Counterpublic : a Future-Visioned Triennial
Sky Will Learn Sky by Cauleen Smith at Treffpunkt/Fellowship. Image courtesy of The Luminary.
Sitting in a church basement, on a restored pew, I was waiting for the second loop of
Cauleen Smith’s film Soujourner (2018). The film, and her subsequent installation, Sky Will
Learn Sky, is a part of Counterpublic, a triennial public art exhibition organized by Brea
McAnally, James McAnally, and Katherine Simóne Reynolds of The Luminary in St. Louis,
Missouri. As I watched the Afro-Futurist figures walk in procession through (the desert
landscape) of Joshua Tree, California I felt witness to one part protest and one part
celebration of blackness.
Given the circumstances I knew of St. Louis, with brutal police shootings and some tone-deaf
choices on work shown in the recent past by cultural institutions (example: the Kelley Walker
exhibition at CAM STL discussed here in 2017 by Kahlil Irving, also a participating artist of
Counterpublic), Smith’s film is refreshing and vulnerable, showcasing revolutionary energy
that demands a move away from the status quo.
Soujourner recalls two specific moments for me about Kansas City in the last year. The
church installation itself recalls Nick Cave’s HyDyve , one of the most visited installations at
2018’s Open Spaces biennial. Second, the film seemed to be in direct conversation with
Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer, who also headlined for Open Spaces’ musical component.
Even with this recall, Counterpublic is radically different, if not the opposite of Open Spaces.
If Kansas City can learn anything from an overpopulated panoply of global festivals,
Counterpublic should be their guidance counselor.
Rodolfo Marron III’s collaboration with Diana’s Bakery. Image courtesy of The Luminary.
There are a few key points that made Counterpublic stand out from the noise of so many art
world events, most of them around uniting alternative perspectives. This is a dynamic art
exhibition for the art world’s imagined future. We recognize that the current world of
biennials, art fairs, and the pyramid gallery system primarily serves the elite class, often
known as the art market or gray market. In its current form, the art world maintains a patina
that is very white, very male, and incredibly classist. There are occasions where institutions
make efforts to celebrate works by diverse artists, but it doesn’t happen often enough. The
concepts behind most contemporary art exhibitions betray their supposed cultural
conversation when academic posturing is only understood by those privileged enough to
understand the language acrobatics necessary to participate. Artworks are not seen to exist
outside of this lustered scope and the artists and art spaces on the fringes often take up the
responsibility of growing new alternatives to these prevailing systems.
In our relationship to the world we like to envision, artists unfortunately function as creative
placemakers and are seen as the catalyst for displacement in working-class neighborhoods.
Once a space or place has been inhabited by artists, it is followed by a coffee shop, and
gentrification ensues. While walking through the exhibition with James McAnally, one of its
three caretakers, we stopped in Teatopia to see Digital Margins by Jerome Harris, Serubiri
Moses, and Gee Wesley where I felt a little uneasy.
All I could think at first was “yikes!”, an art installation in a tea shop in a predominantly Latinx
neighborhood. These were all harbingers of displacement. But I looked more closely. This
installation was a free library on mostly African-artist centric theory, where one could read,
make photocopies, and bind their research for the taking. Not only did this make me hyper
aware of my cis-white dominant scope of research and a need to dig deeper, but James also
pointed out this tea shop, was a black-owned business. So shame on me for thinking I knew
the whole story as soon as I walked through the door. This triennial was directly supporting
the neighborhood that was growing on its own, this is the point of success that focuses on
qualitative experiences of artists and their neighbors.
Fidencio Fifield-Perez installed at Flowers and Weeds. Image courtesy of The Luminary.
