AC Discussion | Who Needs Who the Most: Artists and Cultural Institutions
During a virtual conversation on March 24th, panelists glyneisha, Jonathan González, and Lillian Snortland sat down together to reimagine relationships between artists and institutions by considering artist-initiated projects that aim to shift institutional paradigms of racial equity, fair pay, and institutional transparency. They continued the discussion by offering up positions artists might adopt to meaningfully engage with institutions while taking into account their inherent political and economic entanglements.
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: Who Needs Who the Most: Artists and Cultural Institutions
Panelist 1: glyneisha
Panelist 2: Jonathan González
Contributing Moderator: Lillian Snortland
Date of Discussion: March 24, 2021
List of Acronyms: [g] = glyneisha; [JG] = Jonathan González; [LS] = Lillian Snortland; [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: Who Needs Who the Most Artists and Cultural institutions with Jonathan González, glyneisha, and Lillian Snortland. A big thank you to the Pape Family Foundation, Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment whose support makes virtual programs like this possible.
My name is Peter and I work here at Amplify Arts. For anybody who’s new to Amplify, our mission is to support unity, progress, and innovation in the cultural sector and Alternate Currents is one program that helps us do that by contextualizing national and international topics in the arts with responses from people working at the ground level. The program does that in a few different ways. First with the Alternate Currents blog. Second with a bi-monthly discussion series. And third with a working group of ten arts and culture workers who collectively develop project-based work that helps shape the program and move it forward. Lillie is a member of our 2021 Working Group.
Tonight’s panel discussion is part of a year-long investigation of the future of our cultural institutions and how it can be shaped by equity, transparency, and accountability. Our panelists will be in conversation with another for about an hour and would like to invite you all to consider yourselves active participants in this discussion right from the get-go. Please feel free to enter your thoughts or questions into the Q&A at any point during the conversation.
Before we dive in, I also want to let you know that a video and transcript of tonight’s discussion with links to additional articles and resources will be posted to the Alternate Currents Blog in the next week or two so you can revisit the discussion, there, leave your thoughts in the comments section and help us keep this discussion going. Just visit our website at amplifyarts.org and click on the Alternate Currents anytime tab to read, watch, and listen to more conversations like this one.
So, all that said, I’m really excited for tonight’s discussion and to learn from these three incredible panelists, Jonathan González, glyneisha, and Lillian Snortland who will also be asking questions and guiding tonight’s discussion. So, thank you all again for being here and Lillie, passing it over to you.
[LS] Good evening everybody. Peter said it all. Thanks for being here. We really appreciate it. I guess I'll start off by introducing myself. My name is Lillie. I'm currently in Baltimore, Maryland but I lived for a while in Omaha. I'm a writer and I work in the nonprofit arts sector right now. So, for me this conversation is really important because I feel like I don't want to lose sight of what artists are experiencing in their relationship with the nonprofit sector as someone working there and as someone who's going to have to navigate those relationships myself. So, I'm really excited to get to speak to glyneisha and Jonathan today and I will go ahead and pass it off to glyneisha.
[g] Thank you, Lillie. Hi everyone. My name is glyneisha. I am coming to you tonight from native Kickapoo land, also known as Texas. I'm also born and raised in Texas. I have an extensive art career based out of Kansas City, Missouri, but I just moved back home, getting re-routed, re-grounded. I'm a community organizer, co-founder of a community-based organization called Strange Fruit Femmes, which is a Black-led organization that centers the voices and work of Indigenous, Black, Brown femmes in the Midwest through programs for youth and adults. I'm also a poly-disciplinary artist and educator and do a lot of things that are creative and intentional. I'm excited to be here with you all tonight and with the other panelists. Thank you.
[LS] Jonathan, you're up.
[JG] Thank you. My name is Jonathan González. My pronouns are they and them. I'm currently located on Lenape and Canarsee territories where it's known as the “Two Rivers Meet.” I speak also from the position of a member of Northeast Farmers of Color Network in the process of Land Back campaigns that are occurring here in New York State, but also with the Stockbridge-Munsee people moving into the Western Massachusetts region, as it's known today.
I'm an artist, definitely. I'm an artist. I'm a choreographer. I have been a dancer and a performer. I'm also a kind of a long-term grassroots activist, as someone who is a farmer, and I'm a cultural organizer trying to make strides that push against the kinds of policies that exist in this place where I'm born and raised, which is now known as New York City. I'm born and raised in Queens, [New York] and much of my life's work in geopolitical rights fighting for food sovereignty, but also community gardens, has been located here in this place, in this space. A lot of my art practice is collaborative processes. I work with a lot of people, and that's across multiple mediums, normally and mostly on topics of life-affirming Black life and trying to imagine futures where we live. We’ll talk more about that. I would love to talk more about that. I feel like there's already overlap happening so thank you for having me. I look forward to everything that happens. Yeah. Thank you.
