When stories come up about museums unethically acquiring work for their collections, the plot often centers on things like art looted by Nazis in the early 20th century, or cultural artifacts from civilizations that have been raided by colonial armies. These stories are tied up in legacies of white supremacy and the ongoing desires of wealthy Europeans and Americans to assert their status by displaying these stolen items.
We hear less often about unethical acquisition practices when it comes to contemporary art. And yet, even today, it’s not always the case that museums are acting above reproach.
In this episode, we hear from interdisciplinary artist Fields Harrington, who unwittingly became one of a large group of artists whose work was collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art. It’s a story that’s wrapped up with national fights for racial justice that flared during the pandemic, and it’s also a story of how challenging it can be to resolve these problems once they’ve been created.
Our interview was recorded in October 2020.
Show Notes
Below you can find links to Yanira’s work and some of the people, ideas, and organizations she referenced in our conversation:
- Fields’ website
- “Abolish Fucking Cops,” the digital work that Fields created for Printed Matter’s 2020 Open Call
- News coverage of the cancellation of the Whitney Museum’s planned 2020 exhibition “Collective Actions: Artist Interventions In a Time of Change”
- Open letter co-authored by Chiara No, Kara Springer, and Fields Harrington
- “Diversity of artists in major U.S. museums” (study quoted in episode)
Fields Harrington is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice considers the blurring of boundaries between poetics and science. His work revisits the history of western empiricism and scientific systems, addressing legacies of violence as well as the enmeshment of science, racism, and ideology. By appropriating scientific processes and subverting their grammar, his desire is to relieve the Black subjective experience from a legacy of historical violence. The weaving of artistic and scientific languages deployed in his work proposes the formation of a relational knowledge that recodes science through poetics. Fields received his BFA from the University of North Texas and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a participant in the Whitney Independent Studio Program (2019-2020).
Transcript
Alexis Clements
Hello and welcome back to The Answer is No. My name is Alexis Clements and I’ll be your host. Our goal with this podcast is to share stories of artists saying no to bad gigs in order to think more broadly about how to make the arts a more equitable and sustainable field for everyone. Today I’ll be speaking with interdisciplinary artist Fields Harrington.
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This episode of the podcast is going to focus on something that happened in 2020 that caught headlines around the world. Specifically, the cancelled Whitney Museum show titled “Collective Action.” We’ll get into more details and a conversation with Fields, but I want to quickly recap what happened for those of you who don’t know or who don’t remember the story.
On May 25, 2020, father, grandfather, mentor and hip hop artist George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. Nationwide protests erupted after video of Floyd’s murder became public, and those protests echoed years of organizing and effort from the Black Lives Matter movement. As part of the protests, many artists worked with organizations around the country to generate work to be sold, often in auctions, in order to generate funds to support communities of color. In addition, many institutions put out open calls for work by artists responding to the events that were driving the protests.
Unbeknownst to a number of artists participating in these open calls, the Whitney Museum of American Art decided to begin collecting some of the work that was being sold in these auctions or given away in these open calls, in order to create an exhibition. Most of the artists whose work was going to be included in the exhibition didn’t find out about it until a couple of weeks before the show was set to open, when they got an email from Farris Wahbeh, the Museum’s Director of Research, who was curating the show.
For those unfamiliar with the museum acquisition process, it’s crucial to mention here that it is highly unethical for a museum to acquire the work of a living artist without paying or consulting with that artist. Some people have made the argument that most of the work that was going to be included in the show could be considered ephemera. But the reality is that not all of the work can be categorized that way. And none of the artists were given any say in what was being collected or how it would be contextualized. And perhaps most importantly, for a museum like the Whitney, which has been criticized for decades for the lack of artists of color in their collection, this was a deeply cynical and problematic way to try to fix that problem.
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The lack of representation of artists of color in museums has been an issue for as long as museums have existed in this country. And it’s something that’s been the subject of protest for decades. In January of 1969, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, a group of 75 Black artists, protested an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art focused on Harlem that included not a single work by a Black artist. This helped spur another group, the Art Workers Coalition that was protesting against the Museum of Modern Art later that same month, to demand that MoMA addressed the lack of Black and Brown artists in their leadership and collection.
Here we are more than 50 years later, and a study released in 2019 revealed that the collections of 18 of the country’s leading museums are 85% White, and 87% male. Let me repeat that, in 2019, the permanent collections of many of the country’s most important art museums are 85% White and 87% male.
My guest today, Fields Harrington, was one of the artists whose work was going to be part of the Whitney’s “Collective Action” show. And he was also one of the people who crafted an open letter to the Whitney in response to the events surrounding the cancellation of the show.
