New on The Ostracon: From NOLA to Minneapolis, a movement to revitalize Indigenous names grows

“If someone comes into my house and tries to rename my cat, that doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m going to call the cat. This is not theirs to do. And that’s how I feel about Bulbancha.”

—Jeffery Darensbourg

For several years, Jeffery Darensbourg and the artist Ozone504 have been engaging in what they call “one-word activism,” most notably around the Choctaw name for what today is called New Orleans. The area has been called “Bulbancha,” or the place of many tongues, for hundreds of years prior to the founding of the city in 1718, and Darensbourg argues it’s a better, more descriptive, and more inclusive name for New Orleans. In my new essay for The Ostracon, I link the story of Darensbourg, a writer, researcher, and enrolled member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation, with other figures and movements for Indigenous rights, from Dakota activist Kate Beane’s successful efforts to rename Minneapolis’s largest lake to botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings to the movement to remove racist statues and change racist sports team names.

The cover of the zine Darensbourg and Ozone504 created as a counter-narrative to the 2018 tricentennial of New Orleans.

Bulbancha is somewhat unique among Indigenous place names as it doesn’t describe a sensory experience or physical feature of land but refers to human interaction—the coming together of people and languages through the superhighway of wetlands long used for cultural and commercial exchange. And that legacy is more befitting New Orleans than a name derived from a French duke who never set foot in the city.

Alexandre de Batz’s 1735 painting Desseins de Sauvages de Plusieurs Nations includes mention of Bulbancha (Balbancha) on the bottom edge.

Says Darensbourg:

When I say ‘Bulbancha is still a place,’ I’m not saying everybody else go home. People here say, ‘No matter how weird you are, wherever you live, you could move here and you’re probably not that weird here.’ Obviously, the land that was Bulbancha is still a piece of land. But we’re also talking about those fundamental interactions between people, that diversity, the values of those people, the way that they would all come together and form this sort of place of interaction, place of cultural exchange. That is still a place, and Bulbancha means that place better than any European word.

READ: Bulbancha Forever: From NOLA to Minneapolis, a movement to revitalize Indigenous names grows

New on The Ostracon: What to do with a broken democracy?

My new piece at The Ostracon, the arts writing site Nicole Caruth and I created, offers a pre-election parsing of the site’s name while presenting some principles from ancient Athenian democracy that might merit revisiting in the era of Donald Trump: ostracism (“the ultimate in accountability,” according to John McKesson Camp, the director of excavations at the Athens Agora), dokimasia (“an examination to check the qualifications of an individual before entering office”) and euthynai (“a formal rendering of accounts at the end of a term of office).

The piece looks at voting using ostraka, or shards of pottery with the name of people selected for ostracism on them, when deciding who to send into exile for 10 years due to tyrannical leanings. FSU Classics professor Jim Sickinger explained the nuances:

Those who were ostracized, or sent into exile by ostracism, weren’t always government officials, Sickinger adds, although they often were. “What does seem to be the case is that most individuals who were ostracized were deemed to be ‘too big for their britches’ (my phrase) and to display anti-democratic (or aristocratic) traits, [but] some ostraka actually refer to the sexual practices of their candidates. Others accuse candidates of crimes (like bribery) and possibly treason. There was no precise definition of what made someone susceptible to ostracism, so it really boiled down to strong public sentiment against an individual.”

The images on this one, taken from documentation on the website of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, were designed by Ian Babineau.

COVID-19 Reports Profile Linked by New York Times

“[T]he works are meticulous but piercing, like a carefully released primal scream.” Running down the week’s “5 Art Accounts to Follow on Instagram Now,” the New York Times’s Jillian Steinhauer links to my Walker Reader profile of Minneapolis-based artist Piotr Szyhalski’s COVID-19 Reports, a series of daily artworks responding to the power and politics surrounding the pandemic. The project, created under Szyhalski’s Labor Camp moniker, began on March 24; I featured it it on the Walker magazine on April 27.

Looking for New Opportunities

After 18 years at the Walker Art Center, I’m exploring new work opportunities. On August 30, I received word that my position had been eliminated and the Walker Reader shut down indefinitely.