[LS] Thank you, you guys. I think we should just dive into the big question--the whole reason we're here--because I think that that will open up the door to a lot of other questions as we go along. I think that first question would be: who does need who more, institutions or artists? I want to let you take your first stab at it and then we can move on from there. Jonathan, do you mind going first?
[JG] Yeah, for sure. I'll go first. I wanted to almost read back the question, the Andrea Fraser question because I didn't know the statement. So, I also really appreciate Peter offering these questions because Andrea Fraser states in this that, “there is no outside to the art world and artists cannot exist in an antagonistic relationship to the institutions of art because artists are integral to the institutions of art.” I guess I had a question back to Andrea Fraser, which I would with glyneisha tonight, and maybe with you too Lillie, where I wanted to ask what happens when the practices and collective expressions that we're working on require conditions that cannot thrive inside of the institution? Or cannot be housed or held or harnessed inside of the institution because of all the things I think we'll try to touch on but we would need 40 weeks to really grasp together in terms of the institutions of art and the cultural centers and even community centers, if you want to really go there too, reinforce forms of the state that keep us from getting to do the kinds of things that the revolution is asking us to do. And the kinds of things that are already happening. I guess that's what I'm trying to say too. It's like one: the answer is we do not need institutions because institutions exist outside of what we call institutions and they're collective spaces. They're the organizing space of the place that happens on the corner. They're the mural that honors somebody who's passed. There's so many examples of places where culture thrives and conversation happens and nuanced ways of looking at the ways that we live happen through expression. The institutions that we're talking about I think tonight, which are like 501(c)(3)s, if we want to be specific, occupy a kind of engine of the state which one of my friends, Ron Ragin was just speaking about. They were talking to Sage Crump, who's out of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute. These institutions, perhaps we could say, they valorize the kinds of investments they want to see for reasons that keep us from getting to doing the work we need to do sometimes. And the last thing I’ll say, because I talked a lot, is then what we do with institutions as artists is harm reduction for those who work with them. I would love to talk about harm reduction as a principle when we work with these institutions.
[g] Yeah, one thing that I’m thinking about immediately with that quote is I think, especially right now, artists and community organizers, exodus folks who are within and doing this work, how all of us don't have this reliance upon defining ourselves in collaboration, or in correspondence, or in an antagonistic relationship to the institution because it is such a separate sector of work that's for us, by us and specific for our community. But I think within doing that, you do have to recognize it is making space for what is not happening at the same time. I think that it's also important to give those spaces, these cultural-care, community-started spaces, the credit for themselves. They are what they are, so to speak. And they have power within themselves. We all don't always have to center or frame the conversation around how they are in correspondence to these institutional spaces that don't keep artists like me in mind.
[LS] I think that those are both incredibly good points. I wanted to hop on this concept of harm reduction. I think, particularly as someone who has worked in a lot of different organizations over these past years, I think there is a certain amount of ethics that is always playing in the back of my mind because working within these institutions, I can tell you, they don't always have whole um of humanity in mind, so to speak. They have their very specific demographic in mind a lot of the time. So, I think that for me, I have been trying lately to really look more to community organizers and their vision of abundance where they have resources that might seem like less than an institution, but ultimately, they are never thinking like, “we have this finite amount of resources.” It is talking about an exchange across the board. For me, my harm reduction by being within the institution, is me always trying to have that psychology of abundance voiced. I don't know if that adds a little bit of context from the other side, so to speak. But I’m an artist and I’ve worked in institutions so…
[JG] Yeah, I wanted to respond because that was really generative. I think that's helpful. And also, glyneisha, thank you because you really just upped the ante in terms of where we're going. Like you're saying Lillie, I think my caution tonight is also how much some of us, if we say the cultural institutions are the 501(c)(3)s that tend to reproduce the things that we don't really need, let's name those because there are other institutions that actually are doing really important, rooted work. I don't want to make that get mixed up. Those institutions that typically reinforce gentrification by coming into a community and not creating connections with what is actually already there, and import culture, and import tourism, and import new people who become the owning class of that community and push out and displace people; if we're talking about those institutions? When those institutions learn from organizing spaces, collectives, artists that are pushing the conversation about how we deal with each other, I think for myself as an artist who also has been brought into institutions to try to shake things up and has been kicked out for going too far or have gone too far and been asked to remain, all the pluralities of that, there's something about the extractive economy that is so important to hold truth to. I would love to talk more about this like as we go. What is the bedrock to these institutions in terms of like--someone said, “heart chakra” when we first came in--what is the originating intent of these kinds of models, like the 501(c)(3)? The Ford Foundation and certain foundations that reinforce the presence of these institutions, also come up at a certain time period in which major revolutionary ideologies are happening. And these foundations, and this is stuff I’m learning from Dylan Rodríguez, who I will put in the chat, these foundations show up and they create grants and micro grants and structures that fund the radical aesthetics, but they cut off the final call, which is structural change. Maybe it's like that neoliberal okey dokey that Robin D. G. Kelley talks about a lot. Like we can't get too committed to reform, you know? We really can't because we'll be reforming until we die, you know? Especially people of color, especially Black femmes who are always asked to reproduce this labor. And with artists, especially artists of color, I was talking to a friend yesterday. It's like we do we work overtime in our death sometimes because our citations are used. So, I'm just like, also know that there's a boundary there in terms of how what happens outside and what happens in these locations should have a certain amount of honoring and presence when they look at organizing real deeply. And know that they cannot reproduce that logic because that work is different.
