 I'm Elizabeth Callaghan, I'm the manager of adult programs and this is Vice Director of Education in Program Development, D.L. Harper, and we would like to welcome you to Brooklyn Museum. Every Thursday night we have programming from music to films to tours of the collection, and once a month we have this program in conversation, where cutting-edge cultural thinkers come together to discuss time for topics. Tonight we're really pleased to introduce to you a conversation entitled, Acts of Resistance and Inclusion in African American Art. Good evening everyone. Good evening. I think we're all here. I know, but you know, I want to form up the audience a little bit so that we can be awake when the conversation is going. My name is Radhya Harper as you heard from Elizabeth, and I just wanted to also welcome you here and just bring you up to speed that while we're having this conversation about African American art and artists, this is not a new topic for us at the Brooklyn Museum. We have a history of doing a relevant contemporary program for a very long time, and just recently in the past couple of months we've had programs that have included Fred Bosin and Mickalene Thomas and Karen May-Whees. And at each of these programs the topic of conversation related to now doing this has circled back into the conversation at each of these programs. And I don't know how long ago it's been now, a month? Maybe that Danny got in touch with me and put me in touch with Will. And he suggested this program topic, and of course it was extremely tightly, and we thought let's do this. This is an important conversation and we wanted to be a part of it. So I'm very pleased that you're here and we're very pleased that we were able to put this panel together. And I just want to say something about Danny who wants to really put another context to this program that most of you know Danny as a prolific writer and painter. Okay. And I think of you as an impresario, a person who puts art and audience together and one of the best ones added in Brooklyn and New York City. And Danny is also a member of a board committee at the Brooklyn Museum, the Education Committee. And we're really excited that he's a part of our family and important to us here at the Brooklyn Museum. So please welcome him and thank you all for coming. This is not a new conversation. This conversation has been going on for a long time about inclusion, who gets in, who doesn't get in, who gets on walls, who doesn't get on walls. But it's come back around, it comes back around every so often, when something happens that challenges people's belief about what should have been said. Now, this was reviewed by Ken Johnson and my good buddy in Louisville, Longo, this isn't right, and I picked it up and it was a Facebook conversation that turned into a movement. And how often over the years people have challenged the status quo about getting the work of African-Americans on walls. And now it's come to the point that if you make it to the walls, then who looks at that work and who validates that work and who says whether it's good or whether it's bad and what criteria they use to do that. And so the conversation continues on and we put together a panel of people who look at that and see where it lies. 17 years ago, because of the same issues, inclusion, I started Rush Arts Gallery and Carnival Gallery to make sure that the work of African-Americans on walls. For many people, they don't see that this is a ongoing problem. They come into this, and a lot of people are young, they come into this with this, and they say, why are we here on the wall and make a little Thomas just here at her show and everybody's at all these great galleries in Chelsea. But there's been a long history of struggle to get to. We want to put some context on where that struggle is and where we're at in that struggle, that struggle is ongoing and that because we're on the walls of the Brooklyn Museum and because we're in the walls of galleries in Chelsea, that is not as far out of the inclusion as it is, because what type of water is going on there? There's a myriad of questions that are going to be asked by this panel. But largely it's about who validates that multi-gate key. That's where it came in for me. Who would a gatekeeper say, who sees what and who doesn't see what? So I'm going to turn this over to our moderator. I would like to introduce all the artists and they'll speak in this order. Guys, you should think about that. The first person is William. The artist who lives and works in the Brooklyn. Villalago is a recipient of the Student Lewis Comfort Tiffany Award and the John John Mitchell Foundation Painters and Structures Grant. His work is included in several notable collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Prince of the University's Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in America, the New York and the New York Times. The blog was currently presented by Susan England Gallery here in New York City. Next up is Murray Shure, directed to my left, who is a New York based artist and writer noted for advocacy of painting and post-medium visual culture and for contributions to feminist art history. Shure's work balances political and theoretical concerns with formulas and material passions. Careers of interest include the gendered production of art history, analysis and practices of painting and post-modern culture and the relationship between political and conceptual concerns with materiality and expression. She's the author of the book A Decade of a Negative Thinking with a Lot. Essays on Art, Politics and Daily Life and the blog A Year of Positive Thinking. Next up is Kamara Holloway. Kamara is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Delaware. Her work research centers on modernism and photography within the circum-atlantic world paying special attention to the impact of race on art and aesthetics. Holloway is the co-founder of the Association of Critical Race Art History an organization dedicated to promoting the study of race within art history. Our last but not least speaker is Alok Bethola. Alok Bethola is a renowned contemporary artist whose work has the standards of innovative excellence. Alok Bethola is one of the founders of the Wisu Artist co-founder of the New York chapter of Blackcomb, co-founder of Dwyer Cultural Center and published in literally hundreds of publications. Please welcome our wonderful panelists. We'll even make a start with you. What I would like is thinking about Morrison's expression of how race functions and orders our social order. Talk to me about how you received and assimilated the condons of review and a bit about the petition. Okay, I think this kind of phenomenon, and that's what I picked up on in Kim Johnson's article and particularly the point that he makes that the show would be divide the audience and that he asserts that with a kind of authority and assurance that he understands this audience somehow and so the question becomes like who is this audience, who is this sort of mythical audience he was talking to because in the art community that I exist in, which is extremely diverse, I don't get a sense that people feel that they have to choose a camp when they sort of go into that show or choose a side or feel somehow that the work is leaving them out or functioning on any other level but as art objects and ways to think about the visuality. What Dan was saying earlier is that there was this build-up of conversation in terms of why we were at the petition, which is that you've had lively conversation including Kim Johnson on Facebook and our community kind of saying we want to talk about this and the New York Times saying you can't talk about it. We're not going to have this discussion basically by denying letters. It's a letter writing campaign that was denied. Myself and Colin Asper, who was also here tonight, Anupra Furukin, Stephen Locke and Dushko Petrovich came together and said what can we do so that people can have a discussion in the face of being completely denied by this sort of authority. So we went to the oldest thing in the book, which is like start a petition, get a pothole fixed, start a petition for that and then surely we can kind of allow people to express themselves and over 1,600 people did express themselves. Two great