For lots of us, Satisfaction Month doesn’t really feel like a celebration. It appears like extraction.
As a result of what’s being requested of Black queer artists — yr after yr, venture after venture — is to point out up, supply our tales, submit our ache, carry out our resilience, and belief that another person will determine how you can body all of it. And we’ve seen how that framing often goes: with a press launch, a guidelines of buzzwords, and little or no curiosity within the politics or energy dynamics underlying it.
This isn’t a brand new tactic. The cultural efficiency of inclusion has an extended and calculated historical past.
Within the Renaissance, artists labored on the pleasure of patrons — popes, princes, aristocrats — whose commissions have been much less about artwork and extra about immortality. They paid for work and sculptures to cement their energy, and artists obliged as a result of their survival relied on it.
Within the Eighties, the patron was now not a cardinal however a collector. Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat grew to become iconic not only for their work, however for the way shortly it was aestheticized, monetized, and stripped of its radical edge. Warhol’s queerness was flattened into Pop. Basquiat’s rage and critique of colonialism have been repackaged as “raw genius.” After their deaths, their estates and markets went into overdrive. Their most difficult, deeply private work was made palatable for institutional partitions, luxurious manufacturers, and public sale homes.
That dynamic of erasure didn’t finish with the ’80s. By the Nineteen Nineties, artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres have been being cautiously embraced by establishments, however typically solely in ways in which neutralized their politics. His sweet spills, his stacks of paper, his string lights — these have been celebrated as poetic and conceptual, however hardly ever framed as acts of mourning and protest amid the AIDS disaster. His deep intimacy with grief, queer love, and loss was repackaged as minimalist class.
A latest exhibition of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work on the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Portrait Gallery reignited long-standing tensions across the erasure of queerness and HIV/AIDS in institutional settings. Critics famous that one in every of his most iconic items, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991), was put in with out a direct reference to its deeply private context — his associate’s physique weight earlier than dying of AIDS-related problems — and organized in a linear format that deviated from the extra widespread diminishing pile. Whereas the museum later clarified that different labels within the present included this context, and the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Basis defended the curatorial selections, the second nonetheless speaks to a bigger sample: How simply queer historical past, sickness, and intimacy may be flattened in favor of aesthetic neutrality.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) within the exhibtion Felix Gonzalez-Torres: All the time to Return on the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. (picture Mark Gulezian, © Property Felix Gonzalez Torres,Courtesy Felix Gonzalez Torres Basis)
Even when well-intentioned, these omissions — or relocations of which means to much less seen corners of the gallery — counsel that sure truths stay too “difficult” for front-and-center institutional framing. It’s a reminder that visibility doesn’t assure readability, and reverence doesn’t at all times translate into duty.
Gonzalez-Torres had been educating at New York College (NYU) when he handed in 1996, and by the point I moved to town within the fall of 2002, his presence was nonetheless very a lot felt. Individuals would examine me to him typically — casually, nearly offhandedly — hardly ever mentioning that they’d really identified him, taught with him, known as him a good friend. It took me some time to comprehend what was actually being mentioned, and even longer to know the burden of what I used to be being held up towards. It was unusual. Reverent, generally well-meaning, but additionally disorienting. These comparisons flattened my work into a well-known template, one which the establishment might already digest. It wasn’t about what I used to be attempting to say — it was about how legible I used to be to individuals who had already determined what queer artwork ought to appear to be.
I didn’t need to be seen like Basquiat was seen both. I didn’t need my work to be known as uncooked, instinctual, “gifted.” I wished it to be seen as intentional, exact, and designed all the way down to the millimeter. So I went deep into the pc. Into planning. In management. Each line, each vector, each composition needed to show that my work got here from coaching, not from some fantasy of innate, “primitive” expertise.
Wanting again, I perceive that intuition as a sort of protection. Perhaps not trauma within the capital-T sense, however definitely a response to being beneath a gaze I by no means recognized with — one which romanticized wrestle whereas refusing to honor labor. A gaze that wished my brilliance with out my boundaries.
And I’ve seen how this performs out in actual time. I as soon as ran right into a White man I’d met in a homosexual bar who’d found my work on-line. After we spoke for a couple of minutes, he checked out me and mentioned, “I just think it’s really smart that you make your art for White people.” He meant it as a praise. As if the final word mark of intelligence was studying to bundle your ache for an viewers that can by no means really feel it.
Individuals participating with Damien Davis’s Two Thousand Seventeen (Portrait of Future Felix) (2017) in a 2018 workshop on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork in New York. The 99-piece set up was conceived as a response to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled ” (1989), a billboard piece put in close to Sheridan Sq. off Christopher Avenue in Manhattan to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. (courtesy the artist)
That is what we’re up towards. Not simply institutional erasure, however one thing slicker: institutional enthusiasm. We’re celebrated — however solely once we contort ourselves into one thing recognizable, one thing worthwhile, one thing “relatable” sufficient to be displayed with out disruption.
