There is an entire history of artists working at the Museum of Modern Art alone. In the 1960s, sculptor Sol Lewitt worked there as a receptionist, Minimalist Dan Flavin took a job as an elevator operator, and painter Robert Ryman manned the galleries as a security guard. The artist Howardena Pindell even worked as a curatorial assistant in the drawings department; she came up with the idea to use discarded paper punches in her abstract paintings from her time in that office.

This fringe history of artists moonlighting as MoMA workers informed “Day Jobs,” one of the year’s most memorable shows. Held at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, the exhibition was “an attempt to dispel the stubborn myth of the lone genius, working in isolation in the studio creating masterpieces,” as curator Veronica Roberts put it in an interview with ARTnews.

She pointed to Tishan Hsu, an artist now known for painting and sculptures that combine the imagery of technology with the human body. “Hsu was a word processor in the 1980s, and was doing this with predominantly women at a corporate law firm… He began thinking about how screens were changing our relationships with our bodies, and that question has been the foundation to everything he has made since.” A painting from 1982, Portrait, is on view in “Day Jobs”; it depicts glitchy lips and eyes on a panel with rounded corners reminiscent of early IBM computing screens.

“Day Jobs,” with its assertion that artists’ art is not the only aspect of their life which defines them, and indeed that such circumstances impact what they make, was emblematic of a larger trend that could be seen in US museums in 2023. This year, many institutions began to focus on how constellations of artists form around shared lived experiences. Artists were being celebrated as multihyphenates who are influenced by their peers.

This framing lends itself to explorations of artists’ biographies, which have not always been celebrated in the field of curating. Roberts told ARTnews that while coming up as a curator, mentioning an artist’s biography was disparaged. “There was an endeavor to keep an artist’s life totally separate from their work,” she explained. Of course, there are dangers in overusing biography, which can result in flattened readings of complex works and practices, especially ones by artists from marginalized groups. Now, however, it feels like a misstep to not thoughtfully pay mind to the circumstances of art-making, and this is encouraged in shows that expand the very concept of what it means to be an artist.

One such show was “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969,” which opened at the CCS Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in June. The exhibition considered Native North American artists who had incorporated theatre and performance into their work, and took its inspiration from the 1969 proposal Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process, written by teachers at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. The document proposed that centuries-old forms of Native performance could be reinterpreted for a new age, while also noting that all this contemporary practice “cannot be developed overnight.” In the authors’ words, “it will come only as the result of an educational process in which Indian artists are created who can then make their own statements.”

“The document was a revelation to me as it felt like a missing piece of art history,” curator Candice Hopkins said in an interview. “Here were the dual origins of Native theatre and performance art, rooted in practices of experimentalism and cultural difference.”

By rooting her show in what could be labeled experimental theatre, Hopkins was arguing that the artists she included were inspired not just by art history but by the other arts, too. And she suggested that though they were bound by Indigeneity, these artists were also borne from varying experiences, interests, interpretations, and Native nation affiliations that impacted their art. The show included black-and-white videos of IAIA students performing in masks and regalia, but it also included paintings by Kay WalkingStick, a sculpture by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, and newly commissioned choreography by Jeffrey Gibson. All of these artists were “making their own statements,” as the IAIA teachers might have put it.

Hopkins’s rediscovery of the 1969 manifesto and archives is a testament to how the IAIA students were creating works not meant for art institutions. The contents of “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines,” a show at the Brooklyn Museum through March 2024, function in a similar way. The exhibition highlights zines (short for fanzines), made in the advent of accessible photocopy machines, from the 1970s to present day.

More than 1,000 objects are packed into the galleries, which present how zines aided in the formation of networks of avant-garde musicians and visual artists, many of whom were queer.  And many wear multiple hats. Vaginal Davis, for example, appears in this show as an artist, a model, and a musician. She was credited in over a dozen wall labels, for her self-published Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine (1987–91), for being a subject in Rick Castro’s photographs, and for her collaboration with Lawrence Elbert on the music video The White to be Angry (1999), produced to accompany a song by her punk band Petro, Mureil and Esther (PME). Davis even tracked the interconnectedness of the North American punk scene in the “History of Punk Timeline” (n.d.)—a foldout made for the Toronto-based J.D.s magazine (1985–91).

Branden W. Joseph, an art historian who curated the show with Drew Sawyer, said of the exhibition, “These relationships were not only on the basis of actual lived experience, but also, in many cases, fostered by relationships and situations that artists imagined and then brought into existence for themselves.” The zine, which can be printed matter in addition to video and audio cassettes, was an extension of mail art and artist books, and came into being to meet these community-building desires. And while the exhibition tracks the zine’s genesis in a pre-internet era, it also argues for its enduring popularity with a space devoted to contemporary practitioners.

In a much different way, this year’s edition of the Made in L.A. biennial, titled “Acts of Living” and now on view at the Hammer, mirrors the curatorial thrust of “Copy Machine Manifesto” with stated ambitions to “situate art as an expanded field of culture that is entangled with everyday life,” according to its description. The show includes an exhibition-within-an-exhibition by the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), which has installed a break room (including a Bunn coffee maker, microwave, and soft Muzak) to house a selection from its collections. Food, drink, and casual browsing is unheard of in archives, and LACA wanted to create an alternative space for this.

“It’s very much a conversation on preciousness and preservation” LACA’s director and archivist Hailey Loman told ARTnews. “We emphasize that we want you to work in this space, we want you to hang out here … We are not interested in preserving materials ‘forever.’ We care about how looking at a document can make changes to our lives right now.”

The collections include paper trails from the practices of Patricia Fernández, Barbara Kruger, and others. And while Loman described that archives often prioritize press releases and documentation of exhibitions or performances, those that pertain to the nitty-gritty of process receive a subsidiary focus. In LACA’s collections, there are gas bills, studio leases, even paintings that were deemed subpar by the artists and then tossed out. “These are things that help us to learn how art is getting made and how people are living and surviving,” Loman said.

This greater acknowledgement of the labor involved in the arts coincides with a burgeoning workers’ movement in museums. Across the country, staff at institutions ranging from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum have led unionization campaigns. Meanwhile, artists are agitating for fair compensation. In 2018, the W.A.G.E. organization released their often-cited fee calculator, which determines project-based payment by both an artist’s participation (i.e. solo or group show) and a nonprofit’s annual operating expenses (i.e., from Apexart to the Met). Institutions can advertise their W.A.G.E certification status if they comply with these rates; the most notable ones to do so have been Artists Space and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. 

Roberts, the “Day Jobs” curator, said that her show is connected to both developments. At the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, where she is the new director and where the exhibition travels in the spring, “Day Jobs” will become the first group show held at the institution where participants will be paid a fee. Roberts said this not only has to do with the agency that comes with her directorial position, but also the labor and financial precarity that her show makes clear: “That discussion connects to the exhibition itself, and the consideration of artists’ lived experiences and the conditions of making.”

To put it another way, there are many forces outside the studio that affect what happens within. In 2023, reconciling the two became the job not just of artists, but the institutions that exhibit their work, too. That trend looks to continue as “Day Jobs” travels in 2024. 

