Monthly Archives: July 2022

Over the last several decades, scholars and curators have written about the historical richness and heterogeneity of Asian American art, yet art made by and about Asian Americans has remained for the most part unnoticed, an afterthought, or an oversight, especially in major thematic museum exhibitions and sweeping art histories.

Historically to the present, Asian American bodies have been pummeled, dehumanized, or fetishized into racial objects. How strange and ironic it was then to realize the timing of the New York Timess interest in Asian American art; featured as a recent supplement to its reportage of anti-Asian hate and violence, notably the murders of six Asian American women in Atlanta and brutal beatings of Asian Americans captured on CCTV cameras.

While we could use this space to present artists who have been underrecognized and underrepresented, lost in between the categories of American or Asian art, contemporary or political art, such an endeavor unwittingly embeds Asian American art in an art apparatus that paradoxically segregates and contains Asian American art while maintaining the status quo.

Constantly positioned as middlemen or what Victor Turner describes as betwixt-and-between preserving law and order and as model minorities in order to be recognized, how might we consider recognition and Asian American arts liminality differently, how might we approach thinking about Asian American art as a verb or even as an entropic force? Entropy is conventionally understood to be a process of measuring disorder and energy in a system unavailable to do work and/or its a concept used in information theory in relation to the coding and feedback of messages. Organizing Asian American artists into the canon increases the entropy of the art world and the diminishing means of BIPOC artists to make and show work with impact. Responding to the pressures of needing to be seen and recognized but only in a certain way maintains a harmful system undergirded by extractive capital and white supremacy. Instead of exerting energy and waiting for the art world to reach its maximum entropy or heat-death, how might we figure Asian American art as bringing on a new system that reveals and revels in decolonial arrangements and projects already underway, and/or makes room for new alliances, unexpected juxtapositions, connections, tensions, and dynamic collaborations. How might we shift our gaze of Asian American art as not about suffering but as pure joy, erotic pleasures, quiet intimacies? Asian American art has been about creating safe spaces, expressing identities, and narrating the Asian American experience and history, how might we see it as revealing other histories, amplifying submerged voices, and/or serving as a reparative space for others?

Informed by a number of fieldsincluding Asian American studies, art history, postcolonial studies, Black feminist theory, Chicana feminism, queer and trans theoryand indispensable concepts that include Jose Muozs sense of brownness, Lisa Lowes scholarship on intimacies, and Fred Motens aesthetics of blurring, we realized that in order to refigure Asian American art differentlyas a relational encounter, poetics of relation, and alternative space of knowledge productionwe had to do so collectively.

In our call, we asked artists, curators, poets, playwrights, scholars and activists a set of questions and invited them to collaborate and contribute a flash work of art and/or share with us an excerpt of a conversation or email exchange in relation to Asian American art and its attendant topics. Being mindful of the delimitations of space and time of this issue as well as the contributors space and time, and the realization that not all concepts and frameworks can be transferable, grafted onto or folded into Asian American art in light of differential colonial processes, forms of violence, and priorities of sovereignty, we kept it loose and open. Some artists are in conversation with other artists or scholars of a different ethnicity or race, other submissions are part of long-term ongoing exchange, while other presentations are hopefully the first of many collaborative creative endeavors.

What follows are flash meditations and propositions on Asian American art in which abolition doesnt mean just dismantling and getting rid of something. The contributions do not necessarily reject or even substitute the category Asian American art for something else, what they do is highlight the multi-dimensions and interpretive possibilities of what Asian American is and does, what it can become. Another way to approach this open-ended project is in and through a constellation of contributors who care about each other and Asian American art and its becoming.

Inspired by Kandice Chuhs and Al-An deSouzas An Unsettling Aesthetic Lexicon, we open the issue with their contribution and then offer our own version of a working lexicon of Asian American art as a way to introduce the rest of the contributors and some key terms drawn from the contributions. Please note that some of the contributions are shown here in its entirety, and for others, it is merely a preview and the rest of their exchange can be found online.

