How do we capture Queens energetically?
Here, the curators reflect on the framework and thematics that emerged during the development of QI 2018, touching on applications of the title Volumes. The text also functions as an index for the catalogue. Readers are encouraged to click through to artist images and interviews using the key below each section.
MILFORD GRAVES
The work of Milford Graves was the first step in answering a question I had very early on, prior to the idea of partnering with the library: “How does one capture Queens energetically?” Graves has a very integrative approach linking music, martial arts, science, and global medicinal traditions through the common thread of vibration, and its importance to the human condition. Throughout his career, he often travelled internationally to perform based not on promoting his music, but on his desire to do research and be in dialog with others whose traditions and crafts he wanted to study and vice versa. In that way, he was very conscious of understanding different cultures and societies, not in erasing their distinctions. So, you could say that Graves is international, as he aspires to the universal—something he does by seeking the fundamental. One of his sort-of mantras is “go straight to the source.” Like many of his philosophies, this has deep roots in his approach to rhythms, and is applied across the disciplines he works in. For instance, when he developed his form of martial art, Yara, it was influenced by many other movement and defense techniques. He spent a great deal of time studying not only those other practices, but also the animal movements they were based on (the sources). The tiger became kind of a Yara mascot. He saw connections among its claw movements and traditions and technologies from different cultures, like Indian tabla drumming and healing techniques related to Papa Damballah, a Haitian vodou spirit. His travels informed Yara, but it was largely developed, practiced, and instructed in his backyard in Jamaica, Queens. In the midst of the early 1970s, a viscerally hostile time for black men in America, he was interested in engaging men who lived in his own neighborhood in a defense practice that was empowering, not only as a method for applying force, but as way to alter energies. Like some of the other artists in this exhibition, his practice spans many decades, and encoded within it is a personal and sociopolitical history that has clear ties to Queens but also indexes many places through connections that can be felt in the body. He continues to base his work on the premise that human beings have the ability to posit alternatives by engaging in intuitive understanding and invention.

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Damali Abrams, Emmy Catedral, ray ferreira, Milford Graves, Janet Henry, Camille Hoffman, Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Essye Klempner, Mo Kong, Ani Liu, Umber Majeed, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Mary A. Valverde, Volumes Cyanotype, Cullen Washington Jr., Jack Whitten
LIBRARY
I did a review of all previous Internationals by reading their publications. Tom Finkelpearl’s statement in the first International catalog (2002) introduces QI as an initiative that would support the Queens Museum mission to be an international art center by “seeking the international in the local.” He goes on to say that “since the entire world has come to Queens, we can organize an international art exhibition just by taking some rides on the local subways.” I had noted in my review that the neighborhood representation of Queens International had decreased over the previous decade, with more and more artists being linked (somewhat expectedly) to Long Island City, which is just one subway stop from Manhattan, or Ridgewood, which borders Brooklyn’s Williamsburg. Following Finkelpearl’s sentiment, I felt that partnering with the Queens Library—an institution that is truly all over Queens—was consistent with the mission, whether or not we were able to reach and feature artists from a greater number of neighborhoods, in the end.

It was also an interesting opportunity to ask what it means for these institutions to nestle their work within one another—something that we will eventually do in a more substantial, long-term way in the future when a branch of the Queens Library opens at the Queens Museum. I mentioned the partnership in the open call as a confirmed but undefined part of the exhibition framework. I was doing research into the histories of public libraries and museums, as well as their contemporary practices and relationships to technology. How did they consider their role in communities? Who did they serve? The Queens Museum and Queens Library actually have very similar missions, but we have different strategies and are working in different institutional contexts, with overlapping constituents. It’s not only generative, but also very instructive to think about how and why we do things differently and what we can learn from one another. I was pleased that some artists presented compelling ideas related to public space, the archive, and institutional canons in their submissions.

