Salon Discussion: Not Neutral

Not Neutral - Salon Series
Guest respondents: ​Deana Haggag, ​Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Alicia Grullon, LaTanya S. Autry

In his response to the Walker Art Center's call for New Year Resolutions, Anthony Romero makes a suggestion to arts institutions to: "Recall that your institution is not part of some distant European colonial past but remains part of the ongoing project of colonial domination and that your function as a bastion of cultural legitimacy and valuation is predicated not only on your participation in the enduring colonial project of displacement and erasure but those of capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, able-ism, and white supremacy, as well." This series takes up Romero’s prompt for it’s May Salon: Not Neutral. This discussion will focus on how institutional practices assume a neutrality of place, or experience, and will explore how these false presumptions of neutrality belie the complex and often violent histories and structures that maintain its existence.

The Miller ICA Salons are facilitated topical conversations that include the general public and guest respondents whose life practice explores the chosen topic. The goal of these Salons is to animate engaged citizenship through conversation and exchange across difference and discipline in free public space. The 2019 Miller ICA Salons are a co-organized by the Miller ICA and facilitator, Dana Bishop-Root, who is an artist living and working in Braddock, PA. 

Free + open to the public 

Bios

Deana Haggag is the President & CEO of United States Artists, a national arts funding organization based in Chicago, IL. Before joining USA in February 2017, she was the Executive Director of The Contemporary, a nomadic and non-collecting art museum in Baltimore, MD, for four years. In addition to her leadership roles, Deana lectures extensively, consults on various art initiatives, contributes to cultural publications, and has taught at institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and Towson University. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art and Illinois Humanities Council, as well as on the Advisory Council of Recess. She received her MFA in Curatorial Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA from Rutgers University in Art History and Philosophy. 

Jongwoo Jeremy Kim is the author of Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities (2012; 2016). His article “Filming the Queerness of Comfort Women: Byun Young–Joo’s The Murmuring, 1995” was published in positions: asia critique in 2014. Most recently, Kim co-edited with Christopher Reed the interdisciplinary anthology Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture (2017), which includes his essay on queer temporality and late twentieth-century sculpture, “Now and (N)ever: Robert Gober’s Beeswax Time Machines.” Kim is currently working on his next book, Male Bodies Unmade: Picturing Queer Selfhood, which advances current scholarly debates on subjectivity formation by reassessing the historical narrative of corporeal incoherence in images and objects. Artists Male Bodies Unmade treats include Aubrey Beardsley, Jean Cocteau, Francis Bacon, Robert Gober, David Hockney, and Andrew Ahn. Kim serves as President of the Historians of British Art, an international organization for scholars and curators specializing in British art and architecture from every area and period. In 2007, Kim received his Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where he worked with Linda Nochlin. His book “Picturing the Edwardian Family Man: The Nicholsons at Home” will be published in Art History in November this year.

As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, LaTanya S. Autry centers social justice and public memory in her work. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive program that promotes public dialogue about the African-American liberation struggle, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, an initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums and the Social Justice and Museums Resource List, a crowd-sourced bibliography.

LaTanya has curated exhibitions and organized programs at Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, Mississippi Museum of Art, Tougaloo College, and the Crane Art Center. Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, LaTanya has developed expertise in art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America, which analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.

Alicia Grullón, a 2018-2019 Hemi Artist in Residence, directs her interdisciplinary practice towards critiques of the politics of presence, arguing for the inclusion of disenfranchised communities in political and social spheres. She is co-organizer and co-author of the People’s Cultural Plan, a coalition of artists, cultural workers, and activists responding to New York City’s first ever cultural plan in 2017. Her work has been shown at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, BRIC Arts, Spring/Break Art Show, and Performa 11, among others. Grullón is also a contributing author to "Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts: But How Does it Work?", ed. Nicola Mann and Charlotte Bonham-Carter (Palgrave Macmillan, London) 2017 and "Building Communities through Socially", ed. Alice Wexler and Vida Sabbaghi (Routledge) 2019. Recent activities include the Shandaken Project inaugural artist residency on Governors Island and the Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Alum program at 80 White Street. Grullón is an adjunct professor at The School of Visual Arts and City University of New York (CUNY).