Certain printers and shops are so respected that their name can substantially elevate the value of an editioned work. For example, Atelier Lacourière-Frélaut in Paris once received its own museum retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. In the 1930s, its founder, Master printer Roger Lacourière, gained worldwide fame for his collaborations with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. An editioned collaboration between Picasso and Lacourière will have a different market than, say, a later collaboration between Picasso and Master lithographer Fernand Mourlot or Master Linocut Printer Hidalgo Arnéra, especially if it was included in a museum show.

But what does it mean to be a Master Printer? Specific rules surrounding who gets to use the title are often misunderstood and can even be controversial. “There’s a lot of history to the title,” says Valpuri Remling, a Master Printer and the Workshop Manager at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, one of the most respected print shops in the world. “Like in any craft or skill, to be called a master takes time and dedication.”

What is most important to realise, Remling says, is that it is not the printers who confer this designation upon themselves. Rather, it is a title bestowed by a profession in order to signify individuals who are trusted carriers of knowledge and tradition. “It is rare that one would think of themself as a master at anything — and printers surely do not,” Remling says. “It is a very humbling profession. You learn every day that you still have a lot to learn, especially if you are an adventurous printer and like to experiment with new approaches and materials as much as possible.”

Established in 1960, the Tamarind Institute took its name from its original address on Tamarind Avenue in Los Angeles. At that time, fine art lithography was seen by many as a dying field, as a slew of other positions had overtaken the contemporary art market and even university art departments were closing their print shops. In light of what they saw as a disappearing art, Tamarind’s founders — June Wayne, Clinton Adams and Garo Antreasian — concentrated first on research and documentation. They then recruited Master printers such as Bohuslav Horak from Czechoslovakia and Marcel Durassier and Serge Lozingot from France — the latter of which was renowned for his collaboration with Jean Dubuffet on his The phenomena series.

Tamarind’s early Master printers undertook collaborations with some of the most exciting artists of the time, including Josef Albers, Louise Nevelson, Ruth Asawa, John McLaughlin and Sam Francis. Their efforts helped spark a renewal of the art market’s interest in lithography. More importantly, they initiated a teaching programme that kept alive the vanishing secrets of some of the most knowledgeable Master printers in the field.

The way those Master printers earned the title is the same as how printers in Tamarind’s famous workshop earn the title today. Says Remling, “I am the Master printer of this particular workshop because I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality of work that we print and the lead person in collaborations with artists. I also mentor and oversee the work of my apprentice. Historically, one starts as an apprentice, works for five to ten years under the workshop’s Master printer and then moves on to become a traveling printer, learning and collecting technical and material knowledge before either starting their own workshop and thus becoming a Master printer, or continuing to work in various shoppes as a Collaborative printer.”

The fact that some Collaborative printers do in fact have the skillset and experience to potentially open their own shoppes blurs the lines between these two titles, Remling says. “Many people call any Collaborative printer a Master printer. The terms can get mixed. Then of course there is the designation of a Tamarind Master printer, a title Tamarind gives to only those who have completed (nowadays) two years of training with us and (historically) would go out and start their own printshop. Personally, I like to call myself a collaborative lithography printer or ‘the work horse/ monkey at Tamarind.’”

Old master printers

The humility with which Remling regards her own expertise is pervasive throughout the Fine Art printing field, where even the most seasoned veterans readily acknowledge how much more they have to learn. It is perhaps a remnant of the larger printing field in general, part of a vast, and perhaps unmasterable, ancient craft tradition. The earliest printing processes date back more than 5,000 years to cultures in the Fertile Crescent. The first prints on paper were Chinese woodcuts dating back 2,000+ years. Fine Art printing normally dates to around the 15^th century, when printing technologies became widely available throughout the world.

Within the Fine art space, the term “Old master print” does not mean it is an old print made by a Master printer. Rather, it is used to disseminate between prints created by Old Master artists and prints created for other decorative or utilitarian reasons. Most Old masters did not collaborate with others to create their prints. Rembrandt, for example, owned his own equipment with which he made his own etchings and dry-points. By the 18^th century many more artists had become interested in printmaking and a need for specialists in various printing techniques arose, giving rise to such a thing as a Fine art master printer. In order to distinguish whether a printer was truly an expert at their craft, a system of guilds emerged to designate different levels of knowledge, such as journeymen, apprentices and finally masters, who could become shop owners.

In most printing fields and in most of the world, this old system of guilds and technical designations has gone away. Even within the fine art field, most printers today, like Remling, are humble enough in the face of how much there is to learn to be happy to call themselves a “work horse” rather than a master of anything. Nonetheless, Remling says, “If someone is skilled enough to lithographically reproduce an image originally made in another medium, then that alone is an achievement worth recognising.”

Nonetheless, Diana Gaston, the current and 4^th Director of Tamarind Institute, says it is as important today as ever to maintain a rigorous technical training system within the printing field, including relevant designations such as Master printer. “Tamarind Institute’s primary mission is to provide advanced training in lithography to ensure that the field maintains a pool of skilled printers and educators,” Gaston says. “A critical part of our mission is also to engage contemporary artists in the process of collaborative printmaking, which in turn provides ongoing challenges for our printers to meet during the course of the collaboration and editioning. The broad range of artists we bring to Tamarind, many who have no previous experience in printmaking, maintains a certain skill level in the workshop. The artists are essential to our printers being able to hone their skills and continually advance the medium through experimentation.”

Uniquely valuable

Since 1970, Tamarind has been affiliated with the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. That university connection has allowed for the creation and maintenance of an extensive archive and library, which helps Tamarind’s students understand the long history of printing. One of the biggest misunderstandings about that history — a misunderstanding still prevalent among artists, collectors and dealers — is how to distinguish the difference between a so-called multiple or an artwork that is part of an edition and what the market refers to as an original or unique work.

“Artists come to us to collaborate and create original work in lithography,” Remling says. “Each run, each colour and each impression are individually inked and passed through the press. An original lithograph is merely a piece of art that was created in the medium of lithography and like any other medium it has its advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is the possibility of the multiple — but it is just that, a possibility. A lithograph can exist as a unique piece, though the method of creation remains the same as a lithograph that was editioned.” Even if multiple prints are created, and each of those prints is almost identical, the essential nature of printing inevitably results in tiny inconsistencies between prints. Individual works within the edition are thus, for many reasons, considered original and unique, even though several have been made.

Collaboration between an artist and a printer is another misunderstood realm. Some collectors believe that an artist-made print is more valuable because they are the only one involved in its making. However, rather than diminishing the value of the work, a collaboration with a particular printer can add value, depending on the knowledge and skill of that collaborator. “Collaborative printmaking is truly its own field,” Remling says. “There are wonderful artists and printmakers that create and print their own work beautifully. Then there are artists who collaborate with a printer to create the work. Lithography is quite tedious and requires many special tools and materials, and it is not possible for every artist to have their own studio. In addition, lithography can be quite difficult to master. This is why artists have traditionally worked with printers when it comes to lithography.”

In addition to the technical know-how, a Master printer can bring knowledge of specific materials and other ideas to the table that can help an artist realise new ways they might be able to accomplish a project. “Someone who knows paper and ink, especially the lithographic inks and their mixing, can be a huge asset to an artist normally working in another medium,” Remling says. Most importantly, she points out that working collaboratively is a fun and challenging way to approach an artistic project. “For any artist, it’s a big shift from their often solo studio time,” she says.

Whatever we call that person who helped an artist realise their artistic goal — Master printer, Collaborative printer, or work horse/monkey — Remling says the important thing for artist, dealers and collectors to recognise is that collaborative printmaking allows for a unique kind of back and forth, and the freedom to try something new. That spirit is what makes the fruit of a particular collaboration between artist and printer unique and valuable for everyone involved.

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It happens a lot. Some ennial announces the theme of its next edition, along with a curatorial mini-manifesto armed with all of the re’s — re-imagine; re-contextualise; re-define. The writing makes it clear that this curator has come to teach us, the uninformed and possibly complicit public, the truth about the intersection of art, history, society, politics and culture. The world is a mess, they tell us. But fear not, the artworks selected for this exhibition are somehow going to make a difference. So we go, we look at the art, then the ennial closes and the world is still broken. And the cycle continues.

Pedantic curatorial conceit reached a new low with the 2026 Whitney Biennial. Explaining their theme for this edition, Whitney curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer wrote, in part, “The eighty-second edition of the Whitney Biennial, like those before it, offers a space for contemplating the shifting currents of art in the United States, asking not only what is being made but also what it means to name something ‘American’ at all. Alongside artists from across the country, the exhibition features works by artists from places marked by the broad reach of US power, ranging from Afghanistan to Vietnam.”

A core principal of this recurring exhibition is that its showcases American art. Questioning the definition of the word American is expected and necessary. That’s not where Guerrero and Sawyer went wrong. They failed by avoiding answering the question. What are the various existing definitions of American? What specific alternatives are you suggesting? “Artists from places marked by the broad reach of US power”? That includes every artist on the planet. So, according to Guerrero and Sawyer, we’re all American now.

Sarah Song, a professor of law and political science at UC Berkeley, and a political theorist with expertise in citizenship and migration studies, offers several meaningful, useful and defensible definitions of American in her widely published essay What does it mean to be an American? Song says the most common definition is someone who is an American citizen, a specific legal status she explains currently requires “professed allegiance to the principles of the Constitution and adoption of a shared culture by demonstrating the ability to read, write and speak English.” But, she points out that American could also simply refer to a resident of the United States or a resident of any other place within the broader Americas, aka the Western Hemisphere. American could also mean someone who lives beyond the Americas, she says, but who explicitly shares the “American values” outlined in the US constitution.

Regardless, Song explains, the word American implies “a commitment to some shared values.” Diversity is fundamental to those value, she adds, but “a more inclusive American solidarity requires the recognition not only of the fact that Americans are a diverse people, but also that they have distinctive ways of belonging to America.”

Distinctive ways of belonging. That’s what defines any group. American is not a word that is entirely mutable or subjective, any more than the word French, Chinese or Nigerian would be. Including artists from beyond the Americas into the Whitney Biennial of American Art without explicitly clarifying their distinctive ways of belonging to the shared values the word American can sensibly imply is a parody of curation. It’s an abdication of the responsibility to choose.

Biennial boom

If it feels like pedantic curatorial statements of dubious intellectual value are becoming more common, it’s not your imagination. That’s not because ennial curators pushing an agenda is a new phenomenon. We’re just more aware of it today because there are so many more curators curating so many more ennials. In 1980, there were about half a dozen ennials of any kind. As of 2026, there are around 280 biennials, 18 triennials, a smattering of quadrennials, documenta (a quinquennial) and Skulptur Projekte Münster (a decennial). Each comes with its own curatorial conceit, laid out in a daddy-complex mini-manifesto (some variation of “the world is suffering, you should all be ashamed of yourselves, but art can fix it”).

Various competing theories attempt to explain the ennial explosion of the past 40 years. Some blame the art market, arguing that recurring exhibitions with the term ennial in their title sound prestigious and can increase the credibility of artists to raise their prices. Others suggest it is all about art tourism, noting the hundreds of thousands of people who travel to events like the Venice Biennale, spending millions on rooms, ride shares and meals. Still others think it is a conspiracy driven by the industry that employs millions of art handlers, framers, shippers, installers, PR firms and yes, journalists.

All of those theories have their charms. But what if rising prices, art tourism and the expanded field of art workers are not causes of the ennial boom, but results of it? In her book Biennial boom: Making contemporary art global (Duke University Press, 2024), art historian Paloma Checa-Gismero argues that the rise in ennials is the direct result of the end of the cold war and global adoption of the Internet, which she says empowered a worldwide striving towards what she calls “aesthetic conversions”.

“Aesthetic conversions of the first kind include acts of artistic distinction that change the social status of objects”, Checa-Gismero says. An example might be a curator deciding to exhibit something not usually thought of as art alongside agreed upon art works — like placing an ordinary coffee cup on a plinth in one of the galleries at the Whitney Biennial. The cup is thus converted into an art object, even as its original function as a beverage receptacle is, theoretically, still accessible. This kind of aesthetic conversion creates the perception that anything can be art, in challenge to the traditional belief that only elites can define artistic status.

The second kind of aesthetic conversion happens when someone exhibits an artwork in a different cultural context than that in which it was made. This happens commonly in the group exhibition at the Venice Biennale, where artworks from all over the world are exhibited together, despite being made in different geographical, social, political and cultural contexts. Viewers see them all as the same thing: contemporary art. This creates an aesthetic conversion in which a perception of global art history replaces the traditional canons of art history pushed by the aforementioned elites.

Before the 1990s, ennials were mostly organised and funded by those interested in maintaining some kind of traditional world order. The end of the cold war and the rise of the Internet demonstrated how fragile those power structures were. The ennial boom, Checa-Gismero proposes, was, and still is, a natural expression of what that unleashed: a widespread desire for aesthetic conversions to continually re-evaluate what is considered art, and to advocate for the idea that multiple co-existent art histories intertwine and are of equal importance.

Curator complex

Aesthetic conversions can instigate cultural change; that is the takeaway. It is the biggest factor influencing the ennial boom and it is the reason ennial curators use their platform to parent the viewing public, lecturing us about their particular agendas. Instead of looking agnostically at whatever contemporary artists are doing, then crafting a theme around whatever they notice, ennial curators handpick artists and artworks that support a set of cultural values they want to promote. This is not just art curation, but an attempt to remake the world by convincing people it is already changing.

Site-specificity is an important factor in this process. Hosting ennials in locations far from so-called art world capitals suggests that every place possesses special qualities as an art centre, as well as idiosyncratic local cultural values that can be expressed through curatorial choices. This is exemplified by such remote biennials as the Antarctic Biennial, Lofoten International Art Festival and the End of the World Biennial. Checa-Gismero also describes the Internet as a specific site with its own culture and values and notes how the site specificity of the Internet affected the biennial boom in the 1990s.

“A lot of my earlier empirical material [from the 1990s] is faxes and letters,” she says. “Then very quickly my data migrates to email. Some of these early biennials, [like] Manifesta in Rotterdam in 1996, already had a website. They were already beginning to think about site specificity in a complex way… becoming aware of the need to signify in the online space, this proto-utopian version… pre social network, where the Internet seemed like the promise of a free economical space. So the cosmopolitan aspirations of these biennials, which were very much an optimistic response to the end of the cold war, are very clearly visible in Manifesta’s first website: the internet as a space of free access to all, as a space of communicative exchange free from commercial interests.”

Manifesta’s founding statements read, in part, “Manifesta will encourage reflection on a wide range of cultural, philosophical, political, historical and social issues relating to contemporary art in Europe. Through its charter and its organisational structure it will maintain the maximum independence from political, commercial and sectarian influences. It will give wider currency to fringe areas of European culture and place the artist at the heart of a continuing dialogue with curators, critics and a wider public. In this way, and through demonstrating the pluralism of contemporary art and its openness to contemporary realities, Manifesta will exemplify the important role that young artists can play in helping to make the new Europe a more exciting and culturally diverse place in which to live.”

Compare that heady text to the announcement for the first Venice Biennial, which included little except for dates, prizes and names and nationalities of artists. There was no mini-manifesto laying out a social agenda. That does not mean a particular set of cultural values was not being signified. The winner of the audience award at the exhibition, by a landslide, was Il supremo convegno by Giacomo Grosso, a hyper-realistic painting of several young, naked white women frolicking around an open casket. The politics were implied rather than spelled out.

Today’s ennial ecosystem supports a more overt curatorial approach. The question that needs to be answered is, who does this approach serve? Curatorial statements frame the exhibitions as teachable moments during which some amorphous, generalised visitor can be enlightened about anything from colonisation, war and immigration to climate change and genocide. But who are they pandering to? Are they attempting to shame the major funders or politicians who support the ennial? Are curators court jesters biting the hands that feed them? Who is the audience for their lectures? Who is the public?

These are questions worth asking. It’s why we study art histories, and why aesthetic conversions are important. “Objects designated as art not only receive materials resources,” Checa-Gismero says, “they become common sensibly perceived as important.”

The curators of art ennials are not neutral. They are throwing punches in a culture fight. It is about money, power and who is entitled to write the story of the past and future. Some punches, like the one delivered by the curators of Manifesta 1, score a knockout. Others, like that of the 2026 Whitney Biennial curators, miss the mark. Either way, aesthetic conversions can change the world. If we care what they are changing it from, and changing it into, it is important to stay the fight, which unfortunately, for now, means tolerating whatever lectures our ennial curator daddies choose to give.

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Haitian-Canadian artist Manuel Mathieu had no idea he was on the radar of anyone associated with the Venice Biennale.

“Out of the blue, I received an email saying that they want to invite me to participate in Koyo Kouoh’s exhibition”, Mathieu recalls, referring to “In minor keys”, the main group exhibition Kouoh curated for the 2026 biennale. “I lost my mind. I was like, what is going on? To be honest, I never thought that I would be on that list at all.”

Mathieu then realised he did have a connection to a member of the curatorial team: Marie-Hélène Pereira. A year or so earlier she had visited Montreal, where Mathieu is based. A mutual connection told her about Mathieu, so she called and requested a studio visit.

Mathieu accepted the invitation, and over the next nine months he worked with the curatorial team to bring together what became one of the largest single-artist contributions to “In minor keys”, including five paintings, one mosaic, 14 sculptures and a video installation titled Pendulum.

The video has a strong connection with the soil; it opens with a woman walking through the woods and climaxes with a group of characters falling down together into the dirt. Aware that Mathieu had recently started a perfume business (for which he designs both the glass bottles and the scents), the curators asked if he could create a custom olfactive element to accompany the video. The aroma he created, evocative of the earthen setting of the film, gradually diffuses into the exhibition space from soaked fabric suspended from the ceiling.

Mathieu’s largest painting in the exhibition is titled Genocide. He says it does not reference any particular genocide. “There are many artists talking about that topic in the show,, and I think it is important not to point in any direction, which genocide, because there are many going on. It is an instrument of oppression, a vacuum of violence and a tool of erasure, basically, that is being applied in many places in the world right now.”

Political violence is personal for Mathieu. His family fled violence in Haiti when he was a child. For the past several years he has been producing a film project documenting the country’s ongoing social and political ruptures. What he sees happening there could happen anywhere, he believes.

“There are three things that are extremely important that people do not talk about enough,” he says. “Impunity, abuse of power and violence. That is exactly what is happening in my country. And it is like a copy paste. You can also apply it to this place, this place, that place. My own country is a fucking mess right now. My neighbourhood where I grew up, the house I grew up in, the people I know, what is happening to them? That alone is putting a weight on my shoulders. I do not need to go further than that. But then being exposed to such violence on other people is a way to make you realise you ain’t shit. What it is saying is that what is happening there or to Palestine or Congo could happen anywhere else in the world.”

Mathieu’s choice to centre these topics in Venice is rooted in his belief that pain is a crucible that has the potential to transform. “I do not think we should be afraid,” he says. “You can tell we are getting so close to the heat that you can feel the burn. Especially nowadays, reality is tearing us apart. You are like a walking contradiction. You are seeing things that bring rage and empathy within the same 20 minutes. A good exhibition is something that manages to peel those different things apart inside of you, make you get closer to them and witness them and question them. I think this show does that.”

Melancholy and joy

When Koyo Kouoh was selected to curate the group exhibition for the 2026 Venice Biennale, it generated a lot of excitement. She was already one of the most consequential curators in the world: a museum director, Guggenheim juror, foundational collaborator on 1:54 Contemporary Art Fair, advisor to world leaders and a routine inclusion on lists of the biggest art field influencers.

As the first ever African woman to curate La Biennale, Kouoh represented the promise of something transformative. That promise began to take shape when Kouoh released her three-page curatorial statement in April 2025. The opening paragraph read, “[Take a deep breath] [Exhale] [Drop your shoulders] [Close your eyes]. This is an invitation to encounter these words in the immediate physical, meteorological, ambient and karmic conditions in which they meet you. To shift to a slower gear and tune in to the frequencies of the minor keys. Because, though often lost in the anxious cacophony of the present chaos raging through the world, the music continues. The songs of those producing beauty in spite of tragedy, the tunes of the fugitives recovering from the ruins, the harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds.”

The next paragraph featured a quote from author James Baldwin: “There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonise the moon and others dance before it as an ancient friend.” Kouoh then went on to define the phrase “minor keys”: first, as a musical structure, and second, as small islands. In music, she wrote, minor keys are “often associated with strangeness, melancholy and sorrow”, while small islands known as keys tend to be remote sites beyond the madness of global troubles where “joy, solace, hope and transcendence” can manifest.

The islands of the Caribbean, of which Haiti is one, are among the most famous keys in the world. Modern Haiti was created out of both cataclysm and hope; it is the world’s only nation founded by slaves who overthrew their captors. Mathieu’s words, and the works he made for La Biennale, elucidate the dual definition Kouoh offered in her writing: a mixture of melancholy and joy, sorrow and transcendence.

As Mathieu says of himself, “I bring god the devil with me always,” a contradiction a lot of people today call divisiveness, but one essential to the duality of Kouoh’s theme.

Polemic pandemic

A month after releasing her curatorial statement, Kouoh died unexpectedly of cancer. She had instigated a celebration of “joy, solace, hope and transformation” just as she was disappearing into “strangeness, melancholy and sorrow”. She was 57.

