An open letter to the MMOCA Executive Committee
Subject: In Continued Support of The WI Triennial Artists
August 24, 2022
Dear Members of the MMOCA Executive Committee,
I am an artist and curator born and raised in Madison, where I also lived for over a decade after college before moving to Chicago in 2019. I was very involved in the community, working for the Wisconsin AIDS Ride, the Tenant Resource Center, and with the Overture and James Watrous Galleries; receiving awards from the Madison Arts Commission and Madison Print Club; and getting my MFA in printmaking at UW-Madison.
Over the years I have had much cause for both pride and shame in my hometown's response to our deeply entrenched racism and anti-Blackness, which is made worse by our white-majority culture of performative Liberalism that claims progressive politics while betraying those values in practice. MMOCA has been the most recent source of such pride, and now deep shame and anger. I'm afraid your official statement yesterday has just added more insult to injury.
At first I was thrilled to learn that you brought on Fatima Lester to curate a Triennial of Black women and nonbinary artists. This was a huge deal on a national and multi-generational scale. I was very excited to see the show and to know that Black artists were being given this honor after generations of creating much of the art and culture that everyone loves about America, all with little to no outside support or acknowledgement. To me this exhibition was not just an important material investment in a disenfranchised group of artists, it was also going to be an incredible show. I was proud to tell people here in Chicago that MMOCA had made this change.
Turns out, MMOCA wasn't that proud -- not enough to promote a full range of paid public programs, create a virtual tour, pay a living wage, install the work safely, insure it for its full value, or properly staff the galleries with staff who knew basic facts about the works, and more. Your Director even went so far as to side with a random woman off the street who vandalized and stole artwork from your museum, "de-escalating" that woman's concerns at the cost of insulting the artist who was wronged. Now you have thrown your support behind Ms. Brungardt with no explanation for this except to make a generic claim that she's not a racist and suggest that Lilada Gees didn't hear what she says she heard. All while failing to address the much larger context surrounding what you dismiss as an "unfortunate incident." Now our city is getting a national spotlight for all the wrong reasons and the heaviest part is that I am not surprised.
I was planning a visit to see the show and now I learn many of the artists have gone so far as to pull their work from your walls. I would feel a bit like a scab crossing a picket line, just going into your museum now. You say you are "saddened" by this but you do not admit that MMOCA is in any way responsible. You say you respect an artist's decision not to exhibit their work, but you take no accountability for the actions on your part that would force someone to make such a difficult and extremely rare decision. The Wisconsin Triennial is now in league with the infamous 2019 Whitney Biennial, and yet you have tried to minimize this with platitudes about supporting artistic freedom. There are certain "freedoms" artists should never need to exercise.
The Board's official statement was defensive instead of apologetic, and relied heavily on boilerplate language about equity while pointedly not addressing many specific concerns from Black artists who have published a clear list of demands. You seem more concerned about the harm of the accusations against MMOCA than you do about your relationships with the artists you harmed, artists without whom there would be no MMOCA. Throughout your statement, you insinuate that a dozen or more Black women are lying, overreacting, or just plain wrong about how you treated them. The Committee's statement plays into such classic stereotypes about Black women that it casts doubt on your current ability to assess or talk about MMOCA's racism, and underscores the need for an outside audit.
So, I am writing to share my continued support for all of the Triennial Collective's demands, including:
that Ms. Brungardt be terminated;
that MMOCA make financial restitution to Lilada Gee and others harmed;
that MMOCA formally apologize to and promise not to retaliate against any Black staff members, curators, or artists who were involved;
and that as you engage in the "difficult exchanges" with the community, you let others lead that effort and bear most of the difficulty on yourselves, as you are the people with institutional power.
You need only look to nearby cities like Detroit and Chicago to see that the tide is turning in favor of marginalized artists and rank-and-file workers within the ivory tower of arts institutions. Higher-ups who want to protect the status quo are being forced to make changes because of the protests and scandals that are now inevitable when they will not willingly and meaningfully collaborate with their communities. This is to say, MMOCA will be part of this changing landscape in arts & culture, whether or not you want to be. For now, you can still choose how you participate.
Please do the right thing, and spare these artists and MMOCA the unnecessary burden of more negative attention: Admit your mistakes, fire the people responsible, and listen to Black artists about the amends you owe them.
Very sincerely,
Anders Zanichkowsky