public art https://www.artnews.com The Leading Source for Art News & Art Event Coverage Fri, 29 Dec 2023 21:48:40 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.3.2 https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/themes/vip/pmc-artnews-2019/assets/app/icons/favicon.png public art https://www.artnews.com 32 32 ‘Scary’ Demon Statue in Front of Bangkok Hotel Removed by the State https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/demon-statue-bangkok-hotel-removed-1234691559/ Fri, 29 Dec 2023 17:03:39 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234691559 A giant demon statue in front of the Bazaar Hotel in Bangkok’s Huai Khwang district was ordered to be removed by the State Railway of Thailand .

The statue depicts the mythical figure Khru Kai Kaeo, a winged demon with fangs and crimson talons who is said to be the teacher of Jayavarman VII, a former king of the Khmer empire. Some also regard Khru Kai Kaeo as a god of wealth.

The statue, which was erected in August, drew criticism because some locals found it to be “un-Buddhist and scary,” according to the Nation Thailand. Aside from startling passersby, it spurred online group discussions of devotion to Khru Kai Kaeo.

In response, a group called the Council of Artists Supporting Thai Buddhism urged the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration to remove the statue. They claimed that the statue’s worshippers were engaging in practices such as animal sacrifice.

On Thursday, the statue was removed from its place in front of the hotel, the Nation Thailand reported. Instead, it will now be sited at the back of the hotel.

For violating the Building Control Act, the hotel’s operator, Suan Lum Night Bazaar Ratchadaphisek, has also been ordered to pay a fine of 1.3 million baht (approximately $37,793).

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New Harriet Tubman Statue Design Selected for Philadelphia’s City Hall After Controversy https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/harriet-tubman-statue-design-selected-philadelphia-city-hall-1234685412/ Wed, 01 Nov 2023 16:14:18 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234685412 A new design for a Harriet Tubman statue outside of Philadelphia’s city hall has been selected, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday. It will be the first portrayal of an historical Black woman in the city’s public art collection. The city previously faced criticism for initially selecting a white male artist.

Jersey City–based sculptor Alvin Pettit beat out four competing semifinalists. His bronze statue, titled A Higher Power: The Call of a Freedom Fighter, will stand almost 14 feet tall. It will depict Tubman standing on a pile of broken shackles with her hands folded in prayer and a rifle hanging on her shoulder.

“She is shown in majestic prayer. Perhaps she is calling upon her faith or contemplating a battle,” Pettit explained at a news conference on Monday.

“I captured a moment in time that shows her as a conqueror,” he added as he showed off a clay model for the work.

Tubman was a famed abolitionist who escaped slavery in the American South and then helped free other enslaved people of color on the Underground Railroad. She worked as a scout, a spy, and a nurse in the Union Army during the American Civil War.

City officials had offered the commission to North Carolina–based sculptor Wesley Wofford last year after a traveling iteration of his 2017 Tubman statue was on view at city hall. A group of artists and activists protested the choice, saying that a Black artist should have been given the opportunity instead.

Wofford then reneged on the project, and the city’s office of arts, culture, and the creative economy issued an open call in August 2022.

City officials chose the finalists before allowing the public to weigh in. The final selection was ultimately decided among city officials and Philly’s African American statue advisory committee, which includes members of Tubman’s family.

This is not the first time Pettit has made a monumental sculpture of an historic Black figure. His previous work includes sculptures of educator and philanthropist Mary McLeod Bethune and iconic singer Marian Anderson.

The project will cost $500,000, a fee that will come out of the city’s operating budget. It is slated to be completed by 2025.

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Chevron Says It Destroyed Public Art Piece in California Near Refinery https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/chevron-destroyed-public-art-piece-richmond-california-1234671032/ Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:25:20 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234671032 Last week, Chevron said that it had removed a public art project installed on a fence near the company’s refinery in Richmond, California. At the time, it was unclear if the work had been placed in storage or if it had been disposed of. A Chevron spokesperson told ARTnews late Friday that the piece had been destroyed.

“The wood was placed in our wood bin weeks ago when it was taken down. It has been processed with other wood since then,” the spokesperson told ARTnews in an email.

The piece, entitled Fencelines – A Collective Monument to Resilience, comprised hundreds of wooden slats that community members in Richmond had painted with messages of hope and Richmond pride, with wishes for clean air and water. Residents worked on the project over the course of the past year.

The Chevron refinery has operated in Richmond for 120 years and has deeply impacted local residents. The city’s asthma rates are double the state average, according to an ongoing study at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2012 an explosion at the refinery left 15,000 Richmond residents seeking medical treatment. In 2018 the company agreed to pay the city $5 million to settle a lawsuit related to the incident.

The Chevron spokesperson said the company does not consider Fencelines to be art but an act of vandalism, though they have confirmed that they will not pursue charges.

While Graham LP, the lead artist on Fencelines, told ARTnews that the majority of the artwork was on a city-owned portion of the fence, something the organizers confirmed with the city when they began planning the project, Chevron has argued that the piece was solely on its property.

“This isn’t a he-said/she-said question,” the spokesperson said.

The Fencelines organizers, LP, Princess Robinson, Gita Khandagle and the Richmond Art Center, are working with the mayor’s office to release a statement that will provide documentation of permissions and ownership.

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Man Gets Trapped Inside Public Art in Canada After Easter Mischief https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/man-trapped-inside-public-art-edmonton-1234663800/ Tue, 11 Apr 2023 19:51:41 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234663800 Public art can be engrossing. But for a man who tried to climb the Talus Dome sculpture in Edmonton, a city in Alberta, Canada, it became entrapping—and expensive.

According to the CBC, a man was arrested on the evening of Easter Sunday after firefighters had to rescue him from inside the Talus Dome, a monumental roadside sculpture comprised of nearly 1,000 handmade stainless steel spheres.

Authorities say the 26-year-old man was climbing the bulbous form when he somehow fell through an opening near the top and became trapped inside. Three crews “including a technical rescue team” were on sight to extricate the man, who was later charged with one count of mischief and released.