Mostly, Counterpublic is humble in nature. The presentation of works are quiet and subdued,
a scavenger hunt considerate of its neighbors, lacking the flamboyance of other festivals like
it that can often be obtrusive. Unlike Kansas City’s Open Spaces, where installations,
exhibitions, and events were spread out over the entirety of the city, this exhibition was
walkable, entirely on foot. Most of the spaces were existing businesses — a bakery, a flower
shop, a mechanic. Artists were called to make work that was to be a part of the already
flourishing Cherokee Street neighborhood. I ended up buying objects and meals along my
route, supporting these local spaces that have existed before and will continue to exist long
after Counterpublic. This was an example of caretaker James McAnally’s concept of “wild
building“ that I quoted to critique Open Spaces months ago. The Luminary wasn’t focused on
building something new, but bringing attention to the ways in which art could participate in
and amplify the structures that already exist.
Walkability between the works allowed for conversation and contemplation. Accessibility was
another key factor. Folks had the option to interact directly with the work by attending
performances, following the free newspaper maps, indirectly, by viewing the works and
participating in the actions such as a Latinx reading library, or purchasing a cookie
collaboration by Rodolfo Marron III that supported both the local bakery and grassroots
immigration advocacy group Latinos en Axion. In this regard, the art visitor was elevated to
a member of this community. A participant, not someone on the outside looking in.
José Guadalupe Garza and Miriam Ruiz’s collaborative library and gathering space in El Chico Bakery.
Image courtesy of The Luminary.
I had the opportunity to speak with several of the artists in Counterpublic. José Guadalupe
Garza and Miriam Ruiz are facilitating programming, along with overseeing the growth of a
free local micro-library inside of El Chico Bakery. We discussed how their collaboration
related to the word Ojalá (God Willing, which appears on Garza’s banner along Cherokee) in
regards to everything from the practicality of the white cube as an art space, to whether or
not people even think their work is art. The conversation floated around the aesthetic choices
as a center but moved in and out to conversations on the relevancy of the art market to these
contexts and neighborhoods. At one point Meriam discussed the books as “mirrors, or
portals of possibility” as most of the writing was Latinx writers or Spanish translations of pop
culture icons like Harry Potter. The shelf, filled with mostly fiction, was intentional. Again, this
was a space to enter world building, to imagine futures not yet possible, rather than being
complacent about the status quo.
The world of Counterpublic seems to function beyond the current art market and imagines
community outside of capital itself. These works focus on conversations beyond the capacity
for monetization. I spoke with Marissa Dembkoski, another Counterpublic artist, about their
banner installation along Cherokee Street., and the exhibition as a whole impacting the art
community. We discussed a broad contrast between Counterpublic and Open Spaces. To
Dembkoski, this exhibition was building a community that could be sustained and grow with
those who participate. As a whole this triennial was attempting to be the mirror of fiction, to
take action and create a world in which we could reflect on it a portal of possibility.
Ojalá, a banner by José Guadalupe Garza. Image courtesy of The Luminary.
The following day I met with Azikiwe Mohammed, who was both a part of Counterpublic and
The Luminary’s artist residency. He set up a portrait studio for the community and was
interested in access, the self, and how we experience history. I felt that Mohammed was
responding to the call put forth by an artist like Cauleen Smith, “What is a black utopian
community? What does it mean to celebrate the image of blackness?” We discussed at
length, both image and access. I looked at the printed portraits within his studio and
recognized a sense of self on display that was considerate of the artist looking, crafting the
portraits as capsules of identity. In the figures, there was a performance of being looked at
on display that was hyper-aware of the disconnect the camera can bring complicating the
artist/ subject relationship through a machine that has its own complicated history.
Azikiwe Mohammed’s Armor Photo Studio. Image courtesy of The Luminary.
Mohammad spoke of Shirley cards which proved color film photography’s anti-blackness. It
wasn’t until photography companies wanted to better document chocolate and wood furniture
that there was a correction to the near invisibility of black bodies in film. Our sense of self is
often built through how we are perceived by others. And that perception becomes certain
through becoming an image, once printed as a physical object. Mohammad offered to print
all of the portraits he took of people in the community, intentionally.