artists, real artists, art historians, artists, of all shapes, colors and backgrounds. They didn't influence saying that there is something fundamentally wrong about the positionality of this review. And you're not supposed to do that. We kind of rocked the boat, you're not supposed to just be quiet and let, you know, that get said in the article and you can't talk to in your time. It's about review as a policy of theirs and so I guess we decided to say, okay, we know we're not supposed to do that but we're going to do it anyway. So you're not supposed to resist? You're not supposed to resist. The status quo kind of had a long history running about the gender dynamics of art historians. What's your take both on the kind of humanitarian concerns about like this but also his piece on the female gaze but the kind of work that women naturally seem to produce? You know, in a way, I actually didn't even notice that. I don't take, I hate to say this, but I don't take Ken Johnson very seriously. So I mean, if any of you read the New York Times, you know who the critics are and what their points of view are and what their strengths are and those who have strengths and don't have strengths. So I didn't even notice that particular, the thing about the show in Philadelphia about women. They did talk to him. I happened to be on panel with him the night before and the way we now did this came out. But I thought, which I can talk about a little bit, I'd listen to a tape of the conversation because it was kind of a preview of this entire debate and some of the issues. Sorry, I have notes and I can refer to them. But I think the first thing that I meant and would just introduce myself as is, my introduction to being an artist was through feminism or actually that wasn't even the introduction, but certainly the awareness early on that if you were constituted as other by a mainstream and that applies not just to black artists but to women artists, to gay artists, queer artists. And you had to constitute your own discourse. You had to create your own curatorial practices, your own editorial practices, your own teaching practices. You had to write. You had to do everything to create a discourse. And certainly the artist involved in the movement that is inscribed on the show now did this. Had an incredible web of galleries and publications. Really impressive, fascinating material. So the problem really is not that. The problem is then how does that get into the next step of being somehow entered into a canon. And this gets to what you were talking about, about the gatekeepers. So my own experience has been, a lot of my writing has been taking on some of the major gatekeepers of the art world, which is why I don't think canon Johnson as an individual is that important. I mean a lot of my writing has taken on the editors and writers of Oktober magazine, who maybe now, people don't read Oktober as they did 20 years ago, but they have a lot of influence on institutions in New York. Museum institutions, the show, the abstraction show currently at MoMA, behind the scenes, the ideology of Oktober and their canon that they have formed in modernism and history of modernism is in fact. So in doing that I began to realize that there's something operative that I began to call the white list in opposition to the black list of the McCarthy period. The McCarthy period there actually was a list. I mean people were on a page, written down on paper, don't hire, so they are communists. But the white list is something much more subtle because it's not visible. It's just that you get ignored. First you're told that probably what you're doing is wrong. You're doing your wrong. There's something wrong with your methodology. But the next thing is that you don't get quoted. You don't get referenced. Whatever the critique is that you're putting out, it just vanishes. So in some way the canon remains impermeable. Although I think ultimately the canon gets overturned because movement goes forward and people just forget about what that canon was. So there's both movement and non-movement. One other thing I'll say just as an introduction is I think one of the problems with the people that I've been kind of attacking, and I think this might be true in the art world, is the people in the art world often tend to think of themselves as being resistant or that they are in a position of marginality even when they have a lot of power. So they can't see that somebody who's falsehood feels even more marginalized by them is speaking to them because they're so involved with maintaining their own, what they think of as their own ego position. So they're not actually admitting to whatever power they have. And that influences the writing that they do also. Thank you. Well, Ken Johnson's kind of capacity is aside for a second. So Kamala and I were thinking about when the Ken Johnson thing happened and people started writing the petition. But here we go again. You know, this kind of historical fault line in American studies and in American, at least contemporary history, talked to me about your response to the whole cuff-uffle. What do you call it then? I'm an art historian, which means I spent many, many years working to get my PhD and now I'm spending many more years working to get tenure. But my focus is on research and a longer view of our history. And I am very committed to art history, but art history in and of itself is not a perfect discipline. There are always questions about our values, our ideals, our tastes, our politics. All of these elements are attached to the objects that we call art. And so when we speak about them, we should be cognizant of what those things are. They do affect how we understand these objects and respond to them. So for me that was ultimately the flaw of this particular piece. I didn't initially want to weigh in in any fashion, but I did covertly ask a friend of mine who is a person who studied the history of African Americans in the museums. I art historian named Bridget Cooks, who is a professor at the University of California Irvine, to write a piece. I knew she had some opinions. And the title of her piece, which she could not get published in the Times, was in fact, Here We Go Again. The Times officially stated that they do not accept ends on reviews. So they were not going to further the discussion in any shape or form. The sort of energy around this response to Johnson is sort of characteristic of the entire history of art and the debate over cultural values that we have and that we tend to think don't occur in relationship to art because art is pure and universal, but in fact are very much always in play when we talk about these things. So Johnson's perspective is a rather old-fashioned mid-century perspective that can be considered to be a formalist, what we call a formalist position, which says that the art object should be completely divorced from the social. That's a very particular point of view that is usually now disregarded by most art historians who are interested in social and cultural histories of art. So most of us do happen to take into account the world and the cultures that we live in and how they affect art. For my own particular investments, which are often what is ignored when one assumes a position like his from the center, is the idea to be able to step away from such concerns. And I think that in particular is what Toni Morrison was speaking about. However, we all know that race has always been central to how this particular country works and that the construct of race in this country has been one of the most successful global exports that we've ever produced. So it really does shape a global culture at this time. I have always been committed to African and African-American art and the study of it, which is still very difficult to do. The documentation and knowledge about works by African-American artists is still very hard to come by. And the full story of who has made work, who are people of African descent to have lived in this country or in this hemisphere, there's still a lot of work to be done. But also what had emerged in my consciousness in that of people of my, now I could say, generation of art historians who came to age in the sort of, in the 90s, is that the impact of the rise of theory and its integration into the academy