Her edition of La Biennale has gotten more controversial in the aftermath of her death. On one side of the tug-of-war has been Kouoh’s curatorial team, working in earnest to fulfill her vision of bringing 110 artists, duos, collectives and artist organisations together to give voice to the “frequencies of the minor keys”. On the other side of the rope has been the global art press, which has devoted almost the entirety of its reporting to the national pavilions, which, as usual, are being dominated by noise and nonsense from war criminals, politicians, power brokers and protesters, whose toxicity Kouoh’s curation is intended to subvert.

It’s fair to ask, why report on the national pavilions at all? They are intended as propaganda. The group exhibition should be where journalists focus their spotlights. For participating artists, the group exhibition of La Biennale is often the pinnacle of their career, the result of decades, if not a lifetime of personal struggle. The personal stories of how they got there are often epic. When press coverage collapses, righteously or not, into a curmudgeonly bitch-fest, those are the stories drowned in the deluge. Is that not a net loss for humanity?

Maybe. But maybe not.

Kouoh was not afraid of debates and dualities, and neither is Mathieu. “It is a very polemic Biennale,” Mathieu says. “I mean, you saw the jury resign. It is part of our time, I guess. But I think it is good that it is happening in the art world because it is a sign that we are actually very sensitive to what is going on in the world. We are not completely oblivious, which could have been the case.”

The biennial is many different things at the same time, Mathieu explains. “You can be touched profoundly by beauty and at the same time, in the same room, be questioned about what you are experiencing inside of you. I think the power of a good curator is to be able to balance it out so you have moments to breathe, to reconnect with yourself, and other moments to just feel the disdain. That is part of the whole experience.”

Yet, prior to actually arriving in Venice to install his work, Mathieu was in a much different place mentally. He was feeling overwhelmed by global politics, and even questioning whether he could continue.

“It is hard for artists to work right now,” he says. “I am about to be 40 years old. It is the first time in my life I am questioning my capacity to change the world. I have never once woke up in my life and looked in the mirror and said that I will not change the world. I will. I am here to make this world better and I will change the world, period. There are no doubts. Yet, for the first time I am questioning is it possible still? There is something putting pressure on us, on our humanity, in a way that is questioning our soul, the value of our soul, collectively. It is difficult to create from that place.”

His doubts did not disappear magically. Rather, they were assuaged through the experience of interacting with the other artists who were also in Venice installing their work — the other “minor keys”.

“Here I do not feel like I am alone,” Mathieu says. “I feel like we are all in this together. I feel like all the artists are delivering something that is deeply rooted in their souls. They have a level of empathy, a level of consideration, a level of caring that I feel every day. At least we have that. At least we are in this together. I am talking about younger artists, older artists, sculptors, performers, whoever. You can tell they are doing this because they believe that they are preserving something that is necessary for us not to fucking lose our minds. And I see how the work next to me is connected to the work behind me and connected to my work. I feel like they managed to choose a group of artists that are really together, screaming or chanting to the same kind of music.”

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There’s a myth circulating about the 2019 Whitney Biennial. It goes something like this:

A Chicago artist named Michael Rakowitz withdrew from the Biennial in protest because Whitney Vice Chairman Warren B. Kanders owns Safariland, a company that sells teargas canisters the US Border Patrol uses against refugees seeking asylum.

As with all effective myths, this one has some truth to it.

Warren B. Kanders is indeed a vice chairman at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and he has, since 2012, owned Safariland, a company that manufactures weapons, including teargas canisters that have recently been used by US Border Patrol agents against refugees seeking asylum. And Michael Rakowitz is from Chicago. And he was, indeed, invited to participate in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

But Rakowitz did not withdraw from the Biennial in protest over Kanders’ presence on the museum’s board. Not exactly. It was more like he made a private choice. Protest isn’t the word. “I prefer the word fast,” says Rakowitz, “to mark it as a moment also related to imperfection, penitence, and looking, perhaps hopefully, to the breaking of a fast, should the situation one day resolve.”

The story of how Rakowitz became labeled as the 2019 Whitney Biennial protestor began on Feb. 25, 2019, the day the museum announced its official artist list for the Biennial. The announcement spotlighted two milestones achieved by Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, the curators: they had curated the most equitable Whitney Biennial ever in terms of racial and gender parity; and, for the first time, each Biennial artist will be paid ($1500) for participating in the show.

But instead of focusing on those triumphs, The New York Times broke the story with the muckraking headline: “The Whitney Biennial: 75 Artists Are In, and One Dissenter Steps Out.” Veteran arts journalist Jillian Steinhauer wrote: “This year’s Whitney Biennial, considered the country’s most important showcase of contemporary art, has 75 participating artists—and one who has already withdrawn.” Steinhauer continued, “before the list of participants was even released, a Chicago-based artist, Michael Rakowitz, pulled out of the exhibition in a protest against a museum vice chairman, Warren Kanders. Mr. Kanders is the chief executive of a company that manufactures equipment, including body armor and tear gas, for law enforcement agencies and militaries.”

Within days, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, and several other art media outlets followed the lead of The Times, re-reporting that Rakowitz had withdrawn from the Biennial in protest—and the die was cast.

I live ten minutes away from Rakowitz, whose home and studio is located in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago. I’ve heard him called a “protest artist” and “activist artist” before—one- dimensional descriptions I feel ignore the more nuanced and constructive aspects of his projects. So when I read the flood of media reports coming out about him, I wondered if this dismissive trope was being employed against him again.

I reached out to Rakowitz for an interview. Meanwhile, I contacted Steinhauer at The Times to confirm that Rakowitz had told her he was protesting the biennial. Steinhauer responded, “The choice to use the word “protest” was mine; it seemed like an appropriate descriptor for his action, especially in the context of all the other protests happening around Kanders’ presence on the Whitney board, as well as protests against board members at other museums that have been happening of late.”

Steinhauer has been reporting on Mr. Kanders’ presence on the Whitney Board for years. Writing for Hyperallergic, she was the first to draw attention to Kanders’ business activities in the weapons industry, and to question how the industry’s ethics fit with the mission of a major American contemporary art museum. She has done everything right. She raised an important cultural question at the heart of the art field. Yet, aside from rousing activists to the cause, her investigation has not instigated any movement from the Whitney leadership regarding the ethical framework under which they raise funds. This is the context that informed her understanding of what Rakowitz did.

The Times article buoyed public awareness of a host of other concerns surrounding the Whitney. It helped spotlight a letter that more than 100 Whitney staff members recently presented to Adam D. Weinberg, the Director of the museum, asking for changes in how board members are chosen, and addressing the inherent conflicts between Mr. Kanders’ business dealings and the daily realities of the working people who keep the museum running. It drew attention to calls for action that Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) has been making for a long time for the biennial to compensate artists. ($1500 is the amount W.A.G.E. recommended as a minimum.) It also spurred increased media coverage of Decolonize This Place, a loose-knit activist collective currently mounting its own ongoing protests against the Whitney.

Whether any of this is good or bad may depend on your personal politics. But I couldn’t help thinking the narrative The Times article spun about Rakowitz was hyperbolic at best; or false at worst.

Rakowitz agreed to an interview with me. We sat for two hours in the kitchen of his studio, and over hot tea, in front of dual podcast recorders (his and mine), he shared his saga.

In August of 2018, Rakowitz received his first email from the Whitney—a request for a studio visit from Curatorial Assistant Ramsay Kolber. Unsure of the purpose of the studio visit, Rakowitz said yes. Then when Kolber realized Rakowitz was in Chicago, not New York, she requested a Skype meeting instead. Rakowitz agreed. When that virtual studio happened, on Monday, September 17, Jane Panetta was on the call. She talked with Rakowitz about his work for about 45 minutes, never mentioning the Biennial. About a month later, Panetta and Rujeko Hockley conducted a second Skype interview with Rakowitz, this time inviting him to participate in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Says Rakowitz, “They wanted to show The Ballad of Special Ops Cody (2017), and perhaps something sculptural.”

Elated, he said yes and signed the nondisclosure agreement that day, as did his studio assistants. A few weeks later, Panetta flew to Chicago and met Rakowitz in person at his exhibition at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, which included his Room Z, Northwest Palace of Nimrud (2018). During that visit, Panetta expressed the museum’s desire to have Rakowitz make something similar for the Biennial to be installed in the Whitney’s lobby entrance.

This was a dream come true for Rakowitz. He began formulating a plan for his imagined lobby installation. But his dream soon hit a stumbling block. He read a media report about Safariland teargas canisters being used on refugees at the southern border of the United States. It reminded him about the controversy surrounding Kanders’ board position at the Whitney.

For two decades, Rakowitz has been making work that exposes systems and structures within the culture that lead to injustices like poverty, bigotry, inequity, and war. Seeing photos of empty Safariland teargas canisters along with the faces of tear-drenched refugees affected Rakowitz in an immediate, visceral way. He was wracked with questions of how his work could ever function within an exhibition supported directly and materially by the very systems and structures he has spent his professional life trying to subvert.

He read everything he could about the situation. He perused Steinhauer’s earlier reporting on the connection between Kanders and the Whitney, and studied the letter the Whitney staff had sent to Mr. Weinberg. Thoroughly conflicted, he reached out to Panetta and Hockley. The curators embraced his intellectual journey, encouraging him, if he liked, to make work specific to his feelings about the topic, which could be included in the Biennial.

Rakowitz acknowledged many excellent reasons to move forward: his respect for the curators; the fact that the Whitney Biennial is a massive stage on which to present his aesthetic and social concerns; and the fact that innumerable other artists struggle their entire lives and never get offered an extraordinary chance like this to share their work with the world.

But he also saw one glaring reason not to participate: he could not imagine a scenario in which his work would not merely be appropriated to serve the narrative that the Whitney was not acting unethically in partnering with a weapons manufacturer since they were also democratic enough to allow artists to prominently voice their dissent during the Biennial.

Rakowitz did not want the entanglement of being misunderstood, nor the stress of being used as a PR pawn, so he decided to withdraw. Fully at peace with his decision, he was nonetheless conflicted about whether to withdraw in a public or private way.

“I considered the possibility that going public might be the most responsible thing to do,” says Rakowitz, “but I also know that: 1) singular voices are easy for institutions to ignore; 2) I did not want my decision to be one where the vectors of attention/awareness point back to one artist instead of the issue, and; 3) I believed I could make my stance known to the people that mattered most—the curators and director of the Whitney—without engaging publicly, which can often lead to shaming instead of the actual structural work to be done in addressing these very big problems.”

Ultimately, Rakowitz chose to withdraw privately, and expressed his complex feelings in a heartfelt letter to Panetta and Hockley—a letter he says was intended “for their eyes only.”

Shortly afterward, however, his decision to withdraw from the Biennial was leaked to the press. As soon as he realized his decision was going public without his consent, Rakowitz attempted to get ahead of the story. He reached out to Steinhauer at The New York Times.

“I shared my letter with her in confidence,” Rakowitz says, “and explained my rationale for not wanting to go public.”

Meanwhile, also mindful of the leak, Whitney decision makers decided to release their list of Biennial artists—which did not include Rakowitz—early, hoping to spin the story with positive talking points about the most inclusive, diverse, and economically fair Whitney Biennial ever.

We know what happened next: a hyperbolic headline in the newspaper of record transformed a thoughtful, private decision into an act of public protest.

The tone of the Times article made it impossible for other media outlets to extract the bombastic protest narrative from the announcement of the list of biennial artists. This tactic was commonly used by The Diggers—a 1960s-era San Francisco-based, guerrilla theater troupe led by Peter Berg. It’s called “creating the conditions you describe.”

His back firmly against the wall, Rakowitz released a prepared statement to Hyperallergic, culled from the letter he wrote to the Whitney curators, attempting to enlarge the narrative by clarifying his solidarity with the demands of the Whitney staff members who had sent that letter to Weinberg a while back. That effort did not fare well. Instead of being acknowledged as one small player in a massive effort, Rakowitz has become known as the 2019 Whitney Biennial protestor.

Reality is less exciting than the news. Rakowitz merely made a choice. Rather than saying yes to one thing, he said yes to something else. The installation he imagined for the Biennial is still in production in his studio, and will be shown at another museum. He feels no animosity. In our conversation, in fact, he went on record that he met with Weinberg in person in New York to discuss the issue.

“One of my mentors in the field of public art replied to my request for advice when I was grappling with my decision,” says Rakowitz, “to let me know that Mr. Weinberg is not an unsavory player in all this. So I went into my meeting with him on January 18, 2019—nearly a month after I wrote my letter—knowing he was in a tough position. The meeting was warm, he was grateful for my letter, and I left knowing he was the kind of person for whom the process of building a board would shift significantly in light of all that has happened. We also discussed reform for how museums could adopt criteria for boards in similar ways that best practices are adopted for the exhibition of artworks. Thus, my analogy that a museum would not compromise the integrity of a work on paper by showing it in an unsafe environment; why then would a museum compromise the integrity of an artist by asking them to show with permission and funding from someone making conditions unsafe for others?”

It’s worth pointing out that if Rakowitz is right, and Weinberg is now moving forward towards adopting such reforms, that change will not be rooted in hyperbolic outrage theater. It will be rooted in the fact that people met and had a conversation.

Regarding Kanders, Rakowitz recalled to me something the Dalai Lama once advised thinking about in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. He suggested that instead of exacting revenge we might start by asking the terrorists what had happened to them in their lives to make them capable of committing such violence.

We might just as well ask what happened to Kanders in his life to make him so committed to the military industrial complex. What happened to make him so committed to contemporary art? What is it about his personal story that makes it hard for him to sympathize with the pain his products cause? What happened to make him immune to the conflict his choices have sparked? Shaming him and demanding his removal from the board of a museum denies a basic fact of humanity: that we contain multitudes.

The Whitney is just a museum. It has space and money, but the space is useless without new art to fill it, and the money is just a tool with which to acquire and exhibit that new art.

Artists have the power. They don’t have to adhere to any social or political agenda, nor employ any particular method, nor make any particular kind of work. The only thing they have to do to claim their power is create art that offers something of value to humanity.

When art resonates with people, it influences the rollout of human culture; it commands public attention; it influences the decisions made by gallerists, academics, and foundations; and it forms the pools from which museum curators curate.

In addition to Steinhauer and Rakowitz, I invited all the other players in this story to share their insights.

Mr. Kanders ignored my request for an interview.

A Whitney Communications Associate deflected my multiple interview requests. Her most recent response, several weeks in, was, “Thanks for following up. I don’t have an update at this time.”

Representatives from Decolonize This Place agreed to talk with me, but repeatedly failed to follow through.

A representative of W.A.G.E. talked with me at length about how that organization has been inaccurately lumped in with the protests and alleged protests, sparking unfair social media criticism for supposedly overreaching its mission to fight for fair wages for artists.

In the end, whether they claim their voice or not, they are all part of what is becoming the most grandiose social practice art project of the decade. Rakowitz is a collaborator in it, so is Kanders, Weinberg, Steinhauer, Panetta, Hockley, Decolonize This Place, W.A.G.E., the editors of The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times, along with the Whitney staffers, every artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and every visitor to the exhibition.

What the end result of the project will be is anyone’s guess. Maybe it will be a net positive for the culture. Either way, we in the art media need to think more carefully about the shit storms we whip into shape with our little word wings every time we get it wrong.

It’s easy to use the word protest instead of the word choice. It’s easy to villainize individuals and organizations. It’s easy to throw artists and their work aside in service to activist agendas. It’s more difficult to give people their full measure; to let them tell their whole story; to believe in the potentiality of conversation; and to make a safe space for intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate people to disagree about important things.

The musician Tom Waits said, “The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” In this case, incomplete reporting has inflicted suffering upon artists, and deflected attention away from art.

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Allison Glenn always lived on the Great Lakes as a child, either in Detroit, Michigan or Rochester, New York. Both cities are right across the water from Canada and a short drive from Toronto. She recalls visiting Toronto frequently on family trips while growing up. Now a renowned curator, having contributed to the Counterpublic Triennial, New York’s Public Art Fund, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Prospect New Orleans Triennial and the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, among others, she has been given a chance to reconnect with the city she so fondly remembered visiting when young, as curator of the 2026 Toronto Biennial.

When contemplating her curatorial approach, Glenn’s thoughts naturally turned to water, since her relationship to Canada has always been shaped by the rivers and lakes that connect it with the US. In light of current political realities, those same rivers and lakes could also be perceived as ruptures. That idea is expressed in the phrase “Things fall apart”, which Glenn chose for her theme. It is a phrase of warning but also acceptance, conveying both the inevitability of rupture and also the opportunity it presents. As she says in the following interview, “What if we find the weakness and say collectively that this is a weak set of beliefs? We do not have to fix it. Maybe it needs to stay broken. If we let those things fall apart and allow the fallacies to emerge, we can collectively build other worlds and other universes.”

The theme you have chosen for this edition of the Toronto Biennial is a line from The second coming, a poem by Irish writer William Butler Yeats.

It is, though I am referencing Chinua Achebe’s novel Things fall apart, the title of which is taken from the Yeats poem. The phrase was also used for the title of the Roots’ fourth studio album. Over time, across different locations, artists, poets, musicians and authors have used the phrase as an indicator of moments of intense unrest and violence. It feels that we are in that moment again, so I am picking up on this to remark on the times we are living in now. I was thinking specifically about rupture as a methodology, a generative force, a condition, and about artists who use rupture as an ontological tool, or as a way of understanding, but also as a site of possibility.

Yeats was a spiritualist. He used the phrase “things fall apart” in a ritualistic way, referencing pre-ordained, cyclical apocalypses. Are art biennials a form of ritual?

That is an interesting read that I had not thought about, because again the strongest reference for me is Chinua Achebe’s novel, rather than Yeats’s poem. The lesson that Achebe presents is to not lose oneself in the face of utter destruction. It is important to look at how Achebe quotes Yeats, as two of titles of the books in his African trilogy cite European authors and one Igbo proverb. I am learning that this citational style of titling is anchored to how the narratives unfold in each of the books. For him, it is a comment on a kind of presence and what it means to be speaking of a place, to a place and from a place. But gosh, ritualistic biennials. You have given me a tough question. When you say ritual, what do you mean?

Like ceremony, something people act out to add substance or regularity to life, or to connect a community of believers in the same unseen things.

Well, that is fantastic. I can respond to that. The art world is a set of beliefs, like money is a set of beliefs. There are things we believe in as a society, things we all agree to, then there are smaller subsets like the art world, which is a loose arrangement of people. Everyone’s art world is slightly different. It is not this singular thing. In this time, we are dealing with sets of beliefs that are really at odds with one another, especially in the United States under what has been an increasingly fascist regime that has defunded arts organisations, continually attacking free speech and knowledge. This might sound a little woo-woo, but I believe artists are truth-tellers, seeking a way in the world that perhaps is not what we have all agreed to. We are constantly trying to frame and reframe and understand and revise a different set of beliefs. We do that with every gesture. In terms of the biennial, I guess I am participating in the ritual of saying I am going to call this out. I am participating in the ritual of not being afraid of making a political statemen in a moment when so many things feel like they are untenable. This is the fourth biennial I have had the chance to work on, and the first one I have curated on my own. Biennials provide a different structure to engage. I think we keep doing it because we are looking for new models. Those of us in the biennial sphere believe in the power of the sublime a bit, like what it means to encounter something in a way that you might not have imagined it, or to be overtaken by an experience of close listening, learning, watching, smelling, experiencing outside of the confines of where we have been told art lives. The chance encounter is a big part of the ritual. The opportunity and challenge of seeing the entire biennial is part of the ritual, as is the opportunity, whether you are local or visiting, to see a city in a way that you might not have prior. On your journey to find a work you might come across the best falafel somewhere, or a really cute vintage store, or meet somebody who has the same kind of goals of seeing the work, of understanding it and allowing for the experience to happen. And sometimes it is about finding a coffee or a restroom, taking the train in the right direction. It is the ritual of participating in this conglomeration of sites and ideas, agreeing to something that does not have a clear and distinct outcome. There is a bit of chaos in biennials that we agree to. Chaos is a bit of the ritual. Maybe that is why we keep doing it.

Coming from Detroit originally — different city, different country — did you have a learning curve in preparation to curate the Toronto Biennial?

Absolutely. Being invited was a multi-tier process. At one point I was invited to write a letter of intent. I spoke very personally. I made it about an embodied experience of the region. I talked about crossing the border often, growing up in and around Detroit. I rarely lived more than a few blocks from the Detroit River and Lake St Clair. For a couple of years we lived in Rochester, New York, which was very close to Toronto. So I always lived on the Great Lakes as a child. On our family trips, we often went to Toronto and Montreal. We were close. So I did feel like I had a general relationship with Canada because of crossing the border so often. But I had not been to Toronto in a while. And a lot of the city had changed. I had to get to know the city again. I also worked with a national curatorial advisory, this group of six brilliant curators working across the provinces. They were so generous in opening up their knowledge of their regions to me, and suggesting artists to look at. I had the chance to visit their provinces, their universities and museums and do in-person studio visits with the artists. It was a chance to see the abundance of the prairies and the sunsets over Saskatoon, and the fact that Winnipeg has one of the largest and urban Indigenous populations in Canada; to take a ferry to Victoria in British Columbia from Vancouver. These experiences helped me understand Canada, another embodied experience of why artists might be working in a way, because I do believe that our environments impact us. Then last summer, I was at a cousin’s wedding and was talking to my mom and uncle. I learned that my great grandparents on my mom’s side came from Canada to Detroit. So this journey of understanding Canada has also been understanding my familial relationship to it. It has been this really fantastic opportunity to also learn a bit about myself as I am learning about the country.