It is through the physical object that the self has a sense of permanence. In the digital world,
in our phones, our selfies and camera rolls are ideas, they can be lost and forgotten, but
prints are objects, they need to be physically destroyed. There is a radical act of the self
becoming physical. As Mohammad said, “The self is affirmed through becoming physical…
storage is an extension of memory in the digital, our hard drives are full of other people’s
memories, but our homes are the places where we are told that we’re correct, especially to
people of color.” Photos make the attempt to bridge the gap between memory, idea and the
objects that solidify them. This project and its radical visibility kept me thinking further about
the performative nature of ourselves.
Azikiwe Mohammed’s Armor Photo Studio. Image courtesy of The Luminary.
Yowshein Kuo and I spoke in the Carrillo Western Wear retailer where he had his work
exhibited. On snap-button western shirts, he adorned iron-on patches of murals, famous
paintings, guns, and phrases. Kuo was searching for ways to bridge solidarity between
minority groups. The phrase “World Restart” kept making an appearance, referencing the
world as a video game, which immediately brought my memory from the western wear store
to Hito Steyrel’s Factory of the Sun, which as a narrative video critiques cultural attitudes of
life being more akin to a restart in a video game. We discussed the cowboy as a costume;
the hat, boots, and snap button shirts as symbols of power and armor. The cowboy is the
hero figure of a lost future we all want to believe in. They symbolize hope and opportunity,
the American dream of westward expansion which has already found its end. It is only
through these fictions that we continue to enforce a sanguine outlook on the future.
I thought of Lauren Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism where she discusses how we form
attachments to our objects of desire. It is not the objects itself we seek, but the proximity to
that objects and the promises they brings with they. We all want to believe in the fictions we
construct, in the promises that allow us to encounter the futures we want to have, nostalgia
for the dead futures of past generations, we seek our sense of security through
acknowledging the vulnerability that all of our actions are a performance.
Yowshien Kuo at Carrillo Western Wear. Image courtesy of The Luminary.
Sitting in the front row of Chlöe Bass’ performance at Artist Art Banquet Theater, also on
Cherokee St. This is a Film version 1.8 was a hybrid of text-based storytelling and fragments
of video clips from the Chicago Film Archives and elsewhere. At one point, Bass quoted
another writing from Lauren Berlant in a way that gave me chills regarding my own
expectations and projections in relation to life.“i didn’t think it would turn out this way is the
secret epitaph of intimacy”…“intimate lives produce a fantasy that the private life is the real”
The audience wavered in and out of closed eyes and open, as the black screen called us to
work in a space of imagination. Watching old home movies capture an African-American
family dancing, celebrating, being in a space of togetherness, of wholeness, of home. Bass
discussed our desire for shared public and private spaces, and how Counterpublic was
addressing this need. Creating tiny pockets of experience that share the work of others in
informal settings. In these spaces we are informed less about context of the artist and more
about the neighborhood.
I didn’t expect this exhibition to seem even the least bit celebratory. The giant work by
Joseph del Pesco and Jon Rubin, set to be painted a large sign signifying THE MUSEUM OF
RUINS, felt out of place here amongst the rest of the works. This neighborhood, this
exhibition was far from a ruin. Counterpublic‘s intention seems to celebrate working-class
and force an interaction between the predominantly white audiences of contemporary art and
the neighborhoods they occupy.