and its impact on art history in particular meant that we had noticed, because we were working on artists of color, that issues of race applied to African-American artists but also in other contexts were not being addressed by the discipline. But the discipline itself was very much shaped by notions of race. Race shapes who can make art to begin with, whether that art gets seen, and then how we respond to it. So on the level of production, exhibition, and reception, fundamentally race determines those issues. Similar to the way that Linda Nocklin articulated in her famous 1971 essay, Why Are There New Brave Women Artists, she laid out the institutional and systematic way in which women were excluded from the art world historically. And that is true for queer artists and it's true for artists of color. So we have taken it upon ourselves to foreground on race as a structuring mechanism in how we understand art and that's part of really what our project is. And so when I asked Bridget to write, she wrote it for a blog that I have that promotes those ideas. There's so much to talk about. But before we get into the thick of it, and although you've been around for a little while, you were in a time where there's a thing called the Black Arts Movement. A lot of the joking I've been hearing lately is about Will's petition is a return to the Black Arts Movement. You know, when folks felt that they could say stuff, they could respond, they could resist. How did you receive and assimilate this contemporary slap in the face? Well, first place, we understand that the critics will accuse you a lot. Yes, they are. They are paid. They make them living. Supposedly criticized. Supposedly and informed criticism. Ken Johnson's analysis of comments very uninformative. If he knew and understood the context of the work that was there, he would understand that the production from artists of African descent is wide and varied. So to summarize that exhibition as a pillar of what Black Art is and how you go about commenting on Black Art is way off base in the first place because if you look at what this quote unquote Black Arts Movement is, why you have artists who work in the, this is a perfect example, who was never recognized, the artist that I mentioned, such as William T. also worked in the abstract genre. How do you classify them? They are. But they're working in a medium that some of you guard the same way that this Ken Johnson went about claiming the assemblage is something that is your team. And if you look back in African culture, the whole idea of putting stuff together and creating an artistic piece would go right back to so many of the altars that come out of many of these. Thousands of years? Thousands of years. So again, the important thing I need to emphasize here is that if we're speaking about the Black Arts Movement, you're not just speaking, there was a unique cooperation and interaction that was going on between theater, dance, literature. I, for one, illustrated several books by Barack Obama, Larry Nielsen, others that worked very closely with dancers who were trying to recreate the whole genre of dance that spoke to the liberation freedom of, so the context upon which many of these critics approach African American artists of color is all centered because they're not looking at the reason for why the art is created. And just to close, the works that if Ken Johnson did not know that these were people of color who just went into that exhibition and just looked at the work, the assemblage is no different from, say, Picasso of modern masters. Who were themselves inspired by African art. Exactly. But the point is if you just looked at the art without being intellectual rulers, then he would have possibly a whole different perspective of it. The fact that it is labeled as a show of African American artists infected was a pity. And he says in the review, but it makes a difference, but it makes a difference to know that Mr. Edwards is African American after. This is interesting to me. I'm going to think about what anemologist suggested about the kind of wide and very quality of the work that African Americans produce. Trouble is a question. I mean, long questions lately. Lots of links and news. The New York Artists and the Rachel Mountain about this tension. We're just kind of American tension about artists are your black artists. And for many contemporary artists, that label black is a death of them. And somehow it is a death nail for the gay people. Is the development, the sustainability, the viability of a black ascent tradition something that's desirable? Is it futile? Can we see the outlines of it? And I'm asking this question not about black celebrity artists. I'm asking a question about formally and conceptually. Can we identify anything at all about black ascent tradition? I'm going to say whatever we can jump into. But I think we can jump into it. Come on. I would say that most people would find it hard to think about their art specifically in that way. I mean, some, usually the fingers of the Larry Meals, the Alan Locke's, etc. have articulated such positions. The artists themselves have probably been less deliberate in their decisions. They want to make art and they want to get it out there and they want to get it shown and they'd like to have it examined and experienced very thoughtfully. So the notions about a black radical tradition A black aesthetic tradition A black aesthetic tradition A black aesthetic tradition has only been a 20th century question to a certain extent. Artists prior to the early 20th century never explicitly made those kinds of articulations. It's only when African Americans really become a cohesive modern and national cohort in the 1920s, after World War I, that the black leadership begins to push civil rights political agenda and the idea that the arts must participate in that becomes the question and whether or not there is something inherently black to something produced by a black person becomes a matter of debate. This is for everyone to follow up on that and for the interest of clarity. What I'm going to ask you is I'm a black artist like pounding your chest. I'm asking something a little more subtle. I just want to repeat the question and clarify the question just a bit. It's all open and tradition is desirable or not. But what you said initially about the fact that we live in a society that's always already raced. That's how arts get produced, disseminated, how it circulates and how it's received in red. And so for whatever our self-identifications or pronouncements about what we do in the studio, it's marked as a piece of work that we were just saying. And so pushing that terrain is really complicated. So I guess what I'm suggesting and I'm going to ask the question again is it desirable? Is it futile? Does it make any sense that we cohere around this mantle called black aesthetic tradition? I think I'm saying it's a flawed I'm saying the artists themselves are probably not focusing on that issue and it's others who are focusing on that issue. They get caught up in the expectation of whether or not their art meets a definition of blackness or, as my colleague Jacqueline Francis talks about in the 1920s, Negro art. They themselves are like all other artists making art. We think about a view. When you say art is now de-raised or something. I'm not saying art is de-raised but I'm saying artists are not artists themselves from what I can understand are not thinking until they are required externally to say whether my art fits within a black aesthetic tradition or not. Their work speaks to their own experiences which are inherently racialized and their work may comment on race issues but the idea of whether it has to comply with the notion of a black aesthetic is determined beyond the other. I think it to a point, I think it may be desirable but I don't know if it's desirable to artists necessarily. So in other words it's like the desire is to have something canonical the desires that have something of color assertion in the market. But I think that artists probably move what I do but I move through my work not sitting there making sure that as he's across and I was suggesting, I have to catch up but Marshall was suggesting it wasn't about complying or conforming he was proposing that there was some