Edmonton Fire Rescue Services district chief Troy Brady told CTV News Edmonton that it took an hour and a half to get the man out of his shiny, globular prison. Brady added that both a saw and the hydraulic rescue tool known as the “jaws of life” were needed cut through the steel structure. 

“It’s definitely a first for me,” Brady told CTV. “It’s definitely different than what we would typically use it [the jaws of life] for.”  

Authorities say the man damaged several of the spheres before he fell into the sloping sculpture, and one ball was removed during the rescue.

According to the City of Edmonton’s public art website, “The sculpture is located at a major junction of the city’s river valley trail system, and is accessible to a wide range of people – walkers, runners, bikers, skiers, inline skaters. While visible from the road, the best way to experience Talus Dome is from the adjacent trail.” The Dome was created by Ball Nogues Studio in 2012.

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Past and Present Combine in Frieze Project Spanning Iconic Sites in West Los Angeles https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/jay-ezra-nayssan-del-vaz-projects-frieze-los-angeles-2023-1234657471/ Thu, 16 Feb 2023 13:30:00 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234657471 In 2014, Jay Ezra Nayssan founded Del Vaz Projects, an exhibition venue that happened to be in his apartment’s guest bedroom. Coming to see the art on view was, of course, partly the point, but so too was sitting down, sharing tea, and having a conversation. 

Nayssan considers all this to be related to the Iranian practice of paziriaei, which can be used to describe the welcoming of guests into one’s home with tea, snacks, and conversation, as well as the room in which guests are hosted.

It’s in the spirt of paziriaei that Nayssan and Del Vaz Projects curated “Against the Edge” for Frieze Projects. Situated in sites across West Los Angeles that are directly connected to the history of both modern and contemporary art in LA, the project brings the past and present together in a setting where they can talk comfortably about their commonalities. They may even share some tea.

Each location—the Thomas Mann House, the Merry Go-Round Building, and the Villa Aurora—was chosen specifically for the artist being shown there. And because of the loose threads that connect them, both the art and the locations will be infused with a fresh narrative while maintaining their intrinsic nature.

Ahead of the fair’s opening, ARTnews spoke with Nayssan about “Against the Edge.”

ARTnews: Where did the concept for “Against the Edge” originate? 

Jay Ezra Nayssan: As a longtime resident of Santa Monica, I’ve been wanting to engage with cultural sites on the coastal Westside for some years now. When I was approached by Christine Messineo, director of Americas for Frieze, I took the opportunity to execute some of these projects that I had been considering for quite a while. 

Tell me about the process for selecting the sites across West LA. How did you make the final decisions? 

Rather than look for similarities between artist and site, I wanted to highlight disparities. For example, the Villa Aurora was a home purchased by Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, German Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany. By exhibiting the work of Kelly Akashi, whose practice engages deeply with the site of the Poston Internment Camp, history begins to fold in on itself. 

“Against the Edge” is curated by you and Del Vaz Projects. How did Del Vaz start and how has it grown since it was founded in 2014? 

Del Vaz Projects was founded in 2014 as an intimate exhibition platform located in the guest bedroom of my apartment in west Los Angeles. In 2020, my partner and I moved into a home together in Santa Monica, and since 2021, Del Vaz Projects has been operating exclusively as an arts nonprofit and is evolving into a curatorial platform where projects can occur both within and without our home. 

Nicola L. Nous Voulons Entendre installed at Thomas Mann House for ‘Frieze Projects: Against the Edge’, curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan for Frieze Los Angeles 2023. Photo by Paul Salveson. Courtesy of Frieze; Nicola L. Collection and Archive; and Alison Jacques, London. 

Tell me about the relationship between artists and the environment in West LA. How is the area different from the rest of the city? 

What began as a chain of artist colonies, entertainment districts, and laborer’s communities along the coast of west Los Angeles, the city of Santa Monica, and neighboring communities of Venice Beach and Pacific Palisades have, with the help of real estate speculation and short-sighted urbanization plans, essentially “flipped” on themselves, making them almost inaccessible to creative communities like those that once lived here. That being said, there still remains an extremely vibrant community of artists and cultural sites here, both of which are taking a very active role not only in protecting the rich history of the area but in creating new and dynamic opportunities for artists such as grants, studio spaces, artists residencies, and various types of exhibition platforms.

How has it been working with a global organization like Frieze? Do you think there is enough of a focus on the local within the global art market? 

Working with Frieze has been an incredible experience. I’ve felt encouraged and supported by the entire team from Los Angeles, New York, and London. Under the helm of Christine Messineo, who used to work and live in Los Angeles, Frieze is able to operate at an intimate and direct relationship with Los Angeles community in order to support really ambitious and complex projects like “Against the Edge.” Similarly, I think the local galleries, artists, and cultural institutions appreciate this relationship that Christine and Frieze are fostering here and in return are very much willing to collaborate and support Frieze Projects, which was certainly the case with “Against the Edge.” 

Given unlimited funds, what would be your ideal project? 

It would be incredible to expand “Against the Edge” across the city of Los Angeles and work with the immense network of historical sites and cultural institutions and their respective communities. There is no doubt that Los Angeles has an east-west duality, but more interesting would be to move north-south and engage not only with communities and cultural sites such as Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, but also urban infrastructure and monuments that are vital to life here, like the Los Angeles Aqueduct near Sylmar. 

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On the Eve of His Super Bowl Debut, Hank Willis Thomas Considers Misreadings of His Public Art https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/super-bowl-opportunity-statue-hank-willis-thomas-the-embrace-mlk-public-art-1234657023/ Fri, 10 Feb 2023 23:23:13 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234657023 Hank Willis Thomas is finally ready to sit back and enjoy the game.

On Sunday, the Brooklyn-based artist will cheer for the Philadelphia Eagles from his reserved seat at the Super Bowl in Arizona’s State Farm Stadium, where local art handlers and a member of his studio team have installed a large stainless-steel sculpture of an athlete’s hand grasping for a football. The ten-foot-tall statue, titled Opportunity (reflection), has been in the works for nearly six months, ever since the National Football League asked Thomas for help celebrating the sport’s importance in American culture.

