetings, I do feel like that rootedness in place really shaped our discussions.
This discussion went by really quickly. I appreciate everyone for joining us today. I appreciate this group. I hope you feel proud of the contributions you've made and I hope that, like the seeds in the back of the book, your projects continue to grow. Peter has a few closing notes to share. Thank you everybody so much for being here and for participating!
[PF] I just wanted to take a minute to, first of all, say thank you to our panelists, to Annika, to everybody who attended. We're really grateful to have had you all here tonight and we're really grateful to have had you participate in this discussion with us. We want to give a special mention to Sarah Rowe and Lex JonAe, who weren't able to make it tonight, but who were really integral members of our group and helped move discussions forward. They contributed great projects to the book. We hope you'll check it out. Thank you again and we'll see everybody soon.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity.
About the Panelists:
Corson Androski is a researcher, conservationist, software developer, and photographer/filmmaker from Hutchinson, Kansas. Their work uses the concept of care—as labor, affect, and ethic, given/received by humans and other-than-humans, individuals and systems—to consider subjects like institutional medicine alongside state ecological regulation, and beyond their respective margins, emergent communities of illness alongside informal conservation of the small, overlooked ecosystems of weeds and fungi that spring up in the seams of our patchwork flyover states.
Katie Bettin was born and raised in Omaha. She studied at Colorado State University and received a Bachelors of Science for Food Science and Human Nutrition and a Bachelors of Liberal Arts for Environmental Sociology in 2018. Immediately after she began participating and working within nonprofits that centered around addressing food insecurity around the country and just this last year back in Omaha. In doing so she has been able to recognize aspects of food systems that continuously fall short of serving people and land. It is an ongoing pursuit to better understand her role in helping to transition food systems to something that is rooted in cultural and environmental accountability. She seeks to listen, learn, and understand how her hands, with others, can make this a reality.
Jody Boyer is an artist and educator who tries to make art everyday. In her studio practice she explores the broad interdisciplinary possibilities of traditional and new media with specific interests in personal and collective memory, domesticity, climate change, care and the natural world. Her artwork has been shown in over 85 exhibitions across the country. She received her BA in Studio Arts from Reed College, an MA in Intermedia and Video Art from the University of Iowa and a MS in Secondary Education from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She teaches in the School of the Arts at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and at Norris Middle School. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Allegra Hangen is a multidisciplinary artist who works in video installations, photography, found footage, and archives. Her projects are research-heavy and usually focus on topics like collective and cultural memory, nostalgia, a romanticized idea of home and family, language, and the infiltration of politics into intimate—or seemingly-apolitical—spaces. She actively collaborates with friends and fellow artists between Omaha, NE and Mexico City, namely through Fortuna, a border-crossing residency program that she founded to provide Omahan and Mexico City-based artists time in residence in the other city.
Lex JonAe is an Organic Healing Artist, Certified Peer Educator, Holistic Nutritionist & Health Coach with a Bachelor’s Degree in Health Communication. Lex has studied worldwide with herbalists, shamanic healers, and traditional medicinal healers, learning and growing in the spirit of healing. She is a Product Formulator of Balance Botanica - an Organic Apothecary & Self Care Collection. She has studied throughout Europe, The Caribbean, North & Central America. Lex mindfully handcrafts balms, creams, oils, salts, with a focus on holistic healing of the mind, body, & soul and to enhance self-care, self-love & self awareness using the power of the elements.
Jared Packard is an artist and curator based in Omaha, NE. Packard completed his BA at Clark University and his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Packard currently is the Exhibitions Manager at the Bemis Center and has curated exhibitions including Sissi, Generator Space; the NEA-funded unLOCK: Merging Art and Industry, Lockport, IL; the nationally traveling exhibition, ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection; and (Re)Flex Space, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL. He has shown his work at Superduchess, NYC; ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL; Baltimore Gallery, Detroit, MI; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; Centre International d’Art Contemporain, Pont-Aven, France; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, D.C.; Shiltkamp Gallery, Worcester, MA.
Ilaamen Pelshaw is a Latina artist and illustrator living in the United States since 2015. With a Bachelor’s in Graphic Design she worked for nearly two decades on the commercial and corporate side of creativity. She is known to express her vibrant culture by her use of bold colors and happy themes. Since relocating she has been in more than 25 exhibitions including some Solo-shows. She was selected as one of the winners of the Latin American Illustrators curated by AI-AP for her painting Frida. Selected by Singulart Gallery in Paris, as one of “7 Illustrators to Watch” and featured in several collections curated by Singulart and SaatchiArt Online. Her art can be found in private collections in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Sarah Rowe is a multimedia artist based in Omaha, NE. Her work opens cross cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, fiber arts, performance, and Native American ceremony in unconventional ways. Rowe’s work is participatory, a call to action, and re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of today’s global landscape. Rowe holds a BA in Studio Art from Webster University, studying in St. Louis, MO, and Vienna, Austria. She is of Lakota and Ponca descent.
Lillian Snortland, originally from Eugene, Oregon, is a writer of fiction, poetry, and cultural essays. She has explored themes of fantasy, surrealism, and the imaginative feminine from a young age. At Carleton College, she studied storytelling and material culture of the past—Classical Studies, French literature and media, and art history, and continues to play with a multidisciplinary perspective in her analysis today. She currently works in the nonprofit arts sector. Lillian was accepted into the 2021 Virtual Collaborative Program for Emerging Artists, hosted by Exit 11 Performing Arts Company and Postscript Magazine. Further writing can be found at chaimihai.wordpress.com/, and on her instagram @perfectbleh and @chaimihai.
About the Moderator:
Annika Johnson is Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Joslyn Art Museum where she is developing installations, programming, and research initiatives in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Her research and curatorial projects examine nineteenth-century Native American art and exchange with Euro-Americans, as well as contemporary artistic and activist engagements with the histories and ongoing processes of colonization. Annika received her PhD in art history from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 and grew up in Minnesota, Dakota homelands called Mni Sota Makoce.
About the Alternate Currents Working Group:
The Alternate Currents Working Group is a cohort of ten artists and culture workers based in Omaha who meet monthly over the course of a year to develop and refine project-based work in response to a central theme. In 2021, the Working Group addressed issues surrounding the future of for- and non-profit arts and cultural institutions broadly conceived, their position within the communities that support them, and the shared cultural logic from which colonialism and museums emerged.