[LS] I think something that has stuck to me lately is this idea that the 501(c)(3) we're thinking of has all the cultural capital in the world, all the resources, all the money. A lot of their power comes from their stability and that's because they've amassed wealth all on the backs of smaller organizations, of individuals who are not who they are serving. To me, I feel as if something that that goes along with this idea of changing that psychology completely is the idea that that stability is not inherently good. That stability is what actually stops them from being able to dissolve if they are not serving the correct purpose. There's just like this feeling of holding on so tight to the past because that's the only way to stay afloat and stay strong. So, I think that's always interested me because the individual artist is work is working to stay afloat in their own way, but it doesn't quite have that same grasping. There's more fluidity, I think to being a smaller organization who is really connected to the community, as opposed to one that's latched on to this mythical past and this cultural strength that they think that they have. I don't know if that resonates at all.
[g] Yes for sure, for sure. I am thinking about in our last Soulful Safe Space Sunday for Strange Fruit Femmes, we use this conversation hosted by UC Davis with adrienne maree brown and Angela Davis. One of the notes that I wrote down that I pulled up that adrienne maree brown said is, “Are we speaking to build relationships or are we speaking to broaden, to connect? Are we speaking to separate isolate or make ourselves superior?” So, I feel like, to your points Jonathan, within the 501(c)(3) and distinguishing those programs or those happenings for youth and adults, I feel like sometimes, even bringing outsiders within, there’s still this sense of superiority and the programs have to be met from these standards that are from white supremacy, from the academy, from the institution in even the finest details. How things are set, how place mats or how tables are set, how people are introduced, how folks are welcomed into this space. I think we need to step out of this sense of operating from professionalism and take accountability and recognition for where those standards come from and within the 501(c)(3) work, when it's a person like me or my friend, or my Black femme friend, coming in and offering this work, letting those walls come down, letting yourself be open to that exchange of what these folks in the community can offer and how exactly they want to do that work.
[JG] Yeah. Wow. Thank you. My brain is firing. There's like 400 things coming to my mind right now. I just wanted to say a story so I can ground it in a personal experience in response to what glyneisha is saying. I had an opportunity to be a part of, exactly like glyneisha is saying, a context in which a group of outsiders--artists, people who are organizing--were brought into an institution and I’ll just give the history and be brief to get back to the point. Performance Space New York is an institution in New York City. It used to be called 122CC in the 70s when it started and it's based off of, just like Lillie said so well, a nostalgia about the 70s. The 70s, in New York City, was a really big time for experimental performance for people of all different kinds of creeds and backgrounds because it was a time also where there was a lot of corruption occurring in terms of housing, in terms of what was possible, so artists were present at that conversation and building community in that time. 122CC was a group of artists who came into this abandoned public school and created a kind of collective art ecosystem as squatters. You know, legally they were squatters and that happened in a lot of places in New York at that time. This one example Performance Space New York, I would say, is probably one of the more white hegemonic, avant-garde examples. I will drop a book in the chat by someone who is a really dear person, thinker Nandini Bagchee and CHARAS who are actually a Puerto Rican art action collective who did the same thing and were very much so rooted in trying to affirm life in the community.