How much input did you receive on your curation from the organisation that runs the biennial?

It was a dialogue, like many things are. I do not think anyone has carte blanche in anything in this field. It is important to remove that mystique. There are always parameters set forth. In this case, making sure the biennial is at least a third Canadian and there are more female identifying artists than male. That is something the biennial has always done. They also secured the art museum at the University of Toronto as the main site for the biennial, which was a bit of a relief to have a concentrated, focused exhibition in one space that could then interact with other satellite spaces. They also said that this year we would be working only with a partnership model, so we did not pursue sites that did not already have some sort of programming happening. So, an abandoned building was not in the cards for this edition. Then they introduced me to many curators and organisations and places they thought would be good. I got to know the curators and the organisations and the ways they were working and developed proposals for them to consider. In two instances, I co-curated. For the Royal Ontario Museum, the presentation of work is co-curated by me and Tandazani Dhlakama, and at Mercer Union the presentation of a new commission is co-curated by me and Aamna Muzaffar. But it is also a matter of engaging with the parameters and understanding how much you can push it. A curator is contributing to a larger arc of a project. Because the biennial is so young, I made a decision to not repeat any artists that had previously participated. The biennial, which is a not-for-profit organisation, was also very open to my idea of working outside of the greater Toronto area and to this idea of simultaneity and collaboration. I brought in a bunch of additional venues, including the Anchorage Museum, Times Square Arts Midnight Moment Program, as well as the sites around the Great Loop in the United States, which is this continuous series of waterways that circles the eastern part of the United States and part of Canada and connects to the Gulf of Mexico.

What is the Great Loop project about?

The first edition of the Toronto Biennial, which was curated by Candace Hopkins, Tyrone Bastian and Katie Lawson, laid the groundwork for waterways and relationships. That left some threads for me to pull on. In this region, the horizons of our lakes feel like oceans. They feel like sites of possibility. There are some indigenous epistemologies that consider the Great Lakes the internal organs of global waterways. So I am returning to this idea of waterways, but looking specifically at global waterways and suggesting that the Great Lakes and global waterways are a confluence. The Great Loop project is a collaboration with multiple artists and sites, as well as with Counterpublic Triennial and Medina Triennial, to have a simultaneous harvest at gardens around the Great Loop, working with seeds that would be specifically grown in all of the zones. The intention is that every garden we are participating with is going to plant the seeds, harvest them and share them with their community. The project asks at this moment, when we are dealing with increased nationalism and borders, how can seeds be a radical lens for ideas of exchange dialogue? One participating artist is Jean-Marc Bullet. He is based in Martinique, where pesticides were overused and something like 85 to 90% of the people have trace amounts of pesticides in their bloodstream. Amidst this, Jean-Marc has figured out a way to develop an organic garden. He and his partner develop teas and cacao and tinctures from what has been harvested in his garden. It is really beautiful. And again, he is an artist who is using rupture as a way of understanding accessibility of healthy food on an island that has been poisoned by the overuse of pesticides from banana plantations. Similarly, another artist in the project, Céline Semaan, has a slow forest in Nyack, New York. She keeps bees and has exhibitions, and hosts dinner parties with her partner and her family. Then there is artist Allana Clarke’s Amend Garden in Detroit. She is developing this garden in a food desert and thinking about how this kind of living artwork can address sustainability, food security, food safety and access to healthy, fresh food.

We have a main hub in Toronto as well. Then with Medina Triennial, we are collaborating with Mary Mattingly’s floating garden. And Counterpublic has a project site at the Antioch Baptist Church. They run a garden with Sumner High School and the produce in the garden goes directly to their food pantry. We are asking them all to document what they are doing with disposable cameras and notebooks. They will be telling the story of their harvest and that will be collected and exhibited. Then in Toronto at a convening we are holding in October, we are going to hopefully have tea from Jean-Marc’s garden that is sweetened by honey from Céline’s forest and taste some of the pickled items that have been grown by the Toronto Black Farmers and Fruit Growers Collective. We will taste things and drink tea and talk about the process together. But the meta narrative or meta frame is thinking about global waterways.

You are also collaborating with the National Gallery of Canada. Was that your idea, or was that in the works before you got there?

The Toronto Biennial has previously collaborated with the National Gallery of Canada and the relationship is one that the Biennial has stewarded quite diligently into this this edition. They partnered last year and my colleague Susannah Rosenstock led the charge on that this year. I am very excited about the outcome for the artist. He is able to realise his complete vision.

Going back to “Things fall apart” — it is a warning. But is it also hopeful? The Yeats poem has a line, “the falcon cannot hear the falconer”. It is a sign of distress, but also the falcon is finally free.

Wow, I want to sit with that for a minute. One hundred percent. We can agree that things fall apart. So we need to take a collective breath and just acknowledge where we are. Things are not okay. What is happening in the United States is not okay. What is happening around immigration and detainment is not okay. What is happening abroad around aggression and escalating violence is not okay. The genocides that are happening are not okay. To say something is not normal is liberating. Acknowledging that is the first step in seeing a path forward. Then we can pull back a bit with this idea of things falling apart. It is messy out there, things are dire, but there is a longer history of what is happening. Over a century people have been saying the same thing. It has been going on for along time, and maybe it will be going on longer than we are here. But what if we allow it to fall apart? What if we find the weakness and say, collectively, that this is a weak set of beliefs? I do not believe that for me to be satiated, someone else has to be hungry. I do not believe that for me to feel safe, someone else has to be threatened, or that violence needs to be used in the name of safety and freedom. I do not believe that in order to feel safe on a land, someone else or some other group of people needs to be removed from the land or feel unsafe. So yes, “Things fall apart” also allows for a hopeful theme. We do not have to have a Kumbaya moment. We do not have to fix it. Maybe it needs to stay broken. If we let those things fall apart and allow the fallacies to emerge, we can collectively build other worlds and other universes.

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It’s happened again. I’m in the middle of the street with my seven-pound terrier, Rocky, stuck in place. We’re on a walk, supposedly, except when I pull Rocky’s leash, he won’t budge. He does this a lot—stops for long periods of time so he can look around for anyone who might want to say hi to him. Rocky’s tenderness and tenacity rival that of the famous boxer for whom he’s named.

I amuse myself during these moments by scanning my neighbors’ houses for evidence of deferred maintenance and making little judgments about their landscaping.

The house I’m currently scrutinizing looks dire. There’s a hole in the roof the size of a volleyball. Saplings are growing in the gutters. The grass hasn’t been mowed, I’d guess in years. There’s a rusted car in the driveway with flat tires and expired plates. I smell mold.

I’m aware of about six other neglected houses like this in my neighborhood. Someone uninitiated into the world of distressed real estate might conclude that whoever lives in them must be too elderly, too poor, too eccentric, or too lazy to keep them up.

But I know better. These houses are as forsaken as they seem.

Abandoned buildings are part of every community. Some have been lost to the bank, or are tied up in probate. Others are remnants of failed rehab projects. Some are purposefully left to ruin by speculators anticipating a market spike that will allow them to sell the place for a profit even though it’s trashed.

In the small, midwestern college town where I live, where single-family homes are the norm, about one in 30 housing units is likely to be uninhabited. In a more densely populated city where multi-unit developments are more common, the vacancy rate can be much higher.

A common refrain from journalists who report on homelessness in the United States is that the biggest reason Americans find themselves unsheltered is a lack of affordable housing. Anecdotally it seems true-ish, especially in apex markets like Seattle, San Francisco, Manhattan, or L.A., where economic disparity is the status quo. In those cities, tens of thousands of housing units sit vacant at any given time. How affordable would they have to be for someone with no assets, who’s living on the street, to be able to move in?

The United Way estimates that ten percent of the 3,377,190 housing units in Chicago were vacant in 2023. Local officials there counted 6,139 unhoused people that same year. That equates to about 55 empty housing units per unhoused Chicagoan.

Nationwide, the National Association of Realtors reported more than 16 million vacant housing units in 2023, while according to the U.S. Department of Urban Planning and Development, around 650,000 Americans experienced homelessness.

It’s hard for me not to think, Damn! We could give a vacant home to every unhoused American, and we would still have more than 15 million vacant homes left over.

But it’s not that simple, I realize.

Perhaps journalists should be asking different questions—like why supply and demand doesn’t seem to affect affordability in housing, or what the deeper issues are that cause people to lose their homes.

My wife and I lived in Indianapolis while she was finishing her BFA. I spent my days waiting tables and my nights trying to figure out how to monetize my compulsive writing habit. We rented half a duplex from our friend Amy, a part-time wine rep who sold real estate on the side. Amy always seemed to be at home reading or doing yoga. One night over glasses of whatever she was currently repping, our conversation turned to hopes and dreams. I launched into a monologue about the challenges of trying to manifest an income from the written word in the 21st century.

Amy said, “You could try being a Realtor. It’s easy money, and you’d still have plenty of time to write.”

It’s reasonable to imitate those whose lifestyles you admire, so I enrolled in a two-week course at the Tucker School of Real Estate and soon earned a desk in a Century 21 office downtown. My broker Tracy told me it was important for new Realtors to pick an area to “farm.” I chose the so-called “emerging neighborhood” where I lived. It was an area of town that had been ravaged in the 1960s when the interstate came through. Thousands of homes were demolished to accommodate the highway. Anyone with means migrated to the suburbs. Those who couldn’t afford to move found their commercial district obliterated, their community networks shattered, and their local economic opportunities practically erased. Many succumbed to generational poverty. Some hadn’t worked in decades. Meth and opioids were everywhere. Yelling, sirens and highway traffic composed the soundtrack of the place. A lot of artists lived there because it was affordable.

My first year as a Realtor, I sold 32 houses on my farm. Year two, I sold more than 100. Most of my business came from slumlords hoping to add another flophouse to their portfolio, and flippers looking to fake-house some shit-hole with fresh paint and carpet, then sell it to someone who didn’t know better, maybe on a rent-to-own scheme.

About 90 percent of the houses I showed my clients were foreclosures. The doors and windows had little stickers warning unauthorized people to stay away. Typically, the inside was trashed by copper thieves, junkies, or bored teenagers. Many were full of feces—some human. I learned to bring gloves, shoe covers and N95s to showings.

The unsettling but statistically undeniable conclusion at which I arrived was that, on any given day, about a third of my neighbors’ houses were in foreclosure or otherwise abandoned, and most of those showed evidence of break-ins or illegal squatting.

Meanwhile, Amy was correct. My average transaction only required about ten hours of my attention. My income tripled and I found myself with plenty of time to write. My main contribution to the literary canon from that period amounts to an existential slog through the multi-layered absurdities of my easy, strange job.

When I left the real estate game, I hoped never to return to it. I wanted to forget the horrors it had shown me that were lurking at the intersection of domesticity and unrestrained capitalism. I went back to subsidizing my writing by bringing food and drinks to people who were sitting down.

When my wife was accepted into an MFA program in Las Vegas, I once again found myself looking for side gigs to help keep the lights on.

A newbie to the atomic desert, I got smitten with the idea of jobs that had a sense of site specificity. I briefly worked as a rock rearranger in the geological wastelands Las Vegans refer to as their yards. I waited tables at the greasy breakfast dive of a cheap motel in the part of town locals called “old Las Vegas” (i.e., built before 1980). For a few months I wrote short articles for a gambling website, in which I predicted the probable outcomes of professional sports games. The point of that job wasn’t to guess the winners correctly—the point was to guess wrong in a way that sounded convincing enough to get someone to make a losing bet. I was let go during baseball season, because I was right too often. (Pro tip: it’s all about the pitchers.)

One day I saw a posting on Craigslist for a job that sounded, as the saying goes, like it came right out of central casting. The ad was for a company seeking someone with previous real estate experience who would be willing to put themselves in potentially dangerous situations in order to take pictures of houses. (In addition to my brief experience as a Realtor, I also happen to have a photojournalism degree and a 2nd degree black belt.)

I applied and got an immediate response inviting me to interview with the CEO of the company, someone named Kris, at her house in a gated neighborhood in the posh Vegas suburb of Summerlin South. Kris met me in her driveway. She was wearing Louis Vuitton sunglasses and smoking a cotton-candy-colored cigarette. She opened the passenger door of a giant F-150 with monster tires and said, “Hop in.”

The inside of her truck smelled freshly Armor All-ed. We drove around her neighborhood slowly.

“What’s that accent?” she asked.

“I didn’t know I had an accent,” I said.

“You sound like Opie,” she said. “No offense, darlin’.”

“None taken, ma’am,” I said.

“What do you think of the heat, Opie?” she asked.

“I’m trying not to,” I said.

Every house we passed looked basically the same: tan stucco McMansion, red clay tile roof, palm trees in the yard. We stopped in front of one.

“Is it vacant or occupied?” Kris asked.

I guessed, “Occupied.”

“Why do you think that?” she asked.

“The lights are on inside,” I said, “and those palm trees look well maintained.”

Kris nodded. We drove some more. She asked if I had been to California. I said yes. She said she was going to move there once she socked a little more money away.

We stopped at another house.

“Vacant or occupied?” Kris asked.

“Vacant,” I said.

“Okay. Why?”

“Well, there’s like three newspapers in the driveway.”

“Who the fuck reads newspapers, right?” Kris laughed.

“I mean they look like they’ve been there for a while,” I said.

She nodded. “You’re gonna do just fine.”

We went back to her house, and I was officially hired as a horrible monster, aka a Mortgage Field Inspector, or MFI. That’s “Muffy” to the acronymical.

Muffies work for the evil doers, or rather a subsidiary network that thrives, pilotfish-like, off the scum of the sharks we call the mortgage industry.

Picture some homebuyer who has fallen far enough behind in their mortgage payments that their lender has taken steps to foreclose. This person may or may not have already abandoned their former home. If they have, the property may or may not have already fallen prey to squatters, vandals, metal thieves or appliance pinchers who target empty houses. The lender wants to know whether anyone is living there, and if so, who, and if not, whether anything has been stolen or broken. The job of a Muffy is to go to the address in person and find out.

Did you realize there are people who do this for a living?

Have you ever looked outside and seen someone sitting in their car photographing one of your neighbors’ houses? Has anyone ever knocked on your door and said they were there to “confirm occupancy?” If so, chances are you met a Muffy.

Kris told me that experienced Muffies can knock out six inspections an hour if they’re efficient. The pay was $8 per house.

I know that’s not lawyer money or anything, but for a writer/waiter married to a painter/student, it was a potential fiscal upgrade. It also carried the stink of weird fun, a gonzo mix of driving around a city that shouldn’t exist, taking pictures of derelict houses and staring chaos in the eye.

I briefly even felt lucky to get the opportunity, though I now suspect every applicant got an interview, and anybody who wanted the job got it.

Welcome to Fabulous Las Vacant

My first day as a Muffy transpired clumsily. Incompetence was a factor. Feelings were another. I managed only two addresses per hour, although I gathered how six an hour could indeed be possible. There was no shortage of foreclosed houses in Vegas based on the number of addresses Kris assigned me for the week. And the addresses were easy to hopscotch to since they were packed so close together. Hell, thanks to the systematic job Nevada’s developers, Realtors, mortgage brokers and city planners did bundling their contribution to social collapse into tidy hamlets, ten an hour might be possible. At least, for someone with no heart.

For me with my functioning sense of empathy, the search for evidence that people whose lives were falling apart still occupied the home they had lost to the bank was not revealing itself to be a task amenable to haste.

My first two addresses were labeled PFV, or “pre-foreclosure visitations,” which simply required me to park across the street and take pictures from my car documenting whether humans still lived there.

The first PFV was clearly occupied. For proof of life I photographed a pit bull tied to an olive tree, a fresh Christmas wreath, and a shot through the curtains of Spongebob Squarepants playing on a big screen TV.

I concluded the second PFV was vacant, based on the unread mail deluging from the mailbox; a shoe rack hanging from a dead cactus in the front yard; and a smashed flower pot next to a pile of children’s clothes in front of a half-open, dented garage door.

My next five addresses were labeled FF, meaning they were fully foreclosed houses. According to Kris, FFs were previously confirmed to be vacant and secured. All I had to do was get the key from the lockbox, enter the home and photograph whatever was going on inside.

My first FF smelled like rotting flesh from the street. I remembered this smell from my Realtor farm back in Indianapolis. It likely meant that a wild animal had gotten inside and come to some sad end. There were other things it could have meant. Worse things.

Lacking proper PPE, I declined to enter the house.

The next FF appeared vacant and projected no unwelcoming odors, so I entered. Inside, I found the remnants of a campfire in the middle of the living room floor and a stained mattress in one of the bedrooms. There was a pile of liquor bottles in the kitchen sink, and the sliding glass door to the backyard was open. I told myself it was probably the work of neighborhood teenagers. As with the smell at the last place, there were other possible explanations, which I preferred not to contemplate.

FF number three, too, looked vacant, except something about the place gave off a creepy vibe. The windows were covered with plywood. I knew from my real estate days that, by and large, banks replace broken windows, they don’t board them up.

Kris had informed me that there are multiple reasons people might try to make it look like a house is vacant when it actually isn’t. Some are relatively innocent, like frightened squatters. Others are more dubious, like meth labs, amateur brothels, or human trafficking depots (her examples).

I felt a powerful urge to stay away from this place, but for whatever reason, I walked around back and saw one window that wasn’t boarded. As I approached it, an arm shot out swinging a knife. My karate training kicked in—I ran.

The next two FFs were both obviously illegally occupied. In such cases, my instructions were to block the driveway with my car, get out and be blatant about taking pictures so whoever’s there knows they’ve been seen. Kris gave me fliers to hand the interlopers, telling them they shouldn’t be there, with numbers to call if there has been a misunderstanding.

A red Cadillac was parked in the garage of the first place. I blocked the driveway with my car, got out, and was being obvious about taking pictures of the Cadillac, when a woman dressed head to toe in black leather jumped out of the back seat and charged at me, screaming, “You videotaping me?” I tossed a flier out the window at her as I drove away.

At the next house, I saw a shirtless old timer standing in the yard drinking a beer as I pulled up. I got out of my car, and he went inside. I knocked on the door, then saw that the foreclosure stickers had been half-ass peeled off, and the lockbox had been destroyed, which is supposed to be impossible. I took a picture of the shattered, allegedly indestructible thing, then taped a flier to it.

I had an epiphany during this sequence of misadventures, that all houses have something in common; they exist both as concretions and abstractions. A house is a pile of materials, but it’s also a locus for human struggle.

A squatter with no money and no resources has an advantage over someone living on the street. The squatter has a center around which their life can revolve, and maybe regain some kind of shape. They have an address.

Maybe that’s obvious.

Anyway, my first day as a Muffy left me with mixed emotions: about being chased; about the feeling that I was both predator and prey; about being a participant in a social apocalypse, and also a documentarian of it, like a minor war journalist.

I learned there are upsides and downsides to the gig. The biggest downside: sadness. The biggest upside: lots of time to listen to the radio. I vibed out the whole day to the Diplo XFM station, cruising the sun-cracked Vegas streets, bouncing from catastrophe to catastrophe, cranking the bass, feeling like my molecules were being rearranged.

And I learned that when your job is to bear witness to fractured lives and scrambled dreams, you need to be a realist. It’s tempting to believe all people who have lost or are losing their homes are victims of some cadre of soulless douchebags laughing around a shiny table in a skyscraper somewhere in New York. But even before taking this job I personally knew foreclosed homebuyers who were complicit with the criminals at the banks, who took loans they knew they could not afford, who willfully suspended logic long enough to believe some appraiser who told them their house had recently mysteriously doubled in value, allowing them to take out an adjustable rate home equity line of credit for more than they originally paid for the house.

How many of these humans whose doom I was now chronicling were taken by liars and thieves? How many of them helped do this to themselves? They were all victims, no doubt: victims of their pipe dreams, of bad policy, of greed, of circumstance and, yes, of douchebags.

And I have no doubt that any of them could easily have been me. Whoever you are, whether you’re broke, or part of the 1%, or anybody in between, something we all share in common is our capacity to self-destruct.

Where Soso Meets Blissville

I awoke on day two of being a Muffy feeling happy and grateful to have this strange and exciting thing to do. I was also lucid about how much I would rather the world of Muffies not exist.

Life is bittersweet, or in other words: Soso Blissville.

I shit you not, that was the location of my first address on this day—the intersection of Soso Street and Blissville Avenue. The man I met there inspired in me one of the most Soso-Blissville feelings of my life: a deep melancholy combined with a sense of calm about humanity’s ongoing, slow-motion disaster. He showed me what might be possible for any of us if we could learn to remember our lessons but forget our mistakes.

I pulled up as the man was hoisting a bulging cardboard box into the bed of an already overloaded pickup truck. Three kids were playing with sticks by the curb, laughing. The man was whistling while he worked.

