A Different Kind of MoMA?
On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world. Such was the impact of this show on me that almost every other exhibition I saw both before and after in those three days came to feel almost meaningless, like so much empty, aestheticized and useless decoration. Certainly it made that work seem much less imperative. During past visits to MoMA recently I had gotten the feeling that something about the Museum of Modern Art had changed. Encountering the small crowd of deeply engaged people reading, writing, and attaching their own wishes to Yoko Ono's "Wish Tree" in MoMA's Sculpture Garden a few months ago was one recent breath of fresh air, one that suggested a very different way in which the museum public might engage with both the space, objects and each other. That piece created a space for both contemplation and participation. And several other shows there lately have seemed more conceptually daring, provocative, and more inclusive, with works not always where you would expect to find them (i.e. photography being shown outside of the Photography galleries and in relation to sculpture, architectural projects not in the design galleries, etc.), and not necessarily by artists you would have always expected to encounter in these quarters. But of course, that is just the point: exactly who and what work one should come to expect to find in the 21st century museum in this age of global culture.

The younger curators seemed to be finally holding sway (and maybe the influence of newly appointed associate director Kathy Halbreich was being felt) as more and more work outside of the long established "canon" finds its way onto the walls, integrated into the larger conversation in meaningful (and not token) ways. And the very nature of the conversation itself seemed to have expanded. I had a feeling that the museum--in spite of its recent bout of economic exclusivity brought on by the admission price hike (fancy real estate and serious square footage must be paid for somehow I guess)--was trying to reinvent itself, to make itself more relevant to the contemporary moment in a way that didn't necessarily merely re-inscribe the status quo of the larger art world. My most recent visit a couple of weeks ago convinced me that the institution had, in fact, become a very different kind of institution. Of course the irony of the price restructuring coinciding with a more ambitious and inclusive programming is not lost on me, but still it both looks and feels different in significant and intrinsic ways....and I'm not referring to the expanded building itself.

Walking through the Contemporary Art from the Collection exhibition and encountering the work of Ellen Gallagher, David Hammons, Mel Edwards, Kalup Linzey, Kerry James Marshall, Paul Chan, Huma Bhabha and Kara Walker among others gave an enhanced and far more accurate sense of the state of American art practice in ways that was certainly not characteristic of much of MoMA's history. Din Q. Le's Project 93--which takes a fresh look at what Viet Namese refer to as "The American War"--reinforced this feeling of being in a very different kind of institutional space, one which spoke with a smartly multifarious voice. Some may recall the placement of the important black Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam's painting--exiled to a location by the coat check-- as one among other slights visited upon the works of artists of color in the museum's past...when and if they were displayed at all. That placement of Lam's work had for so long been an apt metaphor for the museum's relationship to its "darker brothers and sisters." That began to change gradually over the past two decades and now a greater and more ambitious inclusivity seems to be an intrinsic part of MoMA's programming. Clearly in addition to making an attempt to respond to its long history of gender inequity (the recent Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography for example was a tour de force), MoMA is facing head on its former perceived racial myopia as well. As such it felt more welcoming than I remember it feeling in a long time, especially since its auspicious reopening in its greatly expanded Yoshio Taniguchi designed quarters in 2004. In 2006 the Cullman Education and Research Center opened, providing the first building for expanded programming and teachers training, further expanding the museum's outreach. The lesson that 2st century institutions cannot expect to grown and thrive in glorious isolation appears to be one that, to some degree, is being taken to heart.

The real eye opening and deeply moving show for me though--and the one that spoke most forcefully to a paradigm of a broader social engagement--was Small Scale Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement. The exhibition consisted of various projects designed and built by an international array of architects, all producing forward looking design projects in response to needs experienced in various economically disenfranchised and marginalized communities. The notion of architecture in service to an enhanced social order is, of course, not new. It has been central to much of the discourse surrounding twentieth century architectural practice. Much of this discourse centered on architecture's capacity for the creation of a kind of modern utopia, a reordering and transformation of social structures through design. Much of what became the postmodern critique of this utopian idealism pushed aside these aspirations in favor an architectural practice that sought merely to critique itself, yet another form of the postmodern "deconstruction of the text." In spite of this, groups began to emerge in response to this overly aestheticized set of dictates who began to argue anew for a return to architecture's capacity to have real social benefit. New Urbanism was a direct response to wanting to both reframe and recapture modernism's social dimension. The architects in this exhibition extend from that tradition. They believe that architecture can indeed be a powerful instrument for affecting social change and that architects have ethical and social responsibilities.