The reality is, Black queer artists are sometimes compelled right into a sort of aesthetic code-switching. We be taught to carry out professionalism, ache, delight — no matter is required. And that efficiency turns into a part of the work itself.
I’ve at all times felt that ballroom tradition understood this higher than most. “Realness” — the power to go or mix in as a sure sort of particular person in the true world, like a businessman, a straight man, or a cisgender lady — wasn’t about conformity; it was about survival. It was about studying to maneuver by means of areas that weren’t constructed for you, figuring out the stakes of being perceived as too queer, too female, too Black, too loud. Ballroom taught a whole technology how you can defend, obscure, and shield themselves from dominant gazes. It was each camouflage and confrontation.
But it surely wasn’t my undergraduate training at NYU that taught me how you can advocate for myself or converse up with confidence. College didn’t present me how you can take up area — it confirmed me how shortly my ache might be aestheticized, my rage consumed, my presence folded into another person’s curriculum. It was solely after college that I discovered the mentorship I really wanted. By a mutual good friend, I used to be “adopted” by two older homosexual males I lovingly name my homosexual dads: David and Kenny. They taught me how you can transfer by means of the world with dignity, readability, and a refusal to shrink. They gave me the instruments NYU by no means did: Methods to shield myself; how you can command a room; how you can title my price.
Kenny seems briefly in Paris Is Burning, a element I share to not elevate one over the opposite, however to floor the world they helped usher me into — a lineage of ballroom elders, chosen household, and survival-based pedagogy that did extra for me than any classroom ever might. David and Kenny modeled what it appeared prefer to stay totally self-possessed. They taught me that voice, presence, and self-determination usually are not given within the artwork world — they’re constructed and defended, typically towards the very establishments that declare to uplift us.
That’s the backdrop towards which I’ve watched at the moment’s artwork world rewire itself. The hierarchy is clearer than ever: Curators have change into celebrities. Flyers for group reveals function the curator’s title in bigger sort than the artists themselves, and generally the names of the artists don’t seem in any respect. I discover that deeply problematic. If the individuals making the work are handled as an afterthought within the presentation of the exhibition, then we’re not speaking about curation — we’re speaking about consumption.
Some artists have even stepped into curatorial roles, inserting themselves into exhibitions beneath the banner of group, however generally as a method of visibility, of getting into the canon by means of the aspect door. It’s straightforward to critique this transfer, however the actuality is extra sophisticated. Typically it’s self-preservation. Typically, the chance to curate is handed down from a faceless establishment hoping to capitalize on an artist’s social capital whereas retaining full management of the funds, the framework, and the ultimate say.
When artists are requested to curate beneath tight timelines or with out enough help, what seems like company is usually a entice, engineered by establishments seeking to outsource duty whereas avoiding accountability. What we’re really seeing is the outsourcing of care: delegated visibility with out structural funding.
However we do have fashions for one thing completely different.
In the meantime, we’re watching companies start to tug again from Satisfaction totally. Sponsorships are shrinking, rainbow branding is much less conspicuous, and inside DEI initiatives are quietly being phased out. A few of that is in response to conservative backlash, a few of it’s easy cowardice. Both manner, it reveals what many people have at all times identified: The help was by no means unconditional. It was strategic. It was business. It was a seasonal development that relied on applause, not accountability.
And to be clear, many of those companies ought to by no means have been allowed by means of the entrance door to start with. Satisfaction was born out of revolt, not model partnerships. And Black Historical past Month wasn’t created to spice up Q1 advertising and marketing metrics. My mantra has at all times been: If I don’t see you celebrating me outdoors of June or February, you gained’t be getting my greenback throughout both of these months. As a result of I don’t exist on your comfort. My work, my life, and my group don’t solely matter once they’re trending. Visibility with out consistency is nothing greater than optics. Allyship that folds beneath strain was by no means allyship to start with.
I used to be speaking lately with the drag queen Holly Dae about these pullbacks in company Satisfaction sponsorship, and he or she mentioned it greatest: “You know, this happens with every conservative administration. These folks come and go. We’ll still be here, fighting.” There’s one thing regular and defiant in that reminder. As a result of she’s proper — we’ve at all times been right here. We’ve survived shifts in political winds, financial downturns, institutional betrayals, and cultural amnesia. Our presence isn’t contingent on company approval. It by no means was.
In case you’re solely displaying up for us in June, don’t trouble. In case your solidarity lives in captions however not in contracts, we see it. In case you want our ache to really feel progressive however aren’t keen to surrender your energy, we all know what it’s.
This Satisfaction, don’t inform us we’re seen. Don’t inform us we’re inspiring. Don’t inform us you’re proud. As a substitute:
Give us decision-making energy.
Give us funding with out strings connected.
Allow us to be sophisticated, inconsistent, indignant, celebratory, contradictory.
Cease demanding readability the place you supply none in return.
We aren’t your theme. We aren’t your redemption arc. We aren’t your technique.
We’re artists. Complete individuals. And for those who’re not constructing a world the place we are able to exist on our personal phrases, your allyship isn’t solidarity — it’s spectacle.
