Tiffany Bradley

We stand in active support of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities as we finish May. Our network is full of artists, activists, and advocates working in the anti-racist tradition. Artist Betty Yu and her Chinatown Arts Brigade collaborators were recently featured in the New York Times arts section. (Although the title is misleading – this work is not new for them!) You can learn more about CAB in this PBS segment, or revisit our ArtOffPause conversation last year. And there are so many AAPI stories still to be told and celebrated – I always enjoy the latest offerings from Asian American Writers Workshop. Their Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities project feels super comforting right now, and they have more upcoming events on deck.

This month is designated to celebrate AAPI culture, but is overshadowed by an increase in hate crimes. These communities deserve safety and respect, as all of our nation does. In particular, we recognize the still-fresh trauma of those who have lost their elders to violence in Atlanta, Indianapolis, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Extra credit: work on equity with donation-based training tools for your community or organization via educator Jaime Jin Lewis.

Yours in spring celebration, 

Tiffany.

Image Credit: Sue Jeong Ka used “ID Shop, 2014-2018” as an intervention for immigrant youth without identification. Via the artist: “ID Shop operated as an artist liaison between queer homeless immigrant youths and art institutions to help them apply for IDs issued by the state government.” Being without papers is precarious in a world where documentation means access to services, education, and financial resources. Sue worked both conceptually and practically with this mobile citizenship pathway. Artists are often intervening between their people and the state.

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Coming Soon!

Our #ArtOffPause artists, activists, and curators have been busy! Here are some things to look forward to:

• Kevin Seaman is offering queer arts community and workshops through Diamond Wave. More on their Summer series here!
• Tammy Johnson launched Creatives in Place, a listening project on 22 artists rooted in the Bay Area. There’s plenty of great art, work. and insights online.
• Smith Museum College of Art (SCMA) unveils “Amanda Williams: An Imposing Number of Times” across campus through 2022.

Nobody wanted this. I was hoping for a bright start to this year. I was all ready to write an essay of optimism and cheer. On this Inauguration Eve, there should be promise coming – a new slate of vaccines, a change in leadership, an economic restart for the country. Instead, we’re watching a quickly unfolding story of security failures, political violence, and social polarization. 2021 could have been a fresh start, but it’s already a cautionary tale of how we’ve failed as a civil society.

Our country isn’t inviolable. It never has been. The failed Capitol coup isn’t a break in our reality, it’s a continuation of our history. But a revisionist approach to art history makes the sight of white violence unbelievable even in real time. Somehow the imagery of a white mob, attempting to destroy a government through brute force, still seems unimaginable to many Americans. That amazes me. White bodies dominate our national culture, whether in art, journalism, politics, finance, or other spheres. Our arts institutions cling to the cultural patrimony of European art, even while people of color have called to #DecolonizetheCanon for decades.

So if that’s our legacy, let’s get real about it. Our reflections of whiteness in art seem limited to heroic sculpture or gauzy pastoral landscapes. When our arts institutions curate or call in loans from European collections, it’s rarely about the failure of white nationalism or racism. The violent extremists that besieged our entire legislature took inspiration from the fascist movements of the last century – their appalling insignia, merch, and slogans make that clear. When arts institutions fail to wrestle with that legacy, it creates a predictable failure of imagination. The real trauma of the past is disappeared from our visual memory. We can’t reproduce or imagine how white nationalism creates a society shredding itself, patriotism lashing back against the people it pretends to protect. That’s our cultural heritage as well. For people of color, our survival depends on recognizing and deflecting white violence. But we aren’t the only Americans affected.

By forgetting the white artists who showed the cost of political violence, we do ourselves a disservice. German artist Käthe Kollwitz lost a son during the First World War, was harassed by the Nazi regime throughout the Third Reich, and died shortly before the end of the Second World War. Through it all, she testified to the pain of her times. She created work that showed European nationalism setting the world aflame, destroying families and drawing countries and continents into armed conflict. She shows white people suffering the effects of white nationalism. And we rarely see work like hers today. Poking around the internet, I found an article on Artnet about current opinions of her work. The TL:DR version is “she’s too emotional, too hard, and too intense.” True story – so is life.

The most surprising thing about the insurrection for me isn’t that is happened, it’s how quickly Americans are willing to turn away and move on. If there’s anything we can learn from Europe, through art history or otherwise, it’s that the fires of white nationalism don’t die out on their own. I’ll let Käthe close out the beginning of this month, and hope for better soon.

“They all devoted their lives to the idea of patriotism.

The young men in England, Russia and France did the same.

The result was […] an impoverished Europe robbed it of its most beautiful people. Was the youth in all these countries deceived?”

Käthe Kollwitz, Diaries, 11 October 1917

Image Credit: The Volunteers, sheet 2 of the series “War.” Woodcut, 1921/1922, courtesy of Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln. The museum calls this a “Danses Macabres” lead by a figure Death. Dancing to one’s death – a fitting image for a post-riot and mid-pandemic time. Let’s do better.

Spelling error updated August 3, 2021.

We wrestle with language on the daily. The struggle to make ourselves understood is a constant – whether through a dashed-off text, hours of online coronavirus-lockdown meetings, or work emails. Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we make a mess of communication.

That’s why I love a good style guide. There’s a precision to feeling like there’s a “right” way to use language. In this moment, every form of communication feels more fraught. We’re displaced from our “normal” lives, and the context of our communities change rapidly. I’ve heard some version of “I don’t want to sound insensitive/ignorant/uncaring, but I’m honestly not sure what to call people.” I’ve also said some version of this. The way we were taught the English language simply doesn’t hold up right now, and that’s okay.

Naming is a way to define an experience, but our lives are more complex than any words. Luckily, we have our entire lives to keep learning from each other! Below are some style guides and resources to keep the conversation flowing…

Image credit: My first impulse was to pick some Mel Bochner, but there are so many goodies in digital collections. I found this Willie Cole blackboard via The Studio Museum in Harlem. A.R.T. (in the new world order), 1994. Museum purchase made possible by a gift from E.T. Williams and Auldlyn Higgins Williams.

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Learning It up!

• A quick history of POC (people of color) in The Washington Post
• Why Black gets a capital B in the Associated Press
• Latinx or not? Looking at usage in The New Yorker
• Need clarity about gender and pronouns? Here’s a how-to guide from the University of Wisconsin
• Soul Fire Farm digs deep into multilingual Language Justice
• Coverage guidance from the newly launched Trans Journalists Association
• Merriam-Webster changes the dictionary definition of racism