It was shocking and sad news, but I’m glad I can depart with genuine pride in how I served the institution, the field, and people who care about contemporary art. I’m grateful to Andrew Blauvelt, former Walker design director and head of the now-disbanded Audience Engagement and Communications department, for the vision to hire me back in 2011 (I’d worked at the Walker from 1998 to 2007 before leaving to be managing editor of the DC-based nonprofit Center for Independent Media) to edit the Walker homepage. The radical innovation he and design director Emmet Byrne engineered was in transforming the museum’s homepage into a content hub, one that forefronted not only stories that contextualized and raised visibility of Walker programs but also issues of import for, and outside of, contemporary art, thus, positioning the Walker as an arbiter and catalyst for conversations about culture. As I wrote in Art In America in 2016, the idea was to approach the Walker’s virtual and in-person visitors with equal value and respect, a notion recognized this spring by the New York Times’s Jason Farago; in naming the Walker website one of the world’s best art sites during pandemic, he called out Walker Reader and noted, “Treating the digital museum as coequal to the physical museum means you can be nimble when disaster strikes.”

That 2011 homepage was hailed as a game-changer in museum publishing. In 2017, a redesign greatly reduced content on the homepage and created Walker Reader as a magazine with less visibility but a more refined editorial perspective, fed by five disciplinary verticals. I was the sole dedicated staffer, supported by the Walker’s design and digital media departments. Despite few resources (my annual budget for all expenses never exceeded $23K), the Reader made a mark in the field and, I hope, in the lives of its contributors. I was committed to paying writers equitably, following WAGE’s fee calculator, and kept diversity—of thought, perspectives, identities, and artistic disciplines—in focus at all times. (Last fiscal year, 69 percent of commissioned writers identified as BIPOC; 54 percent identified as women, trans, or non-binary.)

In 2012, I asked Christophe Szpajdel—designer of logos for death metal bands like Sadistic Passage and Vomit of Torture and a featured artist in the exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production—to create a Walker in his iconic style.

I’m proud of platforms I conceived of and supported over the years, including Artist Op-Eds (featuring the voices of Naeem Mohaiemen and Hans Haacke, Gordon Hall, Jack Whitten, Sky Hopinka, Ana Tijoux, and others), Soundboard (a discussion interface that’s tackled tough topics from the ways museums might respond to sexual harassment claims against artists like Chuck Close to notions around indigenizing fashion and queering design pedagogy), and the ever-popular year-end list series, The Year According to… It’s been exciting in so many ways: interviewing Meredith Monk, editing Louise Erdrich, leading an artist talk with Postcommodity, working with Werner Herzog on a Trump-era addendum to his famed Minnesota Declaration on truth and fiction in documentary cinema, writing about local favorites like Erik Brandt and Piotr Szyhalski, and organizing and serving as conference co-emcee for Superscript: Arts Journalism & Criticism in a Digital Age. There are too many amazing experiences to share (popping to mind: chatting with Coco Fusco as a makeup artist transformed her into Dr. Zira from Planet of the Apes, asking the “Paul Rand of Metal” to create a black metal logo for the Walker, interviewing Thomas Hirschhorn inside his cardboard-and aluminum cave…)

I do believe that Walker Reader, and digital publishing more broadly, has been an important driver of the Walker’s reputation internationally, but it’s also been a meaningful tool for serving its local audiences—inviting local figures, and paying them, to share their perspectives on an array of topics, from Minneapolis poet Erin Sharkey’s response to PopeL’s Skin Set artworks and Twin Cities dancers responding to the annual Choreographers’ Evening showcase to activist and politician Andrea Jenkins’s thoughts on how documentary practices can elevate transgender voices. As cultural institutions wrestle with questions of relevance, purpose, relationship with community, and real equity, I hope the Walker renews its commitment to digital publishing as a valuable tool.