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Abolition of a Category The Brooklyn Rail - Brooklyn Rail

Just one year after opening within the space of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice, the Ford Foundation Gallery shuttered its doors in March of 2020 as the coronavirus forced world-wide lockdowns. Marking its return after a two-year hiatus is everything slackens in a wreck, a group show curated by Trinidadian scholar and artist Andile Gosine that features an intergenerational dialogue between artists Margaret Chen, Wendy Nanan, Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Andrea Chung. The four women share heritage in that their Asian ancestors were brought to work in the Americas after the abolition of slavery. The exhibition title, taken from a poem by Mauritian author Khal Torabully, evokes the destructive aftermath of colonialism, as well as its creative growth. Reflecting on the complex consequences of indentureship, the show explores how these four artists respond to their shared diasporic heritage.

While each artist brings her personal stories to the show, their shared histories and experiences come through in common themes and materials, in particular organic materials. Suspended from the gallery ceiling is House of the Historians (2022), a sculpture in the form of a giant birds nest by Chung. Made on site out of sugarcane scraps, Chung was inspired by weaver birds she saw in Mauritius that build communities of nests in former cane fields. The artist used sugarcane from Trinidad, a nod to her mothers heritage, which often features in her work.

Writing in the exhibition catalog, Chung compares the shape of her nest sculpture with the story of immigration. A member of the younger generation at age forty-four along with Sinnapah Mary, forty-two, Chung saw her family build their lives in the US, a country her grandfather thought he was bound for when he left China only to find himself in Jamaica. All links to his family severed, he was forced to create a new life. Made from castoffs of the sugar industry, Chungs nest takes something laden with gruesome history and creates a home, just as her grandfather and indentured migrants built homes out of situations that were painful.

Also made of repurposed, organic materials is Cross-Section of Labyrinth (1993), a 20-foot-wide sculpture by Chinese Jamaican artist Chen, seventy-one, that takes the form of a leaf spread across the gallery floor. Made of wood from the scraps of the artists family furniture business, the work tells a personal story of Chens family and the rich heritage of carpentry. At the center of the leaf is a series of circles that form a spiral. Four petals surround the maze-like spiral, each one representing the four directions (north, south, east, west).

The sculpture is covered in shells collected from mangroves. Speaking about her work at the exhibition opening, Chen reflected on her sculpture as a vessel for the shells and explained how looking at each shell recalls memories of watching people eat the contents, slurping whatever seafood they once held and casting the rest aside. Her shells are rough, broken, and mismatched, as if the whole piece was once underwater, a nod to the passage her ancestors took to reach Jamaica.

Chens work is layered with history. Wood scraps and shells, once serving different purposes in their previous roles, are given a second life. The history of the work itself is continually evolving as it is displayed. Inevitably, the shells fall off and are replaced, and the acrylic paint is retouched over time. The work also tells a broader environmental story of the relationship between man and nature with the former consuming and discarding the latter.

Shells also appear in a set of papier-mch, pod-shaped sculptures hanging along the wall. Painted in different hues of pink, purple, blue, and gold, the pods are by Indo-Trinidadian artist Nanan, sixty seven, and made from fallen palm branches. Whereas Chen underscored the organic quality of shells and chose a range of shapes and colors to create a natural appearance, Nanan selected pristine shells that she meticulously arranges on each work.

A film by Gosine shows how the artist creates her pods. The camera pans over waves crashing and shells waiting to be collected as Nanan shares memories of visiting Manzanillas beaches with her mother, making art from a young agethe only one in her family to do soand being teased in grade school for her Indian heritage, racism she continued to experience later in life. You learned how to survive, she says in the film. You just had to turn inward and get on with your work. You learned how to make a space for yourself.Nanans shells are arranged inside of and bursting from the pods slightly parted lips. Her sculptures resemble both natural and human elements and can be seen as plant pods or representations of female anatomy.