He is also a work whose artist I feel particularly drawn to. Many moons ago, I studied the history and philosophy of science, and I particularly love the way Fields is appropriating the language and subjectivities of science to explore Black identity and cultures. Given that science has a long history of subjugating and appropriating Black life and culture, this flip is a powerful and rich place to explore. His work,which ranges across media from drawing to sculpture to performance and installation is well worth spending time with. And I was glad to get to spend a bit of time speaking with him about his work and experiences.
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When you were little and looked ahead to adult life, what did you imagine for yourself?
Fields Harrington
I guess it depends on what age. When I was about 14, I was living in Las Vegas and I was in middle school. And I remember taking this class, an art class, and we would do like wire sculptures for a couple of weeks, and then we’d be done. And then we took a class where we could learn Japanese. There was another class that was on meteorology. I really enjoyed the meteorology class, just like learning about different weather systems and why certain cloud formations look the way that they did. There is a time that I wanted to be a storm chaser — weatherman. [laughter] I was kind of all over the place, though. But that’s, I think that’s my favorite one to think back on.
I should also mention meeting another friend when I was in high school — we met at this weird camp in the middle of Texas, and then continued to be friends. And they showed me the San Antonio gallery nights. And when I was in high school, there was a area behind a brewery — it’s Blue Star. Before Blue Star was what it is now there used to be these silos like across the tracks behind it. And that’s where you had like, these artists who would just run out these old grain silos and use it as like a space to show their work, you know. I was like, kind of in awe by that too. And I don’t remember how much people were paying, because I never asked. But it was like a low, really low fee. And it was really about just people coming out First Fridays, and like seeing what you had made. And it was just like a younger scene, and it felt like less pretentious than what I saw in some of the smaller galleries in Blue Star.
Alexis Clements
At what point did you make the decision to pursue the arts as a career,
Fields Harrington
I would say in my late 20s. I went to a community college in San Antonio. You know, I was floating around, like really not knowing what it was I wanted to pursue. Then I got like a small, like, digital camera — I think it was a gift. A girlfriend at the time whose father was really like into their garden, had these beautiful flowers. So I took pictures of those and then I was like, oh, maybe I’ll take a photography class. So that’s what I did. I just took all the photography classes and ended like my last two years at the University of North Texas in their fine art photography program and got my undergrad Bachelor’s.
At that point, I was like, yeah, this is like, maybe it’s a possibility. But then, after graduating and moving to New York, I just worked and didn’t really have a lot of time to pay attention to my art practice anymore. So I would never like, during that time, I was never saying like, I was an artist. I was always like, no, because I’m not making it actively, and because I’m not making money from it — it was weird. I had to tell myself like I wasn’t an artist. When people would ask me like, oh, what do you do? You know, like, I wouldn’t say that I’m an artist, because I didn’t feel like it was my career. But then I think I had about, you know, seven to eight year break before going to grad school. For about two or three years prior to that I was thinking like, the only thing I can think about doing in life is like making work, because I started to see more people who were having these careers that weren’t just making all their income from their production. They were facilitating other avenues for resources and income.
Alexis Clements
Was that the thing that helped shift things in your mind — meeting other people and seeing how they actually put their artistic lives together?
Fields Harrington
Seeing that there was a range of like how people were making it work. Working, like, as an art handler for the first time, too. And then also, that world was introducing me to other folks that were wanting to do the same thing as me, but they had like this way of arranging many different places to get income from, but still were exhibiting and showing work. You know, and finding time in the night to make work.
And then also, working in the service industry too, there’s a lot of artists that I met when I was working as a food runner. But maybe that’s specific to New York, I’m not too sure. But I felt like it had something to do with like being in these specific industries. Because, you know, I think coming into a graduate program later in life and also when you’ve had such a big gap between your MFA, and you’re BFA, I hadn’t been thinking about my art practice as like my peers.
Alexis Clements
One of the things that’s so striking to me about your work is its use of scientific aesthetics to explore race and racialized cultures. I’m thinking of your series of drawings of patents by Black inventors titled “Black Secret Technology,” or your 2018 performance “An Approximation of the Mix,” where you use acoustic levitation to levitate your hair while applying the hair product S-CURL to it. At what point did you start to hone in on the language of science as a central interest in your work.