In the end I think some form of Andrew Carnegie’s vision of the ideal public library sharing space with an art gallery and a natural history museum became embedded in QI 2018, with its multiple projects comprising libraries and exploration of our relationship to non-human organisms and natural phenomena. The merging of these knowledge frameworks conveys the significance of embodied cognition, and communicates the ways in which (for better or worse) knowledge is produced in relation to complex natural and manmade systems in the world around us. I’m sure it is not quite what Carnegie had in mind, but these artists offer a layered plurality of perspectives on the entanglement of these modes of knowledge.

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Gabo Camnitzer, Emmy Catedral, Jesse Chun, Oscar Rene Cornejo, Chris Domenick, Brian Droitcour and Christine Wong Yap, ray ferreira, Christina Freeman, Milford Graves, Camille Hoffman, Qiren Hu, Paolo Javier and David Mason, Patrick Killoran, Ernesto Klar, Essye Klempner, Gloria Maximo, Wardell Milan, Gabriela Salazar, Jaret Vadera
ARTIST CO-CURATOR
Sophia, who is truly a curator, was ready to work with artists to facilitate traditional roles of the exhibition. This includes the website; also, an art critic and a social practice artist are working together on People’s Queens International, which plays a kind of museum interpretation role. But there is also a long legacy of guest artists co-curating Queens International. Reaching out to me and expanding the curatorial process brought positive tension for the both of us.

For the past five years I’ve had the privilege of working with graduate and undergraduate students from The New School, New York University, School of Visual Arts, and Columbia University. My role as a professor conducting studio critiques is very similar to my curatorial process this past year-ish—it’s a long-term and persistent dialogue of true collaboration. A driving force in my decision to sign on to the QI 2018 team was to always make space for others. Because I am an artist, I see how hard it is to maintain a practice, and be seen by institutions. I feel the everyday hustle to pay your bills and still have a free mindfulness for artistic vision. Knowing those nuances puts me in an incredible position as a co-curator because I can share an in-the-field research and perspective—because I see you. Maybe in the back of Sophia’s mind she saw the place-making process in my art practice itself, and thought about how that would add to the team process, as well as mixing well with her ideas about Milford Graves and the library. As we got to know each other and trust our intentions, this kinship created a system that allowed for a sense of “linked fate” overall.

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When you are working with such a large group at varying stages of their careers, it becomes really generative to have different types of facilitators and instigators in the conversation, not only contributing their relationships to the community of artists, but also approaching concept, process, and materiality in dissimilar ways. I reached out to Baseera once I got a sense of the submissions and how the relationship with the Library and its staff would function, thinking about other perspectives that would be complementary. I felt a kinship with her work and her politics, but also enough of a distinction in our points of view that allowed us to productively craft our shared ideas, starting from what I had gleaned from the studio visits I’d been on. Who she is as an artist has marked this exhibition in profound ways.

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WEBSITE
I had become interested in the work of Ryan Kuo after meeting him on studio visits at Residency Unlimited in summer 2017. He was making interactive custom software projects, and software-generated videos to interrogate the manifestation of white dominance in the structures and design of the Internet and other digital interfaces. We eventually began a dialog about the possibility of working together on the web component for QI 2018 with consideration to these questions about the power of libraries and museums—the histories and legacies that they produce through the ordering, recording, and sharing of information, the communities they create, the behaviors that they dictate in sometimes unregistered or invisible ways. With Baseera, we pushed forward thinking about differences in user agency in both types of spaces, and on- and off-line, and wanted to create a web experience that was an innovative experiential tool while being an extension of the ideas within the exhibition. The result is something that marks a break with seamlessness or a logical sense of completion, in order to reveal the process of its making (both the website and the exhibition). We hope it illuminates and troubles the disjuncture between systems and embodied experience, and invites inquiry into these systems and the power dynamics inscribed in them.

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Several artists consistently remind us that the Internet is a place of structural power and hierarchy. The turn, in my mind, of artists today is the thinking of digital and analog hierarchies and policies that discriminate user fungibility—this thought and activity can lead to policy change. Artists of early net distributors learned to alter the mechanics and coding of what we see, providing a structural awareness for more sophisticated technologies of today. Trusting Sophia’s vision to bring Ryan, an artist, to create a digital footprint of our exhibition was easy upon meeting and talking about their practice.

