In a 1995 interview between Lisa Lowe and Angela Davis, Davis states that, “A woman of color formation might decide to work around immigration issues. This political commitment is not based on the specific histories of racialized communities or its constituent members, but rather constructs an agenda agreed upon by all who are a part…
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…
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…
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…
I landed in Chicago a few weeks ago and wanted to speak to the artist and poet Larry Lee about his mid-career retrospective. Because I am not the fastest writer, by the time this blog post is published, the show will have closed. So the post will exist as an artifact of my reflection, and…
Wars never end in the past. A cease-fire is never the end to the war, no matter how much further destruction it may prevent. No matter the point in time, the damage is done. Ruins, neither here, nor there, are carried around in bodies, in the heads, feet and the arms of people, in the…
We want to obsessively discuss the artists we love, support: who we think should fill up everything and everyone. E. Jane is one such artist for us. E. Jane is a multidisciplinary artist residing in Philadelphia. We first heard about their work because of #cindygate–a badass, performative twitter teach-in that is now web archived. Did…