“There is a metaphor here,” Thomas told ARTnews in a recent interview, explaining how the sculpture’s reflective surface resembled the Vince Lombardi Trophy given to the winning Super Bowl team. “That trophy symbolizes the highest peak of success in the league.”

Only a few weeks earlier, the artist was receiving a different kind of top honor. On an unseasonably mild January afternoon in Boston, Thomas presided over the unveiling of The Embrace, his monument to the civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King. That day was five years in the making — time spent navigating a labyrinthian public approval process and hundreds of questions about how to transport the 37,000-pound bronze statue — likely the largest in the United States — from a foundry in Walla Walla, Washington to the Boston Common.

Elected officials including Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, as well several of Kings’ relatives, were at the ceremony, as were many of the historians and activists who have urged Boston to include more representations of Black historical figures among the many white men featured in its tourist attractions and monuments about the city’s colonial past. A nonprofit called the Boston Foundation helped provide resources and $10.5 million in funds so that the statue could stand in the park’s 1965 Freedom Plaza, which honors 64 local civil rights leaders from the 1950s to the 1970s.

“We are learning how to have critical discourse in the public and how that works is not for the weak-stomached.”

Hank Willis Thomas, On The Response To The Embrace

The new MLK monument, according to Thomas, is about love. He wanted to push the boundaries of the figurative style usually associated with public art. With his collaborators at the architecture firm MASS Design Group, Thomas worked from a photograph of the couple hugging shortly after King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. The resulting sculpture — a 20-foot tall statue made of 609 pieces of welded bronze — focused on that loving gesture and omitted the civil rights icons’ faces. In Thomas’ vision, visitors could walk under the monumental work’s arched arms and experience King and Coretta Scott’s famed embrace, a living memorial honoring King’s vision of a more loving and just society.

“The invitation of our work is for the viewer to walk inside and feel like they are in the heart of that embrace between King and his wife,” Thomas said.

But images of the sculpture shared on social media illustrated a different kind of love. Mayor Wu was still speaking at the dedication ceremony when the sculpture was transformed into a meme on TikTok and Twitter, with users describing it irreverently as “a masturbatory metal homage” and a “horny Rorshach test.” Many users coalesced around the idea that the statue depicted sexual acts from every angle, and conspiracy theorists alleged that Thomas had intentionally disgraced two of the most beloved figures in American history.

None of that was true, but the rumors spread so quickly that some attendees of the opening celebrations were still at the monument site when they started receiving text messages from friends asking: Did the Martin Luther King Jr. monument really look like an enormous phallus?

“The internet is going to internet,” Yng-Ru Chen, a Boston gallerist who attended the opening told ARTnews. She disagreed with the online reactions to the memorial and said that experiencing the sculpture in person made it difficult to see what others did. “I very much enjoyed the monument when I was standing in front of it.”

How such a prolific artist like Hank Willis Thomas could see one of his greatest achievements sullied was a question that has stumped the art world. Few artists are as engaged with the public, and virtually none have the same level of expertise when it comes to navigating questions of representation and memorialization.

Thomas’ Long History With Public Art

A metallic sculpture of a hand holding a football is shown in front of multiple signs referencing the National Football League.
Opportunity (Reflection), Hank Willis Thomas, 2022.

Between 2015 and 2020, Thomas served on the New York City Public Design Commission, which oversees the municipal collection of permanent monuments and votes to approve new ones. His appointment coincided with a tumultuous period in the agency’s history, when the de Blasio administration greenlit nearly a dozen monuments that it ultimately never built. Some activists blamed the Public Design Commission for not doing enough to increase the city’s miniscule number of statues honoring women and people of color.

At the time, Thomas was not afraid to weigh into such controversial topics. “There are what, five or six [male] statues that I think could easily be replaced by individual statues of each of these women,” he said during a 2019 hearing about increasing gender diversity in the city’s statues. That comment was picked apart by the New York Post in an article claiming that he was putting the city’s monument men in peril. But colleagues described Thomas as taking that role very seriously.

“Commissioners make a choice to serve and contribute to the City of New York and with that, bring in their expertise and experience,” Mary Valverde, a commissioner who served alongside the artist, told ARTnews. “I can say that as a colleague Hank has been pleasant and I have only known him to be open and generous in nature.”

During the same period that Thomas served as a commissioner, he expanded his public art practice.

In 2016, Thomas, along with fellow artists Eric Gottesman, Michelle Woo, and Wyatt Gallery, founded Super PAC For Freedoms to serve as an artistic platform for civic engagement. The “collective,” as Thomas has characterized it, has commissioned artists to create billboards during political elections and has staged awareness campaigns tackling issues like the Iranian government’s treatment of women. According to Thomas, the collective has about 30 members, many of whom work on the artist’s personal projects. “We don’t really draw lines with the studio,” he said.

During his tenure on the Public Design Commission, Thomas also marshaled his own permanent monument onto the city streets. Near the Brooklyn Bridge, he erected Unity, a 22-foot bronze arm with an index finger pointing skyward. The work was commissioned by another city agency called the Percent for Art program, though it still needed approval from the Public Design Commission. (Thomas recused himself from those deliberations.) When the statue was unveiled in 2019, a New York Times critic described it as “a traditional and fairly conservative work.”

Thomas still remembers the detractors who claimed his piece was extremist. At the time, a handful of preservation activists and Republican politicians claimed that Unity was a symbol of ISIS, the terrorist group. A city spokesman eventually came to the artist’s defense. “This accusation is completely absurd — is every sports fan who holds up a foam finger an ISIS sympathizer?” Ryan Max, an employee with the Cultural Affairs Department had said. “The gesture depicted by this sculpture is a universal sign of uplift and aspiration.”

The experience with Unity prepared Thomas, he said, for “disparate and unexpected responses” to his public art works, adding that his proposal for The Embrace was the most representational option from the five finalists, which included abstractions by Yinka Shonibare, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and other famous artists. Chosen from over one hundred artist proposals, the finalists’ designs were shared with the public in 2018, receiving over 1,000 comments, before Thomas’ Embrace was finally selected in 2019 by the Boston Art Commission, which oversees public art in the city.