I would say Performance Space New York's history is one that actually reinforces western logics of art and kind of imports art from other places and not from the Lower East Side, where they're located. Because of that CHARAS, and their institution, has been shut down by the city and the community right now is in a fight to try to get that back as a landmark while Performance Space still has its territory, which remains typically very locked. You can't really enter it unless you've been given invitation. But I was a part of a project there that lasted a year. A group of about 10 artists was invited to think about the programming. We were also given a salary to be on staff and to think about what would change contractually in how artists relate with an institution. In 2020 this happened. So, when COVID happened in March and all these institutions, cultural institutions closed here in New York, we had to leave pretty much. We had our card keys still, but no one could be in the building anymore safely and a group of us, as artists inside of this whole cohort, were attending the [Black Lives Matter] protests. We had already been organizing. We recognized that people needed a place to get water, to eat, to charge their phones, because we were on the street, and also to hide out at times because there was a curfew which was leading to more arrests. So, it became an opportunity to use the building. And we did. And just to name comrades and people in that group and their labor like Ripley Soprano, Sarah Snyder, Nadia Taikolska, Rudy Gerson, Lou Danielle Brown, Angel Robertson--there's so many people. What we had to do in response, to what you're saying, Lillie, I think we have to push. We have to create situations sometimes, some of us, if it happens. And it's hard still where we really do refuse the system altogether. We went into the building. We created a mutual aid space that was a freedom. It was called Angela's Mondays and we did abolitionist reading circle on Mondays, and we did safety training for first aid for those of us on the street on Tuesdays, and a de-arrest training on Wednesdays, and we did a harm reduction mobile clinic that rode around the streets and helped folks out. We opened the theater doors and turned it into a place where Black, Queer, and Indigenous people, primarily trans and femmes, were there residing who were houseless. That could only happen for so long because when people came back from the Hamptons, and came back from being abroad, and came back to work in the fall, and the winter came, these worlds collided. They really did collide. I think the institution is learning a lot about how it responded, which includes people in the building calling the cops on us and etc. You know, things that reinforced us leaving to the point that we had to leave. I think that'll be in the wake of that institution and I think that's really important--what we do to make a hard break sometimes. Yeah. That was a long story but thank you.
[LS] glyneisha, I don't know if you had um a further response to that story. Thank you so much for sharing that, Jonathan. I feel like this is a good pathway to asking…well, all of us have answered, artists do not need institutions. I want to ask, oh glyneisha, did you have something you want to say?
[g] I said but they need us!
[LS] Yes, they do. I would love to know, in your opinion, what do you think true artistic value is and do you think that the way that institutions value your creativity, your art, or art in general is reflective of that? If so (or if not), what's next? How do we put the pressure on to make them actually see what the value is? Or do we just leave them in the dust and somehow build some system that does actually intertwine well with the true value of art? That was a really long question. I apologize.
[g] For me, that question opens up this kind of definition of the institution that we made for ourselves at the beginning of this that includes the museum, includes the gallery, and my first response is like, hell no! But then, I think about spaces like the Luminary in Saint Louis, CAM Museum, folks who are letting artists come in and have these conversations that don't censor selling their work, but censor these community involved conversations, and also sometimes really personal aspects that like don't everybody always relate to or get. I think that some folks are doing the work and some folks are open to that exchange, which requires this kind of hands-off approach, in a way. I think that they have started that process because they are bringing in thought leaders and artists who are already doing that on the everyday. I'm thinking about my first big solo exhibition in Kansas City. I was the first Black femme artist who was represented by this gallery and as the year progressed with me getting ready for my solo show, it came to a space where I was like, “I need to like really center my people in this show,” and ended up turning the gallery into a Black home, placing wallpaper, furniture, objects that have this kind of matrilineal history within my family, but really centering and turning on the face who feels comfortable in these spaces because I had friends coming up to me like, “You know, I don't know if I want to come to your show because I don't like that gallery. I walk in there and I don't feel welcomed. I don't feel safe.” I think that again, it comes down to the artist.
[JG] Yeah, thank you. I felt you brought me there. I think I was feeling that at the beginning too, I think there's a lot of different scales and ways that people are doing this. I think we're saying, if I could say some examples, I recently was on us a panel last week--I guess we all are doing a lot of these nowadays--where I was watching the Harriet Tubman Collective from Pittsburgh talk about the ways that they see themselves as an institution. The Harriet Tubman Collective is a collective of primarily Black and Brown folks who are disabled, who make work that's trying to create spaces that enable visioning around that world building. The example they said--it was simple but revolutionary--was placing a bench outside of the Harriet Tubman Collective’s primary place, their residence, their house where they operate out of as a creative space in Pittsburgh. People in this in this community that doesn't really have many benches could sit on a bench, which means that they could also be in proximity to this house, which means that they could communicate together, and they could build. I think sometimes it's the really simple things like you're saying, glyneisha, like Black spatial practice. How do we make a space?
I also think we--even for those of us who are making work that is coming out of our lived experience and trying to push a liberation ideology or theology--when we work inside of, for instance, institutions that do not serve us historically, let's say we are already always making a little bit more of a fuss than we perhaps thought we were going to. I think that that is also something that needs to be perhaps honored. I'm thinking about, for instance, Sharita Towne and Lisa Bates This is a Black Spatial Imaginary in Portland, Oregon who made their show. Sharita brought that body of work into PICA [Portland Institute for Contemporary Art] into Portland, Oregon, into that into that institution, which is located in a historically Black community that's completely been displaced at this point, and by bringing this work that's about charting the historical record of Black people who have lived in the Pacific Northwest, an institution that really is not at all serving that population and then asking them to come back and come see this exhibition, it also it creates, just by way of making that thing happen there, it makes this kind of fuss. It makes noise and it also makes a place where we can think together-- a Black spatial place where we could think aloud and contemplate what's happened here.