utility, some serviceability to his body work for instance he was suggesting but other people of his age and his stature that for him constitutes something that might look like how for all his flaws a tradition that's not something that you would hear and you would just assimilate but it's something that you can reference it's like that either somehow artists or artists and they're not at all concerned with race but it's another question he's asking about the utility of something that coheres around this. I can't believe anybody would not agree to that I think the problem for me in your formulation is the word or his formulation is the idea of aesthetic because that relates in some way to the idea of the style and the conflict that I see as a teacher and looking at work done by black artists and it's interesting you broke Jack Whitton's work as an example is that there are two separate things one is do you represent in your work do you represent something to somebody else whether they know you or not say this is by a black artist there are certain signs and tropes that might indicate that and the others are artistic styles that and sometimes the two come together from artists who will engage with that but there are artists who don't necessarily want to and they do maybe have there are things that have led in their lives that are racialized that are part of their background that may lead them to do this or that so they're similar to what also might lead somebody else to do this or that but they may not want to represent and I think those artists then have to deal with both black and white culture or white and black culture looking at them and saying we want you to represent you know why aren't you representing and then you're left out there are two historical incidents that support this idea in the 1920s when there was a critical mass of African American visual artists who were seeking exhibition opportunities and the Harman Foundation created art awards and then art exhibitions they framed the exhibitions and the work as Negro art as racial art and Alan Locke came in and said that work by African Americans should display some kind of racial essence that put certain pressures on artists to respond to that mandate and some produced work that might be called quote unquote representative of a black aesthetic let's say Aaron Douglas but his work prior to that moment of this sort of insistence was traditionally academic the discourse around the work put pressure on the artists to deal with the concept of a black aesthetic and that's where the Negro artists in the Racial Mountain comes out of by Lisa Hughes and the response by George Schuyler and the other writings from that period but Locke is an aesthetic philosopher and he's making certain determinations saying that a racial art would allow for certain social political things to occur after and more recently 1963 A. Philip Randolph goes to Romero Bearden and says we should have some of you guys doing work to support the March on Washington and the group of African American artists known as Spiral is created again a mandate of creating art that articulated blackness for the group for social reasons is being put out there now if you take that aside the work may or may not reflect black qualities and there may be something inherently black about the work produced by black artists but when they're putting their work out there it's before that moment and I think they find themselves having to respond to a mandate. So I get it they live in a world so that's going to happen in America in America. What I'm getting at is this kind of perpetual being around being marked with the racial worker but then in that big show in DC they got rid of it as a rhetorical which for me betrays precisely of that it's not as subtle as there at all besides what the artist says in the studio but at the moment the whole idea of a black aesthetic has been regaining within artistic circles for 50, 60 years during the 60s we were actually creating art that we believed at the purpose the purpose was not only to create something beautiful but at times something that was wrenching something that would be instructive something that would create conversation this was in the middle of the civil rights movement so thus the art took on a purpose a higher purpose other than just being theory and aesthetics it took on a purpose that incorporated theory and aesthetics and all of the qualities that go into making good art which is composition, color and all of those things that you know of the parameters of that creative process of the visual arts I want to keep emphasizing that one of the things that happens in contemporary society is the divorce the visual sciences which I prefer to call it we do from the other art forms which is a reflection of life itself dance when you walk you dance, you move when you talk you're doing some theater, you're doing some literature so all of these things so our view was that the art of everyday life today we can sit up and have theory all day now one of the things that I think is important to understand is the critics get back to Ken Jones are paid to protect all right one example if I would encourage all of you if you haven't to get up to the sacrament I think and see in the 70s when she created that work it was such an uproar between what is supposed to be art and these are many white men critics now between what is art and what is practice within the context of the African American experience just like jazz jazz musicians are going to create black music this is music that I wrote well in july chicago's case it was such an uproar because there was this question about whether this worked and how many of you in the audience by the way have seen the dinner party ahh I'm being very honored and I'm sitting up here in 2013 still talking about the same rate of issues in the 60s so I'm wondering now how many companies are can I because last week at the college arts association I went to a panel reframing post-black okay that's like stepping it forward and I knew it was coming here and I thought okay this is like two universes some of the issues were exactly the same which was all of the artists on the panel were having to in some way explain themselves in relation to being black whether they wanted to or not whether it was relevant to them or how they do did it in their work but at the same time there was this idea now introduced into it of post-black and also the kind of work they were doing stylistically completely different from anything that we're talking about it was mostly photo based appropriational you know more ironic in some cases that are very diverse stylistically so that each person came at the notion of post-black and then we're saying you know the Cory Newkirk we're in your studio you're not necessarily thinking about those things you're thinking about other things how can I to your point would I think the issue of how it's different maybe this conversation is that I think that one of the things that we've talked about which is that it's commodifiable it's not so much that when we're talking about the problem of this idea of black aesthetic is not so much what it might force an artist to do or the pressure varies it's how those notions have to come commodifiable over time in a marker as to what to look for when you want to buy a piece of black art I mean it's really intensely commodifiable and bringing it off a lot of money so the other question I would have is about the frameless black but before we do that Agent Piper published something in 1983 in the philosophy journal Colleges in which he said that aren't an activism perpetually at odds because the kind of institutional agreements made between our institutions our critics, the curators and somehow that is a built-in interruption to any view conversation around the world and what you call the activism what I'm talking about here we had the publication of C.U. Thelma and Lenster of post-blackness we have this area of a kind of post-racial era so they say when they election for black president but what I'm interested in and you guys can all speak about this is this pension of post-similaries and certainly post-black era and once intensely commodifying art objects that are made by black folks but also disavowing as black which they