Emmett Till is dead. I don’t know why he can’t just stay dead. – Roy Bryant This is what our dying looks like. – Jericho Brown What can one say, in response to Dana Schutz’s Open Casket? To say even this, out loud, would sound, without further inquiry, like a reference to…
Grace Hong: One thing that I wanted to talk to you about is, you and I have known each other for a really long time, and there was a distinct moment in our mutual acquaintance when you started becoming this total art collector. And almost at the same time, you also started writing about art.…
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…
1. Currently you are beloved, apoliticized, or, capitalized. We think of one of your names headlining Hirschorn’s gentrification project, your name invoked as a shield against his. No mention in the headlines of your anti-fascist activism, your writing against the artist bourgeois, vulnerable education systems. It is as if you existed solely, in your own…
1. Despite my disdain for predictability and repetitiveness, I have found myself starting all correspondences with friends and loved ones with the same greeting: I hope you are surrounded with lots of love and support amidst fascism! Although I am aware that no amount of love or support may protect one from fascism, I find…
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…
This year has been a year of obfuscation, of debates that aimlessly feint, of the personal political transferring into the politicized brand. It has been the year of exhaustion, it seems. This year I wrote a lot of cover letters and quit most of social media. I dedicated my time to writing longer articles, investigation…
As this year of all kinds of wonders come to a closing, I’m going to try to remember it through a list of things, exhibitions and events with interesting linkages. This list is in no way all inclusive or written from “perfect memory.” This year was full of death and destruction, and I’m not only talking about the…
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…