Fields Harrington
I guess you could say, subjective experiences, the lived experience of Black life and how it’s been under a microscope and in the field of science, in the field of medicine, and in the field of experimentation — trying to define or be compared, or pushed into a category of, like, less than or non human — when it’s placed in the position of these fields of examination, of description, of categorization, which usually are in the natural sciences, or in themedicine field, so these empirical systems that we rely upon for truths or proofs or evidence, subjects the Black body to a non-humanness or less than humanness or close to an animal of some sort. So thinking about that and thinking about, you know, what it means to be in a subjective place, I think, led me to doing that performance.
Alexis Clements
Given the complexity of your work and the ways that it mixes scientific language and African American cultural narratives, it’s really notable to me that the work that was going to be included in the “Collective Action” show was very different from your primary body of artistic work. It’s a stripped down digital illustration in red, black, and white, that includes the text “abolish fucking cops.” Would you define that work as an artwork? Or is it something else for you?
Fields Harrington
I would call it digital ephemera, or digital drawing. I made that specifically for an open call that was from Printed Matter, that was looking for zines, ephemera, posters, pamphlets, that were centered on, you know, the civil unrest of the pandemic and also of the protests. At the time, I couldn’t, I couldn’t go to all the protests. And I was also feeling very, you know, kind of conflicted about that, you know — not being able to just leave and go to every protest and be a part of that movement in the ways in which I was like, witnessing my peers or my followers or the people I was following as well. And so the other way to participate, I thought, would be to like, make something that could be downloaded and printed by someone else, or put on someone’s screen saver, their background image for their phone — whatever. I knew it was going to be downloaded for free by other people, I did suggest that they would donate to several different organizations that were assisting people being incarcerated or other organizations like that. So they had the option to donate if they chose to. But it was always just for free. Like I made that specifically just for that. And I don’t identify it as like, as a work. Because it, I never intended it to live inside of an institution like a museum or gallery.
Alexis Clements
As I understand it, from the news stories and posts online, most of the artists found out about their work being included in the show, when they got an email from Farris Wahbeh, the Whitney Museum’s Director of Research, just a little bit before the show was set to open. Did you get one of those emails?
Fields Harrington
I did receive an email and when I read the email I was really confused because a) I’ve never been acquired by any museum, you know, whatever gallery. So I was like, oh, maybe this is normal, like you don’t get paid, you know, for this type of stuff. But I double checked. So I reached out to my former professor, Michelle Lopez, and I reached out to my former professor Sharon Hayes. And Sharon and I had, you know, very expansive and informative conversations about the possibilities of this arrangement that I had been kind of placed inside of. And yeah, and that was really extremely helpful to hear someone who is in the art world who has a relationship with this institution. And I’d been hearing that there’s just, there was a multitude of ways of going about that situation. And that like, no, those acquisitions are not free.
And also talking to other people, Tina Santusamos, Parker Parker — they all were very helpful, in helping an American artists. They all were very helpful when I reached out to them, because I reached out to people who I knew had these specific relationships with this space. But it wasn’t until, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t like act on. I just kind of like, was trying to draft an email as a response. Once it kind of exploded on Twitter is when I realized, I was like, oh, it was a lot of people who are impacted by this and I would like to kind of like get these artists together. And like respond as a collective, as opposed to as an individual, because I think there’s always more leverage and power, in working with the many as opposed to the singular in these situations, you know,
Alexis Clements
For you what was the distance in time between receiving that email, and the point at which it started to blow up on Twitter?
Fields Harrington
I think it was about a week. I think I must have received the email a week prior to seeing it go viral on social media. But I know that some people had received an email from Farris, you know, before I did, like, weeks before I did. And so the timing is a bit of a blur in that situation.
But I think once I saw it on Twitter, I was like, trying to just like, look to see who was talking about it in that Twitter universe. And then eventually, I was contacted on Twitter in a direct message from an anonymous Whitney Museum employee who had a list of all the names. And they’re like, here you go, here’s everybody who is in the show.
So I just like tried to Google all the emails. And I think I got a lot of them wrong, because people have similar names. And I just didn’t do a good job of like, you know, double checking if that was — but there was no way I could actually double check, like, who got into the show, because there was no list out. And even when you went to the website they didn’t list any of the names of the artists that were going to be participating in the show, or collectives, organizations, that are going to be participating in the show.
So yeah, I did the best that I could to reach out to people. And that was, you know, it was a bit of a success and a failure. Because some people didn’t want to be contacted. Some people didn’t want to see the show cancelled, because some people wanted to be paid. Some people didn’t want to be paid. Some people wanted nothing to do with the Whitney and had already voiced elsewhere. So yeah, there was conflict in the group. And that kind of played itself out in the threads of the emails. [laughter]
Alexis Clements
When you started the process had the cancellation already been announced?