In the backroom of Pearl River Mart, the exhibition “Just Between Us: From the Archives of Arlan Huang” is showcasing a selection of artworks and ephemera from the collection of Arlan Huang. An artist and founder of the framing business Squid Frames, Huang was involved in two key Asian American art collectives: Basement Workshop in the 1970s and ’80s and Godzilla Asian American Arts Network in the ’90s.

“The mission of the gallery is to show work that matters to the Asian American community,” Joanne Kwong, the company’s president, said in an interview. Staging “Just Between Us” was one way to meet that goal.

The daughter-in-law of Pearl River Mart founders Ming Yi and Ching Yeh Chen, Kwong began the store’s exhibition program in 2016. To visit the gallery requires walking through the retail displays of paper fans, tea, sweets, and other sundries. “It is always open to people who are in the retail shop, so you catch different eyeballs than you would at a traditional gallery,” Kwong said. 

“Just Between Us” is no traditional art exhibition. Alongside artworks that more obviously read as artworks—prints, paintings, and more—there are artifacts meant to chronicle Huang’s life.

“The earliest objects in the show are my grandfather’s restaurant menu from his Chi/Am restaurant called the Pekin dated 1926 and my grandmother’s irons from Bangor, Maine,” Huang told ARTnews.

The collection progresses from these family mementos to small works in a variety of mediums: Hoty Soohoo’s black-and-white photographs of Huang and other members at Basement Workshop in 1971, a calendar page from 1991 designed by Martin Wong for the Lower East Side Printshop, Byron Kim’s contribution to the print portfolio From Basement to Godzilla from 1999, and Danielle Wu’s acrylic still life Arlan’s Oranges (2020). 

Wu is a co-curator of the show with Howie Chen. She attributes the genesis of the exhibition with the downfall of another: the canceled 2021 Godzilla retrospective at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in 2021.

“It was going to be a group show unifying all works by members of Godzilla for the first time. But local activists had uncovered [MOCA’s] involvement with building local jails and receiving concession money,” she said. “Arlan was one of the first artists who withdrew.”

Arlan and Wu connected in their efforts to encourage the museum to invite community discussions about the impact of the jail on neighborhood businesses and culture. While those efforts didn’t progress, their friendship did.

“I was really taken with his story about how the frame shop was a way that he made friends in the art world and built this alternate economy outside the art market,” Wu said. “It really goes to show you that through friendship and not through accumulation of capital, you can still access art and have your own collection.”

A counter-show to MOCA in both concept and scale, the exhibition at Pearl River celebrates this scrappy, hand-to-hand form of collection-building. The hang of the works—in a tight line, at eye level, looping around the walls—points to this connectivity. 

“This show probably produced more emails than any other show I’ve ever worked on,” Chen told ARTnews.

Having held posts at the Whitney Museum and MoMA PS1 before becoming the director of 80WSE at New York University, Chen said he was unused to the process of representing a personal rather than an institutional collection. Wu and Chen let Arlan have almost full authority over the checklist, as they whittled down the selection from his storage.

“We did give a little bit of guidance in terms of suggesting some key anchor points,” Wu says. “I thought it was really important to have Sol Lewitt in the show—he was one of his most important clients, and art historically, it is a fascinating encounter.” 

Wu was referring to an illustrated postcard sent to Huang by the late Minimalist and Conceptualist, who was a loyal customer of Squid Frames. The curators argued to include it, as it suggests Huang’s network in the city—the artists he befriended, whose work he helped produce, and Huang’s impact on them and vice-versa. But, Wu admitted, “Arlan could care less.”

Wu, Chen, and Huang offered their distinct perspectives while forming the show, which brought to light their generational differences.

“It was really interesting to go into Arlan’s archives, which provide one perspective on what it was like pre-internet,” Wu said. “You realize that artists really relied on print material and large-scale posters in order to stay connected.”

Huang’s activism from the 1970s features in the exhibition with printed posters from 1977 for African Liberation Day and May Day protests, the latter in Spanish. These were produced at Basement Workshop, which offered printing resources to downtown artists and activists at the time. The ephemera also speaks to the solidarity that existed between Asian Americans and other communities.

This interconnectedness even extends to Pearl River Mart itself. According to Kwong, intergenerational collaboration is core to the store’s identity. Her mother- and father-in-law, who are in their late 70s and 80s, still work the register. When they ran Pearl River in the 1970s, it was in the same building as Basement Workshop on Elizabeth Street, so they have decades-long relationships with Huang, Corky Lee, and others involved in the show. 

Artists such as these have formerly been the subject of research by Chen, who published an anthology about Godzilla through Primary Information in 2021 and will return to the group in 2024 for an 80WSE show called “Legacies,” which will also focus on Basement Workshop and the Asian American Art Center. And, with Wu and Huang, Chen published a catalogue for the Pearl River show, so the archive can be accessible long after the show is de-installed on September 10. It’s all part of a curatorial effort Chen describes as way to find “new ways of representing histories that don’t feel detached from the people who were there.” 

For Wu, the legacy of the exhibition is also personal. “Arlan is a role model for me, as somebody who abstained from the blue-chip art world, but has made it in my eyes, reaching an audience and living the kind of moral and ethical life that many will call idealistic or impossible,” she said. “He showed me that it’s possible.”

Her doctorate on experimental animation in interwar Europe led her to roles at museums and foundations, including the VIA Art Fund, the Getty Research Institute, and the Whitney Museum over the past 15 years. But in February, Rochester surprised herself when she announced she would join blue-chip gallery Lehmann Maupin, which has four locations around the world, as curatorial director.

During her job search, Rochester interviewed with collecting museums, but found the demands of that process, and in turn what is expected of a senior curator, unnecessarily arduous: “I was finding that some of the tasks were just really exhausting,” she recalled. “One institution flew me out and asked me to present three years of programming with budgets…. At the end I decided I did not want to work like that.”

While she was offered that job, Rochester took the Lehmann Maupin role because the interview process was far more stimulating. “I feel like I am working like an art historian again,” she said. “I wrote a monographic dissertation, and my goal with that was to make the case for that one artist’s relevance, to not just look at the famous moments of her career, but to look at the whole arc of it.” When interviewing for the gallery job, Rochester was enthusiastic about this parallel because it would involve “working long term with artists again in a really committed and intensive way.”

Posts at commercial galleries are becoming increasingly coveted, even to institutional curators who have worked at the highest levels. In March, Kate Fowle, who had served as MoMA PS1’s director for just under three years before unexpectedly resigning in June 2022, was hired as the inaugural senior curatorial director at mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth.

Like Rochester, several curators-turned-director told ARTnews that one draw of a gallery job is working closely with the enterprise’s roster of artists, where sustained interaction comprises a large part of the work, as opposed to the more detached role of curators at museums. Of her new post, Fowle said it was the opportunity to think deeply with artists: “I am somebody who has had long-term relationships with artists throughout my career. Now those relations lie at the heart of my job. From when I wake up to when I go to bed at night, I’m thinking through and with artists.”

As with countless other galleries, curators now seem to be terming their practice as “artist-first,” moving away from the curator-as-auteur persona that was glorified a decade earlier in favor of stewarding solo projects or shows driven by existing networks in which the artists can shine. In many ways, Fowle has been at the forefront of these curatorial shifts for more than two decades, having founded the Curatorial Practice Master’s program at California College of the Arts in 2002 and co-editing, with Terry Smith, the 2012 book Thinking Contemporary Curating.