A similar blending of nature and the human body appears in the large-scale, figurative paintings by Indo-Guadeloupean Kelly Sinnapah Mary, the only artist contributing two-dimensional works to the show. In a monumental triptych, each panel measuring over eight feet tall and six feet wide, she has painted a young woman with curly, dark hair. Set in a dense field of green snake plants, the woman wears a white wedding dress and a gold necklace and earrings as she looks out into the distance with bloodshot eyes. Her dark skin is covered with green plants and palm trees. On her neck and chest are a small house and an ominous scene of a lion confronting a child. Sinnapah Marys entire body of work is titled Notebook of No Return, with additional information following a colon, Memories (2022) in the case of the triptych. Her oeuvre title is a play on the seminal work of Aim Csaire, the Martinican author credited as a founder of the Ngritude literary theory that promoted Black consciousness and African culture.

Supporting the exhibition are several noteworthy features and design elements. Just outside the gallery space is a blue, beaded exhibition banner by Antiguan artist Amber Williams-King. Welcoming visitors along with the banner is a soundscape produced by Gosine and the New York-based organization Jahajee Sisters. The score, which flows through the Foundations indoor garden, features twenty-five women in the organization who respond in sounds to the questions: What brings you joy? What brings you comfort? Inside the gallery is a thoughtfully chosen selection of books for visitors to browse, as well as a take-home bibliography for further reading.

The exhibition presents a relatively small sample of the four artists work, however, the show felt as far from small as possible. Each work could be the subject of a review. Visually captivating and culturally, historically, and emotionally complex, all four artists addresscomplicated shared histories. The exhibition is a powerful reminder of the possibility for beauty to come from darkness and pain, as well as the endless creative capacity of the human spirit.

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everything slackens in a wreck The Brooklyn Rail - Brooklyn Rail

To understand how the United States of America became a country without the constitutional right to abortion, look to the history of Black womens long fight for reproductive autonomy.

The reproductive coercion of Black women is a thread running through American history, one that predated and presaged the Supreme Courts recent decision in Dobbs that overturned Roe v. Wade. Enslaved Black women were forced into pregnancy to help build Americas budding economy. Pregnant Black moms are criminalized or excluded from abortion on the basis of poverty. The state takes away Black children from Black mothers at a disproportionate rate.

Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts chronicled this history in her seminal book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Roberts defines reproductive justice as the human right not to have a child; the right to have a child; and the right to parent your child in a supportive, humane, and just society. Her latest book is Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.

For Roberts, reproductive rights and the fight for abortion access shouldnt just be about the existence of a choice, but about the right to live in a society that allows for the freedom to make it. Just having a legal choice that you dont have the means to effectuate is not true freedom, Roberts told me.

I reached out to Roberts to talk about the key moments throughout history, like the passage of the Hyde Amendment barring federal funds from paying for abortions that suggested abortion rights were never fully secure. We talk about why adoption is not and has never been a solution to inequality, why Black women have historically used abortion as resistance, and why American history is a better source of analogies than The Handmaids Tale. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

As someone who has studied the historic fight for reproductive justice, particularly through what Black women have experienced, what was your reaction when you saw the leaked draft opinion in May and then when the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe in June?

I cant tell you how many panels Ive been on over the last couple of decades where the issue was what to do in the post-Roe world. So there was a lot of preparation for it, but I was still shaken by it. I happened to be with my daughter and her two best friends theyre all in their 30s and my thought was, My goodness, they have fewer rights to autonomy over their bodies than I did at their age. When I was their age, I thought that I had good control over my body.

At the same time, though, theres a reproductive justice movement thats so much stronger than it was when I was their age. We are in a contradictory time because with the fight for justice, it seems like were going backward while at the same time building movements that are so much further than we were when we were growing up.

You had more autonomy over your body in the past than your daughters do now. But was there something you observed back then that suggested that reproductive rights were not actually secure?

