We want to begin by thanking you for your work in the Boston Review and for your art writing, particularly on Mark Bradford, and for your pivotal book, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. We have been learning so much from your tweets, your website, your words. We were incredibly struck by…
contemptorary: We are so grateful for your existence and presence in the world. We have been avid readers of your critical race and legal scholarship — and we were so excited to learn that you also have an art practice. We were curious what the field or the practice has offered you. So we wanted…
Under the neoliberal police state, U.S. acts of protest often proceed like a performance: a permit from the city officials required for large groups to march the street, the mapped out and agreed upon distance, the weight of returning home to continue with other daily chores. While a group of established artists and writers have…
Too often radical debates become reduced, or settled with representational politics. Without dismissing the severity and damage that the lack of representation means to communities under siege (as we are intimately invested in the stakes of representation here), we’ve increasingly become interested in expanding the horizon beyond representation, canon-interruption, and inclusion. In The Reorder…
When the presence of Black bodies is policed, and the movement of racialized bodies surveilled and criminalized, what does a Black flaneur aesthetics look like? Is wandering a derailing from the constrained roles situated by contemporary art? In Mounting Frustration: The Museum in the Age of Black Power, Susan Cahan writes that the professional categories…
This space will continue to remain unconditionally committed to the artistic visions of vulnerable communities. Women of color, undocumented persons, marginalized genders, marginalized communities, those living with disabilities, the poor, the refugee, the FOREVER emerging–we write because of you and we write for you.
Contemptorary fully endorses this letter, written by THE QOLEKTIV in response to Creative Time’s invitation of the founder of the Islamophobic group FEMEN, Anna Hutsol, who spoke at the CT Summit on Saturday, October 15, 2016. THE QOLEKTIV is an anonymous group.
There’s this ancient, trite and ongoing notion that art/poetry is for the good. The good of the people, the good of the country, the good of progress (who the people are, for which countries, what good: these are side conversations brought forth by pessimists and unbelievers). For this reason, Artists and Writers do good by…
Part 2 When we think about Cauleen Smith and our Los Angeles-San Diego-Chicago connecting Skype call, we remember that we would have probably all been sitting somewhere having coffee and chatting, had things “turned out” a different way. We remember that we could have had Cauleen in Southern California as an artist and as a…
Our second feature is one effort to undo the rationale of permanent collections. The majority of permanent museums’ collections are categorized by region and attributed to their mysterious donors, whereas the rest of the museum’s exhibitions are often curated “conceptually” and/or chronologically and/or under the banner of aesthetic movements. One could easily make an argument that area studies, and colonial geographies situate the collection development logic of the museum. Let’s tear this apart. We asked writers and artists to create a “petty materialist” “fuck this origin” “did you know about this other provenance” guide to a collection. Or to…