I nodded to him and said some words he indicated he didn’t understand. Then he said something to me that I couldn’t understand.

I handed him one of my tri-lingual fliers, with the bad news written in English, Spanish and Mandarin. He scanned the flier, looked at the boxes stacked in the back of his truck, and gave me a wistful smile that said, “Yep. Time to start over.”

Was he the homeowner, I wondered? A tenant? He didn’t seem defeated. Disappointed maybe. But the kids were laughing, and he went back to whistling.

Whatever forces brought him to this moment, had he forgiven them? Whatever he had done, or not done, had he forgiven himself? What does it take to forgive? I once heard a Holocaust survivor on a documentary say she forgave Hitler. Compared to that, anything must be forgivable.

Maybe I’m projecting my desire to believe in resilience onto whatever moxie I felt this man was showing me. Maybe he was secretly bitter. Maybe he was there robbing the place. Maybe those weren’t his kids. Maybe they were his kids, and right after he loaded them into his truck he drove off a cliff.

Or maybe I really was tuned into something in this guy’s personality. Maybe this was him at his best. Maybe I met a human who knew how to be at peace, even in the midst of their unraveling. Maybe it’s possible for me to learn to be as he seemed to be; to tell myself when it all goes wrong that I can always start over, whistling all the while.

Or maybe I’m a rainbow dreamer. If so, I was in the right neighborhood, because my second address of the day was at the intersection of North Rainbow Blvd. and West Dreamers Way.

A beige, stucco ranch house with red clay roof tiles and desert landscaping, this quaint-looking family home had been foreclosed upon just a week earlier. Inside, it was littered with the detritus of the disappeared: a laundry basket full of kids’ books capsized in a pink bedroom; an office chair missing its coasters overturned in a nook by the kitchen; half-eaten snacks strewn about; a tangle of broken lamps chucked into the rock garden. These orphaned belongings did not appear to have been brought there by squatters, but jettisoned by people in a hurry without the capacity to take everything they owned to wherever they were going next.

In addition to the dozens of photos I took at this house to send to the bank, I took a few just for me. These were not tourist snaps of my holiday in hell. They were reminders.

At the grocery, surrounded by profusions of products lining the shelves, as I reach out toward some giant bag of bacon-flavored ridiculousness, I will remember the bag just like it I saw that day, half consumed on a window sill next to a foreclosed property sticker.

When I find myself in the IKEA lighting section contemplating whether the Fluhgger or the Slogg will look best on my bedside table, I will also compare how these elegant, Swedish-designed lighting products might look smashed in a heap in the backyard after the sheriff escorts me from the house I can no longer afford.

As I plan my next round of home repairs, I will ponder how impressed the neighbors would be to see the plumbing upgrades I charged to my credit card, after thieves rip the pipes out of my walls, leaving whatever won’t fit in their truck scattered on the sidewalk.

Most of us will never suffer the trial of having all the silly things we spend money on publicly displayed for our neighbors, who might then wonder aloud, “What were they doing buying Baken-ets and zebra lamps and doing home renovations when they couldn’t pay their mortgage?”

My second day as a Muffy gave me new perspectives on human aspiration. It convinced me that we fill our homes, our bellies and our lives with nonessential things for the same reason Rocky stands in the street waiting for someone to appear who might want to be friends. We believe we’re worth it. There’s love in the waiting, even when it’s futile. There’s love in that bag of bacon-flavored crisps. There’s love in that squashed Fluhgger. There’s love in that bundle of stolen copper. There’s love everywhere, even in loss. Especially in loss.

House is Where the Pain Is

I achieved a milestone on my third day as a Muffy. I documented 19 foreclosed houses in four hours. That’s practically waiter money.

To achieve this level of efficiency, I had to close my mind off to the signs and signals of humanity around me and just do my job.

At one house, the tennis court was spray painted with the phrase House of Pain. Underwear was scattered everywhere. I took pictures and moved on.

At another place water was trickling out the front door. One of the trees in the front yard was smoldering. The living room was full of wet cardboard boxes stuffed with tax returns. An orange extension cord ran out one window into a window of the house next door.

I didn’t inquire. I accessed the artificiality of my intelligence. I became an app.

The one observation I couldn’t shake, strangely enough, had nothing to do with the human dramas playing out within these houses. It was that only two of the addresses I visited on this day were officially listed for sale. This tracked with what I had witnessed my first two days: that there are roughly 10 times as many distressed houses sitting vacant in Las Vegas than are actively on the market.

Like kismet, while driving to drop off my daily report to Kris, I heard a story on Bloomberg Radio telling prospective Vegas homebuyers to “place their bets!” The story’s conclusion, that the Vegas real estate market was booming, was entirely attributed to data supplied by Realtor.com.

While I’m impressed that the human animal has evolved to the point of being capable of drawing immense economic and sociological conclusions from a perfunctory analysis of simple datasets publicly available on a commercial website, it is unfortunate that a news group that reaches more than 20 million unique monthly users didn’t require its reporter to look beyond a single biased source for their research.

I asked Kris what she thought about the Bloomberg story. She lit one of those long, cotton-candy-colored cigarettes and said, “It’s bullshit, darlin’.”

She said you can’t trust reporters today because they’re paid too little to have time to really look into stuff. They use social media and corporate press releases to push whatever their CEO or advertisers want people to believe. She said journalists can prove an economic collapse or an economic rebound is imminent at any given moment, or that unemployment is up or down, just by including or not including data about the millions of people who have already given up on finding a job, or who make their living “off the grid,” you know, with meth labs, amateur brothels, and human trafficking depots, etc.

As an off-and-on freelance journalist myself, I can report with confidence that Kris is only, like, maybe half right about the news industry.

As for the validity of commercial real estate websites as journalistic sources, they definitely exclude most foreclosed, abandoned, probated, or tax-burdened houses. It’s not just happening in Las Vegas. It’s happening everywhere. So if that’s where reporters are getting their information, their conclusions are suspect at best.

Maybe those houses are left off the market in order to artificially inflate the prices of available listings. Maybe the power brokers think they’re doing the rest of us a favor by not overwhelming us with the truth. Do most people really want to know how many houses in their neighborhood are just sitting there empty, courting disaster?

One thing I know is that whether it’s officially on the market or not, every vacant house impacts the lives of the people who live nearby.

Imagine watching as your neighbors lose their income and struggle to figure out a solution so they can stay in their home. One day they pack up whatever can fit in their vehicle and disappear to parts unknown. Imagine months pass without anyone knowing who controls the property. You and the other neighbors try to keep the place up, cutting the grass and collecting the stray mail. Then one night thieves break in and tear out all the copper. Squatters move in. Trash starts filling the yard.

What effect does one abandoned house have on the life-force of the rest of the people who live on the street? What happens to a community when those effects are multiplied by 10, or 100, or 1,000 vacant houses?

Maybe that Bloomberg report wasn’t bullshit. Maybe it was just a speculative dispatch from the powers that be to a culture committed to the belief that it’s important to pretend everything is fine.

But if you’re one of the millions of Americans who have lost their house to the bank, or one of the millions of people squatting in those houses, or burglarizing them, or doing drugs or cooking meth or filming porn or lighting fires in them, trust me—nothing is fine.

One House, Many Stories

Early one morning, in Charlotte, North Carolina, a mortgage company processor making around $35,000 a year entered the address of a single-story, mid-century modern ranch house in Las Vegas into a database on ezinspections dot com. Minutes later, in a sprawling, carpeted office in a six-bedroom house in the Vegas suburb of Summerlin South, a millionaire named Kris who drove a luxury truck worth three times the salary of that mortgage company processor received a notification on her phone. She mapped the newly added address, then assigned it to the member of her team of Muffies whose territory it matched.

That Muffy was me.

I arrived at said address around 11:30 am. As I stepped out of my car, I heard songbirds chirping in the dead pomegranate tree in the front yard; flycatchers I guessed, based on the show about local birds I caught the night before on Vegas PBS. I saw a tiny lizard perched atop the rusty mailbox eyeballing me, while a circling hawk eyeballed the lizard.

The house appeared to be vacant, but well maintained. It had one boarded window—the rest had drawn curtains. I approached the front door, then noticed that a puny dowel rod had been placed across it like a little barricade. I was in the process of easily removing the dowel rod when a man two-thirds my size and twice my age approached from behind.

“Can I help ya?” he asked.

I turned and smiled. “I think I’ve got it.”

“Mind tellin’ me what yer doin’ with my deadbolt?” the man said.

“You put this here?” I asked.

“I live next door,” he said. “Name’s Ross.” He pointed to another man who was walking up to us. “That there’s Tom,” he said.

“You a Rill-ter?” Tom asked.

“Nope,” I said.

“With the bank?” asked Ross.

“Nope,” I said.

“Well I guess ya must be somebody,” said Tom.

“That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me this week,” I said.

I explained to the men my status as an independent contractor sent to confirm occupancy at houses involved in any number of conflagrations including but not limited to bankruptcy, foreclosure, pre-foreclosure, probate and sheriff’s sales.

“So, yer one-a-them,” said Tom.

“Reckon so.” I gestured to the dowel rod barricade. “Trying to keep the raccoons out?”

“Nope,” said Ross. “That’s so we know when someone’s been over here messin’ with the door.”

“We’ve had a few ‘speriences,” said Tom.

They explained that the previous owners of the house had been spouses who lived into their nineties. The wife fell ill and went into hospice. The husband visited her every day for months. When the wife died, the husband came home grief stricken, then died three days later himself. They had no relatives. They left no will. They had intentionally kept a tiny mortgage on the house, since it reduced their property taxes. After they died, Ross and Tom contacted the utility companies to shut the utilities off in the house. They refused. Eventually, when the bills piled up high enough, the utility companies shut them off themselves.

Within a week the house was broken into. Tom saw it happening and called the police. The police chased the burglars away but did not catch them. Ross and Tom went into the house to find out what was stolen. The thieves had gone right for the deceased couple’s paperwork: IDs, passports, social security cards, etc.

Ross and Tom gathered up everything else they thought a thief might find valuable, including the deceased’s guns, wondering, they said, how they had neglected to think to do that before. They boarded up the window the thieves had broken.

A few days later the house was ransacked, brazenly, in the middle of the afternoon by teenagers. This time, Ross chased the intruders away himself, with one of the deceased couple’s guns. He called the police after it was over. An officer showed up hours later and explained to Ross and Tom that crimes committed against the property were victimless. Since there was no one in a legal position to file charges, there was nothing the police would do.

Since then, there had been more break-ins, more ransacks. There was a near drowning in the pool. Ross and Tom had the pool drained and covered after that.

This crap had been going on for three years, they explained. For three years, these men in their 70s had been fighting off a steady stream of would-be home invaders from their once-beloved neighbors’ home sweet home. In that entire time, the police had not filed a single report.

That’s how long it had taken the bank to get around to processing the paperwork on the couple’s tiny delinquent mortgage and to decide what to do with the property.

I invited Ross and Tom to enter the house with me while I did my work. I didn’t want them to think I was another intruder telling an elaborate lie. I opened the lockbox with my master foreclosed house fob, but the key in the lockbox didn’t unlock the door.

“Oh,” Tom explained, “that’s ‘cause me and Ross secretly been changin’ the locks every time we seen anyone else change the locks, fearin’ the lock changers was metal thieves ‘r scavengers in disguise.”

“That does happen,” I said.

“We know,” said Tom.

Ross let me in with his key, and the two men reverently led me from room to room, all the while telling me the stories of the couple’s former belongings, now scattered, overturned and ripped apart.

“We helped ‘em bring this couch in from the truck. ‘Member that, Tom?”

“Yup. You know, they had the same stove fer forty years. Bet they don’t make ‘em like that no more.”

In the bathroom, some teenagers had broken up the ceramic floor tiles with a jackhammer. There had been a rumor (apparently false) that the old couple had a secret safe in the crawl space.

Every cabinet door was ripped off its hinges, every drawer torn open, the contents tossed about without care. Every drug, every chemical, everything that could be used or easily sold, was gone. What was left was a lifetime of musty clothes, knick-knacks and out-of-style furniture strewn about as if a miniature tornado had systematically traveled to every room, then, satisfied with its destruction, disappeared into a crack in the wall like a mouse.

As I took a picture of the post-apocalyptic kitchen, Ross warned, “Don’t open that ‘frigerator. I made that mistake once.”

I contemplated his remark, envisioning the decomposing dreams of future meals an honorable man had once hoped to prepare for himself and his ailing wife when she returned home from hospice.

I shop for myself and my love. The apples I got at the farm stand; the tahini I purchased months ago intending to make hummus; the frozen grapes; the Italian peppers; the raw cheese. Every ingredient is a storyteller, a peek at our culinary ambitions, the meals and moments we hope to share. If I died today, would they also rot?

When the time came to leave, I expressed my gratitude to Ross and Tom, and told them it was my responsibility to post a blue sticker on the door indicating that I had found the house vacant.

Ross assured me he would tear it off as soon as I left.

I showed him the roll of thousands of such stickers in my car. “Two can play that game,” I joked.

Ross laughed. “I’ll see you next time then.”

No, you won’t, I thought. That would be my last day as a Muffy. I hoped I could learn to do these postmortems from a mental distance. I hoped I could divorce myself from others’ pain. But I had to accept that I’m too sensitive maybe, or too easily heartbroken, to allow myself to become a character in so many peoples’ stories of loss. Undertakers can’t do their job if they start sympathizing with the dead.

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The Bean Inspector confirmed their identity.

July 15th will now forever be known as Bean Day.

Audrey and I drove south, down Highway 1, summer gently pulling us along, like old dogs on a sniffy walk around an endless, meandering, fire hydrant-covered avenue. We stopped in the beach town of Capitola where a strip of Froot Loop-colored crash pads stand sentinel over a patch of sandy earth colonized by seals and surfers.

Lounging seaside we found three pieces of something called sea glass, a highly collectible item according to a passing Beach Bum.

Sea glass doesn’t start out as a gem. It starts as trash. A bottle gets thrown in the ocean by some accidental artisan; the glass shatters on the rocks and gets tossed around by the tides for years, maybe decades, until it is finally redeposited on the shore, by which point the waves have caressed it into a smooth, translucent bijou.

Every beach evidently has its share of sea glass waiting to be found. Isn’t that something?

The Beach Bum notified us that if we had gone north instead of south, we might have come across the biggest deposit of sea glass in North America: Fort Bragg’s famous Glass Beach, an entire shoreline covered inches deep in colorful, glistening, wave-worn glass, thanks to a nearby city dump supplied with a non-stop reservoir of bottles emptied by thirsty soldiers in training.

Over tacos, Audrey and I made plans to drive north next year on this day, like the Beach Bum suggested, and visit the place where the garbage of war is transformed into shimmering love nuggets.

Another Bean Day in paradise awaits.

(Originally published in Grey Sparrow Journal)

There are plenty of good reasons not to hold an outdoor art exhibition in the desert. It can be brutally hot in the day and freezing at night. Winds can top 200 km per hour. A host of scary creatures call the desert home and would be justified in attacking art tourists. Those same tourists also might also cause irreparable harm to the ecosystem. As a resident of California’s arid Coachella Valley, Susan Davis was aware of all of those factors when she founded Desert X, the world’s first desert sculpture biennial. Call it instinct or vision, Davis sensed the challenges could be overcome and it would be worth it. Her confidence came in part from a visit to the Cartagena Biennial in Colombia, where the artworks are integrated into the urban environment. That experience so moved the former art history professor that she convinced her desert community back home they could do something similar in their own backyard.

Most people know the Coachella Valley for its namesake music festival. Held each April, that two-weekend event attracts an estimated 250,000 attendees to this remote locale near Palm Springs, about a two-hour drive from Los Angeles. The 2025 edition of Desert X attracted around 400,000 visitors over the course of its 10-week run. There is some crossover between audiences, but Desert X attracts more interest from the people who live and work full time in the area. With the sculptures scattered throughout the Coachella Valley — which is about 80 km long north to south, and 32 km west to east — Desert X is particularly conducive to visitors who are able to travel to different sites over multiple days. Its natural setting and contemplative vibe also make it more welcoming than a music festival to families with kids and people with pets.

Not that Desert X is any less spectacular than its musical cousin. But instead of a fury of sound and celebrity, the spectacle comes from the curiosity of esoteric forms inhabiting a dustbowl wilderness. Jenny Gil, Executive Director of Desert X, is part of the team responsible for selecting those esoteric forms and overseeing how they are built, installed, maintained and removed. Gil explains that for each edition of the biennial, new curators are brought on board who, along with Artistic Director Neville Wakefield, invite a whole cohort of artists to visit the valley and propose installations for specific sites: “I always tell artists to pick three sites and tell me which is your preferred one, and your second, and third, because we do not own any of the land where Desert X takes place. It is all a negotiation.”

Everything is political

In that sense, every aspect of the exhibition is political. “We are going into the community saying, this artist wants to do a project, basically in your backyard or on this land that has been empty for centuries. We work with the local tribes in order to evaluate the cultural sensitivities of the lands where the exhibitions take place. Then the other major consideration is environmental. Obviously, everything we do as humans has an impact on the environment.” The team works with different organisations in order to mitigate the environmental impact. They do not work in sites that are environmentally fragile or close to sensitive or protected areas. They work with environmental design agencies to construct temporary access paths for viewers, from wherever they park on the side of the road to the artworks. They work with artists to install the works and remove the works in ways that, according to Gil, often leave sites better than they found them.

“A lot of the lands used for the biennial are not regularly maintained, says Gil. There is a lot of trash in the desert.” Gil and her team also organise a lot of public programs that educate everyone involved about the desert environment. “We invite botanists to speak with artists about the environments where the artworks take place. So we really strive to leave no trace after the exhibition and to leave the sites as if nothing had happened there.”

Those parameters can be challenging for many artists, especially if they are used to developing their ideas in isolation in a studio, then simply planting the finished works in a gallery or a museum. It is one thing to negotiate with a fabricator, a collector or a museum board. It is another to negotiate with a natural environment on the scale of a desert and to ensure every material and technique used is non-toxic, culturally sensitive, stable enough to survive two months exposed to extreme elements and yet ephemeral enough that the work can be removed without a trace. Some works from past editions have been fully biodegradable or otherwise disposable in an environmentally neutral way. For example, Eduardo Sarabia’s installation The Passenger for the 2021 edition was completely made from organic palm fronds. Or Ronald Rael’s sculpture Adobe Oasis for the 2025 edition, which was entirely made from 3D printed mud.

“We have had many unrealised projects, says Gill. For example, last year we invited 25 artists to come and visit the Coachella Valley. Curators took them around for about two or three days, sometimes a bit longer. They discovered the valley. They researched topics or people or organisations that they were interested in. Then they went back to their studios and came back with a proposal. We received back more than 20 proposals. We pay the artists for this process. Then we started value engineering the proposals to see what can be done. We worked with our production team that includes engineers and architects and project managers to figure out how these projects could be realised and whether they would sustain the very difficult conditions of the desert, which we do not control. The temperatures are extreme. Everything needs to be built for 210 km per hour wind. We are also very close to a lot of seismic activity, right on top of the San Andreas fault. So yeah, there are a lot of unrealised projects, not because the projects were not good, but because not every project is possible.”

There are also financial realities to consider, since they do all their own fundraising each year. A lot of proposals are amazing in a conceptual sense, but would cost hundreds of thousands of euros to realise. “We are a temporary exhibition, so you know everything needs to be scaled to the desert conditions, but also the temporality of the show.” There are occasionally works that have the capacity to have a second life after the exhibition, although as with all site specific sculpture that is the exception rather than the rule. Nonetheless, some can be disassembled, then reassembled later in another context, such as Unsui (Mirror), the cloud installation Sanford Biggers made for the 2025 edition, which has been re-installed in Paepcke Park in Aspen for the summer of 2025. A work also sometimes lends itself to acquisition by an institution. Such was the case with Jeffrey Gibson’s sculpture Alive!, which debuted in the first edition of Desert X and is now permanently installed in the sculpture garden of the Palm Springs Art Museum.

Desert X Al-Ula

Gil and her team have faced a slightly different set of challenges with the Saudi Arabian iteration of Desert X, which will open its fourth edition in January 2026. It takes place in Al-Ula, an ancient oasis city in Saudi Arabia’s Medina Province. “Land ownership is very different in Al-Ula than in the Coachella Valley, explains Gil, but there have still been negotiations. In 2020, the first year, some of the lands the artists and the curators had identified for works to be shown on were being used by camel farmers. These people are just, you know, minding their own business, as they always have and suddenly they are being approached by an artist who is talking about seemingly crazy ideas and projects that no one has asked for.” Although they work with a local partner in Saudi Arabia that helps organise the exhibition, those types of negotiations have still not been easy Gil says.