I have been aware for some time now of Rural Studio, the design build program for undergraduate architecture students at Alabama's Auburn University. Founded in 1993 by the late Samuel "Sambo" Mockbee in Newbern, an impoverished town of some three people, the program has designed and built some 120 private and public projects, including homes, community centers, chapels, farmer's markets and sports facilities. All are designed and built by the students in consultation with the community. In this exhibition they are showing one of their most recent projects, The $20K House, a project that began in 2005 to address the dearth of affordable housing in Western Alabama. In response they have designed and continually refined the $20K house ($12,000 for materials, $8,00 for labor). Using local materials and local contractors to build them, the houses are affordable to a poor community for whom the monthly $100 mortgage payment (based on median income and the house's value) is as much as they can afford. And yet it allows them to own their own home, avoiding the trailers and other makeshift housing they would more often than not have to use as shelter instead.

Other projects in the exhibition detail projects situated in Bangladesh (Meti-Handmade School), Burkina Faso (Primary School), Lebanon (Housing for the Fishermen of Tyre), Los Angeles, CA (Inner-City Arts), and Chile (Quinta Monroy Housing) among others. I was particularly moved by Urban Think Tank's Metro Cable project in Caracas, Venezuela. The project ingeniously connects the poor residents of the La Vega and Petare barrios to the rest of the city by means of a cable car system which connects at the end to the public transportation system at the bottom of the steep hill which isolates them from much of the city's social and economic life. Resisting the initial proposal by the city to demolish homes in the barrios to make way for a road project, the architects instead devised an overhead cable system that left the town largely intact. Further, each station along the route has its own social program such as a library, small supermarket, or community center, further enhancing the quality of life of the residents while providing much needed amenities and opportunities for community social engagement as well.

These projects, both large and small scale, all provide evidence of how a socially engaged practice can exist in ways that advance simultaneously a set of design and social agendas. These principals are adaptable to any scale; it is the intent that sets it in motion. Here in Chicago artist Theaster Gates, for example, is transforming a once abandoned house on the south side of the city into The Dorchester Project, a building which will ultimately act as gathering place, archive, and soul food restaurant for those in the community and anyone else willing to venture south. Gates, like those architects in the MoMA exhibition and other art practitioners working to join their practice to the larger social community are pointing the way to a future in which artists and community come to find that they indeed have more in common than is often thought to be the case. And that can only be a win-win for everyone. Now if only MoMA would do a price rollback on their $20 general admission fee things would begin to feel even better in these times of increasing economic apartheid. That, or giving their free hours greater public promotion so that the less well heeled know the most opportune time to visit, would enhance their newly inclusive stance even further. I am sure that there are those who would suggest that MoMA and other mainstream museums are still the bastions of exclusivity that they always were. Some are, but I would suggest they look a little more closely and consider that the smartest of these institutions realize that they are indeed public institutions and are attempting to come to more meaningful terms with that fact and their various publics, pulling them closer in the institutional conversation. From where I stand at least the house that Abby Rockefeller built seems to comporting itself in ever finer fashion these days.

Photographs (from top): Installation view, Small Scale Big Change, MoMA; installation view, Contemporary Art from the Collection, MoMA; Viewers read wishes written by other visitors on Yoko Ono's "Wish Tree"; installation view, Contemporary Art from the Collection (Mel Edwards Lynch Fragments in foreground, General Idea AIDS in background); Small Scale Big Change, Primary School project; installation view; Small Scale Big Change, $20K House; installation view, Small Scale Big Change, Metro Cable project; installation view, Theaster Gates, The Dorchester Project.
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November 21st, 2012

Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand.

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On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett.

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Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact.

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The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate.

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Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”.

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John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.

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A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree.

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The Society of Photographic Education Meets in Philadelphia

The Society for Photographic Education held its national conference this past week in Philadelphia.