BROOKLYN, NY - JUNE 19:  Thousands of protesters hoiding signs walk past Brooklyn's finger sculpture which towers over the streets at 22 1/2 feet tall. The big bronze arm sits right at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge and points towards the sky,  Creator Hank Willis Thomas described that "u201cIt"u2019s about unity, hope, coming together. Also in New York, people don"u2019t look up, so it"u2019s a call to action,"u201d Protesters walked from Cadman Plaza to take part in the peaceful protest across the Brooklyn Bridge.   This was part of the Unite NY 2020, Bringing all of New York Together rally and march to support Black Lives Matter and protest against police brutality as protests that happened around the country to celebrate Juneteenth day which marks the end of slavery in the United States. Protesters continue taking to the streets across America and around the world after the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer Derek Chauvin that was kneeling on his neck during for eight minutes, was caught on video and went viral.  During his arrest as Floyd pleaded, "I Can't Breathe". The protest are attempting to give a voice to the need for human rights for African American's and to stop police brutality against people of color.  They are also protesting deep-seated racism in America.   Many people were wearing masks and observing social distancing due to the coronavirus pandemic.  Photographed in the Manhattan Borough of New York on June 19, 2020, USA.  (Photo by Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images)
Thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters holding signs walk past Unity, which towers over the streets of New York at 22 1/2 feet tall. The big bronze arm sits right at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge and points towards the sky on June 19, 2020.

Though other people have characterized the debate around The Embrace as a controversy, Thomas sees it as a public conversation. “We are learning how to have critical discourse in the public and how that works is not for the weak-stomached,” he said. “Lots of people heard about the monument before the online feedback, but ten times more people heard about it after. Kim Kardashian on her trip to Harvard Business School even felt the need to drive by and post about it.”

As he mentioned Kardashian, he received an update on Instagram — the artist Nina Chanel Abney was posting positively about The Embrace on her social media account.

“It’s important that I talk about how my practice is a conversation with the viewer,” Thomas continued. “To whatever degree there is adversity, it is also an opportunity for me to engage. How could I be upset or disappointed when a work about communal love is so well-embraced?”

Thomas said he was “fascinated” to see how responses to The Embrace became shaped by a particular photographic angle once it was fed into social media and that he was “surprised” that there was far more focus in web publications on that response than King’s legacy.

“It was surprising, like a reality check,” Thomas said, explaining that he made a series of maquettes so that his team, funders, and public officials could scrutinize the design. Nobody, he said, had ever raised an issue as far he knew with how the memorial looked from different angles.

“You forget that the media is a business, and they say sex sells,” Thomas said. “So it’s like, oh right, how naïve of me to think we can talk about social justice and not have it overshadowed with juvenile conversations.”

Not everyone has agreed that the controversy was all spectacle. There are some relatives of the Kings who were displeased with the monument. Seneca Scott, a cousin of Coretta Scott King, tweeted “I still can’t get over how they tried to play my fam,” adding in an essay that he found the sculpture “rather insulting.” Later, in the week, when speaking to The Guardian, he revised his original statement. “When I wrote that, I was in the anger part of grief. Now I’ve accepted the grief,” he said, adding that the fact that the statue was privately funded had made him “not nearly as upset.”

The initial blowback, however, forced advocates into damage control. Even Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu, had to defend the monument to her own colleagues. “I went to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, I think the next week, and I told everyone off,” she said in a recent interview. “I said it was our monument. We are proud of it. We love it.”

Making Public Art Means Accepting That ‘You Can’t Please Everyone’

The Embrace statue by artist Hank Willis Thomas is seen in Boston surrounded by onlookers.

Other artists who’ve experienced their own public art controversies are sympathetic to Thomas.

“Criticizing specific angles of the sculpture out of its context is like judging an entire painting based solely on specific details,” artist Lava Thomas, who is not related to Hank, told ARTnews. “It’s a limited perspective.

In 2019, Lava Thomas learned that San Francisco had scrapped her winning proposal for a Maya Angelou monument because an elected official did not like the nonfigurative elements of her design, which included a nine-foot-tall bronze book with Angelou’s portrait on one side and her words on the other. It would take the artist another year of fighting through bureaucracy and organizing support until public officials reinstated her version, though it has yet to be completed.

When asked how to prepare for the public art process, she recommended that artists “develop a tough skin and accept that you can’t please everyone.”

Hank Willis Thomas seems to have developed that thick skin. He has been attending an classes at Harvard Business School in a classroom not far from where his 2015 artwork “Ernest and Ruth” once sat on the campus quad (That edition of the work has since been moved to Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C.). And, while he commutes between Boston and his homebase of New York, he is already planning a series of other public artworks — at least six in the near future — in cities like Seattle, Chicago, Miami, Austin, and San Antonio

It would stand to reason, then, that traveling to the Super Bowl and seeing Opportunity (reflection) surrounded by the 60,000 sports fans walking toward the game must be something of a relief for Thomas. The sculpture is based on his previous work, Opportunity, which belongs to a private collection and has a chameleon-like finish that changes color as the viewer passes it. Like many of his public artworks, the new monument will be placed outside, temporarily placed on the lawn outside the State Farm Stadium. it will then be on view for one year in front of the Arizona State University Art Museum.

“Hank’s powerful sculpture showcased during Super Bowl week beautifully represents the passion, strength, and hope at the heart of our game,” Peter O’Reilly, a spokesman for the NFL, said in a statement. “We hope the sculpture inspires the thousands of individuals who experience it throughout the week and well beyond.”

Thomas remains close to the spotlight, but this weekend he will not be the subject of scrutiny; for the moment. He can leave that burden to the coaches and players on the field.

“I just feel honored to be a part of all of it,” Thomas said.