The impetus for Desert X to expand to Saudi Arabia came from a Saudi artist who attended the first edition of Desert X in the Coachella Valley. Gil recalls that he was amazed by the project and came to them and said he wanted to find a way to do a similar project back home. That same year, 2017, Saudi Arabia happened to create the Royal Commission for Al-Ula, which was given the mission of preserving the history and developing the future of the ancient site. Tourism and cultural offerings were central to the organisation’s plan. Three years of negotiations and conversations later, the first iteration of Desert X Al-Ula opened with the participation of 14 artists. “It became a huge motor of cultural exchange between artists in Saudi and artists outside of Saudi.” About a third of the artists participating in Desert X Al-Ula are Saudi. Another third are from the larger MENA region and the rest are from other countries abroad. The most exciting part for Gil is that the artists are meeting in person during installation and at the opening. Saudi artists are interacting with artists from outside the region and Western artists are discovering immensely, highly qualified Saudi artists with whom they were not previously familiar. There is also a transfer of values happening. For example, the artist contracts being used in Saudi Arabia are modelled on the California contracts and there is a gender balance represented in the curation. The Saudi edition is free to attend, just as it is in California and there are also educational programmes being offered for the public.

Asked what advice she would offer to anyone else out there in the world thinking of organising a desert sculpture exhibition, Gil laughs and says, “Just do not!” She then smiles and develops: “If you are going to do it, spend time in the community first. Make sure what you want to do is relevant. The first thing you will run up against is push back, that nobody wants this. In the initial phase of the first edition of Desert X, that is what it was — just, why are you doing this? Why are you bothering us with this? And we still get that now. When we go to permit offices, local government organisations where we need to get a land use permit or a building permit or events permit, the first answer is always ‘no, you cannot do this’. Often the reason is because it has never been done.”

The most visible recent example of this was Ronald Rael’s project Adobe Oasis. Rael is an architect and an artist, and he is apparently the first person to 3D print a structure with adobe. “He is really challenging these traditional technologies with contemporary and future technologies, which was a huge challenge at the building and permits office at the City of Palm Springs, because there is obviously no precedent for 3D printing adobe structures, explains Gil. So how do you issue a permit? How do you make sure you know that it is within the code? And how do you make sure that it is going to be safe? So usually the answer is always ‘no’. And that is where the work starts.”

In season five, episode 11 of The Simpsons, a group of characters digs themselves into a hole looking for money that is not there. After realising they are now trapped in the deep hole, someone asks how they are going to escape. Homer Simpson proudly and stupidly exclaims, “We’ll dig our way out!” It’s an apt metaphor for the building crisis humanity is facing. The world we have allowed to be built around us now has us trapped in an unsustainable, toxic, sprawling, ecologically disastrous hole. Meanwhile, billionaires keep hiring “starchitects” to deploy energy-gobbling supercomputers to fill every empty remaining inch of our world with over-designed mega-complexes wired with every conceivable “smart” function, giving little thought to vernacular architectural heritage, indigenous lifestyles or wildlife. When anyone asks the architects, developers and politicians for an alternative to our over-built world, like Homer Simpson they have little to propose except, “We’ll build our way out!”

Laurien Holtjer, Director of Engagement and public relations for Rewilding Europe, has an alternative proposal: “Give nature space and let it go.” Rewilding is a way of restoring the balance between the natural and human-built worlds by relinquishing control and letting nature guide our next steps. A non-profit based in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, Rewilding Europe is currently involved in ten rewilding initiatives spanning across 12 European countries. One of those initiatives is unfolding in the Danube Delta, a wetland area straddling Moldova, Romania, and Southern Ukraine where the Danube river meets the Black Sea. The front line of the war in Ukraine is about 200 km away. “War is an awful situation, but we are still working in the delta area,” Holtjer says. “It is a crucial component in the area’s economy and nature. Despite the proximity to the conflict, work continues where safely possible — restoring water systems and supporting the comeback of keystone wildlife species remains vital to the region. It shows how resilient nature is. If we give it space, even in war time it will bounce back. There is a limit to what we can do, but trusting nature is what keeps us going.”

The Danube Delta is a crucial habitat for migratory birds and it hosts more fish species than anywhere else in Europe. It is also home to the Letea and Caraorman woodlands, some of Europe’s last “grazed mosaic landscapes”. A mosaic forest is one that is composed of multiple species and micro-habitats. Grazing is a way of maintaining the health of the forest. Long ago, ancient forests were naturally grazed by wild horses and bovines. Re-introducing wild or semi-wild grazing animals into European landscapes is one of many strategies Rewilding Europe deploys.

“Even after wild grazes ended, many of these places had livestock that took over the role of wild grazers,” Holtjer says, “but with land abandonment, livestock is also disappearing.” Land abandonment is a common phenomenon across Europe and much of the world. It can occur when the economics of a place no longer sustain human society and is particularly prevalent in agricultural areas. “People are moving to cities, young generations especially,” Holtjer says. “Many rural areas face steep depopulation, with declining services and infrastructure — but this also opens the door to new, nature-based economies.” In such areas, where grazing has disappeared, there are more intense and more frequent natural fires. “Fires are natural, but intensity and frequency is a different thing. So with rewilding, we bring back the function of natural grazing. We call wild horses the grazing fire brigade. It is very cost efficient, so there is also an economic advantage.”

In addition to old forests and relatively untouched marshlands, the Danube Delta also includes a patchwork of human-built environments, including farms, villages, cities and industry. The goal of rewilding, Holtjer explains, is not to eliminate those built worlds, but to reimagine the relationship they have with their wild surroundings. “We are not bulldozing the built world and we do not aim to create wilderness. We look at what we can add. Rewilding is a holistic view. We see a well functioning ecosystem as a jigsaw puzzle. We ask what piece is missing. Maybe a river has dams so there is no free flowing water, or it could be a keystone species missing. So we engage the natural process to help nature to heal itself. That way we aim to build well functioning ecosystems, which include humans and their built environment.”

In rural regions experiencing depopulation and land abandonment, rewilding offers opportunities to revitalise both natural ecosystems and human communities. “We see it as an opportunity to change something in a systematic way by building nature-based economies, based on wildlife tourism for example,” Holtjer says. “In some places where nature is coming back, young people are returning, renovating houses and turning them into bed and breakfasts or other businesses. That is a very important part of the process, she notes, because the built environment is part of the culture and identity of every place. There is often a distinct vernacular architectural style in an area, or a way of living unique to that community. If that can be maintained by transitioning the economy to something nature-based, it can help preserve a community’s heritage long term. The last thing we want is to protect an area, put a fence around it and kick people out. These landscapes include everyone who lives there.”

When it comes to urban environments, Holtjer suggests it is more important to think in terms of wild nature rather than true wilderness. Architects, developers and city planners should look at rewilding as something that exists on a sliding scale. On one end of that scale is a place like the Danube Delta, where large connected landscapes allow nature to take the lead with minimal human intervention — a form of passive rewilding. At the other end are highly urbanised spaces, where nature is nearly absent and rewilding requires a more active, intentional approach. “Imagine a parking lot,” Holtjer explains. “There is hardly any nature there. But what if you make a small change thereby removing asphalt and letting plants grow? You are already rewilding by giving space to nature. It is about gradually moving up the scale, giving more space to nature and allowing natural processes to return, even in the most built-up environments.”

Rewilding is ultimately about restoring connections — between habitats, species, and people. “It is all about connections, like building corridors between protected areas so wildlife can move between those parts.” When fragmented landscapes are reconnected — whether through river restoration or wildlife corridors — natural processes can shape our landscapes once again. These connections do not just benefit biodiversity; they also help people see and experience how nature and human life can thrive together in shared landscapes.

Having wildlife running around can even instill a sense of pride and wonder and increase our mental well being. That is something rarely discussed by the developers, “starchitects” and politicians who exert so much influence on today’s urban built world. They assume that the users of their projects want the newest, biggest and most expensive built world possible. Building projects are measured in terms of economics and job creation rather than human happiness and peace of mind. “We look at jobs created and income created, too,” says Holtjer. “But how do you quantify the wider benefits? Some of the most important benefits — like pride of place, community spirit and belonging — are not easily captured in numbers, but they are deeply felt.”

In the end, rewilding is about people. It is about having ongoing dialogue, listening and engaging in communities in a way that ensures they feel part of the process and see how rewilding can enrich their lives. “It is not about us buying land and rewilding. It is about building trust with stakeholders. This is why our teams are locally based and live in the landscape.” The biggest challenge to getting more people to accept such a systemic change to their built world is the inherent loss of control they will have to accept over every part of their environment. “In Europe we are so used to managing and controlling nature, mowing and pruning,” she says. “Nature is perfectly fine to take care of itself. Without us it would thrive. But we can build landscapes where nature thrives and people also thrive. Instead of a thing we have to control, we see nature as our ally that we trust and should give space. That is a long term vision that we have.”

There are two groups Holtjer says this message must be shared with going forward. “First we have to show this to everyone who is influencing land,” she explains. That means politicians, landowners, lobbying groups, architectural interests and developers. At least as important are everyday people who simply inhabit the built world. “We think the change should come from the bottom up. Rewilding is a social movement as well. Younger generations see rewilding as a way forward. It is about the economy, about culture and about people. They are fighting for their own future as well.” Meanwhile, Holtjer says it is important to keep telling positive stories of successful rewilding initiatives big and small. “People are focused on doom and gloom announcements. They think that if we do not act now nature will go down the drain. But I truly think it will be us going down. Nature is incredibly resistant and we have a chance now to shape a world where both people and nature thrive together. All we need to do is give it space.”

The population of the wider Portland metropolitan area has increased at a consistent pace every year since 1950. The population of downtown Portland, however, has experienced large swings up and down, especially in recent decades. In the decade before COVID, Portland’s city centre was perceived by many industries as the hottest prospect in the United States. Numerous trendy hotel chains like the Hoxton opened outposts downtown, adding more than 4,000 new hotel beds to the area between 2010 and 2020. There was a corresponding increase in restaurant tables, spa appointments, bar stools and rideshare operators.

Then COVID hit. Along with the effects of societal shutdown, Portland made headlines during the pandemic as a locus for social unrest around economic disparity and racial injustice. News footage of boarded storefronts, fires, apparent riots and widespread tagging gave the impression the city was an exploding tinderbox. Few people were booking those new hotel rooms or partaking in any of the adjacent goods and services.

Between 2020 and 2025, downtown Portland lost around 17,000 permanent residents. A corresponding drop in real estate value has been observed. Simultaneously, there has been an increase in homelessness. Meanwhile, Portland experimented with drug decriminalisation. That went so poorly that even advocates of the idea have acknowledged its disturbing ramifications.

There is, however, a bright spot in this darkness. Portland’s art field appears as strong, vibrant and unified as ever. One theory floated by some who work in the field is that the people who have left the city centre were never the people who the arts community relied upon anyway. However, most stakeholders believe the driving force behind the scene’s cohesion is an ingrained sense of collaboration. At every level, it is clear Portland’s art community is in it together.

City view

One direct way Portland’s government supports the arts is through the city’s $35 art tax — a flat tax paid by all residents who make more than $1,000 per year and whose household is above the federal poverty line. Chariti Montez is the Director of the Portland Office of Arts and Culture. Her office manages the art tax. “The way it was approved was to improve education and art experiences for students, explains Montez. We give out millions of dollars to arts organisations in operating support, unrestricted funds. Around 80 organisations receive that money. We partner with three different arts nonprofits to distribute grants. We also support music, non-performance based works and celebrate Black arts in Portland.”

Montez notes that when the population of the city declines, that affects the amount of money collected for the art tax. “We definitely felt it was a little crunchy during the pandemic when everything was shut down and we started seeing people moving to the suburbs.” But when the downtown population was booming, that was also challenging for artists, Montez says. “When all those hotels and apartments were coming in, we saw dedicated art spaces going away. Artists were losing the spaces as they were getting redeveloped. So the physical space where people make and share their art was being lost.”

Another way the city government strives to assist the artist community is through support of events that bring art audiences back downtown. For example, Montez says, all those folks who moved out to the suburbs seem to still come downtown for certain specific events, such as the PDX Jazz Festival and the Portland Winter Lights Festival. Those events are in February and March, the coldest, wettest time of year in Portland, yet around 200,000 people show up for them. By supporting those large events, Montez’s office plays a role in transforming perceptions of downtown. She says the Winter Lights Festival, in particular, has the potential to act as a transformative event because so many of the artists take over vacant retail spaces with their installations. It reminds everyone of the potential downtown has to be a cultural playground.

Institutional partners

The Portland Art Museum (PAM) is located in the heart of downtown. Shortly after COVID hit, PAM embarked on a major renovation. They stayed open throughout the pandemic, but with a smaller footprint. “That was important,” says Sara Krajewski, PAM’s Eichholz Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “Our leadership has been very committed to continuing to be a cultural destination, in spite of the lingering effects of pandemic business closures, commercial office vacancies, protests and our city’s challenges with drugs and homelessness.”

Krajewski says PAM undertook several concrete responses to COVID in an effort to sustain the community. They funded emergency grants for artists in the city. The museum also expanded its security efforts on site and around the neighbourhood. Says Krajewski, “That was met with gratitude from folks living nearby. Now that we are nearing completion of our new pavilion and main entrance, many folks are sharing a sense of optimism and pride in the beautiful park blocks where PAM sits. It is really a bright spot in an environment that actually has been turning around, not discounting the complications and challenges of course.”

PAM has also strengthened its collaborations with local Portland artists. “For several large exhibitions, we have sought out community partnerships to amplify the content, bringing a localised perspective to it, says Krajewski. Our goals now include bringing more community-centred lenses to collection presentation and collection development.” PAM also collaborates with Portland artists through the endowed Northwest Art curatorial department and through exhibitions and acquisitions centred on local artists in the Photography, Graphic Arts, Native American Art and Contemporary departments.

The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) also heavily supports local visual art, time-based media and performances. “Interacting with the local community is part of our work on many levels,” tells Reuben Roqueñi, PICA’s Executive Director. We support and work with our peer organisations. We attend their events. They attend our events. There is an intersection there. We also work with some of the same artists. An artist who performs in our building may also have an exhibition in one of the galleries downtown. It is part of our curatorial work to be present in the work with our peers.”

Referring to Portland’s reported “dreaded urban death spiral,” Roqueñi says, “In part it is true in the way it has impacted the arts community. People are afraid to go downtown. The response from the city in trying to bolster the downtown corridors through arts and culture speaks well. But in terms of our work at PICA, we are not downtown. We are at the very edge of the warehouse district, so we are not surrounded by nighttime businesses, which is when most of our activities take place.” Roqueñi says PICA has seen an uptick in drug addiction and the unhoused community outside their building. “I do not have data in terms of whether it has caused us to lose audiences, but it has increased our concern for public safety. I am not here to counter a narrative of the struggles the city is having, because they are true. Though they can be blown up in the media and twisted in a way that is not helpful.”

Roqueñi says the arts community is the perfect place to spotlight more positive stories about Portland. “The arts ecology in Portland is tightly knit, has a lot of intersection between disciplines and is interdependent. It is the rising tide that elevates all boats. Portland is a haven for people seeking freedom of expression. There is a creative community here that is in these times coming together to work together more, holding on to each other, embracing, moving forward.”

Gallery parties

Portland’s art galleries are distributed in a few different areas. The more Blue Chip spaces tend to be downtown. Artist-run spaces and collectives tend to locate east of the Willamette River. Downtown hosts a First Thursday gallery walk every month. East of the river there is a First Friday event. Adams and Ollman gallery is downtown. They represent an international roster of artists, including some from the Pacific Northwest region and participate in major fairs, including Frieze London, Paris Internationale and Art Basel Miami Beach. According to Amy Adams, the gallery’s founder, not all that much has changed in the Portland art scene since COVID.

The Pacific Northwest has always been a place where people come and do things on their own terms, explains Adams. Even during this major outside event, COVID, this turning point for so many things in the world, I do not know if people here stopped doing things on their own terms. Aside from not being together, art was still being made, books were still being written and people were innovating. There was a poet here who was reading poems out of his window and people were bringing their chairs and listening. People were finding a way to do the thing that they needed to do regardless. I think we have an incredibly rich group of people here who do not necessarily pay attention to the outside world.”

Adams and Ollman remained open throughout the pandemic, continuing to host openings and do business. Adams also remained an active participant in the scene as an audience member. She has a list she keeps of all the experimental things she hears Portland artists are doing. That kind of community involvement is essential to how she runs her own business. “Just personally, it influences the way I think about my work, to remember to be nimble and responsive and fun in as much as I can, tells Adams. It is a constant reminder of why we are all in this world. We need to support ideas and innovation, which come from the world of the arts. It makes me feel like the world is okay.”

Rachel Falkowski, co-owner of Witching Hour Tattoo and Gallery, agrees with Adams that Portland is, in some ways, immune to the winds of history because of the independent spirit of its people. “I think Portland will always be a safe harbour for people who do things in a new, different, exciting way, believes Falkowski. This is a town of innovators. If a pandemic did not change that, nothing will.” Witching Hour did, nonetheless, suffer financially during the pandemic since it was forced to close for a long period. “Tattoo artists absolutely cannot work from home, so we were all essentially unemployed until policy allowed the shops to reopen. It was a dark and scary time. But, during the shutdown era, people finally had the time to think about what their dream tattoo would be, to search for their ideal artist and to save up the money to jump on that project as soon as the door opened again. The months immediately after we went back to work were the busiest I have ever been!”

Noah Alexander Isaac Stein is a Portland artist whose work is represented by Black Fish, a contemporary art gallery downtown, a few blocks from Adams and Ollman. Stein is also President of First Friday PDX, the monthly art walk east of the river. “First Friday is in the former industrial area of Portland, in these old buildings that were factories, explains Stein. Spaces have been converted to galleries and art collectives. It is a dynamic place. The rents are lower so these spaces pop up overnight and sometimes also disappear overnight. It is a bubbling cauldron of art. You see some unusual things that you would not see in other parts of the city.” Stein says foot traffic at both First Thursday and First Friday has remained strong throughout the pandemic and post-pandemic years. He has also witnessed continued collaboration between different parts of the city’s art field.

He describes the feeling in Portland as a type of communal ambition, rather than individuals out for themselves — like crowd hustle. He also echoes what Adams and Falkowski said: that Portland is a place where artists do their own thing regardless of what is happening elsewhere. He says, “If you travel the well-worn paths of the art world, you often see the same artists or the same formats over and over again. No shade on that. There are great things happening and you can see that at major biennials and art fairs all over the world. But I am a firm believer that art and culture need to happen everywhere as a function of our critical thinking. The Pacific Northwest has a political history, a history of craftsmanship and self-reliance. You can find a different kind of thing, different ideas here. You just have to look in a different type of way.”

Joseph Kosuth recently opened a new exhibition of work at Almine Rech gallery in Paris. The show includes a lot of clocks, which he says is “no accident”. Kosuth turns 80 this year. The work is “not autobiographical or in the expressionistic sense, he adds, but it does have that dimension to it.” In addition to being a renowned conceptual artist, and one of the progenitors of Post-modernism, he is also possibly the longest serving art teacher on the planet — he tells the story in this interview of how he was unexpectedly elevated to the position of professor when he was just 19 years old.

Kosuth is also an influential writer. His essay Art after philosophy (1969), written when he was 24, had an immediate impact on his generation, convincing hordes of artists that the mediums of the past, especially painting, had become irrelevant because they were no longer sufficient, as Kosuth might say, for asking the right questions. Art after philosophy’s semiotic attack on the art field made Kosuth an enlightened hero to some, and a curmudgeonly heterodox to others. Its ideas are still fiercely debated by artists, many of whom perhaps fail to perceive the sense of humour Kosuth has always had about art and life. As he says: “You cannot have intelligence without humour. And I do not mean that in a vague way. They are packed together.” So the question of painting’s continued relevance may not be as dire as Kosuth’s true believers make it out to be. As he reminds us, artistic innovation is not located in the how, but “in the why”.

How have your ideas evolved since 1969 when you wrote Art after philosophy?

Should I be eligible for the Nobel Prize in Art? Yes. Is there one? No. Short answer. But yeah, lots to be said. I do not even know which door to go through because it is a kind of multi-position piece of history really. But I thought that, see, usually things start with one point and then they get more radical. Can we call it that? Whereas in this case I did what I did and that was the most radical thing that happened. And then things got more and more accessible in the end. Is it a result of the markets compromising everybody’s practice? I do not know, maybe. Is that what has been added to the broth? Perhaps, but I do not know. I am not living in a place where the galleries do anything, you know, so I am out of the run. When I lived in New York, I would go to openings of younger artists. And it has been decades since I got surprised, or informed even really, by what I saw. And I think that is strange. I mean, I am not young. I feel younger. Younger than a lot of the stuff I see being shown. And painting’s pathetic attempt to hang on as having relevancy is, for me, I do not know if I should laugh or cry really. You know, it is not where you can make an addition to the conversation or discourse of art. Just nothing there. And I said that already 40 years ago. You know, people listened, within the practice, but far fewer than I would have expected, because these conclusions I drew, anybody could draw if you got a half a brain and you are an artist. Kick me if I am not being modest. All right? Kick me anyway.

Did the title mean “art in the aftermath of philosophy”, or “art in the style of philosophy”?

Simply the kinds of questions that philosophy traditionally has. If you look at the philosophers, the last philosophers, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, they basically made the same point from radically different perspectives, which was that you cannot ask these kinds of questions that we are used to asking anymore. The limits of understanding, the limits of language, make that impossible. And so we are stuck.

That essay said, “being an artist now means questioning the nature of art”. Is that still true?