I could see that even though we were legally protected from government laws that barred abortion, there was no legal right to demand government support for abortions due to the Hyde Amendment. So we had the legal right to an abortion, but it excluded funding for women who were poor. This was all happening while there was a bipartisan effort to end the federal entitlement to welfare. Plus, in the late 1980s, I watched the prosecutions of Black women for being pregnant and using drugs.

Those two aspects of reproductive regulation, which disproportionately affected Black women, made me think the fight wasnt over.

The advocacy around abortion was focused mostly on the framework of being able to make a choice, without taking into account these structural impediments to having reproductive freedom.

It also didnt take into full account the devaluation of Black womens childbearing and the punitive policies surrounding it. I was an advocate for abortion rights, but I was more concerned about the failure to advocate with the same force for the human rights of impoverished people, or Black people and other people of color in the United States. Once I started thinking about the Hyde Amendment and the prosecutions of Black women who were pregnant and using drugs, I began to see a whole host of reproductive violations that werent at the forefront of the mainstream reproductive rights movement. That really changed the narrative about progress toward reproductive freedom in America.

I can see today how those infringements of human rights are coming together to create the moment were in now, where pregnancy is criminalized and where we are going to see the arrests and incarceration of people who manage their pregnancies, have miscarriages, or have stillbirths. Theyre all going to be punished under one agenda of controlling womens autonomy over their bodies and participation in society, and also punishing anyone whos capable of being pregnant.

Id like to back up then. It sounds like theres almost a straight line from the 17th century to now that has long told us that these rights were never fully secure. And it sounds like it is specifically bound up in a struggle that Black women have faced for reproductive freedom. Can you walk me through some key historical moments that you think speak directly to the Supreme Courts decision and the ensuing trigger bans?

Id first go back to the institution of slavery to look at the connection between reproduction and bondage. The experiences of the enslaved Black woman and the exploitation of Black womens labor were foundational to the state regulation of reproduction in America.

It still is staggering to me when I think about the very first laws in the colonies that were so directed at regulating Black womens sexuality and reproduction, and how that reverberates today.

Black women, during the slavery era, resisted control of their bodies, including by having abortions. Abortion has been a means of resistance for Black women in the same way that exploiting Black womens reproductive labor has been a form of racial and gender oppression from the very founding of this nation.

That was an aspect of the history of reproductive policy and rights in the United States that I didnt think was getting enough attention. I dont think you can understand where we are today without taking into account the historic regulation of Black womens childbearing, which has its roots in enslavement.

And what would you highlight next?

After the Civil War, white supremacists who wanted to take back control of the South, enforce white domination, and effectively re-enslave Black people used the apprenticeship system to violently capture and take control of Black children again by exploiting their labor against the will of their parents. In many of the narratives about this, Black mothers describe how they fought to get their children back. To me, that system is the root of our current child welfare system, or what I call a family policing system, that also disproportionately tears apart Black families and is especially punitive to Black mothers.

I would also highlight the activism of Black women, demanding welfare rights and government funding for their childbearing decisions and for the care of their children. Because Black women were successful at being included in welfare programs, the state reacted by making those programs more punitive and vilifying, eventually leading up to the abolition of the federal entitlement to welfare. This was fueled by the myth of the Black welfare queen. So theres that.

What else stands out to you?

The way in which prosecutors and policymakers turned drug use during pregnancy from a health care issue into a crime, with the prosecutions of Black women who are pregnant and smoked crack cocaine in the 1980s. I see that as the beginning of this latest chapter of the right-wing criminalization of pregnancy.

This is the chapter in which they criminalize pregnant people who dont produce a healthy baby, whether its by abortion or by alleged behaviors during pregnancy that are seen to risk a fetus. That strategy begins with the prosecutions of Black women and also the taking of their newborns. And that is a prelude to what is happening today.

And how have things shifted to what we are seeing today?

