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A particular feeling arises when a news headline confirms what you have felt but did not have the hard data to confirm. A few months ago marked this moment for me. I remember reading the article A Crisis of Whiteness in Canada’s Art Museums, which surveyed the nation’s four largest public art museums—Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Vancouver Art Gallery—to ascertain that their top leadership is predominantly white and lacking in racial diversity. For BIPOC artists, curators and art workers operating within this industry, this is hardly news.  In…

The wall label is an apparently simple documentary form that has substantial effects on how we understand and interpret art. Often the most public-facing piece of documentation in arts institutions, it stands out as a minor text within broader institutional records. The wall label’s standard categories distill a specific, historically entrenched model of artistic production. Artist, title, date, medium, dimension, collection—these categories best represent work for which creator and product are relatively stable and distinct. Certain tendencies within contemporary artistic practice challenge these categories so deeply that the innocuous wall label—and the broader institutional archive—may conceal key aspects of the work….

Hadassah ‘Hazy’ GreenSky is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and visual artist based in the Metro Detroit area where she was also raised. She is a member of the Waganakising Odawa peoples from the lands now referred to as Harbor Springs, Michigan. Like many other young Indigenous women in the midwest [and across the Americas], GreenSky was subject to cheap ill-mannered name-calling like “Pocahontas” by non-Indigenous people when she was growing up. Her personal experiences of racism is a condition of systemic structures and barriers held up by white supremacy all throughout North America. Speaking to GreenSky, she shared with me that…

All my life, I have been compelled to write my way through stretches of time alone, and I have never spent so much time journaling alone as I do lately—living through a global pandemic where nearly every form of socialization is either mitigated for our safety or mediated onto a screen. A notebook is a welcoming alternative to the digital sphere, where participation can blur into performance. Conversely, It is empowering to produce something only for oneself. Yet spending too much time in this mode can often feel a little absurd. Are we documenting our lives or rationalizing our private…

s we move towards reshaping the world into a reality where the most marginalized and oppressed people are able to thrive, unimpeded by state and racial violence, the mediums in which identity manifests are a moving target. Racial and ethnic categories continue to shift, dodge, and take on new forms simultaneous to the expanding social consciousness of systemic racism’s histories. Whiteness in particular continues to evade blame and repercussion for the historical, structural oppression and volatility it has and continues to systematize. Instead, we have witnessed performative allyship from individuals and institutions of power that is as ineffectual as it is…

Time is slippery, expanding, and contracting simultaneously. Forward, back, forward, back, searching for balance. Micro-movements make a dance of the fall (like the dances we do on the sidewalk, keeping our distance). Mid-slip feels endless, somehow senseless, we have no idea where the ground is or when it will arrive. (In the meantime, maybe we grow wings?) Everything is expanding and contracting now — lungs, bravery, optimism. — The flowers came late this year. Laggard blooms, stamens tightly swaddled, all wrapped up in pink. I heard it again and again, the cruelest month, the cruelest month, as if no one could…