(Disclosure: I have benefitted from Fowle’s work, having completed the Curatorial Practice Master’s at CCA in 2018; I now work as an artist liaison at a commercial gallery in New York, in addition to being an arts writer.)

The change from museum curating and directing to artist-focused gallery work aligns with her current ethos “as somebody who has thought through the lens of curatorial practice,” she said, “it is about shifting from the rhythm of a museum program to a more sustained engagement with artists: thinking about where an artist has come from and is going.”

Money, of course, is another draw for curators leaving museums. A quick glance on NYFA’s job listings shows that institutional positions pay less than comparable jobs at commercial galleries. For example, an entry-level gallery assistant position can pay up to $65,000, while curatorial assistantships at certain New York museums offer annual salaries as low as $35,000.

“Sadly, the salaries offered by most museums just barely cover living expenses,” said Anna Stothart, who preceded Rochester at Lehmann Maupin and came from curatorial positions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the San Antonio Museum of Art. She attributes her sales commissions from Lehmann Maupin to paying down student loans and personal debt and becoming financially stable enough to eventually start her own business. Together with Ursula Davila-Villa, she cofounded Davila-Villa & Stothart, a consultancy that provides professional strategy and legacy planning to artists. 

While some curators have taken on positions that are less market focused, others are gallery directors in the classic sense. Anthony Elms worked as a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia for more than 10 years, ultimately rising to chief curator in 2015. He joined New York’s Peter Freeman, Inc., last summer as a director, where, in addition to mounting exhibitions, he is responsible for private sales and manning the booth at art fairs. Elms describes the shift as contingent on the gallery’s program being a good fit. “It was this particular gallery,” he said in an interview. “I’ve always had a love of artists from Eastern Europe, so that material interested me.”

By contrast, Ylinka Barotto, a director at Mitchell-Innes & Nash who has held curatorial roles at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, in Houston, said she was brought on solely to liaise with institutions for exhibitions and acquisitions. “I increase their visibility through institutional exhibitions and acquisitions, and this offers me the opportunity to be in close conversation with my peers at museums,” noting that in recent years the gulf between museum curator and commercial gallery curator “feel[s] less compartmentalized, which is healthy and invigorating.”

This hasn’t always been the case. Davila-Villa, who was director at Alexander Gray Associates for 5 years before going into business with Stothart, recalled a more senior curator at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin making a remark along the lines of “going to the dark side” when she announced she would be joining a New York gallery. “She was older than me,” Davila-Villa said, “so in retrospect not only do I strongly disagree, but I think that it was a disservice to a younger curator.”

Part of this trend owes to gallery owners wanting former museum curators on staff. San Francisco dealer Jessica Silverman, who has hired two curators into new roles since 2021, said, “they make the best artist relations staff because they have experience in overseeing artist projects from beginning to end.”

Previously an associate curator at the San Jose Museum of Art, Kathryn Wade said that during the interview process Silverman asked “if I was comfortable talking about money” even though the role did not include sales. “The answer is yes, I am,” Wade said, likening it to how museum curators are themselves “fundraisers—and never far from conversations about money.”

A major commercial gallery hiring a curator to work on exhibitions was no doubt pioneered by Larry Gagosian, who brought on Picasso biographer John Richardson as a consultant in 2008. That relationship led to six Picasso shows at Gagosian in addition to several others. In 2012, John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, joined Gagosian as senior curator for special exhibitions.

The next mega to follow suit was Pace Gallery, whose first designated curator, Andria Hickey, joined the enterprise in 2018. Pace’s curatorial team now numbers three, led by Oliver Shultz, who was previously a curatorial associate at MoMA PS1; it also includes Mark Beasley, a former curator of media and performance art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (Hickey left Pace in 2022 to be chief curator at the Shed in New York; she is now a curator at large there.) 

One recent hire to that team is Kimberly Drew, earlier an independent curator and writer after a role as social media manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Having worked at Pace since early 2022, Drew said that, compared to the Met, roles at Pace are less predetermined and there is more opportunity to collaborate with colleagues across departments. “One of the things I find to be deeply fulfilling about being back in the gallery space is that there is not the same intensity around delineations,” she said, adding that even though Pace is itself a huge enterprise, she has felt that there is more space for her to shape her role than she has experienced in past jobs.

With their robust exhibitions, public programs, and global reach, gallery giants like Gagosian, Pace, and Hauser & Wirth are in many ways beginning to operate like public museums. But unlike museums, galleries are not subject to public accountability. They are set up to serve artists, even if they pursue ambitious programs outside the scope of their primary roster. Beasley, who was hired by Pace in 2019 to oversee their new Pace Live program, said in an interview, “live commissions and restaging of works overlaps directly with my work at the Hirshhorn and with the Performa Biennial.”

If there are consequences for curators leaving museum positions for galleries, it is likely still too early to tell. Fearing that former curatorial colleagues might make a “going to the dark side” comment when she shared her job news, Rochester said even she was surprised by their response: “Some people have said, ‘Oh, amazing. That’s going to be my next move too.’”

Correction, August 9, 2023: A previous version of this article misstated the leader of Pace Gallery’s curatorial team. It is Oliver Shultz, not Mark Beasley.

In 2008, they formalized the project as a residency program, Denniston Hill (DH), which became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. In Mehretu’s words, the artists “began thinking about what it means to have access to a space, with a particular history, as queer folks of color.” She also framed the project as one that could potentially contribute to the “history of the decolonial project” of land stewardship.

The program has slowly scaled up, and in 2021 hired its first full-time executive director, Megan Steinman, who said DH is “an organization that doesn’t rely on individual people, but on a collection of relationships that are formed by how people work together.”

DH is one of several artist-led residency programs in the Northeast that have been formed in the past decade. Seeking cheaper, bigger spaces, their founders have ventured beyond New York City, and have in the process formed these initiatives in an effort to stave off the isolation of traditional studio practices. Some of these programs have even evolved into institutions in their own right. 

Among the more well-known is the Church, formed by the artist couple Eric Fischl and April Gornik in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. Their program includes residencies and an exhibition space, and was opened in 2021 in a deconsecrated 19th-century Methodist church they purchased in 2017.

Fischl and Gornik have lived in the town since 2004, and wanted to establish a hub for both engaging locals and bringing in outside artists to make new work. To achieve this, they appointed a board and staff early on.

“Our biggest problem in terms of financing is that people think that April and I are the ones funding it, and think it’s a vanity project,” Fischl said in an interview. “Part of what we’re doing, and what Sheri [Pasquarella, the Church’s director] is doing, is trying to dissuade people from thinking that. We’re going to help support the Church as long as it’s viable, but the public needs to want it to be there.”  

Support has been strong in its inaugural year, and programming has flourished. “We started with Martha Graham Dance Company before we officially even opened because it fell into our laps,” Gornik recalled.

‘I Pick Them Up in My Vehicle’

Jeremy Dennis, who sits on the board of the Church, is the founder of his own residency program. An artist and a member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, he began Ma’s House in 2021 in his family’s historic home, where he and his partner live and work alongside the residents. The program is open to Indigenous artists and artists of color, who can send their interest via the organization’s website.

