We Tolerate You…

Recently I found myself at the bottom of a two and a half hour lunch meeting with no lunch, unless you consider 3 untoasted bagels without cream cheese “lunch” now. As I scavenged the bottom of my bag for an old crushed granola bar (procured from my dentist 3 months ago), I watched the older white man next to me open up a clamshell container of chocolate croissants as my stomach growled. He ate one croissant, and then two, and then a third, and by the fourth, I was reminded of how much of our lives are farce. I am eating leather snuffed granola and this white man is living this meeting in sheer decadence. I am beyond a point in my life in which I am going to pretend that this isn’t a real thing, all the time, in everything we do. We are at their tables, and we are starving, but still expected to attend with a smile, come up with grand ideas, and be grateful. And they are eating mothereffing croissants.

There is a grotesque type of opulence that our lives are treated in the institution. I do not mean that we are treated well or with lavish—I mean more the cavalier way our existences are traded like goods, that we are treated as something akin to window dressing to better service the lives of those in power or the image of the institution. And while institutions pat themselves on the back for presenting large-scale exhibitions that create monolithic understandings of geography and race or for hiring one POC staff member even though 73% of staff hired in intellectual leadership positions in museums in the US remain white,

I am reminded of all the internal structures and conditions that pave the way for these types of shows and experiences to come into being.

There is a text-piece by Divya Mehra that states, “I’m Indian so I’m in this show.” An artist friend of ours said he would like to make a complement to this piece, called “I am in this show because you are white.” And we can substitute the words in this show for at this table, or replace show for room, or room for institution. I, and so many of my non-white colleagues recognize ourselves as being diversity hires at some point in our lives. We are told we are brought in to MIX IT UP, to challenge the status quo, to use our faces and our bodies and our minds to repair the damage white people have done to the faces and bodies and minds of our kin. But often MIX IT UP actually means perpetuating whiteness but with a brown stamp of approval.

This feels the truest in the painful process of proposing exhibitions, which often results in a litany of hoops that artists of colour—and the curators of colour that propose them—are expected to jump through, working along murky lines of “quality” that are structured around centering whiteness and western understandings of art. The goal posts are constantly shifting, whether it is about quantity (i.e. I do not understand any of these artists therefore I cannot confirm they are good, so I need more), to levels of authenticity (this artist’s work is too explicitly Asian, and this one is not Asian enough),

or simply to exploitation of time with intention of exhaustion (I will demand so much more justification, explication, and documentation to prove this artist is of a “calibre” appropriate for this institution that you will give up, stop trying, or leave).

Countless proposals die on that croissant table.

In the way that we are at this table because you are white, our opinion is only being solicited because you are white,

and often our silence (or repressed horror) is misinterpreted as permission.

When we speak out, we are told to stay in our lanes, and if we are allowed to step out of our lanes, we are expected to do all the heavy lifting to ensure that institutions are not continuing their reign of cultural terror.

In the same way that our lives and the concerns within them are always being referred to as ‘trends’ or as ‘a moment,’ so often when space is granted for POC staff they are in temporary and/or unpaid or the lowest paid positions in the office, while directors boast creating “opportunities” and “mentorship” for a hypothetical impoverished brown person that needs to be saved. The exploitation of curators and art workers at this level is incredibly disheartening—in part because the layers of exploitation can be so fine they are undetectable and entered into willingly—but also because you can foresee the alienation, trauma, and abuse that await them as they progress further into the field. So many of them will never make it to the croissant table at all, and we don’t wish that table upon them either. We have seen so many of our colleagues grow up and collapse into whiteness.

And why wouldn’t they? In so many ways institutions are inhospitable to racialized bodies. The artists of colour that get approved for exhibitions are often established—already sanctioned by white curators, white institutions, and white markets—or so emerging that they can be “claimed” by a white curator, who can take credit for “discovering” them.

Even though these curators reap the benefits from this artistic affiliation, artists can be left adrift throughout the process, not receiving the proper critical support (as the curator they are working with is ill-equipped to speak about their practice and is reticent to do so in fear of losing the pretense of authority and expertise), or being rushed through channels as part of an act of consensus building (cycling through all the exhibitions, being considered ‘overexposed,’ precipitating a type of fatigue around their work as they fear saying no will result in fewer or no future opportunities).

This all feels rather oppositional to a collective care and concern for the long-term development of an artist’s practice. I have sat at croissant tables with some of the most prominent curators in this country, who work at some of the most prestigious museums in the world, who use words like ‘postracial,’ who defend white appointments as if they are in a vacuum of merit without an established legacy, who argue that the whiteness of their institutions is not for lack of good intentions, who cannot even utter the word white and instead refer to it as “race or whatever.”

I do not want to imply that there are no generative relationships with artists or curators of colour being established at institutions, but it feels far more rare to see a place create and operate from a space of empathy, reflexive inquiry, and an honest desire for the radical repositioning of racialized bodies. I believe that there are many generative relationships between artists and curators of colour being established at institutions, including many of the colleagues I see in this very room, and friendships and community are being built by choosing to think, write, and make together, in spite of the fact that we are continuously left with the crumbs.

And let us end on the magical words of Lucille Clifton:

why some people be mad at me sometimes

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.

———

Editor’s Note: We Tolerate You… was first presented for Common Field’s 2019 Convening in Philadelphia, PA. The essay was read during the panel “Race & Curation” organized by Eunsong Kim. Additional panelists included: Carmen Hermo, Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, and Divya Mehra.