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Published here are the remarks I gave during my opening Keynote Address at the College Art Association Conference Convocation here in Chicago on Wednesday evening.

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The 60s and 70s Redux: All Power to the People

I could not have imagined when I was sixteen and seventeen years old selling The Black Panther newspaper on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, NY that forty years later I would finally meet the man who not only visually shaped the paper but also created the ico

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A Sublime Experience in Worcester, MA

I had the opportunity during an unusually busy month to catch the curated exhibition project by sculptor Rona Pondick.

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When I was a kid the calm evening air would sometimes be dramatically and suddenly broken by my father's excited shout. "There's a blue on!" he would cry out from the living room.

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[Note: Today I am turning this space over to my good friend the writer and playwright Ifa Bayeza. Ifa's critically acclaimed play "The Ballad of Emmett Till" completed a successful run at the Goodman Theater here in Chicago a year ago, where it premiered.

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Where the Past Meets the Present

I was in New York recently, the East Village actually, and from my usual perch at BBar on East 4th Street and the Bowery found myself reflecting on the rapid pace of change in that neighborhood. I had worked on St.

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Where People Go to Be Themselves in Public

Cities are composed of diverse communities. The makeup of these communities is determined by everything from ethnicity, culture, economics, patterns of migration and more than a little bit of overt and covert social engineering.

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Frank Gohlke's Queens Photographs

Photographer Frank Gohlke was in Chicago recently as my invited guest at Columbia College Chicago.

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When Artists Rock the [Art] House

I was asked to give a presentation for the Education Committee at the Museum of Contemporary Art a few weeks ago. The committee is comprised of educational and curatorial staff, along with a few trustees and patrons.

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Art and Youth - A Powerful Combination

One day when I was in grade school, my class took a field trip to Carnegie Hall, then the home of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

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University Moves to Close Rose Art Museum

That sound you may have heard the past two days rippling through the art world was the sound of a collective shudder, as Brandeis University's trustees unexpectedly announced that it would sell off some 6,000 modern and contemporary artworks in the museum's

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Barack Obama's historic ascendency as the 44th president of the United States certainly signal a huge paradigm shift, one that has numerous national and global implications.

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With Barack Obama's inauguration as the nation's forty-fourth president a scant five days away, excitement and anticipation are building as we enter a moment of profound change and potential paradigm shifts.

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I particpated in an Artists at Work panel discussion at the Chicago Cultural Center three nights ago.

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I was in Nashville, TN for a couple of days last week, where I gave a lecture at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts and spent time at Fisk University visiting the storied Carl Van Vechten Gallery, and viewing some of the partially restored Aaron Douglas murals on campus.

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How One Institution Has Made A Huge Difference

I received the recent issue of Contact Sheet, the publication produced by Light Work that documents its programs, resident artists, and exhibitions.

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Barack Obama's Election - The View from Chicago 

My son and I went to Grant Park on Tuesday night for the election night Barack Obama rally and victory celebration, standing for hours amongst a veritable sea of our fellow Chicagoans.

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Believe In Change

Sarah Palin (with the complicity of John McCain) is doing her best to stir the pots of racism and xenophobia in the waning days of their failing campaign.

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Young Artists Take the Lead in Making a Difference

A group of former students from California College of the Arts have gotten together to form Art for Obama, an online auction of photographs to raise campaign funds for the Obama/Biden ticket.

A Beautifully Poetic Show

I haven't written anything on the blog for a few weeks, but not for want of things to write about. I recently attended the opening of a wonderful exhibition that prompted this entry.

Photographing Barack

I've had the opportunity over the years to do commissioned portraits of a number of people.

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Opening Up The Curatorial Process

I've been in Baltimore, MD for the past three weeks working at the Walters Art Museum on a curatorial project with twelve Baltimore area teenagers that will culminate in an exhibition at the museum in December entitled The Portrait Re/Examined.

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The Difference Between Making It Up and Seeing It

Richard "Chip" Benson (seen above in an earlier Lee Friedlander photograph) once said something when I was a graduate student in the Photography program at Yale that has stayed with me all these years.

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Photographs of Transformation

I've been looking at the Paul Fusco photographs made on June 8, 1968 which were recently published by Aperture, and exhibited at James Danziger Gallery.

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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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