For an exhibition at moCa Cleveland, Brooklyn-based artist Finnegan Shannon has taken matters into their own hands, with a show that requires no walking and offers ample seating. After arriving via elevator, visitors are invited to sit on couches and chairs while a conveyor belt parades by them a rolling display of artworks by Shannon’s artist peers. The setup’s closest proxy is conveyor belt sushi—but this is a feast for the eyes, rather than the taste buds.

The soft seating feels decidedly more domestic than institutional; Shannon sourced the chairs and couches from local thrift stores. (They even found a small stool with a puzzle spelling out the first name of the show’s curator, Lauren Leving.) And Shannon tied it all together with some of their own homey touches, like embroidered pillows bearing fluorescent conveyor belts and cut-out cardboard letters on the wall spelling out phrases like _{^{DON’T MIND IF WE DO}} and _{^{WE BEING SILLY AND SERIOUS}}. Shannon further tends to their viewers’ bodies with DIY air purifiers made of duct tape and box fans that help alleviate Covid’s ongoing risk.

The show encouraged visitors to slow down. On the wall, custom clocks told the day of the week rather than the hour of the day, as if asking, what’s the rush? It’s a show about promoting rest and alleviating museum fatigue, but more specifically, it is born of the disability justice movement. It’s aimed explicitly at questioning the ableist valuing of bodily exertion, as well as at the exclusionary assumptions museums make about bodies. Shannon considers the exhibition a fulfillment of their long-held “access fantasy.”

Among the most charming pieces making the rounds are Emilie L. Gossiaux’s 3D-printed sculptures depicting various body parts of her guide dog, London—including a paw and a tongue. Also from Gossiaux is a journal full of hand-drawn illustrations of the color-identification system she created for herself after going blind, in which she associates colors with memories and feelings: a crayon that Crayola calls “purple mountains’ majesty,” for instance, is renamed “homecoming dress purple 2003.” Other pieces on the belt are interactive: visitors can lift them off and return them at their leisure. A card game by Jeffrey Kasper offers prompts for two players to engage in exercises promoting risk and intimacy. A Selection of Snapshots Taken by Felix Felix Gonzalez-Torres reproduces endearing correspondences, cat photos, and figurines that the late artist arranged lovingly on his pillows.

For some photographs in the Gonzalez-Torres book, we see not the picture, but the description he wrote on the back: like _^HOME or _{^{MIAMI LANDSCAPE, 1995, SUMMER OF LOVE}}. These image descriptions are echoed in the audio description track Finnegan made for the show, accommodating blind and low-vision visitors. For Shannon, the access itself is often the artwork, and items like tissues and ear plugs (for those seeking a low-stimulus environment) both circulate on the conveyor belt and appear on the show’s checklist. As ever, Shannon takes great care with the details: the tissue box is in a fabric cozy in the shape of a house, the artist having removed the stairs that made its entrance inaccessible, and lovingly added lavender to the bushes. Here as elsewhere, Shannon approaches access, to quote organizer Kevin Gotkin, as “radical hospitality.”

Implied in all this is the unseen effort that disabled artists often exert when working on an exhibition to make it accessible to our communities. Instead of keeping that work behind the scenes, Shannon compellingly makes it the subject of their debut museum solo.

Shannon is best known for their benches and cushions that appear in group exhibitions, bearing statements like _{^{THIS EXHIBITION HAS ASKED ME TO STAND FOR TOO LONG. SIT IF YOU AGREE}}., written out in the artist’s signature script. The bold capital letters are polished off with soft edges and a lighthearted informality that mirrors their twinned playfulness and criticality. Shannon’s work is always participatory: their “Anti-Stairs Club Lounge” comprised a series of interventions, including a protest at the opening of architect Thomas Heatherwick’s gargantuan Vessel in New York, a 150-foot-tall structure made of interlocking staircases. Before it closed, it glorified 154 flights while promising a premier view.

My own most memorable encounter with a Shannon intervention was at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, where I lay back in a cushioned chaise lounge to watch a gut-wrenching Nan Goldin slideshow, in which she relates how her sister’s institutionalization—and later, suicide—altered the course of her life. I became utterly engulfed, and started to wonder how many other treasures I’d skipped over because I hadn’t wanted to stand around, or squat on the floor, or sit on a hard, backless bench.

That work induced in me a longing to lounge in museums. It also underscored a key contribution of Shannon’s work: the artist doesn’t just point out the absences and assumptions normalized in museums, they also dream up solutions. Rather than institutional critique, you might call it institutional repair.

—Emily Watlington

This article appears in the Winter 2023 issue.

Titled “Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows,” the exhibition, organized by Art21 chief curator Tina Kukielski and artist-designer Prem Krishnamurthy, sprawls across Cleveland and the nearby cities of Akron and Oberlin—a region whose primary industry, the exhibition brochure claims, is healing, referring to local organizations like Cleveland Clinic and Alcoholics Anonymous (founded in Akron). The show largely avoids mentioning the sources of our trauma, or including work that scrutinizes what critics call the Wellness Industrial Complex; instead, it engages organizations like Cleveland Clinic as community partners and sources of funding.