happen simultaneously to me this conversation here is this whole conversation about post-blackness folks who have told me and other people that they were told by certain gatekeepers to use Danny's word what to do and what not to do and the kind of ready, explicit identification of a black incentive practice was looked at upon so what do we do and how do we recognize the kind of rapid commodification of black life and disavow of blackness at once back to the very beginning of African Americans who deliberately sought to work in a fine arts tradition and enter into the quote unquote behind art works so the barriers to that were first of all access to training and then when you master the technique and you do everything that you're supposed to do then you enter the market and your works are not evaluated based on composition and these visual sciences they're evaluated based on the fact of your race and this goes back to Henry Tanner it goes back to 19th century artist and it is only this moment of evaluation that is predetermined by race or by gender or by sexuality that determines how we see the works and understand the works but the works themselves and the artists themselves may choose to explicitly respond to these conditions that exist or they may adopt a posture of refusal but the questions of black art and then post black art which was an art that supposedly was freed from the mandate of having to do an identity based art still the fundamental issues of the art market in the way in which it has been systematically exclusionary to these people the same way the country is right they're fundamentally racially biased hence when these people enter if the art enter like you said by itself if a William 2 Williams entered to the gallery by itself what an amazing canvas they learn he's black and it's a whole different issue but like the 50 American show those that all have to show belief right so you have this discursive rhetorical marketed type of black artist you know that's called 30 Americans and it's a heavy title it's all black artists so how again do we reconcile that moment of commodification in that show that explicit disavow of the racial worker one of the things that I want us to be very clear we're talking about the art noise 30 the people who really are in these conversations and art itself is a small minority the art we're talking about now which is pretty solid as a book by the New York Times is a very small market the broad issue is most human beings respond to booty so if you look at art in a broader context in this intellectual exchange it's invaluable because it is in these forums that taste preference education is on for the broader public but in reality we as artists my generation and I think much of the younger generation outside of are concerned with creating art that affects to you interact with you it's not about theory it's about creating a visual artifact a visual experience that deals with some emotions of course one of the perfect examples in my view is if you go to the music now how many of you with here use the word cool that's cool man that's a new phenomena cool has been around this is what jazz music use to me is good contemporary society it's so peculiar I have slept out when I hear my white brother talking about that's cool because at one point a few years ago you're talking slang now it's become the fabric the first thing with much of the art Joe almost need another who are going to aspect tradition now they have but they chose to assert their blackness in breaking down doors in the art world Norman Lewis who was neglected and I'm very pleased to know that he is now getting some of the recognition here again some of his work after tradition have been ignored I think we spoke about that before one of the techniques that the art world uses to control because remember to talk about economics I don't know if any of you saw the village floor it's not this issue before where they were actually looking at the economics of the art industry and who controls it and the critics like in any other field respond to the marketplace so again besides some agreements that Ken Johnson may have exhibited in his critique of those two particular shows it's also about the art market and we can't forget it so Rich your question about the 30 Americans exhibition in the post black moment is not really about the artists themselves per se some artists may be quite savvy in navigating the market and therefore they attribute to this process but the third the curatorial practice it's about exhibition and display and then also sales so again there's a moment when the work leaves the studio and enters into the world that these issues become domain and for that's the sort of the paradigm Ken Johnson says there's a paradox in the exhibition but the actual what is his fundamental flaw with his intellectual project is that his desire for is about art is precisely the piece that he denies to artists once the work has been attached to a particular body and this is something that's consistent through his criticism I went back and looked at some of his other reviews and this is a consistent trend he is opposed to identity based art he's the one who is making identity crucial his review of particularly upstairs of the Lucy LePard exhibition was laudatory because it was about her consolidation of the concept of conceptualism he then puts a dismissive aside at the end about the rest of her project which was explicitly feminist so he consistently does this he talks about this in relationship to Chicano artists he talks about it over and over again that's what he would these are the notes that I took the night before and he talked a lot about solidarity although then he was called on by some people in the audience saying you're really talking about identity projects and he's saying this is what he said it's good to listen to hear it because it can hear the amount of fear with which he approached the show which I think is really the paramount issue my issues with solidarity there are lots of solidarity movements different identities black, gay, feminist as a critic you're coming in and you're intimidating and this is just I'm reading it like he's saying but he was just talking about it if the show sucks but it's about the empowerment of women how do I modify my criticism well then it was interesting because one person in the audience said well if feminism is not strong enough to deal with criticism and then inaudible and she said we want to engage with real criticism being soft because you're afraid of offending as counterproductive then somebody in the audience said hey anyway you've attacked plenty of women artists you're based on the sphere of identity problem but I do want to stress because I don't think that all art criticism is about criticizing and I think that the times is not answered it will not answer but it's not that it hasn't heard and of course the real sort of ridiculousness of that whole review was that that show should have been written about by Holland Cotter but my understanding of what I've heard is the reason Ken Johnson grabbed that review out of Holland's hands but he wanted to write it which is really weird but it's been interesting to follow I mean Cotter has such a history of expertise in African art and being interested in all kinds of art but his reviews since then like the review of four exhibitions are like exemplars of what it is that you should do to actually look at the work for whatever it is and talk about the backgrounds and research it it's kind of responsible but he does do it so there are examples and that's a standard of expectation for us from the New York Times that is a responsibility that Ken Johnson doesn't feel any obligation to meet which he said at a panel in Philadelphia at the past weekend at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts he just wants to look at the work and so in going to the now dig this he's attributing this identity politics on the works which may or may not have been a frame but that the curator wanted to make he assembled all these artists what their individual motives were may or may not have been related to identity politics they were artists working in LA from 1960 to 1980 and yes there was a lot of racial people and they were responding to it but they were