“I pick them up in my vehicle, and then they are set to do whatever they want for two weeks,” Dennis said. There are few requirements—residents must only give a public talk—and any artists who participate get a small stipend, thanks to funds from Creatives Rebuild New York. “The only difficulty is that with Shinnecock rules, you can only have guests if you’re physically here,” Dennis explained. That means he must balance having visiting artists with his own residency schedule. He’s managed it well, having hosted 19 residents and overseeing regular programs, including a weekly beadwork workshop led by his mother.

Ma’s House is one example of a smaller and scrappier residency and exhibition space. Others of this scale have popped up as a result of artists seeking affordable studios outside the city.  

Cheryl Donegan recalled the ease of showing her paintings at Freddy, a project run by painter Joshua Abelow in an old Methodist chapel in Monticello, New York. “It was a luxury,” she said. “I packed a rental car with everything I had made during the pandemic, didn’t worry about shipping costs, and we kicked around ideas.”

Abelow began Freddy in a Baltimore storefront and moved the project upstate when he bought the chapel in 2016. He paints in the nave, and the gallery space is a room connected to his bedroom. For Donegan’s show, he temporarily installed works over his bed and on the paint-chipped exterior.

Except for the occasional sale of artwork, Freddy’s is self-funded. “It’s not a good fit for a lot of artists because many want to have that monetary exchange be one of the primary goals,” he said in an interview. “It’s for folks who are going to be excited about the context that Freddy can provide.” That includes the change of pace. “When you come up here, it’s not like when you go to a gallery downtown, where you walk in, and you look at stuff, and then you leave. You come here and spend an afternoon, and you’re also in my house. Sometimes we all get a meal after.” 

Walter’s, the contemporary wing of the Walter Elwood Museum, is the brainchild of Brent Birnbaum. After finding his dream studio space in an old carpet factory in Amsterdam, New York, Birnbaum was brought to a quirky local museum to sign the lease. He recalled thinking: “It is 18 rooms. All have different carpet. Everything is crooked and dusty. I was in heaven.”

Birnbaum proposed curating a contemporary program to the museum’s one staff member, and he was given 1,200 square feet free of charge. He built out a gallery space and a zine store. The exhibition program merges works by artists from the greater Albany region with those from the city. “Moving forward,” he said, “the museum is going to let artists pull objects from the collection and bring them into the gallery or otherwise respond to them.”

Cavernous, subterranean architecture is the draw of lower_cavity, a residency in western Massachusetts run by multimedia artist Anthony Discenza. In 2020, he began inviting friends to work in the 3,000-square-foot basement of an old papermill, where he rents the above-ground levels as commercial space. “I leave it up to the artists how they want to use the residency,” Discenza told ARTnews.

The artist Supermrin spent two months at lower_cavity making and installing a malleable, plant-based material she has developed from lawn clippings. Sourcing brush from local orchards, she sculpted the material into the basement’s arches and hallways, “I think the most useful thing was having an environment that is not your typical gallery space,” she said in an interview. “Because my work is so experimental and biological, it’s been useful to utilize a large space without too many conditions for sanitizing.” 

Another former resident, Jak Ritger, shared that lower_cavity is unique in how difficult it was to maneuver. “It’s massive, so I was exhausted just walking back and forth while I was making my light installation. It’s also really dirty, all of my equipment got dusty.” Still, Ritger cited it as an exciting challenge. He made photos, installations, and research-based work in response to the building’s industrial history. 

Ritger put lower_cavity on the radar of Joshua Citarella and the online collective Do Not Research. DNR, as it’s known for short, formed when artists began making works and blog posts in response to readings Citarella made public on Discord, from courses he taught at RISD and SVA. By last spring, DNR had over 1,600 users and was seeking a venue for its first de-virtualized exhibition. lower_cavity’s decentralized floor plan was appealing. “We were the first show to be in this sunken room that looks a little bit like a catacomb or a doomsday bunker,” Citarella said. “The space played into a lot of the radical internet politics vibes that were very present in the show.” The exhibition featured 46 artworks by 41 artists. Over 150 people came for the opening; many had never met in person. 

Citarella says he couldn’t have imagined a better venue for DNR’s inaugural show, and that was largely due to it being artist-run. “Tony was like our guiding angel through this whole process of a rigorous install. It was a profound experience.”

A Residency’s Lifespan

Running a program is taxing for an artist to balance on top of their own practice. In an interview, Titus Kaphar, who cofounded NXTHVN, a residency and fellowship organization for artists of color in New Haven, Connecticut, stressed this: “I want artists who feel like this is something that they’re being called to do. And not to feel like it’s an obligation or a burden. I hope that this doesn’t become a necessary part of one’s existence, as artists of color in the world, that to be successful you have to create your own institution. Because that’s a lot of work.” 

Some endeavors, like Denniston Hill, the Church, and NXTHVN, have staff and structures in place for posterity, while others may have shorter runs. “I don’t know what I would do with a staff, ” Discenza admitted. “At some point, I will not be in Western Massachusetts, and at some point, I will not have access to this kind of space. lower_cavity will have its natural end.” 

Artists are perhaps best positioned to understand the needs of other artists, and experiment with new ways of meeting these needs, especially when challenges arise. An underlying motivation for all of these pursuits is that this work can be generative for the instigators, too. “I’m doing this because it feels consistent with what my work, in general, is about” Kaphar said. “It feels revelatory in my continued experience as an artist.”

Of the 90 artists showing in the exhibition this year, 53 signed a letter published by e-flux that spoke of behind-the-scenes chaos. “The scale and ambition of the Biennale should be attuned to its financial situation,” the artists wrote, saying that they had not been paid fees and production costs. They also reported that there were persistent fundraising and labor issues at the biennial.

The letter was only the latest controversy faced by the art fair, which is typically held every other year in the city of Kochi, in the state of Kerala.

Before the show’s opening in December, as the Art Newspaper and Hyperallergic have reported, the Kerala government reportedly pulled out of a deal to acquire Aspinwall House, the central exhibition site, from a private developer who usually leases the complex for the event. This, along with unexpectedly bad weather, impeded the Biennale staff’s ability to prepare the venue for installation.

Kochi Biennale Foundation president Bose Krishnamachari told the Hindu that the foundation had received only ₹3 crore of the ₹7 crore (or $850,000) in the Kerala State Budget for the KMB. He declined to comment for this article. 

Despite funding and infrastructure issues, the foundation continued to announce the December 12 opening on social media, and artists flew to Kerala in early December to install their work. They arrived to find leaking roofs, materials and media players missing, and even unusable toilets at Aspinwall, according to the open letter.

“Institutional optimism that ‘it will all work out’ is not a viable strategy for producing such an ambitious event,” the artists wrote in the letter.

The foundation called an emergency meeting on December 11 to announce the two-week postponement. By that time, only 10 percent of the show had been installed, according to the artists’ letter.  

“We believe the Biennale Foundation should have made the decision to postpone weeks earlier, when many of the failures were already apparent,” the artists wrote. “Well before thousands of art-lovers traveled for the opening days, and most artists themselves had to return and could not stay on to see their own work installed or engage with the work of fellow artists and visitors.”

The biennial did not respond to a request for comment on a list of inquiries that ARTnews sent.