While I obsessively tracked metrics on the “success” of Walker Reader content—citations, traffic, time on site, social media shares, comments, and links, etc.—one local response remains among the most meaningful to me. Following the controversies over Sam Durant’s Scaffold and an exhibition of art by Jimmie Durham, an artist whose Cherokee heritage has been challenged, I invited artist Dyani White Hawk Polk to convene an online roundtable. Titled "How Can Contemporary Art Be More Inclusive of Native Voices?," Dyani led a substantive, no-holds-barred discussion with Native artists and curators on ways to make a more inclusive art world, covering everything from the need for Native scholars and critics to factors related to education and the art market. I’m pleased that the discussion, lengthy as it is, stands as an online resource for years to come. Further, it was an honor to see the project referenced at length in Susan L. Allen and Amy B. Weisgram Engstrom's piece for the Mitchell Hamline Law Review, “Inclusivity in Contemporary Art: Assessing the Walker’s Scaffold Controversy” (pdf, see p. 188), which noted, “It is through inclusive dialogue, such as the Walker’s Roundtable, that museums can facilitate genuine connections between indigenous culture and contemporary exhibits of history.” Here’s hoping the Walker renews its commitment to this kind of engagement—and that there’s another employer out there who already sees its value and would welcome me to help tell stories that matter.

I’d love to bring the passion and thinking that guided these projects to a new project or employer. Is your art center, museum, company, or nonprofit hiring a storyteller, editor, or content strategist? Let me know.

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Thanks for all the journalists and peers who’ve had kind words to say about my work at the Walker. A sampling:

Carolina Miranda, “Essential Arts,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 5, 2020:

A staff reorganization at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has resulted in the closing of its online magazine, the Walker Reader. That is unfortunate. The site, led by journalist Paul Schmelzer, produced interesting arts coverage in ways that were topical without being self-promotional, featuring contributions by important art world figures such as Jack Whitten, Hans Haacke, Taylor Renee Aldridge and Jessica Lynne. I’ve always thought of it as a model for what museums might do to support arts writing at a time when media is shriveling. I’m sorry to see it go.

Matthew Newton, Director of Publishing, The Andy Warhol Museum, Twitter, Sept. 4, 2020:

When it was announced this week that @walkermag would be shuttered amid restructuring at @walkerartcenter, it felt like a gut punch, at least to those of us familiar with the Reader and the gold standard it had set for journalism pub'd by an art museum.

When I was hired at @cmoa back in 2014, and tasked with making the museum's blog a more authoritative publishing platform, @walkermag offered a north star. And when I reached out to @iteeth, the Reader's longtime editor, he was generous with his time and insights.

Michelle Millar Fisher, Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and co-founder of Art + Museum Transparency, Instagram, Sept. 3, 2020:

When I think of standards and benchmarks in the field of digital publishing in museums, [Walker Reader] is one of the projects that I point to every single time. I deeply admire the editorial work behind it, and am so, so perplexed to hear that something that leads in the field is being disbanded and its editor restructured out of a job. The press release points towards opening up the museum to a greater diversity of voices, and I think that must always be a constant goal of everything that is done in our institutions. There’s always room to push for more improvement—but to this outside eye, the Reader was already leading on this front.

Alex Greenberger, “Walker Art Center Staff Reorganization Results in End of Museum’s Closely Followed Digital Magazine,” ARTnews, Sept. 2, 2020:

Part of the museum’s elimination of several positions includes the loss of the Walker Reader, a digital magazine that published critical texts by artists, curators, and writers about current politics and their impact on art and institutions. For many in the art world, the Walker Reader, which had generated a loyal and international readership, had come to be considered an important publication within a gradually shrinking digital landscape for art journalism… The Walker Reader has been considered an essential publication within the art world. Artists such as Jack Whitten, Naeem Mohaiemen, Hans Haacke, Sky Hopinka, Natascha Sadr Haghihaghian, and others had contributed to it, as had critics and journalists such as Jessica Lynne, Taylor Renee Aldridge, Seph Rodney, Tyler Green, and many more.

Tyler Green, art historian, author, and critic, Twitter, Sept. 2, 2020:

.@walkerartcenter's short-sighted, self-lessening elimination of @iteeth's position - he'd been the only reason for non-MNers to so much as think of the Walker in recent years - spotlights the enormous brain drain underway in art museums and related non-profits - and its effects.