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Haley Bueschlen, Camel Collective (Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats), Gabo Camnitzer, U. Kanad Chakrabarti, Christina Freeman, Milford Graves, Paolo Javier and David Mason, Ani Liu, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Raycaster (Ziv Schneider and ~shirin anlen)
SKYLIGHT
Curating is not only a platform to give space that is needed, but is also a time to build upon the primary understandings of each artist in the group. But as we organized the layout and checklist, we started to understand how difficult it was to curate the Skylight gallery—a huge, open sunken zone under a forty-by-twenty-foot skylight—avoiding the area altogether. In early discussions I kept pushing hanging gardens and dinner parties, but we kept hitting speed bumps due to the way Queens Museum, like many institutions, offers its common spaces, lobby, and atrium for rent to generate revenue throughout the year, which means putting things on the floor is more or less out. This is not to mention, obviously, the immense amount of light that beams in not only flooding the area under the skylight with light, but even illuminating the surrounding galleries themselves.

Many artists in the exhibition initiated new works that considered the architecture and inherent energy of the space. The skylight points toward issues of the commons, albeit public/private. Using these cues we eventually developed an authorless project, which you could also call a “collectively authored” project, that got every QI 2018 artist, collaborator, and staff member in the room at the same time, seated at a dinner table. This event would create a trace of our time together eating dinner at a table cloth treated with material to effect a large cyanotype—utilizing, rather than fighting, the natural light in the space. This artifact, the tablecloth, would be hung from the skylight throughout the run of the exhibition. It was also an opportunity for us to think about the history of the space and land use rights as the team searched for the right catering team to facilitate the evening.

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We wanted to respond to the ethos of the architecture, which creates a kind of intimacy and airiness that mimics the space of a public park—but indoors. With the cyanotype, along with harnessing the sun, we liked the idea of a dinner among these intergenerational Queens artists, and the weight that held symbolically in a historical space of convening (recalling or reclaiming the history of the building as a first home to the United Nations). One of the ways we came to see the meaning of Volumes was in reinhabiting the histories and logics of certain spaces with contemporary reflections on their meanings. The dinner was catered by Quentin Glabus, a member of a group of indigenous chefs called i-Collective. The meal was both a way to acknowledge the omission of indigenous peoples from the UN, and the original settling of Flushing Meadows Corona Park by the Lenape.

The other works in that part of the museum relate to the boundaries of public and private and the layering of sensorial information that we experience on city streets through sound, color, and the movement of light and air. The exhibition “begins” here in the center. The uniqueness of its openness, and the tendency for visitors to traverse it in idiosyncratic ways, was something we embraced as a way to counter the tendency for exhibition design to direct the visitor on a prescribed route. While the show’s galleries were organized around clusters of subthemes, there are also many other ideas running across and between galleries for visitors to encounter and chart. The Skylight and atrium are places for across and between, and can also be a vantage point. We imagined the possibility for visitors to see the many spaces they could explore, and wander through them in a more self-directed way—just as they might sections of a library.

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Haley Bueschlen, Brian Droitcour and Christine Wong Yap, Christina Freeman, Milford Graves, Kim Hoeckele, Camille Hoffman, Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Peter Kaspar, Essye Klempner, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Asif Mian, KT Pe Benito, Jaret Vadera, Volumes Cyanotype
TECH-INFILTRATED
Because historically libraries and museums have had different relationships to the public and the very idea of public and private space, Baseera and I talked through ways in which we could communicate issues that relate to both institutions, like access to information, user agency, transparency of structures. Volumes as a title was something I had been punning around with, because it related to seriality and books, but also to sound (which is a significant part of several QI 2018 projects), and the very idea of physical space in terms of sculpture, architecture, and “public-ness.” It began to really gel when we began thinking about the ways it bridges the digital and the analog, and could connect to the temporal diversity in the projects in the show.

Bifo Berardi says that the seamlessness of the digital era is distinct from the analog in that the sense of time it constructs is characterized by “connection” rather than “conjunction.” With conjunction, there is space and a sense of indetermination between one element and another. With connection, elements are organized with clear relationships that can be immediately located, rather than generated. Connection is faster, easier, and requires less from us. It also eliminates some opportunities for productive detours and errors, and shifts the ability to create and imagine possibilities, as it takes us out of the duration of the body.