The show seems to argue that making and viewing art is good for the soul, so long as the work doesn’t probe too deeply. In Oberlin, FRONT welcomes viewers to the studio of the late painter Audra Skuodas. A child refugee from Lithuania after WWII, Skuodas for decades made striking spiritual paintings of spindly figures against pastel patterns. Explaining their decision to show her workspace as well as her paintings at the Akron Art Museum, the curators said they wanted to highlight how the process of painting helped Skuodas grapple with the trauma of war and displacement. Here and elsewhere, they chose works that respond to troubles that are kept outside the frame.

I’ve been frustrated with art that tries to make viewers aware that the world is deeply troubled and in danger of ending, since these facts are so obvious, and I sure wouldn’t mind being healed. So although my first impression of the triennial was that it was pretty twee, replete with a rainbow logo—referencing the Langston Hughes line that titles the show—I kept an open mind. As I looked around, I kept asking myself if I felt healed, and at one point, I think I did, a little bit. It was in Jace Clayton’s installation 40 Part Part (2022), comprising algorithmically remixed songs that play in 40-channel surround sound. When I visited, someone had plugged their phone into the interactive setup and started playing Adele, who belted out her plea “go easy on me,” which the computer punctuated with pregnant pauses. Her guttural catharsis overwhelmed the Cleveland library’s sterile silence, and heck, I felt it. For art to “heal,” perhaps it needs to be a little bit cheesy. It’s both embarrassing and freeing to be reminded that your intimate feelings follow some kind of script that can be turned into a pop song.

Another highlight also alluded to the cathartic potential of pop music: Wong Kit Yi’s commissioned video essay Inner Voice Transplant (2022), which unfolds via subtitles that light up from left to right like karaoke cues. On select opening days, the artist was present to read them herself. She weaves together stories about healing that take place in Cleveland and China. One involves the first successful voice box transplant, which was performed in 1998 at Cleveland Clinic, where the work is installed; another concerns her mother’s diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis, for which there is no cure. As with most works in the triennial, the tone is playful, but Wong’s contribution stands out for explicitly questioning whether healing is always a possible or appropriate goal. “I feel like the word ‘healing,’” she says in the video performance, “is beginning to seem like a generic over-the-counter medication that can be thrown at any problem. And perhaps it can cause additional problems.” This made only more conspicuous the omission of work by contemporary disability-justice-aligned artists who have consistently been making that very point.

The show featured work about healing, work that was healing for artists and communities to make, and work that tried to heal its viewers. So I kept wondering if, or how exactly, I am broken, and how much my type of damage and need for recovery resembled another visitor’s. “Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows” was conceived before the pandemic, but still began in an era when many of the world’s evils hardly need to be named. And indeed, few artists named them. Sometimes, I wondered whom this silence benefited, or who did the silencing. For Dawn, a new work commissioned in 2021 by Cleveland Clinic, Jacolby Satterwhite asked residents of the nearby, primarily Black neighborhood of Fairfax to draw whatever they consider “utopia.” He then digitized and stylized their drawings, turning them into a mural outside the clinic’s biorepository. One sketch depicts a cube with a letter or two on each face, spelling SOBRIETY; another shows a vase of tulips. For a related installation on view at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Satterwhite animated these images, creating digital spaces one can navigate using an X-Box controller—a small step toward bringing residents’ utopias to life. We can guess why the glossy, growing medical research campus wanted to enlist an artist to help repair its community relations, and why the Western biomedical industry felt the need to reach out to a community whose trust they’ve lost. But the gesture seemed to place the artist in the awkward position of “healer.” Ideally, healing looks less like avoiding difficult conversations and more like finding ways to have them peacefully and constructively, without evading accountability.

The strongest curatorial argument about art and healing emerged in an exhibition on craft curated by Murtaza Vali at the Akron Art Museum. The overarching premise that repetitive art processes are therapeutic seemed a little obvious, and recalled the framing of Skuodas’s studio, but a compelling subsection included work in which artists repurposed detritus, salvaging something from the trash filling up our planet—or at least modeling the principle of grappling with the waste rather than shipping it off somewhere else. In readymades that often borrow car parts, Michigan-born artist Dominic Palarchio repurposes defunct found objects, often eliding distinctions between craft and repair or handiwork. His resulting, oddly elegant untitled sculptures—like a Brita water filter balanced on an oxidized copper pipe—recall the water crisis in Flint while offering space to mourn environmental racism.

This year’s slew of pent-up and postponed -ennials—emerging wearily and worriedly into the world after years of rumination—seem divided into two camps: those privileging politics in the form of heavy-handed didacticism (Berlin) or social practice (Documenta), and those that express a kind of exhaustion with naming all that ails us (New Museum, FRONT) or that beg art to be more beautiful than political (Venice). This dichotomy is disappointingly simple; exhibitions can be positive, repair-oriented, and even breathtakingly gorgeous without dancing around critical issues.

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