When he visited An American City, the inaugural FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art in September 2018, my librarian attended an evening reception for the launch of the second volume of the exhibition catalog at an event at the Cleveland Public Library amid Yinka Shonibare’s The American Library, a both dazzling and sobering installation […]
Pessoa – you know the one, right? – isn’t here on these shelves, but his words are still here with me: To be great, be whole: don’t exaggerate Or leave out any part of you. Be complete in each thing. Put all you are Into the least of your acts. So too in each lake, […]
A voice comes from somewhere (or within), braying: Well, listen to him! So sanctimonious in his white wokeness and so-called decolonial critique (whatever that is)! We see what you’re doing, writing this out loud for strangers’ ears, but inwardly, under your typing tongue, you murmur, “Oh, let the old guard suffer, so I can profit!”. […]
I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. It is that vague time between the COVID-19 lock-down and the great reopening. With the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery on my mind, I scribble the following oddly formed questions into my notebook: what position is left for, or forced upon you, […]
You are team-teaching a class with an artist, in which both you and your fellow teacher received full credit, called Free Us from the Western Canon and you are currently working on a project in which the students recreate Plato’s Symposium along the model of MoMA’s first “Supposium”, held in March 2014 under the title Beyond Default […]
Over the past few days, several things have occurred that have set me to worrying (somewhat more than usual) about the future of the university. I am not only thinking about some immediate and disturbing developments at my own specific institution (Ohio State University), but also about the very survival of the university as an […]