One way in which the conditions now are different from when Roe was decided [in 1973] is that we have medication abortion and its easier for people to self-manage their abortions. But on the other hand, we have this buildup of criminalizing pregnancy with fetal protection laws, prosecutors prosecuting and getting convictions of women who have stillbirths. We see the arrest of women who had self-managed abortions prior to the Dobbs decision. That foreshadows a future where women and girls and people who are capable of pregnancy are going to be arrested and incarcerated for pregnancy outcomes. So again, criminalizing pregnancy whether you want to have a child or you want to terminate the pregnancy those prosecutions are a pivotal point in the story of how we got to where we are today, and how Black women were both targeted and fought back again.

During a period in the 1990s, Black feminists got together and developed the framework of reproductive justice. Thats certainly another key moment though, of course, we can also go back to enslaved women who started this work, and the Combahee River Collective of the 1970s that wrote about interlocking systems of oppression and how Black womens position in society is oppositional to white male rule.

So the crafting of reproductive justice analysis is built on that history that recognizes the human right to not have a child but also to have a child, and to parent a child in a nurturing and supportive and just and humane society. That looks beyond the question of whether there is a legal choice to look at the societal conditions that allow people to actually exercise true reproductive freedom and autonomy.

Youve said that forced pregnancy and family separation taking children away from their parents through the child welfare system are connected and that understanding this connection is key to understanding the struggle for reproductive justice. How are they connected?

One way that we can see they are connected forms of state violence is that the right is arguing that adoption is the solution to both of them. And, unfortunately, some liberal people are also arguing for adoption as a solution to the struggles of families who are feeling the brunt of an inequitable society. I dont think its a coincidence that were seeing adoption thrown around as the solution to what really is state violence and state oppression.

Yeah, Ive been seeing what looks like mostly white or foreign couples or white women holding up signs that say, We will adopt your baby. Yet when asked if they actually will, the answer seems to be, No. What is this about?

Compelling pregnancy and taking peoples children away from them are both ways of upholding a system of white male elite rule where you divert attention away from structural inequities that need to be demolished and replaced and point to private mechanisms, which is what adoption is.

In the case of family separation, we have a family policing system that instead of helping families, blames family caregivers especially Black family caregivers and relies on taking children away. To me, that is a neoliberal form of privatizing issues. Instead of a society that supports families needs, it turns to private citizens taking children and claiming them for their own. That is exactly the same response of a regime that now wants to force people to carry pregnancies to term. They turn to this private response of adoption in place of facing the fact that one of the main reasons that people have abortions is because they dont have the means at that time to take care of children.

For state legislators and the Supreme Court justices to pretend that adoption is going to take care of it is just blatant mendacity.

Every aspect of that is just false theres not going to be enough people to adopt all of the children whose needs cannot be met because of poverty in this nation, because of the structural racism, because of discrimination against women. Children will either grow up in families that dont have the means to meet all of their needs on their own, or theyre going to go into a dangerous and harmful foster system.

Its all about blaming people who are unable to meet childrens needs. Its about denying them freedom to make decisions for themselves and then punishing them for whatever outcomes befall their children. Under this regime, they include the fetuses where there isnt a healthy baby.

This also sounds connected to the idea that abortion for Black women is a form of genocide, an idea thats been repeated for a long time. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has even cited this idea.

Yes, this is also related to the false accusation that abortion is a form of genocide that Black mothers are complicit in. Abortion hasnt been used historically as a form of controlling Black reproduction. Sterilization has. Theres a big difference between forcible sterilization and upholding the human rights to control your body and not be compelled to be pregnant. Those are two radically different things. One is about compulsion and unfreedom. The other is about freedom and resisting compulsion. Those arent the same thing.

Clarence Thomas is just wrong. And so are others like him who say that abortion is a tool of Black genocide and that Black women are participating in the destruction of the Black community when they have abortions. And they refer to the eugenics era as a historical reference. Thats just false.

The historical reference is compelled sterilization of Black women, which is akin to compelled pregnancy. Theyve got the references all screwed up when they make that argument. The billboards that went up [10 years ago] to shame Black women for abortion that said, The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb that message supports sterilizing Black women, as well as compelling pregnancies. Its a message about reproductive control. Its a false message that isnt about any kind of liberation for Black people.