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A Seven-Foot-Tall ‘Tribute’ Statue of Queen Elizabeth II is Unveiled by King Charles III https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/queen-elizabeth-ii-statue-unveiled-by-king-charles-iii-1234646503/ Fri, 11 Nov 2022 20:52:02 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234646503 A new statue of the late Queen Elizabeth II was unveiled yesterday by King Charles III. The monument sits in a niche at York Minster Cathedral in England.

The 1.1-ton, 7-foot-tall French limestone statue shows the queen in her robes of the Order of the Garter and is installed above the West Front entrance of the 850-year-old building.

It was made by stonemason Richard Bossons, who worked at York Minster for 11 years and won a competition to create the statue. Previously a specialist in cathedral gargoyles, Bossons has never before completed a portrait. The 3-ton lump was cut by a machine before he added the finishing touches with a chisel.

“I hope everybody likes it. It is the best I could pull out of myself. Hopefully I have done justice to the Queen and the King likes it and I have done justice to the front of the building,” Bossons said of his work.

The statue was commissioned five years ago with the intention of commemorating the queen’s platinum jubilee. It was finished in August, just one month before her death.

On his decision to portray the queen later in life, Bossoms remarked, “I wanted to get a sense of her longevity on the throne over 70 years.”

At the unveiling, King Charles reflected, “The late Queen was always vigilant for the welfare of her people during her life,” calling the statue “a tribute to a life of extraordinary service and devotion.” 

The statue will eventually overlook the Queen Elizabeth Square.

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Biden Rolls Back Trump-Era Restrictions on Public Art in Federal Buildings https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/biden-rolls-back-trump-public-art-mandate-1234617678/ Wed, 02 Feb 2022 16:35:19 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234617678 On Monday, President Joe Biden rolled back a Trump-era rule restricting the visual art that could be displayed in federal buildings. The order, implemented in July 2020 amid nationwide Black Lives Matter demonstrations against the police killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, stipulated that works commissioned should portray prominent American historical figures, events, and “illustrate ideals upon which our nation was founded.” The order also required a “lifelike or realistic representation of that person, not an abstract or modernist representation.”

The narrow stipulations excluded a large number of artists from consideration from the ​​Art in Architecture program, which commissions artwork in government spaces. The amendment to the policy, announced by the General Services Administration, reverses the restrictions on subject matter with the aim of attracting diverse candidates and art styles.

“GSA’s public art collection is a national treasure, and this rule reflects the government’s important role in ensuring equity and opportunity for artists of all kinds and from all communities,” said the agency’s administrator, Robin Carnahan, in a statement.

Carnahan added, “Public art is for the people and we want to make sure our public spaces reflect the rich diversity and creativity that strengthens and inspires them.”

The Trump mandate specified that statues should depict figures such as former presidents, abolitionists, or police and firefighters killed or injured during service. “America owes its present greatness to its past sacrifices,” the document said. It also dedicated a section to the debate around monuments to Civil War generals and other controversial historical figures linked to slavery and colonialism, which were the frequent target of protestors.

“These statues are not ours alone, to be discarded at the whim of those inflamed by fashionable political passions; they belong to generations that have come before us and to generations yet unborn,” the order read.

Art in Architecture has commissioned around 500 pieces of public artwork on government property since 1972. Among the works that would have failed to meet Trump’s nationalistic stipulations are Alexander Calder’s soaring 1974 sculpture Flamingo, outside the John C. Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago, and Ellsworth Kelly’s 1998 Boston Panels, a series of monochromatic panels installed in seven areas of Boston’s John Joseph Moakley US Courthouse.

“Art looks different in different parts of the country and in different communities, and so now this allows us when we go into a federal building to potentially see art that reflects that local community and/or the individuals within the community and across the country,” Krystal Brumfield, associate administrator for Office of Government-wide Policy within the General Services Administration, said in a statement.

This is the second effort from Biden’s administration to undo Trump’s agenda against the aesthetics of federal spaces. In December 2020, Trump signed an executive order to ensure all new government buildings costing more than $50 million feature “beautiful architecture.” The order said that “classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style,” and disparaged Brutalism and Deconstructivism as having “little aesthetic appeal.” Biden rescinded that executive order in February 2021.

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Kerry James Marshall to Design Stained Glass Windows for National Cathedral Following Removal of Confederate Symbols https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/kerry-james-marshall-windows-national-cathedral-1234604709/ Thu, 23 Sep 2021 19:46:17 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234604709 Kerry James Marshall has been tapped to design new windows for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., church officials announced. The previous windows, which had been donated by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1953, honored the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

In 2015, the windows became a point of contention. Two years later, in 2017, the National Cathedral decided to remove the two stained glass windows honoring Lee and Jackson. At the time, nine people had just been murdered in a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by the white supremacist Dylann Roof. The shooting prompted church leaders to think deeply about the presence of Confederate symbols in the National Cathedral.

“Right now I don’t have a clear concept of what I think I will do,” Marshall told the New York Times. “It will have to be work that is able to synthesize a multiplicity of ideas and sentiments about what the country represents for all of us. There will be some kind of imagery that presents itself as an invitation to reflection on the meaning of America now.”

Marshall is a preeminent contemporary artist well known for his engagement with social justice, Black portraiture, and American history. In 2020, Marshall’s work was featured on the cover of Vogue’s September 2020 issue.

In 2018, Marshall vowed to never make public artwork again after the city of Chicago attempted to sell his mural Knowledge and Power (1995), which he had painted for the Chicago Public Library. Though the city reversed its choice to sell the work, Marshall remained disillusioned—until now.

This project represents the first time Marshall has worked with stained glass. He is collaborating with the poet Elizabeth Alexander, who will write a poem to be installed in stone tablets alongside the windows. The new windows are expected to be unveiled in 2023.

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Kameelah Janan Rasheed on Learning and Unlearning https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/kameelah-janan-rasheed-interview-reading-learning-unlearning-1234597485/ Thu, 01 Jul 2021 18:49:05 +0000 https://www.artnews.com/?p=1234597485 “Finally in the coherence / we weep”: the words are in serif font and the letters slightly effaced. The w in “weep,” in particular, is missing flecks of ink, and I know that Kameelah Janan Rasheed must have considered its acutely threadbare shape when she placed this word on the bottom right corner of an unnumbered page about three-quarters of the way through her 2019 book No New Theories. Throughout the book, and across her art practice, Rasheed attends to text that is tentatively legible and partially withheld.