Jenna Ross, Staff shakeup at Walker Art Center aims to raise its ‘public voice,’” Star Tribune, Sept. 1, 2020:

Among the losses: Paul Schmelzer, editor of Walker Reader, who has worked for the Walker for 18 years. In 2014, he launched Artist Op-Eds, where artists grapple with urgent issues. Earlier this year, the New York Times mentioned the Walker Reader in praising the Walker's website as "a networked treasure house."

On a more personal note, these comments on my Facebook post made my day/year.

And, from Zachary Small’s Sept. 15, 2020, Artnet piece on brain drain in the arts:

 “What Mary Ceruti is doing there is disrespectful to the institution,” the art critic Tyler Green, who has been following the situation at the museum, said. “Why would anyone in the industry think they have job security when something like this happens to someone as prominent as Paul?”

September 25: Keynoting the Crossing Borders Arts Journalism Conference

Along with Carolina Miranda, Hrag Vartanian, Robert Bettmann, and others, I'll be talking about art journalism, intercultural interpretation, and supporting diverse voices in the arts as one of several keynote speakers at the five-day Crossing Borders conference. Keynotes take place the afternoon of Friday, September 25. Join the conference Facebook group or visit DayEight’s website for details and registration info.

Update: here’s video of the event; my talk begins at the 53:00 mark.

From Armajani to Lil Bub: Photos from the Walker

When I was editor of the Walker Reader, I was more or less a one-man newsroom. I got invaluable help from the Walker’s top-notch designers and technologists, amazing photos from the staff photographer (the excellent Bobby Rogers, most recently), and contributions from staff, but plenty of times I had to go it alone. Thanks to a great little camera, the Fujifilm X10, I was able to get some strong photos to illustrate many of my pieces—from shots at an outdoor artist residency by ROLU to many photos of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, photos of local musicians (and one not so great, but still kind of awesome photo of Sonic Youth), and shots of works in the galleries.

Some of the most noteworthy—as I noticed this week when Minneapolis-based Iranian artist Siah Armajani passed—have made it far beyond the Walker’s walls, to the pages of the New York Times, online news stories by Artnet, and beyond. Here are a few recent examples, from Armajani to the late, internet-famous Lil Bub. While I’m not trained as a photographer, I’ve enjoyed getting out and capturing imagery to add something special to my stories.

Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, by Siah Armajani. Photo: Paul Schmelzer

“Siah Armajani, Sculptor of Communal Spaces, Dies at 81,” Holland Cotter, New York Times, Sept. 3, 2020

Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, by Siah Armajani. Photo: Paul Schmelzer

“How Siah Armanjani’s Sculptures Confound and Connect us to ‘Home,’” Camile Lefevre, Midwest Home, Sept. 11, 2018.

“Museums Shut Doors as Midwest Freezes,” Annie Armstrong, ARTnews, Jan. 31, 2019.

Lil Bub at the original Internet Cat Video Festival. Photo: Paul Schmelzer

Felines feted in Cat Video Fest at The Grand, Steve Fuller, The Ellsworth American, Mar 17, 2016.

The Ostracon: In Minneapolis’s Third Precinct, a restauranteur puts justice at the heart of rebuilding plans

For The Ostracon—the writing platform I started with Nicole J. Caruth, thanks to an arts writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts—I recently profiled Ruhel Islam, the charismatic owner of Gandhi Mahal, a beloved Minneapolis restaurant that was destroyed in the uprising following the murder of George Floyd by local police. Upon hearing news his business had burned to the ground, Islam’s words, overheard by his daughter and posted on Facebook, went viral—“Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served: put those officers in jail.”—sparking more than 33,000 shares, 40,000 reactions, and 3,100 comments, expressing love, thanks, and pledges of support and drawing the attention of media outlets worldwide, from the New York Times, CNN, and the Boston Globe to London’s Daily Mail, The Times of India, and the Dhaka Tribune.

A month later, after the news frenzy had died down, I met with Islam to discuss what’s next for his restaurant and his mission to “bring peace through pleasing the palate.” His dream for the design of his new building: “addressing every single issue we have in our life. One of the main goals I want to achieve is a fully fed community. And everyone means every part of our community: people, plants, trees, bugs, birds, animals.” He aims to incorporate all the elements he did in his old restaurant—from solar panels, an on-site bee colony, and basement aquaponics garden to hiring ex-offenders as staff and sourcing produce from a network of backyard gardens in the neighborhood—while adding new features, including intercultural housing, room for raising chickens and goats on the premises, and a LEED certification.