A Lack of Transparency

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale has in past editions weathered other scandals. In 2019 workers on the 2018 edition said the biennial hadn’t paid them for their labor. During that last edition, Biennale cofounder Riyas Komu stepped down as the foundation’s secretary after allegations of sexual harassment. And in 2011, before the first edition even opened, the Kerala government was asked to investigate the biennial’s financial management.

Delhi-based artist Asim Waqif said that he knew about the precarious legacy of the biennial, with past participants warning him about unpaid production costs and installation delays. Still, Waqif told ARTnews, “I had dreamed for years to be part of the biennale.”

After artist Shubigi Rao, curator of the 2022 edition, extended an invite, Waqif discovered he had to curtail his ambition for this dream opportunity. Waqif had planned to sustainably harvest the bamboo for his large outdoor sculpture. Since the Biennale would not advance money or provide a budget for him to oversee this part of the project, Waqif said he conceded the harvest to the foundation’s management. Only one-third of the material was available when he arrived in late November to install.

Training local flooring workers to help him create the immersive structure, Waqif was able to finish his project for the original opening date. While his work was completed on time, he still considers the lack of transparency by the foundation frustrating. “Biennales should give artists opportunities to expand artist production beyond studios and galleries,” he said. “Artists had to limit the scope of their projects to deal with the inadequacies of the foundation.” 

London-based artist Pio Abad, with his wife, jewelry designer Frances Wadsworth Jones, also said they scaled down their work after receiving little assistance to carry out their initial plan. Instead of creating a three-meter-long facsimile of a necklace belonging to Imelda Marcos, wife of the corrupt former Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Abad and Wadsworth Jones constructed a small 3D-printed copy of one of Marcos’s tiaras. “In the end it was the right work for the moment,” Abad told ARTnews. “But it’s always nice when you’re invited to work at a Biennale scale to produce something that matches that scale.”

Abad said that the biennial hadn’t made him and other artists aware of what was taking place behind the scenes. “If there were challenges being faced,” he continued, “I think all the artists would’ve appreciated being told exactly what those challenges were and how we can navigate them, rather than trying to guess what’s working and what [isn’t].” 

Most artists were unable to see their projects through before leaving India, with only 10 percent finished by the original opening on December 12, according to the open letter. 

“I boarded the flight [to India] having no idea what I would find,” Berlin-based artist Philip Rizk recalled. He arrived on December 10 to discover the screens for his four-channel video on the ground and the electricity out at Aspinwall. Although members of the collective CAMP helped Rizk mount his work, the piece was still not fully installed by the time he left.

‘I Felt Like I Had Been Scammed’

One project was never even realized because the artist behind it withdrew from the Biennale on the day she arrived, she said in an interview with ARTnews.

Landing in Kochi from Nairobi at 3 am on December 11, Jackie Karuti had not been told where she would stay or who would pick her up. “When none of that had been confirmed when I arrived, I felt like I had been scammed,” she said.  

What she did receive was an email from foundation president Bose Krishnamachari announcing the postponement. With no per diem, no signed contract, and no idea of the state of her installation (she had not received any communication from the biennale since November 23, two weeks before her arrival), she decided not to stay. “The importance of the KMB and the challenging yet ambitious position required in organizing such an event is not for me to overstate at this moment,” she emphasized. “I would be downplaying the terrible organizational structure, lack of care and accountability, which is the issue here.”

Karuti, who is from Kenya, acknowledged that, as in her home country, India is a place where it is difficult to put on such an event. Still, she was frustrated by how the foundation did not take ownership of the delay, instead blaming the weather and infrastructure. Other basic administrative essentials they oversaw, like contracts, were never resolved.

“On a legal level, if anything should happen to my work or myself, they are not responsible,” she said. “I emailed them to please sign, and by the end, they never signed the contract.” Without a signed contract, she is also concerned about intellectual property. Since returning to Nairobi, Karuti has not heard if her artist and visa fees will be paid. 

Karuti, Rizk, and many other participating artists have conceptual, often video-dominant practices; they depend on biennials to show their work. “Biennales and art events of this magnitude are crucial to independent artists who rarely get invited to exhibit in bigger institutions” Karuti explained. “It’s considerably challenging for those working conceptually with no one to advocate for them and it gets worse if you’re coming from a region where the artistic landscape is still nascent, further making the production and realisation of your work and ideas difficult.” The Biennale did not respond to a request for comment on Karuti’s withdrawal.

The Biennial Responds

In their open letter, the artists stood with the curator, who they wrote “has worked through challenges well beyond her purview.” Artists spoke of Rao working herself into the ground, overseeing shipping and managing the clean-up of waterlogged venues, even being hospitalized the week before the opening. (Rao did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)

Krishnamachari sent a letter of apology to the artists shortly following the e-flux letter. He owned up to “poor finances, attrition of manpower, pandemic, and uncertainties regarding sites” as “serious shortfalls” on the part of the biennial, and admitted that the delay was “a grievous error of judgment.” He promised a review by the foundation’s board of trustees in the first quarter of 2023, with institutional changes to follow.

Regardless of the outcome, the artists involved believe that this Kochi-Muziris Biennale will provide an important case study for biennials in the coming years.

“I keep on thinking Kochi might be the first post-pandemic biennale, where we can’t take things for granted anymore,” Abad said. “You can’t take production lines for granted. You can’t take shipping schedules for granted. You can’t take manpower for granted in a way that we used to.”

“There’s this strange thing that happens, and I’m sure other painters will talk about it: you go to the opening of all this work that you’ve done, and you have this moment of incredible alienation,” he said in an interview. “You can’t understand the work for a while.”

The mood was made only more atypical by the arrival of an unexpected visitor: the New Yorker critic Hilton Als. “All of a sudden Hilton comes bursting out of the front door. He just praised me and said all these wonderful compliments and then jumped in an Uber and drove off.” 

Als, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer who has forayed into art curating, with a buzzy exhibition about the life of Joan Didion now on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, made that praise public in a New Yorker review of the show. He revealed that he’d connected with Jordan Stein, the founder of Cushion Works, whom Als had previously befriended, and that Stein convinced him to see the exhibition.

It was there that Als first encountered Goodroad’s paintings, which the artist creates en plein air. The paintings in the show from last year featured diffuse, muddy hues that suggest San Francisco’s characteristic fog, and they often verge on abstraction. Als praised them as “savory, like something you want to taste for yourself, in part for sustenance and in part to become a better person.” Looking back on Als’s visit, Stein told ARTnews that it “changed Brett’s life.”

Als has returned to Goodroad’s work once more for a show at Greene Naftali, the artist’s first in New York. Curated by the critic himself, it features 15 works that Goodroad, 43, has made in the year and a half since he left San Francisco.

Goodroad moved to a small Arizonan city with his partner Tiffani; they bought a house, and Goodroad was going to enroll in a nursing program that was more affordable than ones in San Francisco. He had not been able to pursue a full-time career as an artist, but with a new level of interest in his work from Als and others, he recently committed to being a painter. In these recent works, the brilliant blue sky and the lucent greens and yellows of the Arizona desert brush intervene. A bright primary palette often appears in most of the canvases.