Rigorously interdisciplinary and a self-named “learner,” Rasheed often makes work in the form of immersive installations stuffed with scraps of text that she finds or writes. Taking over surfaces like the facade of the Brooklyn Museum, a massive digital billboard in Times Square, or the walls and crevices of a gallery in Berlin, the artist makes architectural elements from poetic language, using her fine-tuned eye for typeface, color contrasts, and scale to bring viewers into a physically active reading experience.

Rasheed, born and raised in East Palo Alto, California, began as a high school teacher, after receiving a BA in public policy from Pomona College and a master’s in education from Stanford University. Still working full-time in curriculum development, Rasheed intertwines her educational impulses with her artistic production, pairing exhibitions and book publishing with public lectures, workbooks, and on-site workshops.

Like the radical Black publishers who preceded her, Rasheed wants to own all the means of her production. In her home studio, she keeps a negative scanner, a Xerox scanner, a Risograph, and an etching press. She also keeps an extensive collection of books stacked around her workspace, many of which became verbal footnotes during our conversation—at the moment, she’s reading and referencing volumes by cultural geographer Katherine McKittrick, Blackpentecostal Breath by Ashon T. Crawley, and Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier, to name just a few.

A long animation cel is spread out on a desk, with black ink painted on in blotchy patterns

Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s desk, where she paints film for animation projects.

Rasheed is equally interested in algorithmic literatures—the language of artificial intelligence and text generation—and the juxtaposition of machine learning and predictive text with handwritten annotation. In our conversation, Rasheed spoke about these autocorrect algorithms as being almost oracles that can point the reader in unexpected directions. It feels like more than coincidence, then, that when I downloaded a robo-transcription of our interview, the document was filled with lucky incoherences. The software refused to write “No New Theories,” instead offering enigmatic alternative titles (“know me very,” “nonappearance”) for this intentionally fragmented and elusive book. When Rasheed mentioned understanding “myself,” the machine heard “my father,” coalescing the artist with the family member whose reading and note-taking process so closely resembles her own. “Unlearning” became “I’m learning” became “unlearning” once more in the robo-transcription and in our actual conversation, as Rasheed enacted a close reading and generous rereading of her practice, her precedents, and her translation of complex, expansive care.

 

 

Long vertical black-and-white banners with images and text hang between columns in front of a museum's entrance

Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Are We Reading Closely?, 2020–21, banners installed on the facade of the Brooklyn Museum.

NICOLE ACHEAMPONG So many of your installations are site-specific. Could you talk about how you engage with architecture? Does the space ever end up affecting the content of the work?

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED When I enter a space where my work will be displayed, I like to think about how people are going to move in that space. Will they have the option of lingering, of stepping back and moving forward? I like to be responsive to the architecture. If a space has many 90-degree angles, I can think about it as a book. If a space has really high walls, it’s an opportunity for me to think about the affordances of such height and what I can do with wall painting and wall drawing. None of my work is “pick up and pack and put in.” I have to physically be there. I have to sit with the spatial realities. I have to annoy the installers: “Over there! Just kidding, I changed my mind, move it over here.” I’ve had the privilege of actually being able to change the work during the show. That’s been really important for me in thinking about knowledge and unlearning and unknowing.

ACHEAMPONG I’ve seen a lot of scientific vocabulary sprinkled in your writing about your art. You’ve discussed your interest in ectopias, or abnormal positions of bodily organs, and you appropriate that term to talk about displacement of language rather than of biological function. Another word that comes up again and again in your artist statements is “ecosystem.”

RASHEED When I was in elementary and middle school, the science lab teacher happened to be a Black man. He took me under his wing. He would let me order supplies and insects from the biology catalogue. From a young age, I was interested in doing experiments as a form of play. By the time I got to college, I had written off science as a career path. Now I feel like my eleven-year-old self is resurfacing. Scientific language is important to my art practice not because I believe that science is the only way to understand the world, but because I think of myself as an interdisciplinary person. I used to struggle to describe what I do because I didn’t have language that implied relationality and changeability and adaptation and experimentation. “Ecosystem” is a term I can use to think about that. I grew up in Silicon Valley, so there was an implicit interest in technology and the internet. We were the recipients, I guess is the word I’ll use, of a lot of tech programs, and so I was interested in computers and networks from a very early age. Even thinking about what Octavia Butler talks about as “primitive hypertext.”

ACHEAMPONG That’s another term that pops up frequently in your work. I was prompted to read the transcript of a 1998 panel discussion at MIT in which Butler uses it, where she’s talking about how she’s engaged in analog research.

RASHEED Butler did in a few sentences what I had been trying to articulate for several years: she asserted the right to move laterally across many disciplines and ideas, described it as a physical process. When I’m building out installations, I am interested in what it means to read with the body. When I put a large work next to a tiny thing, you can stand back from the large piece, but you have to move in close to see the small one. One time after I finished an installation, I sat in the corner and watched people move. It looked like they were dancing.

A book is open to a spread with collaged texted and photocopied handwritten notes in the margins

Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s book No New Theories, 2019, screenprinted and sewn bound.

ACHEAMPONG After reading some of your thoughts on hypertext, as in your 2017 interview with the Creative Independent, I felt more conscious of how algorithms determine my daily learning habits. Do you find AI and machine learning to be a generative partner to your own learning?

RASHEED I have more than four thousand photos of Black families, which I’ve been collecting since 2010. I’m interested in the care that’s given to Black people in our lifetime but also in what happens to our material remains, the little stuff that is left behind. I got really interested in digital afterlife. I’ve been researching GANs, the use of AI to create fictional faces and voices and videos, and the destructive potential of this technology. If you go to thispersondoesnotexist.com, it generates a face for a fictional person, using a GAN that has been trained on data sets of photos. I imagine an entire world populated with Black folks who have passed away, who are somehow living on through these avatars they never consented to. My interest in AI and neural networks and GANs and machine learning in general comes out of a desire to understand how the abuse of afterlife, of material culture, of organic material extends into the digital landscape as well. While these technologies can be generative in many ways, so far we’re on a path of extractive policies.

