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…
Materializing the Gaze: Rashayla Marie Brown’s “Reality is Not Good Enough”
It’s often difficult for me to watch films in art spaces. Whenever I come across a film screening at a museum space or a gallery, I become an official member of camp-narrative, or camp-movie-theater. I want nice chairs, I want popcorn, I want to fall asleep on someone’s shoulders (yes yes, the critique of entertainment,…
Porous Identification, Radical Translation and Immigrant Imagination: in the works of Carmen Argote
I write this on the seventh anniversary of my immigration to the U.S. To me, being an immigrant, similar to being queer, is about making new relations in the world. From the vantage point of immigration’s disorienting spatiotemporal (dis)placement, nothing’s going to be “the same,” as “sameness” is rendered irrelevant with a constantly wiggling reference…
On Larry Lee’s “The (Un)Timely Death of Multiculturalism”
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…
Contemplating Contemporaneity with #BlackLivesMatter
Attending a few of the previous talks from the “What Is Contemporary?” series at MOCA Los Angeles, I was particularly interested in the last iteration: What is Contemporary? Black Lives Matter: Patrisse Cullors and Tanya Lucia Bernard in Conversation on Thursday, July 7. Given the last week’s police shootings and killings of Alton Sterling and…
Susan Cahan’s Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power
Susan Cahan’s Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power presents a straightforward argument: US Museums (specifically in her book, NYC museums) were and remain segregated. Museums have been “resistant to racial integration” and hostile to the Black power and civil rights movements. Cahan argues that the resistance against social movements in the museum space was active, as the museum boards were and are made of the very politicians that sat and sit in on policy changes regarding race, oversaw the passing of desegregation laws, and witness(ed) the impact of these new policies. She traces their pathways:…
On War, Language and Intergenerational Trauma: A Conversation with Damir Avdagic
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…
Nikki S. Lee’s “Projects”—And the Ongoing Circulation of Blackface, Brownface in “Art”
It’s the end of AAPI month so I suppose this is the perfect time to critique Nikki S. Lee. I’ve been avoiding writing about Lee. I am incredibly over the position of discussing things I find to be deeply deeply racist, hurtful, and at the same time: basic. I want to spend my contemptorary time discussing…
The “Fuck you!” Poetics of Nuttaphol Ma
I place my body in spaces where I find myself delicately balancing between the confines of the clocking in and the clocking out, the dreams of leaving and dreams of roots, the longing and not BE longing. Words overflow from these experiences. Like laughters and tears, they flow uncontrollably. I collect these tearful, at times,…
Ruminations on “Refugees. Welcome Signs”
Last January and February LACE hosted the exhibition Customizing Language as part of the Emerging Curator’s Program. The exhibition included many great pieces by some of the artists I respect the most. Raquel Gutiérrez wrote a beautiful piece on the exhibition on Hyperallergic. Here, though I am going to retrospectively reflect on one particular piece in the…