Yeah and that is the kind of thing which is not only true, it is truistically true, possibly. But it is also the basis of the activity which can change and reflect present day reality through the work of younger artists. So it can stay true. That is to say, it is not the art that media defined as modernism — painting, sculpture, lithography, whatever. And so the artist’s work can then reflect political and social reality of the moment, which is what it should be doing, and you know, not making decor for over the sofa of the bourgeoisie. That is not what our mission in life is for, though I know many of my works do, too. I mean, there is too much to be said to say anything more.

You convinced so many others to believe in that essay. Do you still believe it? Does it still matter?

Nothing has changed much. It is not dogmatic, ideological. It is a toolkit to approach what new comes up. So that makes it qualitatively quite different than new media or other applications. The questioning process is still very valid, always relevant. There is always a job to do. That should be the mission. The ability of the impact of what they call conceptual art is that it is continually renewing itself in these ways, you know, which makes it a lot different than modernist ideas that are invested in certain media.

Do you agree that if you are just painting or sculpting, you are regressive?

Yeah, I do agree with it. But I do not know how productive it is to shame and blame. I mean, I think there are other ways to ask the right questions than that. I have learned that lesson. These wrinkles, you know, it took a while. Because it is an essential part of the art, what you say to the young artists about what they need to do — know what the right questions are. All that comes up in teaching and you learn it in teaching and you develop that tool in teaching. So, yeah, I think it was very valuable for my practice as an artist that I began teaching so early. I learned a lot, from being thrust into that situation, about asking the right question, I think.

What has it meant to you to be able to teach?

Well, I see a somewhat global view of what artistic practice should be. Of course, you make the actual propositions about what art is in the works. But also one theorises — you write texts about your practice as an artist. That is what I did. The next thing really is teaching. It is what you tell a young artist they must know and do to be an artist. Right? And so it is a very important part of the construction of what our model of art is as it evolves. So it is important. I was in school in New York Art School and School of Visual Art, and I was pulled out of class. I was actually notorious, apparently, in faculty meetings, as a student, etc. That is the background story you have to know. And so at a certain moment I was pulled out of class and taken to the founder, director, president of the school, who nobody ever… you saw him in the hall, but… so that was kind of scary. I was 19 and he sat down and he said: “So you are consistent?” I said: “Yeah, I am”. He said: “Well, listen, I am sick of hearing complaints about you from the faculty.” He goes on and on. So I assumed I was going to be thrown out of school, you know, for being a disruptive element. And he said: “So I am afraid you are going to have to go on the faculty because you are obviously not very good as a student.” He was a man who did his PhD on Robert Burns, the poet. I mean, you know, this guy was… and so I immediately became a professor. They needed someone and he just decided he would pull me out of the class, make me a professor. So that is how I started. Although my students were my age, so it was a little bit awkward. And I had dated half the women at that point, so it got really awkward in other dimensions. But I like teaching a lot and I like very much the questions students asked over the years. And I have talked the whole time and will continue to teach probably to the bitter end, you know, which I hope is not too bitter.

Is your ideal student one that applies what you say or one who rejects it?

I am too selfish for that. I want to learn something. I want them to combat me. I want them to be the same smart ass prick I want as a student, you know, and so that is, you know, kind of the process. But I taught all over the world pretty much. Yeah. And the best arts students are in Germany. My last class in Venice, they were quite amazing. That is where I teach presently.

When you say they are the best, could you describe why?

Well, they are well read and self reflective and asking the tough questions, the relevant questions, I should say. But I do not see any big difference in the quality of the work being made by young German artists, however. So I do not know. Curious process. It is the creation of meaning within a classroom, within one’s body of work, with someone else. It certainly comes down to one subjective response to the sensuality of your sense organs, taking in form and colour and all that, which, if it is prescriptive, it is very limited as a theoretical model for what art is. Certainly, given the history of art as we know it, contemporary art, for it to be prescriptive is problematic.

You have said that “there are two histories of art”. Could you explain that?

Well, there is the art market history and then there is the art history. And they used to be one and the same. And at a certain point they became competitive with each other. And so now the history of ideas, which used to be the important thing, takes second place to what sells for the most amount of money at auction, which is really… You could cry! It is pathetic, but it is a fact.

Have you ever had a student become discouraged by your teachings?

I have had dozens quit art even. I have been a very destructive influence. But, you know, sorry about that.

Have you ever been discouraged by your teaching?

Well, yeah, that is when I changed my work. That is the heart. That is how an artist should respond to that.

Could you talk about one of those times?

No, it is not enough time!

Is there anything interesting about new mediums like NFTs, AI, digital art?

I do not know. I am not the one to ask. That is not the level for me. That is all a new kind of paint. And that is not where you can ask the right questions. Just new kinds of paint, essentially, you know, and without the history in which it worked and was relevant like painting. There was a time when painting was meaningful and really the area in which one could actually have something to say. But AI, I do not think that has really spoken yet. And anything new will be only judged by its potential commercial value, which is uninteresting.

If Faulkner was right and the past is not past, can painting still be relevant?

Well, yeah, I mean, I suppose if you look around the world, there are a lot of people painting. Does that make it relevant? I do not think so. But yeah, I mean, the danger of what I am saying is it suggests that innovation is located somehow in the how, not in the why. Whereas I really feel the questions you ask, the why, is where innovation must come from. It is not unproblematic, all this.

To an uninitiated passerby, treasures of Modern art would be the last thing suspected of lurking beyond the modest entrance to the Menil Collection in Houston. One might not realise they are at a museum at all. But this simple looking structure is actually the work of a master, the first building in the United States designed by renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano, who also designed Centre Pompidou and the Whitney Museum of Art. The steel trench in the front yard that looks like a rain gutter gone slightly mad? It is a work by legendary land artist Michael Heizer. And that other humble, windowless structure, about 150 metres away, with the otherworldly obelisk out front? That is the famous Rothko Chapel, home of Rothko’s most famous works, a suite of monumental black paintings he completed shortly before his death. (The obelisk is a sculpture by Barnett Newman.)

Dominique and John de Menil collected more than 10,000 works of art in their lifetime. This verdant, urban campus serves as the primary storage, research and exhibition hub for their life’s work, which includes one of the most important collections of Surrealist art in the world. The Menils were French transplants who found their way to Texas after fleeing the Nazis during World War II. Among their ex-patriot friends were Max Ernst, whom they commissioned to paint a portrait of Dominique, and René Magritte, whose work is well represented in their collection, and whose catalogue raisonné they also organised and financed.

Natalie Dupêcher is associate Curator of Modern Art at the Menil Collection. She oversees the Surrealism galleries, and has organised numerous exhibitions around the collection, including Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition in 2022, the first-ever major transatlantic retrospective of Oppenheim’s work (co-organised by the Menil Collection, The Museum of Modern Art and the Kunstmuseum Bern). She recently shared her insights into the collection with me. Here is a partial transcript of that conversation:

I’ve heard the Menil has the largest Surrealist art collection in the US. Is that correct?

What we usually say is that we have one of the most significant collections, because it is difficult to quantify. In terms of numbers, we do have the largest number of works by René Magritte outside of his home country of Belgium. But more broadly, we say our collection is one of the most important, not the largest.

What makes it important?

From working with the collection and researching it, it seems clear to me that a large reason that many artists associated with Surrealism became so well known is in part because of Dominique and John de Menil’s championship of them. Particularly Magritte and Ernst, who are the artists we have in the most depth and in full panorama across their careers. The de Menils started collecting Magritte’s work in the 1940s, at a moment when Surrealism was not at all in vogue. In the US, Surrealism was considered old fashioned and overly narrative, not interesting, not on the cutting edge, compared to new movements of abstract art. But they were Magritte’s champions in this country. It was thanks to their enthusiasm in building their collection, mounting exhibitions, and publishing his catalogue raisonné that Magritte became as well known as he is in the US. Much of that is true of Ernst as well.

Why did the de Menils focus so much on Surrealism?

In an interview in 1982, Dominique de Menil spoke about the origins of her and John’s interest in Surrealism. It was a type of art that she did not really love at first. It took her a while to warm to it. They were working closely with Alexander Iolas, a gallerist in New York who showed a lot of the exiled Surrealists, and he was quite persuasive that, one day, the world would catch up to these artists. Eventually the de Menils became true believers, friends with many of the artists, and put on exhibitions in Texas and around the country.

I also want to mention that they were not only collecting Surrealism at this time. They had broad interests, and pursued it all simultaneously. For example, in the early 1970s, they opened the Rothko Chapel with these commissioned paintings by Rothko. The early 70s is also when they launched the Magritte catalogue raisonné, which was a huge logistical and financial effort. Also in the early 1970s, they financed the De Luxe show in Houston, one of the first racially integrated abstract art shows in the country. So they were huge supporters of Surrealism, but all of these other projects were on the boil at the same time.

When people use the word surreal today, does it mean something different than when the de Menils were collecting these works?

Surrealism has become a catch all, almost a synonym for anything strange or unbelievable or out of this world. It has become much more part of everyday vernacular, untethered from the art movement Surrealism with a capital S, that I work on, or that these artists were associated with. But Surrealism as an artistic and literary movement also changed over the years, from how it was originally formulated in 1924, when the first Surrealist Manifesto was written. In that manifesto, André Breton is really interested in automatism, automatic drawing, writing or thought — strategies to access pure thought without conscious control of the mind, how to get at dreams and access them directly. But the movement evolved from there. Magritte is a very different painter than, say, André Masson, who made automatic drawings in the mid-1920s. Magritte’s paintings are highly controlled and deliberately made. Surrealism also spread beyond Europe. It became an idea that was taken up by artists around the world. The wonderful exhibition, Surrealism Beyond Borders, from a few years ago, suggested that the core idea around Surrealism was about liberation. So Surrealism could become an anti-colonial tool for artists working in Latin America and North Africa in the second half of the twentieth century.

Breton praises the word freedom in the first Surrealist Manifesto.

Related to that, I think, is that Surrealism never had a unified look. If I asked you to imagine a Cubist painting, we would probably picture something that looks relatively similar. But Surrealism is very different. In the canon, we have Magritte’s paintings of bowler hats and fluffy clouds, so precisely painted that they look photographic; we have Meret Oppenheim’s teacup; we have Wifredo Lam; there are automatic drawings, and collaborative exquisite corpses. There is abstraction, representation, photography, sculpture. Surrealism became something quite open or fluid. A lot of artists saw it as an invitation rather than a closed system.

I wager most people picture Dali’s melting clocks when they think of Surrealism. Were the Menils supporters of Dali?

We do have a work in the collection that they acquired in the 70s, a drawing, but they were not major collectors of his work. Dali had a real genius for self promotion and provocation and an interest in pop culture, and he embraced having his art seen in not just a fine art context. I wonder if that is part of the reason why his name is more familiar to many people than other Surrealist artists. Dali and Magritte both created paintings that capture the real world, but with something crucially out of sorts. Something is amiss, like the melting clocks, or the face covered with ants. In addition to that, both created representational paintings. Max Ernst’s work is not legible in that same way. He is not an abstract painter, but he is not creating realistic paintings of the real world, either.

Contradiction was important to Ernst. How is it important within Surrealism in general?

The famous line I have in mind about contradiction is “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table,” from the 19th century poet, the Comte de Lautréamont, who predates the Surrealists, but who they took up. Ernst phased this idea of contradiction slightly differently: two things coming together on a plane that does not suit them. That contradiction can be present in a painting, but where I see it most operative, where they literalise it, is in the Surrealist love of collage. They are putting two things, two clippings, two cut-outs from magazines or newspapers, together on a plane that does not suit them. Something comes from that juxtaposition that was not present within the two components individually. So many Surrealist artists made collage works on paper, in part because of their broad interest in the possibilities of juxtaposition, and the charge that could result from it.

Is collage well-represented in the Menil Collection?

Yes. We have collage works on paper by many artists associated with Surrealism, as well as postwar and contemporary artists who were influenced by the Surrealists. Then there are works that might not be thought of as collage, but in a way are. We were speaking about the Meret Oppenheim exhibition, and her famous fur-lined teacup, from 1936, is a collage object. The French word colle, the root of collage, means glue. The way that work was made was to glue fur to the teacup, saucer, and spoon. The key operation in collage is this kind of uncanny juxtaposition. Something seems familiar, like an ordinary tea set. It’s something we see everyday, so it fades into the background. Then, through this small but radical gesture of covering it in fur, the tea set becomes different, uncanny and uncomfortable. That is the magic of this act of putting two things together that seem like they should not belong.

Many Surrealists were first Dadaists. But Dada was nihilistic. Was Surrealism’s embrace of contradiction an acceptance of the absurdity that ignited Dadaism?

I see that interpretation. There is an organising force within Surrealism that was not present in Dada when it kicked off in 1916. Dada is more diffuse and explicitly anti-art. And yes, this interest in contradiction is at the heart of Surrealism. A lot of the visual strategies are about creating a sense of surprise or dislocation in the viewer — I am looking at something that seems familiar, but something is off, so now I am in the world of the unfamiliar. Surrealism also had an ambition to affect daily life, and had a real political force. A recent exhibition in Munich, Surrealism and Antifascism, addressed some of the episodes of resistance that figures like Ernst and Breton, or Claude Cahun, took up. That’s really important: Surrealism wanted to reform the way we think about our human existence and our relationship to others. And there is something about the artistic strategy of defamiliarisation that goes to that aim, or ambition. We have become so used to our everyday life that we do not really notice it. We are going through the motions without having awareness. Being surprised or shocked or confronted by something unfamiliar or uncanny was meant to be an awakening. So there is a political charge in that idea.

Does that make Surrealism a hopeful movement for us today?

In some ways, yes. One thing I find hopeful in it is the multiplicity we were talking about earlier. That there are so many artists, writers, poets, dancers and musicians who took inspiration from Surrealism, transformed it and made it new again. Eventually, over the years, the movement became a home to so many types of artists from so many different backgrounds. That goes back to the fact that there is not one aesthetic. There is a set of philosophical principles, like the idea of freedom, and making the familiar unfamiliar, and certain political commitments against fascism and totalitarianism. Some art movements from the past might not feel as alive as Surrealism does today. I am not sure hopeful is quite the right word. But inspiring. Or instructive.

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“Golem Girl” breaks that mold. Written by artist Riva Lehrer, who lives her life with spina bifida, it exposes the genre’s typical positivism as a veiled form of pity that says, “Fear not, with the right attitude your objectionable reality can be altered!”

Lehrer, in fact, shows how the very idea of normality is an illusion. As an instructor in the Medical Humanities Departments of Northwestern University—one of many professional roles she fills—Lehrer leads future medical professionals in drawing exercises in which they sketch preserved human fetuses showing a range of genetic anomalies. Students may enter the class clinging to the infantile programming that taught them to see these fetuses as deformed or abnormal, but over time they begin to see them as beautiful representatives of the true diversity of possible human experiences.

This is just one example of how Lehrer has devoted her life to the goal of cultivating empathy. Sympathy and pity, she explains, require othering by positioning us outside of each other’s realities. Empathy asks us to actually feel what it is to be someone else.

Born in 1958, Lehrer lived the first two years of her life in the hospital, enduring multiple surgeries. Back then, in the rare instances when a child with spina bifida did not die at birth or soon after, doctors were trained to lead parents to believe the child could have no reasonable expectation of a productive, happy life. Most children with Lehrer’s prognosis lived in institutions, rarely seeing their families again.

Lehrer’s mother fought with doctors and administrators for the right to take her daughter home, regardless of what complications the system warned her that would entail. Lehrer speculates that her mother’s devotion had something to do with the two babies she previously lost in childbirth. This, Lehrer says, was a type of “dark luck”—a tragedy that nonetheless helped ensure her survival.

Reading the phrase “dark luck,” I first wondered, isn’t it always necessary for someone to fail so that someone else can succeed? Then I thought about how many people must see someone with a genetic variation such as Lehrer’s and think her survival was not lucky at all, since she has had to endure so much pain, disenfranchisement, and othering from abled society.

I now find Lehrer’s concept of “dark luck” revelatory of how luck only exists inside of social constructs based on the belief in opposites, such as winners and losers. Within a social construct that values all experiential variations equally, the concept of luck would not exist.

It is precisely because we live in a culture obsessed with concepts such as luck and opposites that Lehrer calls herself a monster. That’s what a golem is: a clay monster in Jewish folklore brought to life by supernatural powers.

“Golem Girl” candidly, and frequently poetically, elucidates how a golem can be both predator and prey. Monster and master are just different terms for outsider and insider. Crucially, Lehrer shows us how golems become scapegoats—blamed whenever it serves the master’s purposes.

Like all golems, Lehrer has faced a never-ending barrage of expectations to perform to whatever role the masters give her, whether it’s the timeless expectation that she adapt to failed, i.e. handicapped inaccessible, architecture, or the recent demand that she accommodate society’s claim of freedom to go mask-less.

Her memoir offers a reasonable alternative to the monster/master dichotomy by revealing variation as the default condition of nature, and empathy as the prerequisite for human sustainability. Nowhere is the way forward more clear than in Lehrer’s portraiture practice, which is detailed at the end of the book. Grounded in collaboration between artist and sitter, her studio practice is itself an act of exploring the idea that when we empathize with each other, we become harbingers of a culture not based on the fiction of opposites, but on the fact that our destinies are intertwined.

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Being a realistic painter means making recognizable pictures of the world. Painting reality means also making visible the invisible: revealing what makes us what we are, and what stops us from becoming what we long to be.

Conteh’s painting Quan’ta II (2019) shows a young, Black man, tattooed, and gaunt in the cheeks. The painting looks as though it has been pulled from a fire, its surface coated in melted urethane plastic and paint mixed with atomized metal dust, soil, and battery acid. The figure’s face is subsumed within a radioactive, pink haze.

“I remembered how when I first painted this man back in 2016, he was going through some things in regards to aspirations he had,” Conteh explains, “trying to get into the music game, dealing with some issues with the law. Meeting back up with the brother now, he’s still dealing with the same things.”

Quan’ta II conveys Conteh’s understanding of what this particular human being is facing.

“I scratched his eyes out,” Conteh says. “Maybe he isn’t seeing. There’s an obscuring of his past for him to be going in this same loop, external factors creating the blindness, moving around in the dark, creating this lack of vision, creating a system where he’s going back to the same things, trying to get somewhere without progress.”

Jade (2020) shows a young lady, painted red, holding a black dollar bill. Her arm is partially eaten away by her toxic green surroundings.

“This woman’s name is actually Jade,” Conteh says, “but it’s also a play on words, like jade green. It’s an allegory about Black economics. Red, black and green represents the African diaspora, the African flag: the red blood of the people; black for the nation itself; green for the land. But here, it’s an acid green separating the hand holding the dollar from the rest of the body. The dollar bill is painted black, representing Black money, and how the body politic, through public policy and politics and societal design, separates Black folks from wealth. The figure is dressed in winter clothes. It was cold outside when I painted her. It’s cold out here for us.”

Even online the images are striking, but digital viewers lose out on the essential physicality of Conteh’s works: the material presence that communicates Conteh’s message, that Black America is literally rusting away.

“Atlanta is a microcosm of how Black folks are living everywhere,” Conteh says. “Everybody looks at this city as a shining symbol, where you see the best of how African Americans are living today. But it’s a bit of a ruse, a shallow view. Outside of the entertainment industry and sports, those types of narrow images of African American success don’t reflect how the vast majority of African Americans are living. Yeah, we have our successes, but those are not indicative of the norm.”

Conteh calls images of Black success on social media a “decadent veil” that supports a false narrative.

“The decadent veil affects how we see the reality of this country. It affects how we vote, and how things are socially engineered,” Conteh says. “The way it plays out, it creates apathy where there should be a true indictment of how these systems work. I’m not big on celebrity. I’m not big on symbolism. Yeah, we had a Black President, so people think that equates to success, or parity in the workplace, or education. This speaks directly to how this country functions. People like happy stuff. But for every LeBron James, every Denzel Washington, every elected official or judge, there are 39 million Black people whose lives are not like that, who don’t have that type of access or the special currency those people were given.”

Conteh’s passion and insight frequently leaves him feeling isolated.

“I’m the party pooper, man. I’m the guy people don’t like having conversations with. I suck all the air out of the room. I don’t mince my words when it comes to the realities of this country. I talk about data. I talk about Black folks eating failure every day. The rest of the country is doing well, and that success is baked in with them not being Black. When you’re Black you have to eat the scraps of every facet of life. But people Black and white in this country have this cognitive dissonance that it’s not true.”

Though they might avoid Conteh’s social critiques at parties, people gravitate towards the visceral reactions his paintings inspire. It’s unsettling to Conteh, however, how many viewers respond by calling his paintings beautiful.

“When you see my work, you see cracked surfaces, weathered paint, things left to ruin,” Conteh explains. “Where Black folks are existing, the neighborhoods and communities, there is disrepair. It’s crazy to me when people say they like things that are weathered. More often than not, folks who say that have the opportunity or privilege of having newness around them. They have the financial systems to be exposed to so much, so they like things that are distressed, like distressed jeans, or when it comes to décor, old country stuff. It looks old, but its high-end materials, like torn-up, ripped jackets, like old cars.”

Conteh is not making paintings that “look” distressed. He is painting distress.