I was interested in the ways this shift corresponded to institutional strategies in libraries and museums, and of course in the ways artists were taking up these concerns. When I first introduced the exhibition in formation to Baseera last winter, and we began delving into these politics of information and identity-formation as they were appearing in the work of artists, she summed it up with this brilliant phrase: “cheerfully apocalyptic.” Some of the artists depart from this notion for historical perspective or greater speculation on the future, others conjure more opportunities for the analog and the digital to collide, and still others collapse distinctions, conveying a sense of futility regarding the recursive nature of human systems across times and realms.

The notion of techno positivism in some ways feels so distant from our consciousness now—we just don’t think about the utopian possibilities of the Internet—but it persists in our lived experience and complicity with the convenience that digital products and infrastructure offer. We feel that together the show offers reflection on the ways our efforts to organize and order have always come at the expense of us or others, non-human organisms, or value systems. Some artists are proposing ways to break those patterns, others are embodying their outcomes so that they can be more tangibly understood outside of the ways they are recorded in official histories.

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There is a material space taken up by artists in Volumes and it creates a material inversion of the Internet itself. Net disruptors of the 90s and early 2000s, artists such as YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, Cao Fei, Cory Arcangel, or Paul Slocum interrupted our perceptions of reality using digital coding affecting online computer terminals and design usage of websites. The Internet is a lot more invisible now—it allows for alternative realities to occur in digitally augmented rooms using preloaded apps on personal hand-held devices, leaving little to trace back to the standard uses of the Internet. Artists are finding ways to critique this expansion revealing the Internet’s consumption, access, race hierarchies, environmental impacts, and trade policies. This transition in user experience with the Internet seems to cause artists to disengage from code and algorithms altogether and instead look to the formation of networks and infrastructural effects it has on our physical, material culture outside of the computer terminal and augmented rooms. Artists in QI 2018 are dealing with these issues directly, working to expose the grid and categorical margins of Western social norms. Some QI 2018 artists choose to expose how the Internet has maintained these social structures. (In fact, Ryan Kuo, an artist working with web-based materials, was asked to implement his artistic sensibilities in the design and function of the website that is dedicated to QI 2018 exhibition.)

Our social environment is centered on this technology and the momentum and freedoms it seems to offer us, yet we are also facing net neutrality infringements and daily self-induced surveillance. We realize now, as our understanding of the Internet gets more sophisticated, that it was never an equalizing tool, it is a false rhizomatic network. In its intended design, it was very much meant to discriminate. I came to this understanding through one of my own works, centered around a Nike shoe that I customized and fabricated through the Nike online website. This service prevented me from inscribing text I wanted on the shoe due to anti-Islamic rhetorics. By applying some strategic misspelling I tricked the system into approving my customized options, in turn receiving the shoes. This was a palpable moment for me, where the abstract promises of the new world of free movement, corporations that champion intersectional thought and secure communication, wireless Internet systems that championed neutrality, autonomy, and “we are the world” networking capabilities revealed a more accurate face of inequality.

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Haley Bueschlen, Camel Collective (Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats), U. Kanad Chakrabarti, Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Patrick Killoran, Umber Majeed, Asif Mian, Beatrice Modisett, Arthur Ou, Raycaster (Ziv Schneider and ~shirin anlen), Jaret Vadera
LIVE
One of the key threads we established for the exhibition related to the ways people actually move through spaces, physical or virtual, literally or metaphorically. The idea of performativity was critical to hone this idea of embodied understanding, navigation, taking up space. Performance shows up in works that are participatory, inviting the visitor to engage directly in contemplating or building narratives; in the artistic process, with artists imprinting their bodies and their labor in their work; or through the unpacking of the ways our realities are formed and encourage us to shape and perform our identities in relation to them.