responding to it with aesthetic statements that were intended to be beautiful, compelling and speak to an audience Ken Johnson says the show is black therefore I'm going to see identity politics in all of the works he came in with fear exactly like that and as Kenny Kelly points out at PS1 last week she said the show is called Art in Black Los Angeles so she makes the distinction I mean I was going to say the same thing I don't know if everybody has seen the show but there's more there's not just black artists and not just black men exactly who we were using there but that says a lot that he goes in and frames it as a black show and maybe tomorrow we'll think about Rear Road folks in the McCarthy area famously said it didn't turn people in to save their life it turned folks in to save their swimming pools so the economy stuff is that was Arson Wells and I think that still happens today when folks are not willing to give up a certain celebrity status it would look like I would say that if you have been assigned a subaltern identity in this country in particular or probably globally you resist by existing and continuing to aspire and move about the world as if you were entitled to do so so that was the case for Joshua Johnston one of the first artists of the 19th century to work in this country it was true when Henry Tanner worked at the turn of the 19th to 20th century although he found he had to leave this country in order to do so and remained abroad for almost 40 years and it remains true now the exactly the economic market forces the social forces making our existence one of resistance because according to the system we should be subject and making our labor available to support the hegemonic right and if we try to carve out our own lives within that context we are always resisting and the nuances may change but you know what are the things I say so the new the new twist of 30 Americans and the popularity of certain celebrity black artists is a new twist but it's you know it's building on a very long tradition of negotiation that we participated in as Americans well a lot of folks thought talking to curious critics about and so it makes me think again like in this moment of you know we're not taking keepers to like be resisting forges walls and making falling of the mouth comments but what does resistance resistance look like for you are you inactive or something I think recently? Yeah I mean to the point you know I've read on yours the White Best I felt it gave me kind of permission that maybe this isn't that I knew of course you know the New York Times here as you say but this isn't going to be something that it's going to crumble the New York Times or something like that but it's a it's a small act in relationship to a kind of large corporate kind of force and so I guess I felt to the larger point that you're talking about I can't speak to this larger cultural resistance in the 21st century but I guess as an artist and as an educated as an artist I am interested in history and I'm interested in reframing the conversations of history that I find curious and interesting that maybe I even disagree with or heads with what the work is about trying to find a visual language to reframe those things narrative language to reframe those things and to think about them and have other people think about them and as an educator I think it's important to show students a wide range of art that is about a lot of the same things that I'm always talking about you know Jack Witt and into Overstreet they're fine examples as Robert Lyman and Don Judd and whoever those people's contemporaries were and the more we kind of understand you know break down these categorizations and show the kind of continuum of these larger sort of the larger our community I think the better off we are we have the existential and the pedagogical and of all you've talked really well about what the black arts movement was what are you trying to do what do you think that will look like today well listen I'm alive and well many of my colleagues you know we haven't been put out the pasture we're here resisting creating and the very fact that we are still here look at things like post blackness as something that is a real oddity but we understand the commercialization of society so the whole idea post black my complexion has not changed so those kinds of things you resist out of survival and you try not to you address them so that it doesn't ferment and become the norm which I hear this idea post blackness which I understand framework I understand what Telmo was trying to do and she's successful in it because we're sitting here talking about it but it also makes us think that there's been a great change listen there is a tremendous there's been a quantum leap in terms of consciousness I see a lot of young people in the audience and that just thrills me who are sitting here listening probably can tell me a lot of stuff that's moving forward that's resistance because they're going to resist the nonsense the propaganda and their free thinking so free thinking in itself is resistance so going forward I think the whole idea of cooperative interaction what I think correctly I don't have my finger on the pulse of everything there is this individualism within the art world that has always been in the 60s, 70s maybe maybe they were real camaraderie people getting together in the 50s that's spawned the the aspect of this movement these artists who have issues with society and those issues brought them together around a state around a state of principles and styles and all of those things and I don't really see that much happening again briefly from a moment there's two words of art which is away from the individual towards the collective and the resistance to the market culture is coming from the Occupy movement and from those people who are in the Occupy movement who are involved with art and trying to figure out how to bring those two together and so there's a lot happening in that but it challenges certain notions of studio practice and some ways of being an artist but that's tied into a social movement again so it brings these lovely people into you guys have been incredibly patient we have a lot to talk about but any questions from the floor please raise your hand Elizabeth is right there with the microphone we're only expecting okay maybe this is sort of comically simple but you're talking about the existence of non-existence with black aesthetic it seems like with artists like Henry Tanner I mean just by basically depicting African-Americans or Africans they're automatically creating black aesthetic so it's sort of the the movement already exists because you're conflating two things which is subject matter versus object matter so you've got the subject matter which let's say is an African-American subject an image if a style is still influenced by a French Academy then style is something different but I mean a style doesn't have to be centered around I mean you can center a style around anything an aesthetic style around anything that's aesthetic so I mean the black figure itself is an aesthetic object that's an aesthetic truth you can center an entire style around that but even around the color I think there's another issue at the heart of what you're talking about because you have to bring up say like Tanner, somebody who represents figures and actual people and the point of that work is the same I would assume at the same point say if you painted a white person painting an image of a white image is that you're getting at some sense of humanity I think the struggle in all this and this sort of racial neuroses that we live in in this culture is that you actually have to fight to say that this black body actually represents a universal humanity in which you can anybody can identify with so no it's not about a black aesthetic that's not the point it's the same point that if you were a white man painting an image of a white person and you were concerned with the picture of humanity that would be the same concern it's not a style it's a concern if you're black you're expected to make black subject matter recognizing the black subject matter which means you have to put black bodies on your canvas on your pedestal but many many many other people made work with black bodies and fetishized