“When I paint these things, that’s the reality of a people,” he explains. “When you see tearing, erosion, cracking, that is something that’s been left out and exposed, discarded. The atomized steel dust, the bronze, the brasses: I’m thinking of the hardware in the apartment buildings, the bus stops, the kiosks at the train stations. The only beauty that I see in it is that folks are still here despite those circumstances. If you go to another side of town, somebody cleans those up and paints them periodically. If you’re over here in the West End, anywhere where Black folks are impoverished, ain’t nobody cutting the grass, scrubbing off the old paint and repainting stuff. The tax base ain’t over here, so we ain’t gonna re-do any of this. That’s the type of story I’m telling in this work, through the materials.”

About the burnt, urethane plastic Conteh recently started using on his paintings, he says, “I’m showing when places get burned out, how you just paint over it and live around it. I’m tearing, boring through the canvases. That’s where I’m at right now. There’s a myriad of things I’m doing to show the materiality, and to marry the image with the meaning.”

Conteh recalls one painting he made where he treated the surface like black mold. “This person went on and on about how beautiful it looked. I was like, ‘What’s beautiful about living around mildew and mold? You’re not putting two and two together.’ When you see mold, you ain’t supposed to be around it. There are folks who can’t get away from it, when it comes to their apartment, or their kids’ schools.”

Conteh remembers the multitude of Black people who fled New Orleans after Katrina, and the mold and mildew that overtook their former homes.

“I hate to say refugee, because hell, we’re all Americans, but after Katrina, they were refugees in their own country,” Conteh says. “And it’s not only them. Unfortunately, being Black in this country there is a shared experience that transcends time, that transcends place, that descendants of slaves all share. No matter where in the country you are, you are American in name, and only in name. We’re overlooked. The greatest country in the world, the wealthiest country in the West, but the people who built it are the poorest people in the country. That’s the story of us, of America.”

Viewers also frequently remark about the fashion in Conteh’s paintings, pointing out a pair of hard-to-find Air Jordans, or a piece of jewelry worn by someone in his paintings, they assume it’s a brand statement.

“When I have shoes in a piece, it’s because yeah, this is what people are wearing. But it’s not just fashion, its economic,” Conteh explains. “You might have on a pair of Jordans or Ballys even though you’re poor. You’ve been socially engineered to be a consumer. It’s a direct connection to the decadent veil of consumerism. People who don’t have money spend anyway. You are disenfranchised. You can’t buy a house. You can’t start a business. You can’t create wealth. You don’t have access to it, or the social currency to get it. What you can do is you can show you have something, a piece of the American dream. You can show it in shoes. Consumerism is a very American thing—as American as apple pie.”

Conteh’s wish is that people would understand that these are not just paintings—they’re reminders.

“They should remind everyone who looks at them that this is the reality of Black folks in this country right now, specifically the Black folks whose shared experience is as the descendants of slaves,” Conteh says. “Everybody who lives here as Americans should be reminded there is a group of people who are American in name, but who are not American in practice. If you have this painting on your wall, you should ask yourself, ‘What should I do to make these folks American just like me? What should I do to make these folks who built this country American just like me so they have the same rights, privileges and protections as me.’ You have to say, ‘If we’re going to talk about equality in this country, let it start with me.’”

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On this delightful occasion, I say this to editors of short fiction:

Gift of the Brabblefly was the first short story I ever got published. It’s the namesake of this newsletter. It benefited from the insight of two visionary editors, 15 years and a world apart.

The first was an editor at Space Squid, a sci-fi and humor magazine out of Austin, Texas. She accepted Gift of the Brabblefly for publication, pending my acceptance of a single revision — a six-word sentence she wanted to cut. It was a surgical edit that profoundly improved the flow and mood of the piece. It enlightened me to editorial potential.

The second was the publisher of Antipodean SF, a speculative sci-fi magazine based in Nambucca Heads, Australia. (Antipodean means diametrically opposed places. The North Pole is the antipode of the South Pole.) This editor, while preparing Gift of the Brabblefly for an Australian audience, requested another tiny edit, that again improved the story. I was re-enlightened to the power of editorial insight.

I had read this story hundreds of times over the years, torturing over every word, cutting everything that wasn’t the story. Yet, these editors quickly and easily found stuff I missed.

Capable editors don’t just find typos. They rip open the fabric of perception and hoist struggling writers through the gleaming hole...or something like that…I’ll have my editor take a look.

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James Little has been an influential painter and teacher in New York for decades. He is what some people call an artist’s artist — a high compliment that essentially means “the real deal”. Though he has received steady attention from museums and private collectors throughout his career, recently at age 70, Little found himself in the international spotlight as the breakout star of the 2022 Whitney Biennial. A major profile in the New York Times followed and the world finally learned what so many of Little’s colleagues and students have known all along: that he is a contemporary master. His work has been called minimal, painterly, even formalist. But as Little says in the following interview, his paintings are far more humanistic than those simple labels suggest.

“I am interested in feelings and emotive content, Little says. I am not interested in stripping the thing down to some sort of whimsical idea that I may have entertained about some experience I had that does not mean anything to anybody but me. I am not trying to share my misery with people. What I am trying to do is touch on emotions, and feelings, and perceptions, in real time. And I am trying to do it with generosity. I am trying to share it.”

Little’s latest pre-occupation is a major monograph his representatives at Petzel Gallery are putting together, two years in the making. It tracks his career from the early 1970s to the present. Readers of the book will realise that although his visual style has evolved over the years, Little’s intense work ethic has been staunch and steady from the start. He hand-makes his own paints, often working in encaustic, considered by many painters to be the most challenging medium. He is also known to invest sometimes six months or more on a single painting. The three monumental works he exhibited in the Whitney Biennial were composed of only two hues of black. His current body of work, he explains, makes a similarly intense study of white.

How would you describe the white paintings you are working on?

Well, they are done in oil and wax, or encaustic. Large scale. I think the last one I finished was eight panels, 12 feet across, about six feet high. I am going back and forth with these tints and shades. For instance, the black paintings were a shade apart. Two shades of black and the white paintings are two tints that are one shade apart. So I am playing around with that kind of stuff. I pretty much allow my paintings to dictate where I go. I do not have, I guess, a strata, or anything that I just abide by with a lot of regularity, or any sort of restrictions. I do not set it up that way. I let the work dictate where I go. Or the idea. It is not like a situation where I am particularly working on any specific one thing. So right now, I am engaged with these white paintings. But at the same time, I may break off into another idea while I am working on those, so I always keep the door open.

Are these white paintings shaping up to be geometric compositions?

Yes. They are simple, geometric compositions. But they are also very complex. And sophisticated on a particular level. They are very analytical and I guess you could say, to some extent, reductivist. But they are not minimal paintings. They are very animated paintings, but I only use a few things to get the pictorial punch that I want.

You say they are not “minimal”. What does that word mean to you?

It just means the minimum. They may be misinterpreted as minimal, because I only use a few things, but what I get out of it is quite a bit. I just develop a working design, or a particular kind of organised space, and I go from there. From that point a lot of the paintings require more technique and medium and that kind of thing. So everything plays an equal part. I do not call them minimal, because I use what I need. And if I need more, I use more. The thing that I am more interested in is trying to make something that works, by whatever means. I do not like overloading a painting; I like clarity. It seems to me, the more you put in, the less clarity a thing has.

Have you always had that approach?

No. I had to work my way through it. I went through processes and experimentations; I experimented a lot. I was younger and I had not firmly found my way. I was good at that stage, but I never stopped experimenting. Like I said, I allow the paintings to dictate where I go, and it just came to a point where the paintings began to edit out. Certain things became less meaningful to me. I started paying more attention to other things that interested me in regard to painting, surface and design. I had this phase where I was using a lot of colour but nowadays, I do not use a lot of colour. I am using, some people would say non-colour, but I do not say that. I mean, the last group of paintings I have been doing have been black and white and some of them have these colour shapes, stencil-like images. Geometric. But the emphasis is not directly on colour. The colour is there. Shape is there. Surface is there. Geometry is there. Everything has equal parts. As opposed to saying “James is this geometric painter who is very good with colour”, I want the painting to do a little more than that. So I work my way through the colour thing. I know what I can do with it and I want to see what is beyond that, so I allow the paintings to do that. I know when there is closure. And when there is closure, you just try to take the next step. The next risk or the next challenge. That is the way I have always done it. But nothing ever came out right out of the gate. Never.

What is it like to make your own paints?

Well. A lot of it is in my head. You do have to go in and practice it and do the dirty work, the mixing and all that, but a lot of it is in my head first. And when you say mixing paints, I work with several different media. For instance, I am doing the oil and wax painting, but I also did paintings with dry pigment, paintings with oil on linen, and I have done some things where I worked with acrylic. That is four different mediums right there. Each one has a particular kind of personality, a resonance. I try to engage with that. It is not like there is some sort of formula that I have set. You know, every time I go at it, there is a certain kind of experiment going on. And you just never really know what is going to happen. I am closer to it because I make the materials.

Are materials connected with something psychological within you?

Well, there may be some sort of innate need. It depends on what I intend to do and which medium is going to best help in expressing a particular kind of idea. I will go back and forth. It is a good tool to have, virtuosity. And I think just working a long time, you develop a certain kind of virtuosity and dexterity. I mean, if I have an idea for a new painting, I will figure out what is the best medium to use to go for this particular construct. Sometimes it may be the best thing to do is just use pencil on paper. But I just know a lot about the materials. That has come from me exploring and coming up with tools and formulas that I can use. I try to find the right fit so to speak. So your personality is sort of intertwined with that, or woven into that same thing.

Why did you move to New York?

Because that is where the art world is. You know that guy, Willie Sutton? He was a bank robber back in the 1940s or 1950s. They asked him why he robbed banks. He answered, “That is where the money is.” There are other places like Chicago, California, Europe… But New York is just the epicentre.

What does abstract or geometric painting mean to our culture right now?

You have to look at my work in the context of art history. I am not interested in trying to make paintings that reflect this chaos that we are in right now. The thing that I am interested in is order. I have focused on that kind of thing throughout my career and I have taken a lot of criticism for the way I work. I have been called a formalist and “this and that”, and some of that is true. But, to be a formalist, and couple that with painting, you really do have to know what you are doing. And it is not a word that you just toss around lightly. I see it as a badge of honour. I am trying to make paintings that somehow reflect the extension of modernist concepts, or abstract painting, or even modern painting. That is where I am at. So if you are interested in painting, or abstraction, then you have to give my work a hard look. It is not something that is glossed over. Basically, my paintings are based on ideas and concepts and questions. That is what I try to do — solve problems, reach solutions… and provide answers to some extent, based on that pursuit.

I am not that interested in what is outside of painting. I am not going to be the person that sits here and responds in real time to what is going on in Washington or in the Middle East. It is not going to come into my painting as it is happening. I will reflect on that one way or another, but that is not what is going to get me to where I want to go. I have to get to another thing before I can speak and be heard when it comes to politics, and that is, make some significant paintings. Make some work that holds up. Make some paintings that raise questions. Make paintings that provide some answers to those questions and some solutions. But also make works that arouse the curiosity of the average person, whether they like them or not. Trust me, I am not trying to make paintings for people to like. I am trying to make paintings that people can respect, paintings that evoke feelings and question our existence in this moment in time. It is not about narrating anything. You are alone there with the paintings. It is not a spelling bee. So if you come with some preconceived idea about what painting is, and what I should be doing, then you are going to be disappointed in what I do. But if you come with an open mind and try to meet the thing halfway, you will probably have some sort of success with the kind of paintings I do.

What have you learned about the art market?

The art market is unpredictable. But I think if you are consistent in what you do and the kind of work that you do, you might be able to do pretty well in the market. If it is turbulent, if it is something that confuses collectors, or people that are participating in the market, I do not know if that works in your favour. I believe the market likes clarity.

What does it mean to you to live and work as an artist?

Well, I have not had much of a choice; at least it was not a rational choice. There was nothing else in front of me that I felt like I could embark upon and make any sort of significant contribution to it. And there was nothing out there that I felt complete freedom with, or complete control, that I had complete authority over what I was doing. So that is how it has turned out, but it was never something that was preconceived or something, that was some sort of collaboration with myself and my alter ego. My whole life around art was something organic. There was this appetite, this hunger. It was a love affair. And I had to figure out how I was going to get through it and get to where I want to be. You know, it takes a long time. It is a long haul, very difficult, especially if you are interested in making anything of any sort of real quality. And if you are interested in making works that are going to hold up and making any sort of contribution to the history of art within the canon, it is a tall order. But I arrived at it just out of an innate, or a God-given desire to pursue art.

One thing about painting is physicality. It is a physical activity and a mental activity. And when you couple the two, it is a very taxing and challenging activity. It takes a particular animal to be able to embark on something like this and come out on the other side. The odds of making it as a painter are slim. And there is only a sliver of space within the canon for any artist. A sliver. So if you can get there, you really accomplished something. And nobody can give you a roadmap of how to get there. You have to be really attuned to your psyche, your feelings and your instincts. And you have to be super smart and stand for something. When it comes to art, it stands on its own. The only thing I can promise when it comes to painting is that my work is going to meet you halfway. No more. So I will get back to saying that I use what I need. I am interested in making unadorned works. I am interested in flat space. I am interested in what you do with flat spaces and how you organise flat spaces. That is pretty much my a priori when it comes to abstract painting, in terms of what I am interested in. I think at this particular time, that is the most progressive path.

You know, life is fragile. Everything is fragile. In this particular day and time, the way the world is going and the way politicians are behaving — destroying institutions and trashing culture — if we do not have art, we are done. The last defence is the arts. But in a way, it is not tangible. A lot of it is perceptive and conceptual. But we have to have it. And so that is why I remain calm. I can see the idiocy. I can see the ignorance. I can see the lack of sophistication, and the lack of will. So you have artists to be a bulwark against this kind of destructive atmosphere that we live in. And they have always done that. Throughout history, in all times of war, in religious crusades, all the way through, the arts really have preserved and saved culture. Without that, you do not have anything, so it is best to be cool. What are you going to do? You cannot go out there and challenge these people with these automatic weapons. You have to challenge these people with beautiful art. It is a long game. That is why you are going to see dozens and dozens of people fall off by the wayside. They might be big stars or whatever, with rising careers, that may have made a lot of money, that may have all kinds of things in fashion, in television, in creative arts and performing arts. You will see a lot of them fall off, but then you will see the core, the ones that really have lasting power, the ones that have made a real commitment to art. That will be the front line of this whole thing when it is all over. And so that is what we have to do.

I think artists are privileged and lucky to be able to have a space they can go occupy and get away from some of this madness. Matter of fact, when I did my last show, a lot of people came to it and said they were just so happy to see something that could relieve them from all of the chaos that was going on. Everybody kind of settled down and looked at my, what did they call them, “meditative black paintings” in this big, beautiful space that Friedrich Petzel built on 25^th Street. Anyway, you have to turn the page and do what you know how to do. Do not waste your talent. And that is pretty much it. I am just working hard, trying to contribute what I contribute.

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Blue Chip art is easy to spot in Las Vegas — a massive Shepard Fairey mural on the outside of The Plaza; a site-specific Ivan Navarro infinity mirror in the Cosmopolitan’s high roller poker room; a giant Frank Stella painting behind the registration desk of the Vdara Hotel and Spa. Yet, the city lacks the type of contemporary art ecosystem one would find in New York, LA, Paris, Hong Kong or hundreds of other modern cities. There is no “gallery sector”. The city’s few white-walled commercial galleries are more like art stores for tourists, centred around Pop Art, street art or prints by masters. The city has one institutional, collecting art museum, The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) — at least until the new Las Vegas Art Museum opens in 2028. And museum quality exhibitions are sometimes hosted in The Sahara West Library gallery, operated by the Clark County Library District.

But if you are a serious collector or art tourist visiting Vegas and you feel like you just need more of the good stuff — exciting, meaningful, experimental contemporary art that will expand your mind — you might have to go rogue and find one of the half dozen or so alternative art spaces around the city. Just finding these spaces can turn into its own adventure. Some are nomadic; some are in semi-apocalyptic strip malls; some are inside artist’s homes or studios; many are open by appointment only; all are tucked away in the real Las Vegas, the parts of town most tourists never think about, where actual human beings live, away from the glitz of the strip.

Couper Russ gallery

Matt Couper and J. K. Russ moved to Las Vegas from Aotearoa in 2010. Russ is represented by PAULNACHE Gallery in New Zealand. Couper shows with the always buzzy La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles. Both are accomplished, established artists who have exhibited extensively in galleries and institutions. They consider Vegas an ideal place to live and work, but they also consistently notice how few exhibition opportunities there are for local artists. In 2022, they opened Couper Russ Gallery inside their home, transforming the family room of a nondescript, two-level ranch with a pool into a pristine-looking white cube.

The curatorial focus of Couper Russ Gallery is strictly on Las Vegas based artists. Says Russ, “There are a lot of artists working away in their studios here. They are here and they are doing it, but they are not that visible, you know?” Couper agrees. “We started making a list of artists practicing in Vegas, and we knocked out like 150 really quickly.” Couper and Russ also routinely drop in on the MFA studios at UNLV. The fully-funded, three-year programme, which boasts several influential artists on its faculty, has turned out numerous successful studio artists in recent decades. When Couper and Russ work with an artist, they not only present the work professionally in their perfectly lit space. They also document the exhibition with high resolution images and create extensive writing about the works.

Most generously, Couper and Russ often hang the work in conversation with pieces by historically significant artists from their personal collection. “We can get a young artist from Las Vegas who is obsessed with drawing and put them next to a Philip Guston drawing, says Couper. That is a really big buzz for them and it also allows you to physically look at something that is from a very well known American artist alongside an artist just starting out that we think has potential.”

Couper Russ Gallery has no “openings” per se. The driveway is only big enough for maybe two cars, so visits are strictly by appointment. That limitation has done nothing to soften the gallery’s impact on the community. Artists and collectors who have visited the shows say they are particularly grateful for the “grey space” the gallery occupies. “If you go to a gallery on the strip, the impetus is on buying and selling the work. And if you go to a museum or institution, their impetus is on communicating something about society,” says Russ. Couper agrees: “Here, it is a little more informal and relaxed. People might be connected to the art world already, but we also aim to be a welcoming space for people who perhaps have not spent a lot of time in art galleries. They can bring their own experience to the work.”

Scrambled eggs

Like Couper Russ Gallery, Scrambles eggs prioritises the work of Las Vegas artists. Unlike Couper Russ, the space in which they show that work is always changing. Manny Muñoz founded Scrambled eggs in 2022. He had been looking at a lot of Vegas art on social media during COVID lockdown. Then, he says, “When things opened back up, I had this desire to go out and see all that art in person.” Muñoz realised that most of these Vegas artists had few places to show their work in public. An architecture student at the time, he had a little office space near downtown he had been renting as a studio. He decided to pivot and turn that space into a gallery.

“I was like, I think I can do this, says Muñoz. It is small enough to where if it fails, no one is going to know. I called up Brian Martinez, an artist I had been getting to know. He was a BFA student at UNLV. I felt like he has some of that academic education, so he might know what he is doing, so he can kind of help me figure it out. At the same time, he was super well connected outside the art scene. He grew up on the East Side of Vegas, which is primarily Hispanic. So that was something that was interesting to me, because it was also tackling the idea of black and brown artists, or underrepresented artists. It was kind of a big conversation at the time and I think it still is. But we do not really focus as much on that any more, because we are trying to look at artists more as a holistic part of the art scene and the community.”

That first show was well attended, so Muñoz and Martinez invited another artist to do a show a few weeks later. That went well, so they invited another. Over the summer they put on six shows in about four months. Then Muñoz had to let go of the lease on the space because it was too expensive. After nearly a year of no shows, Muñoz reached out to the director of the Donna Beam student gallery at UNLV and asked if he was interested in collaborating on something. The director liked the idea of an outside curator coming in to do a show. “This was like almost a year since we had done our summer shows, so I hosted what we called Scrambled again, explains Muñoz. It was all the artists who had shown in our first six shows.” Muñoz raised a little bit of money for the show, which he spent on catering and a Mariachi band that performed outside the gallery under a tree. The show drew a huge crowd, which told Muñoz that he could have shows anywhere and the community he was building would show up.

Around this time, a little art book store called Hasta Siempre Books opened up downtown. Muñoz connected with Pedro Duran, the owner of the shop and found out there was a little back room included in the lease. He invited Pedro to curate an art exhibition in the space under the Scrambled eggs name. Pedro’s show was another success, which showed Muñoz that he could trust the curatorial part to others and just work behind the scenes. After a couple more Scrambled eggs exhibitions in the bookstore’s back room, Pedro moved to New York. Since then, Muñoz has been partnering with other spaces and curators, expanding his nomadic, community-centric model.

Meanwhile, he has been receiving mentorship from a Reno non-profit called The Holland Project and he started an interview series with his artists, which is hosted on Wendy Kveck’s popular contemporary art blog Couch in the Desert. He is also preparing for what will be the collective’s biggest exhibition, at the Sahara West Library, a sprawling, institutional gallery run by the Clark County Library District. As for the future, Muñoz says he eventually wants to transform Scrambled eggs into a real “third space”. Ideally that would mean having a permanent space that hosts experimental art exhibitions, maybe has a printing press, a music venue and spaces for local vendors and workshops. “I am always looking at it from the point of view of how we can use this for something beneficial to the community,” Muñoz says.