Ruhel Islam at Bullthistle Gardens, one of the backyard farms that sources produce for his restaurant. Photo: Paul Schmelzer

As David Gray, a friend of Islam’s and an urban farmer who sells produce to Gandhi Mahal, tells me, Islam is driven by his Bangladeshi culture and his Muslim faith, not to mention his memories of home.

“He envisions Bangladesh,” he says. “He wants a village. He wants a true, sustainable way of living. If you could walk to Uptown and there were fruit trees you could pick from, vegetables growing everywhere, raised boxes, people growing things on the rooftops, just a complete free-for-all based around food—that’s what he sees.”

To support to the rebuilding of Gandhi Mahal or the community of Lake Street businesses impacted by the unrest over George Floyd’s killing, check out the Gandhi Mahal GoFundMe site and WeLoveLakeStreet.

READ: In Minneapolis’s Third Precinct, a restauranteur puts justice at the heart of rebuilding plans

A mural from a boarded-up business near the site where Gandhi Mahal once stood. Photo: Paul Schmelzer

Werner Herzog, Trump, and the anniversary of the Minnesota Declaration

To launch the redesigned Walker Reader, I wanted to make a statement—a big moment to mark a shift in editorial perspective.

Then I thought: Werner Herzog.

The enigmatic director of Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man had made history in the Walker Art Center cinema in 1999 when he shared his Minnesota Declaration, a manifesto on truth and fact in documentary cinema in which he famously defined his notion of “ecstatic truth” for the first time. It was 2017, the early days of the Trump Administration, and we were starting to hear about “fake news” and “alternative facts.” I wondered what the famed documentarian would have to say about it all. So I asked.

The result: Herzog agreed to write a Trump-era addendum to the historic declaration, and, to flesh it out as a full package, I invited an array of voices to weigh in as well.

Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation and Command and Control) offered a rousing rebuttal to Herzog, “‘The Truth’: An Anti-Manifesto for Artists.”

Art critic Ben Davis (9.5 Theses on Art and Class), wrote that “a ‘politics of objective facts’ corresponds to no politics that I know of” in his contribution, “Beyond the Imaginary Politics of Objective Facts.”

Filmmaker Sabaah Folayan (Whose Streets?) looked at the somatics of the question in “Pain, Bodies, and Emotional Truths.”

And artist RaMell Ross offered a poetic meditation on memory, race, and his late mother in “Goodbye, Pluto: An Elegy on Loss, Memory, and Photography.”

The series, Truth In the Age of Alt-Facts, didn’t pan out as expected: it was meant to launch the new Soundboard feature, but the technology behind the multi-author tool had been delayed, as had the relaunch of the Reader itself. So it ran a few months early, to commemorate the 18th anniversary of Herzog’s declaration. But I’m still proud of it: the diversity of voices and perspectives, the chance to again surface Herzog’s manifesto, and the triumph of helping contribute to his update to a historic text.

Launching Soon: The Ostracon

Early next month, Nicole J. Caruth and I will be launching The Ostracon, a new art blog funded through an arts writers grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. In the meantime, please visit our splash page and click the survey link to share ideas on people and issues on art’s periphery and beyond that we should know about. (Thanks to Jasio Stefanski for bringing his design and web development vision to the project!)

New York Times Names Walker Website Among World's Best During COVID-19

It's such an honor to have the New York Times include the Walker in its rundown of the world's best museum websites during COVID-19 (and to mention two of my favorite Walker Reader projects). I might laminate the section on the Walker to keep in my pocket as it succinctly sums up the vision some of us have had for years of having "digital and physical programming operate as coequals."