[LS] I am curious, in terms of that last example that you shared, Jonathan, was this just a one-off exhibition or was it something that remained after? Sorry. I was putting something in the chat, so I missed that part.
[JG] I think it's worth looking more deeply, and I'm sure somebody in the audience might be able to even fill in more information, but as to my knowledge, it's a series. So, there's actually a few different iterations of the work.
[LS] I think that is incredibly important to me because I’ve seen in so many times where it feels like it's just like a drop in the ocean of other exhibitions where it makes a really impactful deep splash but then it's gone. And it's basically just like restarting over in that place every time you bring someone in, every few months. It just doesn't feel, I don't know, it doesn't feel long lasting enough to me.
[g] But that's such an important point, Lillie. I admire spaces that are thinking about these programs and positions that they can implement to facilitate a continued translation process so folks that have artists-in-residence or farmers-in-residence curators-in-residence critics-in-residence, which are most often these one-year residency programs, where those folks can really come in and engage with the community. One example is my beloved Charlotte Street Foundation; a foundation in Kansas City, 501(c)(3) foundation in Kansas City that, that really does a lot for artists. I've worked with them a lot, but I think it was around maybe 2016 they had a curator-in-residence program and this person named Lynette Miranda from Chicago came in and really just changed Kansas City on its face as far as the conversations that we were having in our art communities. So, I think like those opportunities are important.
[LS] I also wanted to take about a minute, if that's okay with you two, to let people put any questions in the chat that they might have. I know that we could keep we could keep talking but I’m hoping that we can make space for some voices out there in the virtual sphere.
[g] Another thought that I was having, while you are thinking of questions, based on some thoughts from Jonathan’s points--when the institution, when this space opens the conversation, they have to realize that they made the table, if that makes sense. I think a lot of times, within these larger cultural conversations and decolonizing and breaking down these thoughts, it's not always easy. I think sometimes those shows happen, the conversations happen, the panels happen, and the points made force those institutions to look at themselves in the mirror. Sometimes they don't want to always do that. But I think that when the community gets involved and has questions for the institution, it's important for the institution to make a space, a forum, make a space of community and fully engage in the conversation because you made the table. You made the seats. And you invited us!
[JG] Yeah, I’m gonna keep talking. If people in the audience do want to chime in, just please cut us off because I think we'll just keep going. But I want to agree that I feel like what I am--and I’m still in dialogue with institutions, I’m not moved away from institutions--but I think the thing that proves to be most effective in the kinds of creative processes that I enjoy being part of when I’m in the process of visioning with other people, in the kind of organizing that I’m a part of when I’m in the process of coalition building with people across multiple perspectives, is the regular town hall format; the place in which we can from our affinities from our separate spaces of deep visioning, come back together, and be reminded what this collective vision is holding up to. What is our accountability so far and where have we produced harm? Because there has been harm. And we didn't show up. And how are we going to enable a hard dialogue each week to do that really important work, which I think, again I just want to center that the institution is not one thing. Because that is an institution. That's actually a working institution right there. That's an example of an emergent model that doesn't have perhaps 501(c)(3) representation but is a functioning ecosystem where more people can enter with all their various interests and diversities into that space and collide.
I think the institutions that we're centering right now, they're not spontaneous, nor risky, nor able to be because they have so many other contractual agreements that don't permit them to hold space for possibility, for chance, and that includes a weekly place where they can just hear from the community because that produces a certain level of risk. I think white supremacy ideology works in a way that it wants paternalism. It wants to own the dialogue and the narrative around itself. So, it's not able to take in the kinds of critiques that would disturb the public eye of what they're doing. The last point, and then I’ll stop, is that then these kinds of incubators where we're invited in, they always become good PR, right? The institution actually doesn't have to do anything once they invite the kind of representation of whatever “other” they want to be using in that time. And I feel like it's a broken record. My ancestors probably said this. I feel like we need to break that record. We need to say what we're doing there and what we're doing over here.
[g] I think we could spend the last 20 minutes of this conversation giving some examples and talking about the work that we do, folks who are stepping outside the institution. Just thinking of these stories and talking about it, it's traumatic. The trauma comes up.