the black body so there's two separate predictions is Thomas Hart bitten is he making a black I guess I would like to interrupt you want to finish your question sir yeah sorry I don't mean to like I'm not I don't mean to put up too much of a fight here I'm just saying that when Michelangelo makes the date he's not objectifying the white so I don't see one immigrant on depicting or anyone who's necessarily objectifying blackness by depicting Africans or African-Americans people with white skin I don't think it's let's freeze the question just a little bit differently to say that somehow what Kerry Gibbs Marshall is getting at Kerry is a pretty smart guy what he was suggesting is not about styles of course because and Amola talked about why in all of our complexity we can straddle paintings not something about aesthetic styles being somehow in like a perpetual opposition what he was asking and again opening the question is that desirability of a tradition loosely formed is not some injunction or a bad day for you to conform to this or that he's talking about the same way as a guy's same background and there are art students some of them who just graduated who can point to what does collage look like for instance what does it look like when you're doing it with a black body A.J. Arthur J. Friend did stuff with film that completely transformed the genre itself a recent article talked about this how the black figure of something looks on the screen I've opened it in questions being made by resistance at some level when it's really opened it it's asking a question about what can we gather from the fragmented history of black's experience in the final world the representation of the black body and the black bodies of artists are I think two separate things which is we saw you sort of maybe conflating the two we wanted to make a certain distinction between that why do we think Alangelo makes David he's representing the human figure to the body a certain set of ideas what they may or may not be I mean people might say it was a celebration of Florentine identity black bodies and white bodies historically have had different meanings attached to them so when people choose to represent black bodies they're coming up against the idea of what that black body means and people who are of African descent often try to reframe that definition that the culture has of what the black body means but white artists do too William Christopher who was the life partner of the artist George Tooker was deeply invested and inspired by the 1963 march on Washington and Martin Luther King and did a whole series of images celebrating the life of Martin Luther King this is a white elite artist who had no obligation to do so but he attempted to also redefine what the black body meant so it can what the subject matter connotes is I think distinct from the person who speaks one of the things that is very interesting is let's just take Romeo and Juliet he glorified the idea of the black body his work also is integrated with Mondrian if you look at some of the way he creates his paintings the idea of the large can go back to Picasso, Paris and then you take another example of say the William T. Williams and you look at the Zulu houses the way they were painted in South Africa or you look at Stella the way it was earlier used in line in form which could really be linked to those Zulu houses in South Africa it also engages contemporary modern thinking, modern design out of Europe so to be quite attracted to this whole discussion is an exercise its utility to describe any concrete definition of black art I think some of the issues we did cover such as resistance is very, very important and critical but I believe just as you're not going to be able to define music yes there's certain styles, rhythms the way you execute that is peculiar to the black experience the black rhythm but it's music and in Europe I just submitted an image to the jazz in Germany you'll have a hard time explaining to some of them that this began with Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong because they explained it other questions what about I'm glad you brought it to music a lot of the conversation is confusing because when I think of which conversation is confusing ours the whole conversation about art I heard you particularly kept trying to go we've got to include all the arts in this conversation and that's something I was trying to figure out too because as a musician for me, I think of it this way as a black musician my job is syncretism I'm supposed to bring things together so if I hear something from Europe that I like I'm supposed to include that in my music so that when you come to my music and look to define it what if you heard something by Bach that you like exactly I would include it in my music I think the longest one did that all of our great masters did that and so when we come to this question of finding one particular way of looking at it I agree with you when you say it becomes futile because to me the main thing that makes the art black when I look at hip hop when I look at jazz, when I look at these forms is the idea that it's the ability to take everything in which comes from that philosophy from South Africa as Ubuntu we exist because of each other which exists dimensionally opposed to the European idea of I think therefore I am so we're supposed to be syncretic in our art and that's what makes it black to me Other comments, questions I would say that like you said people artists do take from everywhere we don't always want to acknowledge or recognize it but they absorb the same way if musicians do things from a variety of sources and then use it to as the basis of their their artwork That's not limited to a lot of artists that's basically Another question That was wonderful guys I wonder if Carrie James Marshall called to this again new black aesthetic tradition could be an attempt to force critics like you know, Johnston to put work in a certain context that is better informed or more informed about what artists live through and bring to their work You know personally I don't think it's necessary I think they should do their homework before creating reviews but I wonder if Carrie is thinking in that way like let me set the standard or show or talk or set up what it is artists concerns are so that when it's looked at or understood it can be understood in an informed way This is an incredible question because I'm a scholar of American studies and includes the Americans and like Kamaru said before you know about Shakespeare versus the tradition of African American literature for instance because folks have not before folks have studied it, right? So there's no impulse here from Carrie James Marshall for sure to contain what he's curious about I think is what Deirdre is suggesting that somehow despite the mario, the synchronicity that forms all the work that we do we're all something definitive that we might say we can relate this to that it's not trying to give you a mantle or wear this garment called black it's something about the work that pedagogically, ideologically like epistemologically is important and illuminating all these suggestions that we have to build someone like Ken Johnson that makes something up explicitly stated last weekend that he did not do research prior to going to the show does not want to do the research before going to the show so he was perhaps uninformed about the artists themselves besides David Hammons who he seems to like and and he was uninformed about practices that's where I see his flaw as I said someone like Colin Cotter is deeply well informed to an exhibition which I think is the role of the critic he examines the art and he examines the exhibitionary framework and evaluates and assess them for both their strengths and their weaknesses Ken Johnson does not feel that that's his job I personally would say that someone like that should not have a job at the times because he has a public platform basically to just articulate his own biases rather than helping to inform his readership I guess I'm kind of interested in the modification of resistance as one thing but also being a resident of the studio museum interested in the idea of this show as a corrective measure as you've described it the studio museum also acting as a corrective