Goodroad applies his oils gesturally to create corduroy-like wale textures, with stitches of paint that amass to form larger sections of color. Some of these areas are almost opaque while others reveal the hues of the underpainting, like blue that offers a view of the saffron beneath At the Depot (2021–22). Although each painting may be appear to be either or a portrait or landscape, the two genres blur as figures and horizon lines merge.

“The thing about his paintings is that they live in his head,” Als said. “They’re not really finished. He has to stop working on them. That’s what makes them so vibrant. You’re in conversation with them while you’re looking at them.”

Indeed, Goodroad returned to one preexisting work for the Greene Naftali show: Untitled (2013/22), featuring a bulbous puce-hued cloud with a vermillion outline. The painting was completed the first time during a year-long residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, California in 2013. This was where he first met Stein, who recalled that he was struck by the artist’s “washed-out Rococo-type paintings – trippy little 18th century French court paintings – that absolutely boggled my mind.”

By this point, Goodroad had been in the Bay Area for a while. After completing his M.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007, he stayed in the city, working as a truck driver delivering organic produce and painting between trips. The physical labor of that job eventually took a toll on his body, and it also affected his artistic process. He’d often leave a canvas for four or five days to do his deliveries. Although this slowed down his progress, he has described being happy with the results: each coat dried entirely before Goodroad returned to the painting, allowing the colors to “breathe” and reach their full luminescence, as he put it. 

Stein gave Goodroad his first show in 2017, and he had another in 2021 at Cushion Works. The latter show was meant to mark Goodroad’s farewell to the Bay Area before moving to Arizona. But after Als’s New Yorker review, there was interest from all over, and curator Klaus Biesenbach even bought a work for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The show ended up selling out. According to Stein, the Greene Naftali show has too.

“Goodroad wouldn’t know the market if it hit him on the head, and I hope it doesn’t,” Als wrote in his New Yorker review. Asked about that line, Als said he put it in as a “warning” to artists entering a culture that “supports them doing stuff for the marketplace instead of themselves.”

Als’s coverage is, in part, what instigated a market for the paintings, and perhaps he provided a warning because he knew the power of his endorsement. Still, Als told ARTnews that he doesn’t think Goodroad is in any danger of bending to such forces. “If someone wanted me to be more productive, I would probably refuse it,” Goodroad responded when asked about market pressure. He attributes that sensibility to having worked in the Bay Area, where artists do not get the same kind of visibility as New York or L.A.

While the market may have caught on to Goodroad’s quirky, mystical pictures, his enduring curiosity in making art seems to quell Als’s fears. Goodroad said he wasn’t interested in talk of wheeling and dealing, and instead directed the conversation toward a discussion of one of his favorite works on paper, Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Woman Seen from the Back (ca.1715/16), which depicts the seams and folds of a figure’s heavy baroque-era garments.

“I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t come across his goofy squiggly hands,” Goodroad said of Watteau. “This drawing of a woman in this long dress, sitting down. He managed to describe this dress with just parallel lines. Somehow, he did that. It’s this bit of magic, you know?” 

A major figure in the Bay Area art scene since the 1970s, Villa left behind a studio in the Mission District when he died in 2013 of cancer. His friend Mark Dean Johnson, a cocurator of the exhibition with Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, had a studio neighboring Villa’s, which after his death still housed a number of his known works put away in closets, with the main space sublet to another artist. In 2016, Dean Johnson called an electrician to fix some wiring in their building, but there was one hitch: “The electrician never got into the attic, complaining he couldn’t examine the wiring because the space was too crowded with storage,” Dean Johnson recounted in a recent interview.

That storage as it turned out, held over 50 unaccounted canvases by Villa. They ranged from Ritual (1970–71), an unstretched canvas with purple-and-blue airbrushed, snaking forms and a billowing blonde wing surrounded by a ring of chicken bones, to Excavation (1982), a composition of two full-body prints in white paint subsumed by printed hands and feet in yellow, blue, and red. On the other side of the country, deep in the Whitney Museum’s storage was their contemporary, My Roots (1970–71), which hadn’t been exhibited since it was shown in their 1972 Annual Exhibition and subsequently acquired. Adorned with hundreds of feathers, the mixed-media painting’s surface visibly ruffles when people pass; a quality Lagaso Goldberg describes as “responding to your presence, your breath.”

These pieces are emblematic of Villa’s wide-ranging practice, which Dean Johnson and Lagaso Goldberg have arduously worked to give renewed attention to. Their efforts resulted in “Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision,” which debutedat the Newark Museum of Art this past spring and is currently on view, through October, in Villa’s hometown. The show spans two venues in San Francisco: the Asian Art Museum (AAM) and the San Francisco Art Commission (SFAC), which reside across from each other at city hall plaza. (The SFAC portion closed on September 2.)

Though Villa was a hometown hero whose work had been acquired at the height of his career, his significance was little known beyond the Bay Area, and the curators initially struggled to secure funding for the exhibition. When the duo first applied for one of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s prestigious exhibition-related grants, the organization hadn’t heard of Villa. The Foundation ultimately backed the show’s extensive catalogue, which includes essays by Patrick Flores, Lucy Lippard, and Margo Machida; in Lagaso Goldberg’s words, the Warhol Foundation’s team were “heroes” by supporting new scholarship regarding an overlooked figure.

Villa’s absence from the art historical canons of body art, performance, and abstraction during the latter half of the 20th century is likely due to his distance from New York, where art movements and artists have been historicized. Add to that that Villa was Asian American, and his identity was decidedly central to the art he created. Dean Johnson recalls Villa’s exuberant reaction to the expansiveness of the 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, “Carlos said, ‘This is so fantastic because people are recognizing that art isn’t only centered in Paris and New York galleries. Art is a global phenomenon.’”

“Worlds in Collision” bracingly traces Villa’s return to San Francisco beginning in 1969 until his death; he lived in New York for a brief period, after graduating from the California School of Fine Arts (the predecessor to the now defunct San Francisco Art Institute, aka SFAI). Included in the exhibition is a non-objective painting he made fresh out of school: Untitled (1959), an amalgamation of gestural, morosely hued forms. While Villa’s address book was purportedly the “fattest in New York” during his years there—digits included friends Brice Marden, Sol LeWitt, and others, according to critic Paul Karlstrom’s oral history in the catalogue—Villa was ultimately unhappy in New York, his minimal paintings produced there were “…going further and further away from me and becoming something else,” Karlstrom recalls Villa saying.  

Villa’s return to San Francisco resulted in his turn to making art that directly addressed what the curators call, his “creation story”: an SFAI teacher reportedly once told a young Villa “there is no Filipino art history” after he inquired about the lack of Filipino artists in the school’s curriculum. He sought to change that, and that anecdote grounds both presentations of Villa’s retrospective.  While this biographic framing could be limiting for an artist, especially one with a penchant for abstraction, it is precisely his experience of being a Filipino-American moving through the world in a particular place and time, experiencing rampant anti-Asian racism in the U.S., that reveals what exactly he meant by embodiment in his art making. His art is one that claims visibility, representation, equity, and, most importantly, value for Filipino-American art and artists.