I'm thinking about how those 501(c)(3)s treated me and I’m just like, at the end of the day, they care about their funders. So, it's important if you need to step away, take your shit back. Say, “You no longer have the power to host, represent, be in conversation, collaboration with me.” Like I said earlier, they need us. We don't need them. So, it's important for us to branch out and do the work and try to also lean on folks who are doing the work that we can learn from. In starting my community-based organization, Strange Fruit Femmes, y'all can find that at: https://www.strangefruitfemmes.com/. We're also on Instagram @strangefruitfemmes. I just you know we had so many conversations about when you're doing this activism work, how it's so structured around being a non-profit or having to gain 501(c)(3) status. I seeked out an organization in Kansas City called Front Space run by two Mexican women who have started their own organization thinking about cultural artistic spaces built for themselves and built for the community. They taught me so much about learning about Fractured Atlas and fiscal sponsors and ways that you can navigate and get sponsorship, get grants, get loans, and how you don't have to follow this route that everybody teaches us or prescribes us to.
[LS] We do have one question in the chat that I will take a moment to read. The question is: “You've referenced experiences with different kinds of institutions--commercial galleries, non-profit galleries, residencies, etc. I’m curious. Do you see some of these institutions, or characteristics of them, that serve artists better? Worse?” Anyone.
[JG] I kind of feel like we have answered that question in many different ways. If I could be maybe more specific, I feel personally, and in community, that space and time that's not surveilled, so no one is watching the people who are using that space and time, has always been really a pleasure for a lot of people to build out the things that they want to do. So, if that's called a residency, sometimes that can be very helpful, if it's very hands-off, meaning that the institution is not present and asking for a lot of deliverables in terms of what happens there. I think also experiments, like the one that I was a part of are really important. I think that this dyad between better and worse is a thing that doesn’t work for me because we're actually talking about transformational change. So, things are going to feel bad in the moment, like glyneisha said, and then later actually be like, “Oh, that was actually very important. I needed to have that really hard experience to understand the whole thing, the whole system.” So, even when it's better, it’s still broken.
I guess what I’m saying is what I’m saying is that my critique, or my location as an artist, is one of anti-capitalism. I’m an anti-capitalist, post-nationalist. I don't want the nation of America. I think this project doesn't work and I think my work is to both find pleasure in being with my community, in terms of expression, and being somebody who feels in line as an artist to express. I feel a channel in that way. I honor through that way. Then simultaneously, I push in a policy driven way to try to make space for the ways that I see that those doorways don't exist, and for the ways that I’m read in spaces, can access them. So, trying to really stay present in the way that Shirley Chisholm reminds us. Our time on earth is one that we have to pay back for by producing real change. So, I don't think it matters where it happens, basically is what I’m trying to say. I think the long goal, and the principal goal, is to see the end to all these institutions, and in the meanwhile, to try to build out that the employment looks different; that the executive levels stop being white cis people; that the lower administrative level stops being primarily Black femmes and Indigenous femmes and people who have to do labor that doesn't actually sit on their application, but it becomes a part of their work; that the custodial staff is not the same kind of undocumented people; that the institutions are no longer locked all the times; that there's more transparency when we're talking about what kinds of aesthetics we support, and which ones we don't, and to name how that is continuing to make the role of the artist a capital “A,” rather than letting us think about how artists are really echolocated everywhere around these institutions and not being chosen. So, I want to name those things no matter where I go, it doesn’t matter. The institutional ways that we get in there, we use them.
[g] My comment in response to that is exactly. Period.
[LS] Let’s see. It looks like we have another question that came in: “A lot of this conversation is making me think about ways that institutions could become more personable, not in the way of posting social media statements, but actually working with artists on a person-to-person basis. I see it as a kind of transparency and tearing down the walls, in a way. Not sure if this is a question but I’m interested to hear the panelists’ opinions on this.”
This connects, to me, with the previous question in that, at first, my heart says, I do not trust galleries and I do not trust that transactional aspect. But then you find that transactional aspect in basically every other version of that relationship between an artist and an institution, so to speak. So, I found it interesting, like one person once said to me, a gallery actually has some of the most vested interest and long-term relationship with the person who they are representing. Yes, it is transactional, which is not ideal, but there is a weird aspect where at least they are invested in a way that other forms of like institutional relationships aren’t. They just say, “Okay, we're gonna bring you in. We're gonna pay you your one-time fee and then you're out the door. And we'll maybe post a picture of you three months later to say, ‘Look who came through. They've gone on and done such great stuff.’” So, I think that for me, I feel like that person-to-person aspect is what is missing. Right now, it is just completely extricated, and it needs to be flipped into something that doesn't have that transactional aspect. I'm not really sure what that would look like. Somewhere between the residency model and a gallery relationship, because residents are only there for generally a short period of time and then they too move on. There is also a sense of transiency. That relationship isn't really as solid as it could be. I don't know. What you guys think about that?