Because art is not just what’s on a museum’s walls. “Art” is a whole collection of experiences and ideas and principles, and a museum’s digital and physical programming have to operate as coequals. The museum that understands this most fully is the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, which a decade ago rolled out the most aggressive and accessible websites of any American museum. The site is a networked treasure house, where its collection and exhibition displays mingle with a panoply of artistic and art-related content, like the Walker Reader, an editorial arm of the museum that features debates on Indigenous art, or on how museums respond to the #MeToo movement.

Treating the digital museum as coequal to the physical museum means you can be nimble when disaster strikes, and the Walker has already published pandemic-related articles and curated new video displays and playlists.

Mentioned but not linked, our five-part Soundboard, Museums & #MeToo (Mar. 2018), and our various discussions on art and indigeneity:

“What Does It Mean to Have an Indigenous Lens in Film?” (Mar. 2019)

“How Can Fashion Be Indigenized?” (June 2019)

“How Can Contemporary Art Be More Inclusive of Native Voices?” (Oct. 2017)

New Artist Op-Ed: Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho on Farmer Activism in the Philippines

By seeking to learn from the innovative practices of the Filipino peasantry in order to fundamentally rethink what it means to be both an artist and a citizen beyond the conditions we were dealt, SAKA engages a wide, planetary outlook, one that allows it to articulate other kinds of desires within and beyond the specificity of its aligned struggle.

The island of Negros is known as “the sugar bowl of the Philippines.” But such romantic imagery obscures a dark reality: during tiempo muerto—the “dead time” between sowing and harvesting cane—farm laborers there go without wages and food. “It is death built into the clockwork mandate of the sugar plantation,” write artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho. In an Earth Day edition of Artist Op-Eds, the duo looks to bungkalan, a movement that offers a means of survival and militant political resistance for farmer-activists who cultivate unused plots of plantation land to grow both food and community.

Co-edited with curator Victoria Sung, their essay, published online and as a print-on-demand pamphlet, is the fourteenth in the Walker Art Center’s ongoing Artist Op-Eds series.

Read “Surviving Tiempo Muerto: On Bungkalan and Peasant Resistance in the Philippines”

Soundboard 9.0: Why Identify Identity?

Over at Walker Reader, we recently published our ninth Soundboard feature, this one timed with the Minneapolis performance of Miguel Gutierrez’s Walker-commissioned performance This Bridge Called My Ass. I invited Gutierrez to pose a question to four thinkers on a topic of his choosing. Based in part on his (artworld-viral) 2018 essay “Does Abstraction Belong to White People,” he decided to tackle an issue at the heart of his performance: Latinx identity. Responding to the prompt “Why identify identity?” was dance historian Brianna Figueroa, artist Xandra Ibarra (who also performed in This Bridge), Venezuelan Twin Cities–based performer Pedro Pablo Lander, and artist-organizer Sebastián Niculescu who covered the topic in powerful, personal, and poetic ways. One of my favorite Soundboard discussions yet.

Readers read each short essay by clicking on a headshot to refresh. Animated identity by Jasio Stefanski

Soundboard 9.0 promoted on the Walker Reader landing page

INTERVIEW: How Whistleblower Reality Winner’s FBI Interrogation Became Powerful Theater

Tina Satter’s performance work, Is This A Room: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription, is hands down one of my favorite theater works of all time. Coming to the Walker Art Center this weekend, Is This A Room (as its subtitle states) takes the verbatim transcript of the FBI’s June 3, 2017 interrogation of Reality Winner, a USAF veteran who leaked a secret NSA report on Russian election hacking to The Intercept. It’s a powerful piece: funny, suspenseful, frighteningly relevant. In advance of this week’s performances, I facilitated an interview between Satter and Winner’s mom, Billie Winner-Davis, in which we filled in the blanks (literally: the many redacted sections of the FBI transcription were rendered on-stage by blackouts) about why Reality is in prison today, how Satter and her company interpreted the transcript for the stage, and Winner-Davis’ reaction to having a pivotal moment in her daughter’s life turned into art. Truly an honor to be part of it.

A sample:

PS

In the year since you premiered this work, we’ve gained even greater awareness of the role and power of whistleblowers, thanks in large part to the recent House impeachment hearings. I wonder if the work resonates differently now, 12 months later, for either of you?