A book bound with a pink spiral with large, hand-cut lettering

Kameelah Janan Rasheed: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations, 2019, Risograph printed and spiral bound.

But an autocorrect algorithm can be like an oracle, an act of divination that points somewhere you didn’t expect. Sometimes I’m typing one word and another word pops up, and that asks me to go somewhere else with my thinking.

ACHEAMPONG The main text of your book No New Theories is a conversation between you and critic Jessica Lynne, with annotations and citations that seem made in the spirit of primitive hypertext that Butler speaks of.

RASHEED What’s funny about this book is that the first edition came out in 2018. It had some printing errors, so we pulled all the copies from the shelves. Then, early in 2019, Printed Matter said they had some funding to reprint the book. My first thought was just to correct everything. But then I thought about making the revision process public, to embrace the fact that this is a revised text and that revision is part of learning—a notion of publishing as call-and-response. When I publish something, I want people to respond. I want it to be annotated, literally and figuratively.

Jess and I did that interview in 2017. By mid-2019, we still believed most of the stuff in it, but there were other things we were thinking about. I printed out the interview and passed it off to her. She wrote a bunch of notes, which I included as footnotes. And then I went back and annotated on top of that. Even as we were wrapping up the book, I thought of another thing I wanted to add. And I said to myself, “Kameelah, a book is not the final time you get to speak.” The book becomes the temporary gathering of ideas. The only thing that holds them together is the structure of the book. But that doesn’t mean you can’t publish another book. I later noticed that the annotated pages in No New Theories look like my dad’s notes from his religious studies in the 1980s. He has a binder of excerpts from the Quran, along with photocopies, typed and handwritten notes, sometimes on the back of handouts he got at pharmacy school. No New Theories ended up following almost the same format as his process for learning and revising and processing. My dad’s notes are this singular plane where all of these life cycles have collapsed onto one page, and I think about the interview in No New Theories as being very similar, where all these different life cycles of revision and thinking and learning and unlearning are collapsed onto one page. Now I’m working on the third edition of No New Theories, because I’m interested in what it means to keep a publishing project in perpetual processing—what it means to say the book is never finished. I want it to be almost a ritual, returning to this book every few years to revise it.

A dark-skinned woman wearing a black headscarf stands in the middle a room of seated people with thoughtful expressions. Everyone is looking at and listening to someone off-camera

Kameelah Janan Rasheed facilitating a workshop in her installation Ecosystem, 2018, at the New Museum, New York.

ACHEAMPONG Your bookmaking process has an accidental lineage with your father. I am also wondering about your relationship to a lineage of Black radical publishing. In your exhibition at the New Museum with the Black School, you presented your research on independent Black presses. How are you connecting your own publishing practice to your historical precedents?

RASHEED Through my recent research, I started learning more about small publishing projects that were happening in East Palo Alto, where I grew up. There was the Mothers for Equal Education bookshop. I also found a publisher who wrote a book about Black curriculum. He has an opening section where he says: “This book was made by Black people. The words were written by Black people. It was printed by Black people.” During the New Museum program, I was really interested in building an archive of Black printed matter. Now there are more than three hundred pieces—and more every day—from Black publications from the ’60s through the ’80s. Everything from Aché, which was a Black lesbian newsletter up in the Bay Area, to examples produced by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. I’m collecting these things because I want not only to talk about them, but to hold and touch them. I had library hours at the New Museum show so anyone who could get there could look at everything and engage the material with their hands. That was important for me because sometimes these publications are behind paywalls or at institutions where people can’t touch the things that are connected to their lived experience.

For me, the legacy of radical Black publishing lies not only in the concept, but also in the design, in the production, in modes of distribution, in the use of bookstores not just to sell books but to organize and get together. When I think about No New Theories, I’m thinking about what it means to widen the scope of what’s considered a publication, to bring those histories back in. I’m still building this archive, and my assistant and I are going to start scanning again. The goal is to have access to Black design aesthetics, especially vernacular typesetting and handwriting. People used to have these beautiful handbills that were drawn by hand. It’s amazing to think about Black folks who made do with what they had, and became skilled print technicians and makers of beautiful objects.

ACHEAMPONG That’s a perfect segue into the physicality of the book objects that you’re creating. An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations [2019] is a spiral-bound book; Scoring the Stacks (experiment ii), also from 2019, is saddle stitch. The common thread across your binding choices seems to be that these are books you can very easily lay flat and open wide. It seems like an anti-precious tactic.

Multicolored index cards printed with instructions for activities to perform in a library lie on a black surface

Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Scoring the Stacks I, 2019, performance, banner, notecards, and prints; at the Brooklyn Public Library.

RASHEED The spiral-bound book, which I published with Endless Editions, was such a fun product because with the Risograph there’s so much imperfection. Sometimes I buy books that seem too pretty for me to read. I wanted the book that I made to be beautiful, but not precious. I would love to go to someone’s house and see No New Theories with Post-it notes and marginalia. That kind of reader engagement is important to me because I have a hard time reading books without writing in them. I want to invite people to do that.

I’m also interested in intentionally leaving literal and figurative gaps in the book that invite people to participate—things that will get people to do something with their body or say something as they’re reading. When I did the Scoring the Stacks project at Brooklyn Public Library in 2019, people had score cards that they carried as they moved throughout the library to find things and then create something new. We just finished our catalogue workbook for that, and there’s a series of activities in it. The oils in your hand can smudge the cover. I never want to make something that people feel like they can’t touch. I would not be sad if there was a finger smudge on the wall. That’s exciting to me. I like the tactility of making work that is partially on the wall, but because of the humidity in the space or the quality of the paper, it’s kind of coming off the wall as well. I like the markings of living-ness in my work.