In the early ’70s, Villa gained access to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s ethnographic collections of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. He studied these objects, like Hawaiian ’hu’ula feather capes and Tapa (bark) cloth from the Pacific Islands, closely. Combining these trans-Pacific influences with his training in action painting, Villa pursued works that reference his own body: his monumental feather-and-taffeta-adorned painting on a semi-circle unstretched canvas, Painted Cloak (1971) was sized to his measurements, while Art’st’s Feet (1979–80) and Art’st’s Head with Bone Dolls (1979) are casts of his extremities in paper pulp and feathers. Likewise, First Impression (1981) is a grid of prints of his face in white paint on black paper, which takes up an entire wall at the Asian Art Museum. At SFAC, Villa’s full-length Untitled body cast (c. 1980) was positioned on a low plinth, as if lying down, corpse-like, with the black-and-white feathery Kite God (1979) suspended directly above.

Using his body as material, Villa pursued the project of, according to the catalogue, “becoming Filipino-American.” To do this, he drew widely from disparate influences from the vestments of his Roman Catholic upbringing to the repetitive tubular forms found on Oceanic objects, which he replicated onto his canvases with strokes of an airbrush. In a catalogue essay, art historian Margo Machida describes Villa’s building of a fictive trans-Pacific history, and his place in it, as a prescient act of world making. This is a term prevalent in recent discussions, that, in  Machida’s words, is  “[a] critical formulation cited in contemporary Asian art and art history to move beyond partisan presumptions of universality that had long dominated Western art.” Given his trailblazing status in this regard, Villa’s absence from the discourse around other practitioners of so-called body art from the same era—Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Ana Mendieta come to mind—proves that so much of art history is still to be written to accurately reflect those who have long been cast to its margins.

Villa wasn’t only engaged in a vibrant studio practice, his impact of training the next generations of artists—he spent for over 40 years teaching at SFAI—is also essential to understanding his art making. The exhibition also focuses on his work as an educator and activist, as Lagaso Goldberg stressed that he didn’t separate this role from his identity as an artist. A space at the Asian Art Museum presentation is dedicated to the work of Villa’s pupils, including Paul Pfeiffer and the collective the Mail Order Brides. Numerous contemporary painters he taught, including Sarah Cain, Eamon Ore-Giron, Alicia McCarthy, and Kehinde Wiley, also cite his impact on the careers they pursued.

Studying with Villa beginning in 1992, Ore-Giron said in an email, “Carlos gave me the confidence and permission to pursue my vision out of what Western pedagogy was emphasizing, which was almost exclusively rooted in European history.”

Cain, who was his T.A. in 1999, added, “His connection with students was beyond what most faculty engage in. He operated on a very deep human level.” She recalled him giving her vitamins when she was an overwhelmed undergrad, and his artwork fortified her too, saying “I first encountered his work Art’st’s Feet in the office of his good friend Moira Roth, and it stopped me in my tracks.”

In July, SFAI’s board confirmed what many had long expected that the state’s oldest art school would indeed close its doors. Jeff Gunderson, SFAI’s longtime librarian, said that the school is still navigating what will become of the many important materials, including Villa’s archive, it was meant to steward in perpetuity.

Despite SFAI’s unfortunate end, “Worlds in Collision” has shed light on just how much of an influence Villa continues to have. This is likely just the beginning of new scholarship on this understudied artist and his many ripples of influence. As Ore-Giron fondly recalled, “Besides being a great teacher and role model for young artists, he was a great friend. I still feel the warmth of his smile when I remember him.”

But in the middle of the night on July 21, less than 24 hours after Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as the country’s new president, he ordered a military crackdown on GGG.

Sri Lankans have endured a crippling economic crisis, with fuel and food prices skyrocketing. The country’s lucrative tourism industry has taken a major hit since the onset of the pandemic, but it was the mismanagement of resources by the Rajapaksa administration that ultimately fueled this backlash that led to his ouster.

Almost as soon as GGG took root it began to feature the works of visual artists. An art gallery formed and the feminist public art project Fearless Collective erected a mural on a standing wooden flat. Tehani Ariyaratne, the chief operating officer of Fearless, wrote in a recent email that “the sense we got, painting in the art space at GGG, was that art was being used as a powerful medium of resistance and to express the feelings of the protestors at the site.”

While protestors’ anger was reflected in much of the art on view at GGG, the Fearless mural, which was collaboratively painted by local artists, set out to visualize the possibilities of a new country emerging from aragalaya. The mural depicts four figures that embody the qualities the painters want in their leaders, with each displaying a symbol of an attribute: a flower in the hair for compassion, a scale for justice, rice plants for abundance, and a clay oil lamp for mobility. The Fearless artists created a place of hope and joy around the work, which Ariyaratne recalls was intentionally filled with music and laughter.

The Fearless Collective mural, painted at the Gota Go Gama protest village on Galle Face Green.

Vasi Samudra Devi helped conceptualize and paint the mural. A trans-woman artist and activist, Devi was involved in organizing the country’s first ever large-scale pride march, which took place in Colombo this past June. (Homosexuality is still criminalized in Sri Lanka, under a penal code dating to 1883 that was established during British colonial rule.) Devi’s own paintings have become more abstract as she’s begun creating works publicly at GGG, and a major inspiration for this was when she painted deconstructed pride flags on the bodies of participants during the pride march.

Devi said that the immediacy and public nature of painting on bodies has influenced how she works on canvas, as has working en plein air, during which she dances and lip syncs with those gathered. Titled “Polycule,” her series of paintings made at GGG combine bright, flowing forms with the musculature of the human body to illustrate the vibrant fluidity of sexuality. Though representations of political insignia or depictions of violence don’t appear in the paintings, Devi stresses that they are, indeed, political, as they emerge from the conditions of struggle and oriented toward the future, visualizing what the artist hopes to see in her country one day.

Natasha Ginwala, a closely watched curator on the international biennial scene and an associate curator at large at Gropius Bau who splits her time between Colombo and Berlin, has been involved in COLOMBOSCOPE, the city’s biannual arts festival, since 2015. She recently wrote about artist actions she witnessed at the protests, describing a projection of the words “No More Corruption” on the facade of the Presidential Secretariat, which called for collective solidarity and justice, and artist-led ritual dance processions to symbolize the exorcism of the government’s wrongdoing. In an interview, Ginwala pointed to the importance of collective public actions and stressed how this has also been a time of reflection for many Sri Lankan artists, as well as taking care of oneself and one’s peers, which she called a form of “invisible labor.” Artists are doing the valuable work of “watching, observing, and being open to a genuine reformulation” of the country’s social and political structures, she said. “The pressure of collapsing systems is huge, so how to continue, reimagine, and sustain creative efforts in the face of repeated political failures and economic ruin” is crucial, Ginwala added.

Imaad Majeed, Testimony of the Disappeared, 2022, installation view, at Colomboscope 2022.

Reflection seems to be the current mood of cultural practitioners across Sri Lanka. Colombo-based poet Imaad Majeed recently spent time with Muslim and Tamil minority populations outside the capital city for a project that showed at COLOMBOSCOPE in January. With their collaborators from the publishing platform The Packet, Majeed made Testimony of the Disappeared (2021–22), which featured drawings and concrete poetry made from the public testimonies from the activist group, the Mothers of the Disappeared, who have been seeking justice for loved ones killed or missing since onset of the country’s civil war in the 1980s. The project emerged out of the lack of national attention toward protests against the Rajapaksa regime last year, when thousands of people marched in a Tamil-speaking northeastern province calling for the government to account for its atrocities committed during the 30-year civil war that ended in 2009. Among those were the heavy bombing of areas controlled by the separatist group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians and the disappearances of LTTE cadres who voluntarily surrendered to the Sri Lankan Army.