TS

It’s horrifying how relevant this remains, because Reality remains in jail, and the facts that she was sharing are so taken for granted, are in the public debate. I was screaming at NPR when Fiona Hill was testifying, saying it’s just a fact that the Russians did this, and I was going, “Reality. Reality.” It’s just beyond an attention to whistleblowers. What Reality was alerting people to has remained more relevant than ever.

BW-D

I scream at my TV quite often, too. It’s been frustrating, since day one, how little empathy, how little attention has been placed on Reality and her case. When the whole impeachment whistleblower thing came up, everybody was saying the word whistleblower all day long, every day. And I’m just like, “Yes, what have we been trying to say? Now will you listen to the value of what a whistleblower can hold?”

Now we go back to the whole dialogue about, was it really Russia that interfered with our election or was it Ukraine? Again, 

“My daughter is in prison right now because she released a document with proof of Russian election interference. And I can’t believe that now in America we’re going back to a place where people are even doubting, was it Russia?” —Billie Winner-Davis

I just want to scream. My daughter is in prison right now because she released a document with proof of Russian election interference. And I can’t believe that now in America we’re going back to a place where people are even doubting, was it Russia? It’s sad, and it’s infuriating. I live in a constant roller coaster of emotion.

READ THE WHOLE THING.

Learn more about Reality Winner at Stand with Reality.

2019: The Year According to Jim Jarmusch, Art + Museum Transparency, Anthea Hamilton, 21 Others

An annual Walker Art Center ritual returned for its eighth year just before Christmas: The Year According to, our take on the year-end listicle, featured 24 artists’ perspectives on what made 2019 unique. Contributors ranged from filmmakers and activists to choreographers and authors, fashion designers and magazines to photographers and playwrights. As always, a format that can seem quite cliche yielded both substance and surprise.

Participating in the 2019 edition were:

Alexis Mark
Art + Museum Transparency
Pelenakeke Brown
Taeyoon Choi
Cyrus Dunham
Jes Fan
Tia-Simone Gardner
Girls Like Us
Anthea Hamilton
Hammer
Pao Houa Her
Emily Johnson
Jim Jarmusch
Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
Carolyn Lazard
Cristóbal León
Richard Maxwell
Jon-Kyle Mohr
Marianna Simnett
Sonya Sombreuil/Come Tees
Angela Two Stars
Xiaolu Wang
Tetsuya Yamada
LinYee Yuan/MOLD Magazine

The project couldn’t have happened without the help of so many at the Walker, chief among them designers Brian Huddleston (whose unreleased typeface Mulberry is featured in the identity) and Somnath Bhatt (who made the hand-drawn icons), digital designer Jas Stefanski, and design director Emmet Byrne.

Announcing The Ostracon, a new blog funded by a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant

I’m excited to share news that writer and curator Nicole J. Caruth and I are recipients of a 2019 Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The yearlong grant will fund the creation and development of a new collaborative blog called The Ostracon, which will launch at theostracon.net in the first half of 2020.

The Ostracon will look at figures and ideas outside the mainstream of contemporary art—from public policy, indigenous rights, and folklore to community organizing, historic preservation, environmental science, journalism, and food justice—that may offer insight into new forms of making and art that’s more responsive, relevant, and connected to the way we live now as individuals and communities. Taking its name from the pottery shards used in ancient Athens when voting to ostracize community members, the site aims to celebrate, instead of push out, voices from art’s periphery. 

Press:

ARTnews
Artforum
e-flux
Glasstire
Stanford Department of Art & Art History

What Gives Your Body Power? A Choreographers' Lookbook

Every year for 47 years, the Walker Art Center has showcased the best in Minnesota dancemaking through Choreographers’ Evening (held annually Thanksgiving weekend), and for the past few years we’ve introduced participating choreographers through a utilitarian, yet uninspiring, meet-the-artists blogpost. This year, we shook that up. With design director Emmet Byrne at the helm, and powered by the imagery of photographer Bobby Rogers and videographer Andy Underwood-Bultmann and the development chops of digital designer Jasio Stefanski, we created a multimedia lookbook. Instead of straight bios of performers, we asked them to respond to the question in the headline above. Along with video loops and photographic portraiture, the end result is more evocative—and fun—than ever. Check it out here.