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We built in a live performance for the opening reception. Over the course of five months, a few artists in the exhibition plan to activate their artworks through performance. Several artists in Volumes leave a sense of performativity to their work with or without the direct presence of the body. Also, visitors to the museum at times are asked to activate the installations and artworks, switching the role of the visitor to the user, or performer. Also, as an artist working with a curator, it was an opportunity to think about works of art that are sometimes compromised in group exhibitions. Video, performance work, ideas around installation art, basically all the work I make. Performance is a space that I have carved out in my practice to visualize ideas that seem too complex to handle any other way. But these mediums or genres inhabit space in ways that are not conducive to traditional museum presentations. Sophia and I tried to maximize the architectural layout of Queens Museum to give reverence to these particular works.

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Camel Collective (Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats), Emmy Catedral, Oscar Rene Cornejo, Brian Droitcour and Christine Wong Yap, ray ferreira, Christina Freeman, Milford Graves, Kim Hoeckele, Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Juan Iribarren, Paolo Javier and David Mason, Peter Kaspar, Patrick Killoran, Ernesto Klar, Umber Majeed, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Gloria Maximo, Asif Mian, Beatrice Modisett, Arthur Ou, KT Pe Benito, Gabriela Salazar, Volumes Cyanotype
MIXING
Some of the artists in Volumes mix digital tendencies with analog technologies and mine the materials that can be fabricated from consumerist entrepreneurial sites online. This might come from what Sophia points out about the “infiltrated” body. The awareness of pop-up reminders and download upgrades, the passive acceptance of their presence while these digital infiltrations become so "seamlessly enmeshed into what we do."

These material phenomena of our times—deeply entrenched in global geopolitical occupation via corporate-national military occupation—contributes to large displacements of bodies and horrific labor conditions, all of which are thrown into heterotopic living conditions. With no CEO to blame, no figure to point to as the person responsible, as Alain Badiou claims in The Century, we are left with fast and easy consumption of material, or products networked by bureaucratic systems of the faceless: of the Internet. You could call this an arte povera of contemporary commercial detritus: the range of unconventional processes and non-traditional everyday materials are that of alibaba.com, bulk Amazon Prime orders, digitized prints of family pets on blankets, or random images grafted onto memorabilia plates.

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Contrasts of old and new are often achieved here through assemblage or collage, or some other artists employ an accretive process to create an impression that indexes or compresses time, space, and charged material sourced from everyday virtual or real experience. I think there is a way in which the site-responsiveness of the show’s organization offers a similar gesture. Works have been situated in such a way that they commune with histories and forms but also critically reify, revise, or augment them. And none of this happens in a monumental or reductive way.

In this context I think the discourse around the limits of the human mind and body in relation to advanced technological aids and augmentation is very interesting. Andy Clark has been theorizing on the “extended mind” since the 1990s, essentially arguing that it is arbitrary to say that the mind is contained within the boundaries of the skull. Clark posits rather that “the mind” corresponds to a relationship between the brain, the body, and the environment, with external objects always factoring into cognition through the aid of the body. This theory is easily applied to digital technology—if a notepad is an extension of the mind, than so is a virtual assistant, like Alexa or Siri. There are interesting questions, however, about the pace at which technologies are being developed, and whether or not the nature of this complex coupled system between individual and environment is actually changing because we adopt new tools so quickly. And another question is the degree to which some of these new tools might be bypassing the body. What does that say about the nature of the self, and who we’re becoming? And following from that, whose interests and perspectives are dictating the construction of these tools that then rapidly become our partners in thinking?

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Haley Bueschlen, Emmy Catedral, U. Kanad Chakrabarti, Jesse Chun, Chris Domenick, ray ferreira, Milford Graves, Janet Henry, Qiren Hu, Juan Iribarren, Peter Kaspar, Mo Kong, Asif Mian, Wardell Milan, Arthur Ou, KT Pe Benito, Raycaster (Ziv Schneider and ~shirin anlen), Jaret Vadera, Mary A. Valverde, Volumes Cyanotype, Cullen Washington Jr., Jack Whitten
IDENTITY
When we think about the internationalism of Queens, we think about migration, by choice or by force, and the ways that it shapes collective and individual experience. In this exhibition artists are at varying degrees of remove from immigration and displacement, and we see them addressing it in different ways—but the majority do address it, or its aftereffects. Perhaps for someone today who identifies as bicultural, but has not directly undergone or enacted migration from one territory to another, the very complexity of their identity was inherited, and therefore can also occupy a space of resolute fact. I mean that multiplicity may be inherent to their experience. (I also say this as someone born of two 1.25 generation parents.) There can be a desire or need to bear witness to these different facets of the self, acknowledging that they can move in and out of integration and alienation—within themselves and in relation to the societal structures determine their value. Certainly another factor in this shift is our expanding consciousness around intersectionality and code-switching, or even epigenetics and the plasticity of self (or selves).