measure and sort of interested in when those sort of institutions will expire this sort of the box I feel like you described it kind of a box that I've just gotten put into almost as victimizing but feeling like that's still being perpetuated I don't know is this precisely why the studio museum was founded I mean these questions that you're asking are precisely this conundrum that we face how do we respond to the situation of what the art world is we can propose a dialogue on the black aesthetic to force people to understand ways of making art and design and viewing the world that they may not be ordinarily for V2 even though I think we agree that they should be and how break open the box create a space for everyone to participate and so the black aesthetic multiculturalism these various movements and ideas have always attempted to put that forward but again they're always caught up between the issues that the museum did right now with the directors brings up this idea as well over its history the studio museum which was a similarly motivated institution has continued to thrive and adapt and shifted the dialogue maybe to impose blackness or maybe not but we have to evolve with these situations and of course if we become really Marxist right it's all it is all about the market and you have to adapt to it and all of these institutions and debates help us with that and hopefully yes there will be a moment when we move to a different stage I don't want to go just when she died when I was there when she died what I was trying to say is not so much his work statistically but the support that he got from the high authority began to support his work came as a result not only to the brilliance as an artist there's a billy with debt but the fact that he had a body of support behind him you are our body of support going forward if this hierarchy is to be utilized the king makers it's going to be in your hands and that's what I'm saying when there is a popular support of what art is and it's taken out of this elitism then we will begin to see some real changes not only in giving us some relief so that we can work without having to be enslaved by the tenets of the art and art that went wishes of a few people in this village did you see that village's voice you should get that right so that's what I'm saying is that the future going forward is going to be in your hands before we close I wonder if we have time for one more question you guys put your questions together quickly Sean and Slater are here let's take those questions I guess sort of as a follow-up to general first question that general conversation specifically about like resistance and categories maybe like how we're going to deal with that it seems like especially this conversation has made it really clear that there's a lot of confusion around like when like the category or like the nominative distinction becomes like a strategical force and like when that's going to be rhetorical like political power move and like when that's impressive right or when that's like not something that you want to take about because being like quote don't think about it in the studio as artists because like more complicated complex as individuals right and when you're going to take or sort of like I'm an individual free thinker like my resistance is like chart rank etc etc like and how it seems as though like especially talking about what solidarity means in terms of an affiliation with a kind of group right and also like in the world that we're going to inherit or live in like what it's going to look like to have categories or not categories and like why not so like either okay or if it just happens to use categories as a strategical voting force Sean for your answer yeah it falls very much in line with that question that there was an interesting response to both the petition and pollen callers review that the argument really there was a similar response with an argument that until an exhibition like Ford does not exist and regardless of the individual artist's concerns whether it's identity of politics or not until we divorce the work from an exhibition in the language of that exhibit you know certain language will we not achieve that next step this is a really close question to my category of musicians so the idea for itself is being a mark to break the confusion kind of stems because at least from that article confusion in that article is that it's not confused at all and confused with this debate and the art you know parse these things out and correct the context in which the show resides and in which you know the exhibition resides so these are all different spheres in which you know have been kind of confused and that's a big problem in a society which has not sort of completely healed from an idea of any racism is still sort of a problem the confusion is not to help so these conversations need to be had at least especially for people who want to find them a little confusing I think everything is good in a sense that those exhibitions will continue as long as they're needed they'll shift in a way I haven't seen before especially what I heard and I even can't talk about it and in a way I thought wow she's so lucky she gets to curate a show which sounds lively filled with different kinds of art actually she's way luckier than curators that were the established white institutions that are actually very restricted in some way in what they can show artistically so I I feel like it's fine it's fine and things end when they end the point in which there's no need for it really it probably will shift to something else there are moments where things overlap so there are women and only art galleries that co-operatives like AIR gallery that are sort of in that moment where is there a need for this or not does a younger generation need it or not and there's shifts in the art world all of a sudden in any world where suddenly something happens and something new comes along and then there will be a new version of the same discussion because those things about who is in, who is out who has power is the you the story, the history Briefly as we study grace as opposed to defining kindness what becomes evident is that this question that you have about categories and when they're no longer necessary or the freedom to think beyond them has been a privilege of whiteness as whiteness fashions itself as the universal although it's deeply embodied they take on the ability to just be and to think freely and to do whatever and never to mark themselves as whatever so that very thing in a way has been commodified and so this particular type of response to categorize or actually respond to the categorization project that came out as a part of the modern society is a way to attempt to sort of dismantle or break it apart but I believe that as Merrill was saying these, that effort to define or to categorize and to challenge that the category is will be there as long as they're needed to be till the ability to just be is something that is afforded to everyone or you wake up one day and suddenly it's possible that what had been power structure no longer has power and it seeps up on you and climate change seeps up on you all of a sudden there's a point where we have less of a tourist reference at the moment firstly I'm very pleased to be sitting amongst such distinguished thinkers and such a responsive audience I have lived long enough to have seen a quantum leap in terms of consciousness receptability to the diversity and acceptance of one another is spawned by integration of mixed parentage that is very important Rathabatna is a perfect example of that so it begins to change the discourse of what is black and what is not black at one point if you had one drop of black blood in you you would sit in black well still as Mara is saying there's an evolution now where that is going to be a little more blurred and as we go forward into the future I think we'll see more and more because of course prioritization of the actual human body but also thinking and the way we look at it not just expression but as corpus for new business and we can't even think about life now because they still to be invented but the fact that we have opened a dialogue is by both spells for the future I want to take this opportunity to thank our amazing panel