[g] I think, kind of based on some of the points that Jonathan was making earlier, I’m really sitting here trying to think about where they could do better, but it just can't happen because the institution wasn't built to be personable. It wasn't built to have a relationship with me. They don't want to be my friend--the gallerist, the residency, the institution. So, for me, that exchange, or that um community, I find it elsewhere. Also, sometimes because I recognize that relationship, I’m intentional about the relationships that I’m building, and I don't want to build relationships that are fraud and based on capitalism and based on exchange of temporary service. We can just leave it professional, leave it at what it is, and like I’m gonna find my community and know that where I fit in, where I find happiness, where I feel accepted is elsewhere. Thinking about the main questions, do artists need the institutions, do they need us, I feel like, as an artist who sells and makes a living off of selling my work, I have to accept that the system in which I am in and contributing to, the art world, capitalism, but also make space for like what is not.
And then I also want to say you know, girl, Lillie, the gallery’s ain’t nice either!
[LS] I don't trust them, but I’m like there are bits and pieces if someone says, “That is something that I’m missing in these other relationships,” that's something. I’m not pro gallery. Let me be clear.
[g] I just want to say the issue with the galleries is that most galleries are white men and so they're always going to subscribe to the good old boys. I was probably, when I was represented by a gallery, I was probably the fourth highest paid artist, but still the gallery owner was not having no dinners with me, not taking me out to coffee, but having donuts and coffee every Sunday with the white men who weren't selling shit. That's really what it is. So, I think it's important to be aware of that. Instead of trying to fit in a system that wasn't made for you, we gotta think about Audre Lorde and the master's tools.
[LS] Something that I think, just to continue down this road, if that's okay, I think that that investment quality is a capitalist concept. So, I’m going to sort of build on the foundation that I just laid, which is in a capitalist mindset. That is totally my fault. That is I’ve presented to you--this idea that that investment is basically replacing a true authentic relationship in capitalism. The closest that you can get is saying, “Well, at least someone is in my corner for their own interests financially.” But that is a sort of protection and stability, to have someone investing in you and in your corner. I do agree that we need to be beyond that and that might not be found with any relationship between an institution and an artist. So, I fully agree with you glyneisha. I think that we basically have to use our imaginations and completely exit that framework as much as possible.
It sometimes feels like asking for a miracle, but it's not if you like have faith in artists, which I think is one thing that I haven't had a chance to bring up, but part of why I am also really excited to be a part of this panel and listening to you guys. For me, the people with the imagination are the people with the power to actually change the world and say, “We should not be in this circle of capitalism in the first place, because it's all a system.” I think when you're in it, you feel as if that's that is all. That is as far as you could go. But that was a system that was made, and institutions play a part in a system that was made, so you can unmake it, and make a better one.
[g] I do think there are people who operate in this state of easily going within and without the academy, within the institution, outside of the institution, and use themselves, their reputation, and what they can offer to actually build relationship with artists and actually have a friendship. I’m thinking about Larry Ossei-Mensah, who's a black critic who has a magazine and an art speak series, who shares artists on his Instagram. But once you meet him, I think he does, within himself and within his work, try to have this continued relationship with the artist that is not about these one-off experiences. When he's going into residencies and meeting these artists, he's thinking about the future, “How can I connect this artist these artists with other opportunities, other programs, other things that are in reference to what they do in their work?” I think that there's people in all of those places and institutions who are trying to really think about community and relationship building.
[JG] Yeah, I want to affirm that. Thank you. It just made me think that it would be so great if all of those people, in all of their jobs and whatever they do, all went somewhere else together or were like, “Okay, let's go let's go over here and try to make something so we can all stop being inside of our own coffins of capitalism.” But I think the contradictions, in the way that Octavia Butler tells us, are really necessary and we need to maintain those contradictions as we start to vision towards what's next. And we are at a very transformational moment. It's about harnessing and naming that and not being able to be given the same kinds of reprimands by way of the managers, and by way of the people who are executives, about the unrealistic nature of choosing these other things, which are really about choosing affirming life for people who are normally not affirmed. That happens, like glyneisha said, in these very finite principles.
I want to try to think about what are the ways that we need to be exchanging our art and our energy and how we will have to divest from all the really bad things like oil and representations that continue to harm us? I think about the example of Tamir Rice's mother in terms of what she called upon activists and also the art of Shaun Leonardo and divesting from representations of Black death, which are so easily circulated and made by, a lot of the time, artists of color and reproduced and sold internationally. So, what are we going to divest from forms of work, even making work, that terminology, and also the kinds of lives we lead? I think we're all going to have to choose that differently. Some people are going to need certain kinds of supports and some people, we need other things. But when we get there, if we imagine it very wildly in the way that June Jordan was trying to build out a new Harlem, when we do that imagining where we as cultural practitioners and channelers or whatever our names and tokens might be, can we build out those kinds of practices or name those things in whatever space we show up in currently. A lot of the time it's naming the fact, the world you want to see when you show up inside of the doorstep of a white supremacist institution, that creates possibility too and helps you identify who's there with you.