Postcommodity's New Codex Investigates Land, Systemic Violence, and Minnesota History

“How the fuck does an indigenous people who descended from a magnificent history become labeled ‘illegal’ and ‘alien’ while remaining a part of their own sacred ancestral continent? And how in the hell did it become a reality that indigenous peoples of our western hemisphere would suffer the indignity of being called illegals and aliens for moving along the ancient migration and trade routes—as their ancestors have done since time immemorial?” In its 2017 contribution to the Walker Art Center’s Artist Op-Eds series, Postcommodity considered the year 2043, when whites in the United States are expected to become a statistical minority, to investigate issues around migration, “nativism,” indigeneity, and linguistics. To mark the collective’s return to the Twin Cities for an October 5 lecture as Public Art St. Paul’s 2019 Distinguished Artists, I commissioned its current members, Cristóbal Martínez and Kade Twist, to continue iterating around themes from their essay for Walker Reader. The result is a codex, a form of pictographic storytelling with roots in ancient Mayan and Aztec cultures, that investigates the Twin Cities’s past and present in terms of its relationship to migration, violence to the land, and Indigenous sovereignty. Its title, 44.8968° N, 93.1501° W, references the GPS coordinates of Bdote, a site of spiritual and historic significance to the Dakota people: the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, Bdote is at the center of the Dakota creation story and was the site of the mass internment of Dakota people following the US/Dakota War of 1862. The codex, shared for the first time on Walker Reader as a downloadable pdf, is accompanied by my interview with Twist and Martínez.

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44.8968° N, 93.1501° W

New Soundboard Feature Looks at the Power of Restoration in Expanding the Cinematic Cannon

Inspired by a Walker Art Center film series on lost and restored films, Walker Reader’s eight edition of Soundboard, our multi-author tool, looks at the ways film restoration can mean challenge and expand the cinematic cannon. Guest-edtied by Amy Heller, co-founder of Milestone Films, the four contributors wound up sharing a thesis—that new technologies are allowing the restoration of lost or forgotten films, which in turn adds missing voices to film history, including works about Black and trans life.

Contributors:

• Ina Archer, artist, filmmaker, Media Conservation and Digitization Specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture

• Todd Wiener, motion picture archivist at the UCLA Film & Television Archive

• Margaret Bodde, executive director, The Film Foundation

• Amy Heller, cofounder, Milestone Films

Soundboard: How Can Fashion Be Indigenized?

Inspired by a Two-Spirit fashion show held as part of the Walker Art Center’s Terrace Thursdays program, I commissioned art historian Amber-Dawn Bear Robe (Siksika/Blackfoot) as guest editor for a related Soundboard four-way discussion on Indigenous fashion. She contributed writing and invited three others to contribute as well: potter/designer Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo), designer/online retailer Jessica Metcalfe, PhD (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), and designer Sage Paul (Denesųłįné) to tackled the question, “How can fashion be indigenized?” The package was enhanced by a magazine-style graphic created by the talented Walker digital designer, Jasio Stefanski. Please give all four essays a read!

New Artist Op-Ed: Jules Gimbrone's "Touching a Third Sound: Trans-Sensing in a World of Deepfakes"

Using “deepfakes”—videos generated by AI to animate presidents and celebrities to say things they didn’t—as a jumping off point, composer/visual artist Jules Gimbrone’s new Artist Op-Ed for the Walker Art Center asks: “How can we cultivate new methods of sensing the world that aren’t reliant on a categorical flattening of complexity into the quantitative binary of real/fake?” Their answer: Trans-Sensing. The nuanced ways of perceiving many trans people have had to develop could provide a model for any of us for accessing a world of visual dominance in less binary ways.

On this one, I had the rare pleasure of working with Gimbrone, then finessing language in person, and finally working with Gimbrone, designer Jasio Stefanski, and photographers Bobby Rogers and Malanda Jean-Claude to conceive of and realize photography that captured the ambiguous and sensory nature of the topic at hand. And in another Op-Eds first, this piece includes both video and audio embeds, as well as our traditional print-pamphlet companion piece (to come). Please give it a read.