Joseph del Pesco and Jon Rubin at 2712 Cherokee Street. Image courtesy of The Luminary
Fast forward to Kansas City. It hasn’t quite been six months since Open Spaces closed, and
already the artists are feeling the effects. This biennial was a spectacle to showcase the
glory of the city as an arts destination. The restrictions for participation rendered most artistrun
spaces in the town unable to participate. Yet Counterpublic made space for honoring the
existing community as it stands, whether it be artist-run spaces or neighborhood businesses
and gathering points. It called art viewers to experience work in these uncommon spaces,
questioning the gaps and segregation that often end in gentrification. The siloing of artists in
working-class neighborhoods allows them to be made quiet catalysts of displacement by
developers. The Drugstore, the studio space in midtown Kansas City where I have been
working for the last five years, is closing in its current location. Alongside other artist studios
in town, like Kunstram KC on Oak St. This is the ripple effect of the Open Spaces mentality in
Kansas City. The desire was to celebrate an arts town but it left a lot of us without any space
to make work.
While I see these changes happening in tandem, I don’t think that Open Spaces reached a
wide enough audience to cast a net that amplified gentrification, it occurred during a
significant nexus point. This is all happening at a moment where the relationship between
Kansas City and national developers are growing wildly. These companies are charging
crazy rent based on speculation— the kind you would find in cities like Chicago — forcing
citywide increases without reasonable improvements to space or infrastructure. These are
the catalysts that displace artists and working class folks. Kansas City and private donors
spent a lot of money promoting and funding Open Spaces; I look back at the financials and
wish the money of the festival could have, and in the future will be, invested into
organizations, exhibitions or spaces that positively impact communities considering the long
term effects of their relationship to the city as a whole.
Both in Kansas City and beyond, artists need to stay aware and vigilant of our relationship to
issues of race and class in our neighborhoods, art spaces, and agendas. It needs to be a
distinct part of our memory. The disparate fractioning that is often felt in these neighborhoods
needs to transform into an attitude of action and togetherness. Cherokee Street is named
after the indigenous populations of the Illini Confederacy that have been systematically
uprooted, honored only through a crude monument of a Cherokee man at the start of the
district. Artist Damain Dineyazhi placed letterpress signs in the window of the corner venue
facing said statue, that critique this notion itself. We must look at how history is written and
remembered and recognize how it is often utilized for propaganda rather than clarity to
recolor the images of the past in our mind.
Chlöe Bass’ installation at Mesa Home. Image courtesy of The Luminary.
To end, I would like to return to Bass’ performance, with a quote she recited from a
psychoanalyst on memory.
“Argentine-Mexican analyst Nestor Braunstein “Freudian memory is a three-sided coin. In
addition to forgetting there is repression. Which is the unconscious deciding what, how, and
how much is remembered and forgotten. Freudian memory is unfaithful to historical truth. To
the chronicling of real events. It acts not as a supposed objective journalist we know does
not exist, but rather it distorts memories and mixes them with fantasies, with familiar novels
and individual myths. In other words, the context in which the memory is recounted is just as
decisive as the text itself of what is remembered.”
As artists, in this space, we must make choices about what will be remembered of these
neighborhoods where we share space. We must honor those who are already there and take
action in solidarity with them as to not speed up their erasure. This is an opportunity for
artists to step away from the studio and into action based organizations that fight waves of
development, displacement, and underpay. We must stand up to the elaborate and wellfinanced
spectacles of the current Art World and start to build the fictional worlds that we
want to inhabit. We can nostalgically wonder and be haunted by the future of success that
will never come, or we can choose to build a new world, outside of our current scope of what
is possible that challenges what we face and what the future can hold
Through collaborative building, we can live in and inhabit an emergent strategy. We can find
the places in which our voices will be heard, where the privileges of some can help amplify
the voices of others. This new fictional world will be organized. Where “Sky Will Learn Sky” I
look forward to these processions put forth in the film world of Cauleen Smith and through
the curatorial voices of the folks at the Luminary. To end with a quote from James McAnally
in his Manifesto for an Art Organization we can Live In and With “Artists may often be both
the perpetrator and the victim, yet we must actively oppose these new social roles.”
Counterpublic is on view in the Cherokee Neighborhood of St. Louis, MO from April 13-July
13 2019. More information on the exhibition and where to see it, including hours,
performances, and accessibility notes are available on counterpublic.us/sites