[LS] I think we are coming up on time so I want to open up to any last-minute questions that someone might want to throw in the chat. In the meantime, do you have any closing thoughts glyneisha and Jonathan?
[g] Yeah. I think it's so important, like Jonathan said, to end on how do we fit ourselves, the artist, the individual within this space? It makes me think about one of those fearless conversations that you shared with me, Lillian that's about this conversation we're having right now. Y'all can look those up. But a person named M. Carmen Lane, they talked about how before you can decolonize the institution, you have to decolonize the self. So, it's like we do these things where we recognize land, but how do we recognize ourselves? How do we recognize how we are fitting and contributing to the systems, or against the systems, that we're talking about and speaking about? But also, even within the work that we're doing, even if it's BIPOC spaces only, how do those spaces also contribute to white supremacy? How can we decolonize the self within that work?
[JG] Yeah. I would love to add to that. Something I wanted to say earlier that I blanked on is that we also have to de-Americanize our narrative about the ways we are. As someone whose family come from the Caribbean, from Haiti, and DR [Dominican Republic], I think when we make our visions of how we will do the things we need to do transnational, we figure out that it's not so imaginary what it would mean to make in ways that really enforce mutual aid, share narratives and story that also honor something sacred and don't just continue to aim to innovate and produce more kinds of products and more kinds of hoardings of materials and cultures that continue to be about competition. So, if we can think transnationally, then we can ground what we do structurally. Also, just thank you. This was really lovely. It was a pleasure to talk to you to glyneisha and Lillie.
[LS] Thank you guys so much for being here. I’m not seeing any other questions. I would like to just end with one thought. It’s a quote in response to what capitalism is, as in what we are working within, and how we can respond as cultural workers, whether that's within an institution, or outside of it, or wherever you find yourself navigating this. “Capitalism is organized abandonment, so the only possible response is organized care.” To me, that means mutual aid, non-transactional exchange based on a sense of safety trust and collective liberation. I think, for me, that is also the sense that I’ve gotten from what you have shared. All these stories of where things have gone awry, and when things have felt like they’re moving in the right direction can be encapsulated by saying, we are trying to work towards care and collective feeling. I feel like that is an okay place to end and I just want to thank everyone for being here.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity.
About the Panelists:
glyneisha is a multimedia artist, currently living and working in Kansas City, MO. She completed her Bachelors of Fine Art in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2017. glyneisha was a 2019 summer studio artist-in-residence at Art Omi in Ghent, NY and is was an artist-in-residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE. She is a 2020 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Fellow and a recipient of the 2020 Byron C. Cohen Award, administered by Charlotte Street Foundation.
glyneisha has exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions in the United States including SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS, the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE, Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin, MO, and Haw Contemporary in Kansas City, MO. Her work is included in several private and museum collections in the United States.
Jonathan González is an artist working at the intersections of performance, text, sculpture, and other time-based media from Queens, New York. González’s work speculates on the political utility of the “stage” as a method to interface with publics upon systems of liveness, objects, and economies of data that construct the built environment.
Their works include: Not Total (homeschool PDX, Yale Union x Paragon Arts Gallery, 2019), Working on Water in collaboration with Mario Gooden (Columbia School of Architecture, 2019), h/S: Jonathan González (Ciccio Gallery, 2019), Maroonage: Elaborations on the Stage and Staying Alive (Contact Quarterly), Lucifer Landing I & II (MoMA PS1 x Abrons Arts Center, 2019), Collaborative Curiosity (Contemporaryand), and their upcoming publication, Liar Liar (53rd Press). Their curations include Sunday Service @ Knockdown Center and Movement Research Fall Festival: invisible material. Previously an LMCC Workspace Resident (2018-19), NARS Foundation AIR (2018), Jerome Foundation Fellow (2019), Mertz Gilmore Grantee (2018), Art Matters Fellow (2019), Shandaken Project/Governors Island AIR (2019-20), and Bessie-nominee for Outstanding Production (ZERO, Danspace Project, 2018) and Breakout Choreographer (2019).
Lillian Snortland, originally from Eugene, Oregon, is a self-taught writer of fiction, poetry, and 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 to provide opportunities of capacity-building and cultural capital to those in need. Lillian was recently accepted into the Virtual Collaborative Program for Emerging Artists, hosted by Exit 11 Performing Arts Company and Postscript Magazine. Further writing can be found at https://chaimihai.wordpress.com/.