Many artists are working in abstraction as a way to break down systems of representation and their correspondence to organized values in art, in culture, and in politics. This is a significant repurposing or detourning of abstraction’s historical role—because here, abstraction is not a means to communicate essential qualities or ideas, but expresses fluidity and complexity as well as the slipperiness or outright failure of acts of portrayal or definition. Appearing across many forms, from painting to multimedia, image, sound, and language, even material processes are transmuted as an act of resistance toward these systems. In many cases, these makers emphasize their gesture in abstraction as evidence of their work as artists—citizens who participate in the act of developing culture and constructing new narratives that are subaltern, more porous, or make space for multiple truths.

This issue of representation is of course also present from the curatorial perspective. Especially in large group shows like biennials, the conversation around the demographics of inclusion is ingrained in my conception of curatorial work. Being conscious in this regard does not boil down to quotas that should dictate artist selection. Rather, I am aware of the potential limits of my own subjectivity. I have a responsibility as someone who is participating in the chronicling of contemporary production in the context of centuries-old disenfranchisement. It requires me to periodically stop and evaluate the range of voices included and how their proportions relate to the exhibition at every level—in the intended scope, conceptual framework, and relationships between individual artworks and the lineages they come from or current issues they address.

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For Volumes we are thinking about material and infrastructure as a way to discuss identity in America, as a way to complicate the spaces between information and knowledge keeping and making. At times artists are working directly with materials as performative replacements of their own body, thinking through American occupation or historical categorization that erased or mythologized cultures, materials, and religions. I see many up-and-coming artists turn to collage to talk through the disorientation of their bodies and complexities of their identity. We are also looking at how artists use formal abstractions and collages of material in art to point to bodies, land, and history in an urbanized gridded system—if you don’t fall in line with the grid you are rendered invisible. Identity in the art-historical information and knowledge sector is seen as a politics. Artists in the show at times are admittedly against the political nature of their bodies as information and knowledge, as representatives of a larger group. Instead they are very much dedicated to their research in science and international perspectives, and are fixated on materials and art historical trajectories.

Volumes is a very important moment for me to think through, right now, how identity politics as we know it has everything to do with the way this country came together. Identity politics is oddly seen as a black thing, or brown thing, a non-white thing, but it is an every-thing. This country pioneered capitalism through ownership and occupation of land, people, and history. Our country created a hierarchy of identity to enable the system of capitalism. Art is a vocal and visual receptor of the times—many people in this country are getting their rights stripped away, being gunned down as I write, so clearly there will be a re-centering of questions around identity in the artworld. There is a real refocusing on gender roles and race politics in the entire nation. Sophia and I come from complex histories and we agreed to find ways to talk through policy, material, and economy, while creating the dichotomy of digital and analog experiences, bridged knowledge and information sharing, and bringing the libraries and the museum into the same frame. Identity shapes identity.

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Damali Abrams, Camel Collective (Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats), Gabo Camnitzer, Jesse Chun, Oscar Rene Cornejo, Chris Domenick, ray ferreira, Janet Henry, Kim Hoeckele, Camille Hoffman, Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Qiren Hu, Juan Iribarren, Paolo Javier and David Mason, Peter Kaspar, Ernesto Klar, Mo Kong, Ani Liu, Umber Majeed, Gloria Maximo, Asif Mian, Wardell Milan, Beatrice Modisett, KT Pe Benito, Gabriela Salazar, Mary A. Valverde, Cullen Washington Jr., Jack Whitten