Fields Harrington
Yeah, it kind of happened. And I think that’s why there was conflict in the group is because within the time of like, people being interviewed by different, you know, news sources, the Whitney decided to cancel the show, and the thread had like kind of just begun. And so people were kind of arguing about like, not wanting to have the show cancelled, and placing blame on people and stuff like this. And it happened pretty quick.
Alexis Clements
Yeah, it seemed like it all happened really, really quickly. And then a little bit later on the day that the show was originally supposed to open, the letter that you and some of the other artists wrote together was released, highlighting the failures of the Whitney Museum and the situation as well as the field as a whole, and calling on the museum to address many of the issues raised by the show and its cancellation. What was it like for you to be part of that collective response? Was this your first time being involved in a collective effort like this?
Fields Harrington
I think it was, yeah, probably was the first time to collectively refuse publicly like this, which was, for me a little bit difficult because that public stance does come with a lot of attention. And that was, that’s something that I kind of, I’m in and out of. Like I can receive that attention, I can also like, not be able to receive that attention as well.
And so I think what I learned is that coming to consensus is really difficult with a large group. And you know, our group was not even that large, but trying to come to some type of terms that was gonna give everybody what they want is usually impossible. But coming to several things that we can agree on is, it’s hard to work in a big group. And I don’t see myself as the organizer, and I don’t see myself as an activist. But it really did make me appreciate the organizers who are actually out in the world doing larger projects that have more social implications. You really do lose a lot of sleep. There’s a lot of emotional labor and mental labor that goes into that organization of people, which is like, yeah, it’s just a challenge. And it’s like, there’s nothing, it’s not good or bad. But it’s just like, things that you kind of learn along the way.
Alexis Clements
There’s a certain risk always in putting your name on something publicly, because even people who might otherwise agree with you might disagree with your tactics, if not your motivation.
Fields Harrington
Publicly, I think when I was sharing on Twitter and Instagram, I received praise for the things that I was saying in these interviews and stuff. Criticism, I think, came inside of the group, in the initial kind of emailing exchanges that we had, because there was a lot of people who kind of fell out, out of those email chains, because they just didn’t have the capacity to dive in to trying to find a way to respond. And then there was other people who are very vocal about not wanting to be a part of this group, and, and really frustrated with the people who decided that organization of the artists was the thing that needed to happen. And so there was criticism that came, I think, from, you know, that internal space, of working with people who just like had different views on like, what they, how they wanted to see this happen. Yeah.
Alexis Clements
Do you feel like this, you’ve seen any evidence that this is contributing to other conversations that might help with consciousness raising around issues of equity and how institutions treat their artists?
Fields Harrington
Yes. Yeah, I guess the letter does raise consciousness in the sense that it does call into question these systems of acquisition that are in place in the museum’s and how there’s a history of acquisitional practices that are unethical. You know, this, this event with the canceled “Collective Action” show is not isolated, it comes out of not only a place like the Whitney Museum that has a history of unethically acquiring work, but also acquiring work from non-artists from different geographies, in countries that don’t have the privilege, like some of us do, to refuse, or don’t have the resources to refuse in the ways in which we are refusing, that really predate us, and what happened in the 70s and 60s with the Whitney Museum and in their exhibitions of Black artists at that point in time. And so it continues a conversation that I think we’ve have seen over time. And for those who haven’t been aware of that history,and that are coming into it through these letters, these open letters, I think it raises consciousness there, right? So people who don’t have the assumption that these museums are bad, or these museums are unethical, or they, you know, what have you. I think it’s an opportunity there to inform and to educate.
Alexis Clements
And then getting to that question of, has the Whitney said anything to the authors and signers of the letter since it came out?
Fields Harrington
We were all contacted by Farris and by Scott [Rothkopf, Chief Curator and Senior Deputy Director] at the Whitney Museum, first for a conversation. And in then that conversation we had, as a group who were participating at that point, or, like, went into that conversation, you know, addressing what it is that we collectively wanted, and wanted to repeat in these meetings with them to drive in, like, a demand, right?
So yeah, we heard from, you know, first, I guess, first like an email, and then a conversation on zoom. And then again, after the letter was published, another email responding to the letter and understanding the labor and time that went into organizing as a collective and a group, and providing a fee for that labor, which was I think, one step, but also addressing that they were open to having studio visits wit people who wanted to have a studio visit. And, you know, they addressed that they’re going to make the changes on acquisition practices in organization of shows like this in the future, but we shall see.
Alexis Clements
One of the things in the letter that you mentioned was a year of programming a year of actions around this. Did they respond to that? Or did you decide to go forward as a group with that request?