And is this another reason why some people claim that abortion still feels like a white woman issue?

Ive heard that, too, believe me. At the time when the Webster decision was being considered and we thought that Roe might be overturned, I was speaking about it at a church and a Black man came up to me and said, Thats a white womans issue. Why are you talking about it? And there is a history of some Black nationalists chiding Black women for any kind of family planning, contraceptives, or abortion. Its just ridiculous to say its a white womans issue when Black women are more likely to seek and have abortions.

Black women have been advocating for reproductive freedom for just as long as white women have been. We have included the right to abortion in our fight, but its just that we havent focused on it since we recognize that sterilization, abuse, and being prosecuted for having babies, and Black maternal mortality, and so many other issues involving our reproductive lives are equally as important.

Theres a long history of Black women advocating for abortion rights. Loretta Ross has been advocating for abortion rights for decades. Shirley Chisholm, in her autobiography and advocacy, championed abortion rights and spoke out against Black men who said that it was a white womans issue. Black women use abortion as a form of resistance against slavery.

Its wrong to say that its a white womans issue. And its also wrong to say that it is a form of Black genocide. Those are false in terms of politics, history, in terms of what Black women have been advocating for for centuries. Theyre anti-freedom. Theyre anti-freedom, and they are inconsistent with the history of Black rebellion and abolition activism.

I also want to get your thoughts on The Handmaids Tale references and memes and the people who declared, Welcome to The Handmaids Tale! when the Supreme Courts decision came down. This is the reference that seems to be the most widespread whenever womens rights are on the line.

But lately some people have been pushing back, arguing that the meme erases the realities that marginalized groups of women have faced for centuries in America America has already been a Gilead for Black women, for example. Why do you think The Handmaids Tale meme is still prevalent?

Mainstream US society has never taken full account of Black womens lives and autonomy and imagination and vision. So the response to any current trend is often to look to white people as the victims and as the visionaries. But as Ive been saying, Black women have been at the forefront of movements to both contest oppression and also reimagine a society that is more just and humane and caring and equal. I think thats just one reason why we would get The Handmaids Tale before we get the very real history of Black womens reproductive labor being exploited or Black women being compelled to be pregnant for the profit of white enslavers. Its not an imagined story. Its an actual history that continues to shape policy today.

Theres a big difference between saying this fictional dystopia is a metaphor for our reality and saying, lets look at the real history of the reproductive violence against Black women and how it actually has shaped policy in the United States since the time of slavery until today.

Its also prevalent because white people dont have to grapple with the reality of how we got to the overturning of Roe. It is a result of the dehumanization of Black people, and it is a white backlash against every advance for liberation that Black people have made. It is a result of policies that have put Black women at the center.

Its mind-boggling but so important to recognize that we can name all these moments of history where thereve been these regressions in freedom, where stereotypes about Black women and policies geared at controlling Black womens sexuality and childbearing have been at the center over and over again. One of the reasons for ignoring this is that its a way to skirt radical social change. Its a way of pretending that America is built on principles of equality and liberty when you ignore the deep roots of inhumanity and slavery and coercion and punishment that are still critical to understanding where we are today.

As someone whos examined and been a part of this fight for a long time, what gives you hope right now?

What gives me hope today that we can continue with a reproductive justice framework is fighting back against these assaults on our freedoms while building a radically different society that doesnt rely on carceral approaches to meeting human needs. This means it doesnt police people or force people into compelled pregnancy. It doesnt take peoples children away from them as a way of meeting childrens needs. I see all of these carceral, punitive, inhumane approaches as part of a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist approach to meeting human needs. Theyre all interconnected.

I find hope in the fact that we have a reproductive justice movement that has been active and flourishing. Im also finding a lot of hope in the very quick action by abortion funds that are taking immediate steps to help people who need abortions.

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Reproductive rights have never been secure. Ask Black women. - Vox.com