Available Space Art Projects

Available Space Art Projects (ASAP) opened in 2020, during the height of COVID. It was founded as a project space dedicated to artistic freedom and experimentation, by Homero Hidalgo, an artist who moved to Vegas to earn his MFA. Hidalgo was born in Ecuador and previously lived in Miami and San Francisco. One of the first things he noticed about Vegas was that it was missing the type of art spaces he had seen in other cities, where artists could cut loose and challenge themselves. According to Hidalgo, “you go to San Francisco or Miami and there are pop-up project spaces everywhere. So I figured why not get that started here in Vegas? The mission was to encourage artists to do their B-Side projects. I wanted to shake the leaves of the town so people could see more unconventional art.”

Hidalgo partnered with artist Holly Lay and secured a lease on a commercial space in a rundown strip mall called Commercial Centre, off Sahara Boulevard. ASAP started getting proposals from artists right away. At first, they said yes to everyone and gave the artists full reign to do whatever they wanted. Hidalgo was amazed at the quality of the work. He was also impressed at how the Vegas community turned out big for the shows and for the artist lectures. Soon, the number of proposals they were receiving grew to where they far outnumbered available exhibition slots. Hidalgo also started receiving a lot of interest from artists outside of Vegas.

After more than 30 exhibitions, Hidalgo started looking for a permanent space where ASAP could grow. He was also looking at the idea of buying a place that had some acreage so artists could branch out into land art projects. Then in December 2024, ASAP faced the most familiar of challenges that so many alternative art spaces encounter: gentrification. The wonderfully run-down strip mall the gallery occupied changed hands in a development deal, and they lost their lease. Since then, ASAP has been hosting exhibitions in the front space of artist Wendy Kveck’s studio — the same Wendy Kveck who runs Couch in the Desert, which publishes the Scrambled eggs artist interviews. (Kveck is a professor at UNLV and one of the most prominent artists working in Vegas right now. She is one of a handful of people, like Matt Couper and J. K. Russ, whose name comes up repeatedly when interviewing people in the Vegas art scene.)

Hidalgo says he is still contemplating what a permanent space for ASAP looks like. He wonders what it looks like to continue supporting Vegas artists and encouraging them to level up, while also expanding his programme to include more artists beyond Vegas, including Blue Chip artists. The ultimate goal might be to evolve the project into something evermore rare in the contemporary art ecosystem: a white wall commercial gallery that participates in the market while still prioritising experimentation and artistic freedom. Regardless, he says the most important thing is to keep encouraging the artists who live and work in Vegas to think big. He says, “People here are supportive of the arts. When we sell work, it is to Vegas locals. They are genuinely moved by the pieces they are buying. The reason why is because what we do always has the artist in mind. That is why we focus on the art and the artist first.”

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It used to be common for this or that artist to be declared part of the avant-garde. For various reasons, such declarations fell out of fashion and would be absurd to make today. What does it mean, anyway — the avant-garde? It was originally a military term for frontline forces in a war, those taking and dishing out the most vicious attacks. According to the National Galleries of Scotland, the term was first used to describe artists in 1825, “by French social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon” who “called upon artists to ‘serve as [the people’s] avant-garde’, insisting that ‘the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way to social, political, and economic reform.’”

De Saint-Simon evidently considered human civilisation a battlefield. His society was also unapologetically patriarchal, so the first artists to receive his avant-garde label, Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, were men, of course. They were both virtuoso realist painters, but it was not their medium nor the quality of their work that made them avant-garde — it was their subject matter. Instead of the popular themes of religion, wealth, power and romance, they centred peasants, farmers and the working class. That was controversial. It bucked convention. Avant-garde henceforth became synonymous with defying tradition. Impressionists were called avant-garde, as were Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists, Surrealists, Dadaists, Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists, Postmodernists — all the “ists”.

Meanwhile, the term’s inherent patriarchal militarism continued to determine who was allowed to be part of the avant-garde, namely straight (or at least closeted) caucasian men.

In 1978, that perspective was brilliantly challenged by artists Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff, in their essay Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture. They wrote: “Manifestoes of modern art often exhort artists to make violent, brutal work, and it is no accident that men such as (Joseph) Hirsh, (Diego) Rivera and (Pablo) Picasso like to think of their art as a metaphorical weapon.”

They quoted Kirsh, who said, “The great artist wielded his art as a magnificent weapon truly mightier than a sword;” Rivera, who said, “I want to use my art as a weapon;” and Picasso, who said, “No, painting is not done to decorate apartments; it is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.”

The three quotes were made between 1932 and 1949, during the height of Modernism. Supposedly, Modernism embraced newness, summed up by the title of Ezra Pound’s 1934 collection of essays, Make it New. But beneath the surface, Modernism continued the old belief in patriarchy, militarism and Western cultural supremacy. At the Bauhaus, the most famous and progressive Modernist art institution, female students were not allowed to study painting or sculpture. They worked with textiles, a medium associated with so-called “women’s work.”

Another point Jaudon and Kozloff made in Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture is how the official canon of art history systematically discounted the work of artists who did not fit in with the majority. Female artists were discounted, as were gay artists, disabled artists and artists from non-Western cultures. Among other falsehoods, this allowed Modernists to claim they invented geometric abstraction, when Islamic artists had mastered it centuries before, and monochrome painting, which Hindu artists had been making for millennia.

Modernists saw themselves as representatives of “the culture”, which was, in their minds, Western, straight, male and attached to its own siloed history and sense of importance. Jaudon and Kozloff showed how language was used to shape that perception and manipulate outcomes. They hoped their essay would inspire readers to challenge the assumptions of their education.

Jaudon and Kozloff were hardly the only artists of their generation to challenge the limited version of art history being taught in schools. In his 1969 essay Art After Philosophy, artist Joseph Kosuth wrote: “Being an artist today means to question the very nature of art.”

Kosuth explained that if you say you are questioning the nature of painting, you are actually not questioning the nature of art, because to even accept painting as a form of art means you are also implicitly accepting the tradition to which painting belongs, aka Western canonical art history. The essay made him a leading protagonist of what became known as Conceptual Art. And his critique of traditional forms was so effective that for decades, every art student was saddled by the cliché that “painting is dead”.

Then in the 1990s, something happened that suggested that maybe painting has not lived — the Internet became widely available.

Global digital interconnectivity profoundly weakened belief in the inherent dominance, superiority or even existence of a monolithic Western culture. It made clear to everyone that there are (and always have been) innumerable cultures co-existing alongside whatever culture or cultures are momentarily dominant; not sub-cultures, but co-cultures.

There are eight billion people today, each belonging to numerous cultures. There could be 50 billion, 100 billion or a trillion co-cultures co-existing at any moment. Co-cultural respect demands we no longer pretend to believe in universal values. This is why there is no longer “an avant-garde”. Every contemporary artist is an avant-garde of one.

The Avant-Gardes

Many consider the end of a singular avant-garde a welcome development. Artists no longer need to feel pressured to contextualise their work in terms of bigger cultural constructs or a single narrative of progress. They can choose which art historical story they belong to. It can be the traditional Western canon if that is what they want; it can be Modernism. Or it can be something global, or hyper-local, specific to a particular culture to which they belong. Having agency over their artistic position means they can ignore the manifestoes and movements of the past if they want… or they can build from them. And they can decide for themselves if their mediums are dead or alive.

Chinese artist Shao Fan describes his personal journey as an artist as a negotiation between competing influences from Western art history and Chinese tradition. “For nearly a century, traditional culture had been continuously suppressed or devalued, Shao says, from the May Fourth Movement through the Cultural Revolution, and even after reform. Western art arrived with such force that it became another form of forgetting. We began to look at ourselves through Western eyes. Only in recent years have we started to return to our roots. Chinese art today still learns from the West, but the need to reconnect with our own traditions has become stronger. For me, that balance — between outward curiosity and inward return — has defined my entire path.”

James Little enthusiastically embraces Western Modernist values, not because that is the only history he values, but because it relates to his personal pursuit of virtuosity and creative freedom. He also embraces the title of painter. “I have taken a lot of criticism for the way I work, Little says. I have been called a formalist and “this and that”, and some of that is true. But, I think to be a formalist, and couple that with painting, you really do have to know what you are doing. And it is not a word that you just toss around lightly. I see it as a badge of honour. I am trying to make paintings that somehow reflect the extension of modernist concepts. Or abstract painting. Or even modern painting. That is where I am at. So if you are interested in painting, or abstraction, then you have to give my work a hard look.”

Bernar Venet, who most people would describe as an abstract sculptor, has never described himself according to a single medium or intellectual approach. He joins Kosuth in a belief that the medium is irrelevant, and that ideas are all that matters. “To me, it is obvious, Venet says. I do not understand how one can speak of painting, sculpture, literature, music as if they were separate worlds. To me, it is the same thing: imagination, invention, the question posed. I always return to the same principle of equivalence: that the argument can be expressed in any discipline, any medium. What matters is the proposition, the thought, not the support.”

Jessica Stockholder, meanwhile, describes being an artist as her way of knowing herself and others. “I have not always found it easy to be with myself, she says. Being in the studio is a way of being with myself while also talking to the world.”

Richard Tuttle echoes that sentiment, noting that for him being an artist is about creating unity from disparity. “You would never be an artist unless you were born to be this way, Tuttle says. Being born this way has a characteristic that you are absolutely ambiguous about everything. Nothing you experience, or can say, does not have an equal and opposite place or validity in your mind. Because of this, you are always trying to make a unity. One characteristic of art, whether it is Western, or recent or old, is that there is a unity that happens in a made thing.”

Critical Revival

If artists are frontline culture warriors, art critics have typically been seen as the rear guard — a grimy cohort following distantly behind the battle, noting what could have been done differently and to better effect. Happily, the rise of the “avant-garde of one” also has the potential to set art critics free. Critics no longer have to base their criticism solely on the linear canon of Western art history. They can judge each artist on the terms the artist sets forth for themself. If an artist claims they are doing something with their art, the critic can simply judge how well they are doing it, or if they are doing it at all. If an artist says they are working within a particular tradition, the critic only has to judge them according to that tradition’s rules.

This shift has been embraced by some contemporary critics. In a recent article in Hyperallergic about the work of artist Rashid Johnson, art journalist Seph Rodney mounted a substantial and well-supported critique of Johnson’s latest exhibition based solely on the fact that Johnson is not living up to his own declarations about his work. This critique respects Johnson as a solo culture, holding him accountable only for whether or not he is advancing his own guard.

Other critics, however, abhor this change, and even call it the death of art criticism. Maybe they are uncomfortable losing their critical entitlement. For so long, reading the right art history books and taking the right classes has made them the experts in the room. Now they must put in the time to learn specifics about particular artists, including perhaps studying different cultural histories, different concepts of beauty or different philosophical traditions before either trashing or lionising a particular artist’s work.

It is a heavy lift for a critic, just as it is a heavy lift for an artist to have to individuate rather than follow a trend. But in a world where there is no dominant culture, no universally agreed upon cultural values and no singular artistic avant-garde, it is also a more honest approach to art. It argues that the most important thing an artist can do is discover what they were, as Tuttle says, “born to be.” And maybe the most important thing art journalism can do is provide opportunities for artists to converse honestly about that process. This could mean the death of art criticism is the re-birth of the artist interview. Instead of offering answers, critics can, as Kosuth recommends, focus on asking “the right questions.”

Michelle Grabner is an esteemed artist, curator, gallerist, critic and professor. A Guggenheim Fellow, she curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and soon after was named by Artnet as one of the 100 most powerful women in art. Her work blends formal abstract visual strategies with hints of everyday life — jam lids, brooms, bleacher seats or gingham table cloth patterns — an approach that invites viewers into what Grabner calls an “intellectual engagement” with the familiar.

Beverly Fishman is also a Guggenheim Fellow, Anonymous was a woman awardee and former Head of Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She makes abstract art rooted in the visual language of Big Pharma. She is best known for her wooden relief paintings, which are abstracted from pill forms and sometimes combined into multi-forms — a visual chemical cocktail. The high-gloss auto paint Fishman uses emits a glow, creating nuanced colourfields around the work and in the carved out spaces, which Fishman calls missing doses.

Both Grabner and Fishman are considered abstract artists, though they both also intentionally reference the objective world of recognisable imagery. Asked if she is thinking about specific messages or contemporary political concerns when she is working, Grabner says, “Absolutely. My work is highly critically thought through. I am hoping that that which becomes familiar, nameable, let us say a gingham pattern based on a grid, can be translated into a different kind of formal interpretation. The grid allows for a kind of sameness that can in some contexts be profoundly boring and redundant. But in another kind of social situation, where we are living in too much information, that predictability may be a handhold and may be really important. And with the gingham pattern, I am talking about … the idea of a grid carrying an anecdote to the chaos of too much information, too much political slant, the constant teasing out of truth and fiction in that daily information. That grid structure gives you a predictable, dependable framework.”

Grabner hopes that the grid will offer enough comfort to viewers that they will stick around to enter into a more complex relationship with the work, which allows for deeper personal interpretations. “There are many modes, hopefully, ideally, of intellectual engagement in the work, Grabner says, but there are a lot of viewers that I leave behind. It is not a good time. We are very literal. So if it looks like gingham, it is gingham. It is hard to get some sorts of viewers to actually think about the grid or think about the other vocabularies that are in it, and think about them abstractly as opposed to just thinking, you know, tablecloth. It is about trying to put a lens of abstraction over the thing we think we know, and then in that abstraction, doing a different kind of value assessment. Instead of taking it for granted, let it command our attention in a different way.”

Fishman similarly hopes viewers will linger with her work long enough to see beyond their initial interpretations. She is an adept art historian, and brings a multitude of Modernist abstract references into her work, including the Light and Space movement, Finish fetish and Hard edge geometric abstraction. But she is not referencing those movements or their concerns in a direct way. Nor is she trying to do it as an empty academic gesture. There is always what she calls a “confrontation” happening in her work, between aesthetic concerns and directed political content referencing society’s relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.

“I wrestle with abstraction, Fishman says, and I have done this for decades. But my work has always been connected to the contemporary cultural moment as well. It has never been pure abstraction. It has always had its source in real life issues circulating in contemporary culture and society. And I think as much about these social and political issues as I do about abstraction, to be honest. So there are two sources of inspiration for my work. I have a deep knowledge of the history of abstraction and my work comes from an engagement with this history: I want my viewers to recognise that my art emerges from this history and that it is deeply thought out and felt on an aesthetic level. But, for me, my work has also always been about confronting something in society that, in my mind, is really important: the role that Big Pharma plays in our lives, how medical imaging breaks down and transforms the human body, how color helps to construct both gender and identity. But I have never wanted to be didactic about my thinking. I have never wanted to be obvious or literal. I hope one could have an aesthetic, transformative experience through abstraction… and then realise through the mind that there is a lot more going on in the work than that.”

Cultural currency

Abstract art has always been an easy target for criticism from those who feel art should be a political tool, because it seems to lack obvious narrative content. However, the lack of obviousness is, in fact, the most political part of abstraction — it allows people to think for themselves. Freedom of thought is in short supply today, as are other qualities often inherent in abstract art, such as experimentation and beauty. These things are reserved more and more for the powerful and the elite, who increasingly want to commodify and control them.

“We are at a point where experimentation is hard to transact, says Grabner. I have sat in front of funding boards who want to give money to an exhibition that I am curating, but they need to know exactly what an artist is going to do three years from now at that space. I tell them that no, you are supporting the experimentation of that artist. That is what you are funding. And increasingly, it just does not happen because it is hard for experimentation to be transactional, especially in that context. That is even becoming problematic in art school where federal funding is withheld if we cannot show an artefact of learning. That is a huge problem. How do you show the artefacts of experimentation? Decades ago, critique was considered a form of assessment and accepted by the governing bodies who give accreditation in higher learning. Now critique is not, by our accrediting bodies, considered a form of assessment. So the best I can do is just keep insisting that experimentation is necessary for an artist. No one will ever understand what success is if one does not fail in those forms of ignorance or experimentation. You cannot have success without — I do not want to say failure, because that seems a little cliché and easy — but without the freedom to fail.”

The cultural currency Fishman most often uses in her work is beauty. She knows that a shiny, colourful, beautiful object has the power to attract a viewer from across the room. “I use beauty, and beauty is dangerous, Fishman says, because we stop thinking. We are just drawn to it. We are just taken by it. We are just in awe of it. We lose our rational side for a bit. I hope it is something I have utilised that keeps the viewer looking longer. To stay with something longer. Then, when the beauty starts to calm down a bit, thinking might take over. Then the thought process might change. That is very important to me.”

Fishman’s titles have long been an ironic foil to the beauty of her wall reliefs. A glowing, cotton candy-coloured multi-form that might look perfectly at home in a child’s bedroom might also have a title like, “Bipolar, Opioid addiction, Anxiety,” having been named after the diseases that are treated by the pill forms she is abstracting. Recently, however, Fishman has shifted her thinking about her titles in a way that offers viewers a different kind of entry point to the work. “They no longer deal with the disease, Fishman says, they deal with the cures. So, instead of it saying ‘depression, osteoporosis, anxiety’ it says something like ‘calm, stability, happiness, liberation’. That is because what was going on was, I was coming into my studio being elevated by my own work, having an experience of my own work that was different from the titles. I wanted to have an experience that did not bring me down, where I felt some joy. So the titles now are about the potential outcomes, not the disease itself. I think I am doing my job. But again, I do not want to be literal.”

Space for interpretation

Grabner has similar concerns about balancing enough stability in the work that viewers can be drawn to it, and leaving enough space for interpretation and subjective meaning. Over-storytelling, she says, is too prevalent in the art field today. “AI will tell you how to think about something, Grabner says. We are also at a time where artists and the cultural system at large are telling the artist’s story and the artwork ends up often being a prompt to that story. We are not meeting at the artwork anymore. We are meeting at the story of the artist. And sure enough artists are exceptional and have really interesting stories. But I say very carefully when I am lecturing, mostly to students, that to honour you, I will talk to you about yourself. But if I am honouring you primarily through your work, we are going to assess the work that you make. You are an artist and I owe you that.”

In addition to trying to talk more about themselves than the art, Grabner says artists are afraid that if they do not explain the work enough nobody will “get it”. Viewers are similarly terrified that they will say something wrong about a work and then be embarrassed. “This is something I deal with, particularly with young students who feel that if they get an interpretation beyond what they were conceptualising in the work, that either I am absolutely wrong or they have failed in communicating the ideas that they wanted to bring forth, Grabner says. I have to really underscore that critique is not judgment and that interpretation expands the work. You do not have to agree with it, but if there is something that you put forward that somebody else can see and assess very differently, that is a miraculous thing. That is a thing that we should encourage and not a thing that we should see as an assessment of the work failing.”

Grabner says this phenomenon comes from “over professionalisation of artists who spend a lot of time writing artist statements and articulating exactly what they are getting after. That really closes down radical or rigorous kinds of assessment and interpretation. I am really pushing back against the professional, institutionalised practice of accompanying an artwork with such highly specific language that there is no room for reassessing it, reinterpreting it.”

It is a problem, Grabner says, because it means no one but the artist can participate in the art. “As a viewer, that is how I participate: if I am just looking at something and reading 500 words that accompany the piece of how I am supposed to interpret it, then I am just consuming the work. I do not want to do that. I want to be active as a viewer and start to disentangle it — reshape it, recontextualise it, and then revisit it and see where my assessment was. And I do not have to be right. That is the fine line between consuming an idea and an object or actually participating in its meaning making. In the art marketplace, it is just easier for an audience who feels uncomfortable about art making to transact the story of the artist, as opposed to telling somebody you should feel comfortable interpreting this red square.”

Fishman adds that, for her, the most crucial element in the interpretation of abstract art is to revisit the work over a long period of time, in different circumstances, to allow interpretation to evolve. “I keep looking at it and surprising myself or something shifts, Fishman says. Or I will look at the piece in the morning light, I will turn the lights on, I will go back in the late afternoon for a different quality of light and see if something else happens. I am interested in being involved with the work over a long span of time. I think that is what makes it different from anything else in life that is immediate.”

This is one of the biggest ways abstract art intersects with politics today, Fishman says: it exposes humanity’s chronically short attention span and unwillingness to quiet their minds. “Our culture does not want to spend that much time even with themselves, Fishman says. People cannot sit in silence. They are afraid of silence and have to make noise for themselves. I sit very quietly with nothing going on, except whatever my brain wants to think about. That is scary for a lot of people, especially a lot of younger people. And I do not mean going out in nature. I mean just sitting with yourself. They are talking about AI reducing our intelligence, because our brain does not have to work so hard to create a full sentence, or redo something. If a machine can take my first impressions, my inchoate ideas, and turn them into polished prose, then I do not have to develop my thinking. I do not have to rework my thoughts, you know? It is the same way with Instagram and everything else. People will say, I saw your work. No, you did not see my work. You saw a tiny image taken from a single perspective on your phone. I had a group of students come to a show and some of them said, I never saw your work in person before. It is so different from what I thought it was. And I said, yes, it should be different. It should have something — and not a cheap trick, not something fast. Not something that is obvious.”

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