Part of the Testimony of the Disappeared’s motivation is to encourage those in the aragalaya movement to focus beyond economic strife to include the concerns of all Sri Lankans, including the grievances of  minority groups. “Now that something has been accomplished by getting Gotabaya out, I feel I would have more faith in the movement if it seeks to transform the structure of Sri Lankan state and what it can accommodate,” Majeed said. Amending the constitution to move away from a majoritarian democracy and reimagining a flag that recognizes all of the country’s ethnic groups are places to start. Majeed emphasized that if justice for past atrocities isn’t achieved, another separatist group, like the LTTE, may form.

Hema Shironi, Cage Free and Proud, 2020.

Given the lack of public transport to get to the protest village and personal responsibilities, artists like Hema Shironi, who moved to the suburbs of Colombo shortly after becoming a mother in 2021, have been making work at home. Working primarily with fabric scraps, Shironi said she is well positioned to make art during a period of scarcity. In her mixed media sculpture Cage Free and Proud (2020), a piece of cement rubble is surrounded by a mesh cage. Shironi has embroidered the cage with the insignia of the India housing project for rebuilding homes in Killinochi in the north, which was a battleground city during the civil war. Her extended family fled the city during the war, but have since returned and have found these new uniformed homes to be unappealing.

Though she is not creating works that directly refer to the protests, Shironi said all her art comes from her experiences in the country’s political climate. They are, therefore, inherently connected to this struggle, and pursuing intricate designs and embroidery is her way of feeling involved in this collective action. In her words: “Everything is based on these protests. I am not making new pieces about the protests, I am pursuing my own stories and my experience, but what I am making at home is connected.”

Soil is an element common in Bopape’s work, serving here as a literal ground for a miniature landscape as well as an allusion to larger concerns with geography and territory. Water is also central to this work. It appears in the soil-on-paper drawings of cresting and falling waves that Bopape created over the past two years, enlargements of them projected across a long wall in the first gallery. Water is the focus again in the second gallery, where footage shot on 8mm film, presented low to the ground, depicts the artist’s shadow cast across the foaming breakers on the shore of Virginia’s Rappahannock River. Bopape uses these elements to channel larger histories. She met descendants of enslaved laborers who worked on one of the plantations that once dotted the riverbank, and created small, oblong clay sculptures bearing imprints of their hands, suggesting how bodies and substances might jointly carry such a past. (An extension of this project is on view at Prospect.5 in New Orleans.)

View of “Dineo Seshee Bopape: Ile aye, moya, là, ndokh…harmonic conversions…mm,” 2021–22, at ICA at VCU, showing Lerole, 2021.

During the lockdown in her Johannesburg hometown, Bopape turned to less material ways to address how the environment might bear the imprint of violent histories. She collaborated with musician Tlokwe Sehume to mix vocal and instrumental tracks with sounds of the wind she recorded pre-pandemic at sites in West Africa that were central to the enslavement and trade of people, including ports on the coasts of Senegal and Ghana.

These sounds permeate the show, contributing to a cacophony of discursive components that amount to a public memorial. The subject—those dehumanized and lost in the slave trade—emerges slowly, through wall text that points to the locations where Bopape gathered the soil, footage and sounds that merge in the show, and through a short story by Bayo Akomolafe in an accompanying booklet. Akomolafe writes of a spirit that appears and dances amid the capture and transport of people from West Africa to North America; like Bopape’s exhibition, this is not a textbook retelling of enslavement but one alive with its own codes of survival.

That this exhibition is on view in Richmond is significant: the city was home to one of the largest auction houses for the sale of enslaved people. The former capital of the Confederacy, it is currently undergoing its own grassroots reimagining of memorials. The central site of the bronze monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee has been reclaimed as a memorial to victims of police violence and a gathering space for the Black Lives Matter movement.

The spacious white walls of a museum are very different from the outdoor roundabout where the Lee monument resided. Still, as the wall text notes, both share the grandeur and carry the memory of “the wealth created by forced labor”; museums are, after all, inheritors of a colonial project. The horizontal constellation Bopape creates on the ICA’s floor, and her repositioning of soil on walls, reorients that space in a way that feels akin to the reclamation of the Lee roundabout, now marked with small gardens, basketball hoops, and memorials to specific people. Sitting below the huge pedestal and (recently removed) bronze general on horseback, these additions are at human level and scale. Both acts induce a rethinking of the conventions of looking and remembering.

In An Aspect of the Divine Life (Society Indoors), 2001–07, and The Visiting Hour (Some Are Ghosts), 2007, well-dressed ladies and dapper dandies stand between stage curtains created from accordion-folded paper. Their oversize heads and toothpick bodies—which Goodlett drafted in ballpoint pen with a caricaturist’s shading and features—recall marionettes. Two other works, both untitled, feature the large, isolated hands of a puppeteer. In both, the hands pull back curtains to reveal a central room containing an empty red chair. Operating as the central character of the scene, the chair is framed by paper floral sconces above and by the faces of spectators drawn onto crumpled paper balls in the pit below.

Mike Goodlett, Dollhouse Asylum, 2006, wood, glass, paper, and ballpoint pen, 48 by 38 by 6 1/2 inches.

While most of the shadowboxes suggest theatrical stages, one, Dollhouse Asylum (2006), depicts a house in cross section, with chambers connected by a maze of passageways and staircases. Lumpy, brown phallic forms made from pantyhose stuffed with cotton wool rise from the ground floor, and a pink, shell-shaped satin ornament with vaginal folds hangs in the center. These ersatz rococo flourishes call to mind the stylistic interventions Goodlett made at his own home in Lexington, a farmhouse he inherited from his grandparents some thirty years ago. Published images of the house depict trails of white paper flower petals lining the ceiling, while a makeshift skirt of irregular cardstock flaps hangs from the dining room lampshade. For the house’s many doorframes, Goodlett constructed decorative wooden and plaster molding that echoes in the curved flourishes of the frames he made for his shadowboxes.

The sole photographic elements in the works on view are a trio of images from gay magazines on the walls of Dollhouse Asylum: two photographs of shirtless men, and another depicting a leather daddy in chains. Placed in an upstairs chamber, the photographs allude to the artist’s sexuality and evoke the closed-door intimacy of a bedroom. They also hint at the direction of his subsequent work: in the 2010s, Goodlett made erotic graphite-and-ink drawings depicting bulging phallic forms. His last sculptures, the subject of a 2020 virtual solo exhibition staged at Goodlett’s farmhouse and hosted by MARCH gallery, likewise echo the stuffed pantyhose components of the shadowboxes, with spandex fabric stitched together to mold Hydro-Stone cement into freestanding biomorphic forms.

Remembered by Lexington locals as a friendly but private person, Goodlett treasured his time at his home and studio. He donated the house and land to Institute 193 just prior to his death to start an artist residency, so others could find creative solace there. His scrappy shadowboxes, constructed from the thought-filled pages of his diaries, are a reminder that our homes are places for expansive introspection, creation, desire, and dreaming.