A large banner with a poetic quote hangs from the mezzanine in a library's lobby

Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Scoring the Stacks I, 2019, performance, banner, notecards, and prints; at the Brooklyn Public Library. Photo Gregg Richards

ACHEAMPONG How do you determine which typeface to use?

RASHEED I have a bias toward serif fonts. I feel like they have a bit more attitude, a little more noise. My husband makes music, and my process of selecting a typeface is similar to how he finds samples. He might hear a particular bass line or half a bar that interests him and save it in a folder. If I’m reading a book, I might just like the curve of an a. So I take out my phone and use the Genius Scan app to save that a, or photocopy it on the spot and put it to the side. I collect texts in a very intuitive way. I’ve started to read this book called Understanding Molecular Typography. It’s about how letters have physical and chemical properties because of the ink. I thought that was kind of amazing, and it made sense to me. I recently published this essay in Active Cultures about a West African practice in Quranic schools, where after writing a verse on a tablet with ink, some folks wash it off and ingest the water with the ink in it because they want to ingest these passages of the Quran for their spiritual properties.

ACHEAMPONG While looking at images of one of your recent works, the all things are organized as uncertainty flag at Ballroom Marfa, I was struck by how the words aligned with the movement of the flag, to see the italics on their own kind of tilt.

RASHEED When something isn’t typeset using a computer, you get these small imperfections that are really beautiful. I like using things that are not typed out, because I need the noise. I need the tonality. I need the texture. There’s a certain texture that comes out of photocopying a page in a book and then cutting out one letter and enlarging it. I can’t achieve that noise with standard text from a machine that is designed to be perfect.

ACHEAMPONG Right before I received the assignment to interview you, I read an essay by Jane Gallop called “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters.” It’s about how reading, as we typically process it, is projection. She defines close reading as a form of disruption that allows us to see things that we don’t already know. Does that idea resonate with how you move viewers into a more intentional kind of reading?

A red flag with black and white art and lettering waves against a clear blue sky

Kameelah Janan Rasheed: all things are organized as uncertainty, 2021, flag; at Ballroom Marfa.

RASHEED Some people come to my work and read it like a book. One person said, “I went to your show, and I googled every sentence, because I wanted to understand the source information.” And others say, “Girl, this is pretty. I just like the shape, and I don’t know what the words are, but I like how the text creates this shape on the wall.” All that counts as reading. Going into a space and trying to make sense of what’s there is a reading process. That’s the case for all art. But when it comes to my work, because I’m using text and words and language, people tend to over-intellectualize it.

“Are we reading closely?” [2020] at the Brooklyn Museum involved two public programs. At the first, I talked about the importance of being engrossed in the text and what a text can possibly be. The second was about close reading in the context of surveillance: some texts are not supposed to be read and deciphered by everybody. What does it mean when a text enters an institutional archive, and people close-read it? What does it mean when someone goes to study a particular community and make sense of a ritual, despite not being invited? I think that close reading is important in terms of having an engaged, embodied, intentional reading process. But I also think about what it means to refuse to be read. Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men talks about Black folks being particularly evasive. She says something like: Folks always trying to get in your business. Slip a little bit of something outside the door, so they go away, but hold onto something for yourself. What gets unread is just as important as what is read. Yes, it’s important for you to read everything, but the choice not to read something is important too—either out of respect or a desire to let mystery persist.

ACHEAMPONG You talk about “unreading,” and another word that I’ve heard in this conversation is “unlearning.” What are you unlearning?

RASHEED I am unlearning the urge to ascribe scientific certainty to everything. It’s not because I don’t believe in science. I just don’t think that everything needs to be deciphered or assigned a certain meaning. It’s OK for things to be messy and murky and opaque. When I think about unlearning, I think about what it means to unpin some of the ideas that make us comfortable. What does it mean to be able to sit with discomfort? You can enjoy the moment without understanding what’s happening.

I spoke about No New Theories in terms of all these sexy curatorial ideas around incompleteness and revision and uncertainty. But then when it happened to me, I said, “I don’t want this! I meant it could be cute for an idea.” But if uncertainty is part of my ethos, then I need to live it. Unlearning for me means drawing a stronger alignment between the things that I hold true as ideas and how I actually live my life. Part of that is letting go of certainty and finality. This is why I’m going to keep coming back to No New Theories. This is why, if someone asks me a question about something, I say, this is what I think right now, at 7:20 pm. But tomorrow it could change. I’m trying to be comfortable with my discomfort. To understand myself as a learner means complete surrender. And that surrender is hard. That’s what unlearning is for me: surrendering.

Electronic billboards in Times Square are lit up with white and yellow text at night

Kameelah Janan Rasheed: My Husband is an Essential Worker, 2020, digital projection in Times Square.

ACHEAMPONG I was sitting with your work My husband is an Essential Worker [2020] and particularly with the words, “let’s take care of one another.” From there my thoughts wandered to Saidiya Hartman’s words: “care is the antidote to violence.” Do you think of reading as an antidote?

RASHEED I had this conversation with someone else. They asked: “What do you think art can do? Can it change people?” No, art doesn’t change people. People see art. They engage with it. And there may be a series of actions that result from that engagement. Reading is an invitation to do many other necessary things in the world. So much of what I’ve learned has come through the practice of reading. But I could have easily read and said, “that’s cute,” and then just kept on with whatever I was doing. I’m interested in how people read, but what I’m really interested in is how that process can invite other ways of being and engaging. Can reading combine with other rituals and practices to make you a person who engages differently? Last summer, at the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests, everyone was like, “Read all these books!” Then everybody read the books about anti-racism and kept on acting the same. Stop wasting people’s time!

ACHEAMPONG Exactly.

RASHEED Genuine change is going to take many more steps. Reading saved me. But do I think that reading alone is going to be the antidote? Absolutely not. People have to have the desire to enact the world that they’re reading about. Otherwise it’s just a recreational activity

This article appears under the title “In the Studio: Kameelah Janan Rasheed” in the July/August 2021 issue, pp. 70–79.

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