Fields Harrington
To be completely transparent, after this letter went out, I was in the process of like balancing a lot of life things. And so I like had to step out of like, taking a position that could receive a lot of tasks. So I had to kind of see my limitations and, you know, capacities in that moment. But I would say that, you know, in the last exchanges of emails and meetings that we had, we did speak about the possibility of organizing ourselves.
Alexis Clements
Do you think the Whitney museum was speaking to the group in good faith? Or do you think this was just crisis management for them?
Fields Harrington
Yeah, it’s a hard question to answer, because on the one hand, my initial response is no. Like, why would I want to form a relationship with an institution that had a significant misstep during a pandemic and civil unrest. Knowing that this is not solely on one individual, so there’s many people who thought that this was a decent idea. But at the same time, you know, going back to this idea of like the career of the artist, and what that looks like, there is dependency that artists sometimes have to have on some certain institutions, or considering their practice, and considering the urgencies in their work. Having a stage or platform like the Whitney Museum to display or exhibit your work does put you in a position to project you into this formation of a successful artist, or an artist who makes a lot of money, or an artist that sells, or what have you. And again, going back to what I was saying earlier, there’s many formations of learning how to be an artist, or how to have a career as an artist. And so on the other hand, I think about that in the back of my head, I’m like, oh, well, there is this relation that I will continue to have with this institution that would benefit showing with them again.
Alexis Clements
As you pointed out, the way that this show was handled is part of a number of longer conversations about unethical practices. This isn’t the only time work was acquired in this way. And I actually helped organize an art benefit many years ago, where a museum bought tickets and acquired work through the art benefit. They disguise themselves, they did not put the name of the institution when they bought tickets. They bought tickets through multiple people, so that multiple people could acquire work. And we didn’t find out until after the fact. And it was heartbreaking. It was a such a slap in the face.
And one of the things that I’ve seen on social media is artists talking about never participating in charitable auctions and sales again, and not participating in situations where their work would be given out at less than market value or where they wouldn’t be compensated for their work. It’s a very understandable reaction. Is it one that you share? Would you walk into a request to participate in an open call, like the Printed Matter open call, differently now that you’ve gone through this experience?
Fields Harrington
After the Printed Matter — I mean, that was another conversation that I had to have because I’m also still kind of confused about Printed Matter’s relationship in this canceled show, which is that they didn’t think about protecting the artists and they already had an established relationship with Farris, and knew that this show was being organized, but assumed that it would have been carried out in an ethical way and the artists would be contacted and told that this was happening before this show would have gone up in the museum. It’s just like a really challenging kind of conversation to have, because it’s like, it’s something that I feel like, slides into so many different territories of acquisition, of institutions, of working with digital ephemera.
Alexis Clements
What are some of the things that have come out of this process for you personally?
Fields Harrington
I think it just gave me more evidence that like, there is more leverage and there is more possibilities in working with a collective as opposed to working as an individual. I think that’s something that some people are still trying to, or haven’t learned, are still trying to learn — understanding your own limitations and capacities, and working with a group, and being able to address them and not feel totally guilty by being burnt out, in those dynamics, in those relations. But also understanding that is more possibility, there is more leverage in the collective as opposed to the individual. That’s a big takeaway for me.
It’s hard not to think about all of the open letters that have come out this year alone. I think it’s given some of us more time to sit with and reflect on different experiences where we felt wronged or put in a position that felt, where we were being taken advantage of or being abused, and not just in the art world, but you know, in many other worlds. And before, you know, we didn’t have as much time to think about these things, and respond and react to these things. There is something to be thought about more, maybe in a different conversation, about the use of like the letter, the written language not only as a gesture, but also as a form of action, and a form of participation, as a collective, to refuse.
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Alexis Clements
There are going to be a bunch of links in the show notes for this episode, from the letter that Fields helped co-author, to the study on museum collections that I mentioned earlier, along with links to Fields’ website and work. So please be sure to check those out.
We’re also eager to hear from you. Send us your stories of saying no to bad gigs, whether it was you acting alone or in a larger group. You can email us or record a voice memo and send it to theanswerisnoshow AT gmail.com. You can also find us at The Answer is No Show on Facebook and Instagram, or on our website at theanswerisnoshow.com.
And if you can, please take a minute to rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast apps.
Thanks so much to today’s guest Fields Harrington, and Ali Cotterill, who’s helping to produce and edit these podcasts.
We’ll be back with you soon. And remember, collectively saying no to bad gigs can help us all get to a better Yes.
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