Hope & Dread, Episode 8: Westward Ho!
The series heads north by northwest to Portland, Oregon to uncover a surprisingly hideous history: could it be that this hipster mecca was founded as a whites-only utopia? Answer: hell, yeah. When a curator has to rub shoulders with Neo-Nazis during the installation of her exhibition, there may well be trouble built into the very fabric of the state. We speak to the broader arts community in Portland to tease out the fine threads of race, land, ownership and identity and ask - as tanks roll down city streets elsewhere - if Oregon is a warning from the past or a glimpse into the future.
Tune in to find out.
New episodes available every other Wednesday.
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Guests: Maya Benton, Flint Jamison, Lulani Arquette, Kristan Kennedy, Ashley Stull Meyers and Hank Willis Thomas
© Gillian Laub; Courtesy of Benrubi Gallery
Ep. 8 – Westward Ho!
Charlotte Burns:
Do you ever have those moments where you remember something, but it’s as if you’re outside your own body, witnessing the world shift?
One of those moments for me was in March 2020, when Covid was starting to strike.
They were strange, in-between days: we all knew that Covid was rampant, but were waiting for the government to shut the city down.
It was a cold but bright Manhattan morning—maybe you know the kind: brilliant blue skies wrapping around city blocks, filthy piles of snow littering sidewalks.
I was at the Armory Show, an art fair on the piers by the West Side Highway. That’s where I bumped into the curator and art historian Maya Benton. And, on a day when it felt like the world was getting weird, it was a pleasure to see an old friend. Maya and I had studied together in London. And I’d recently commissioned her to write about an exhibition she’d been organizing of photographs by Gillian Laub of racially-segregated proms in Georgia.
The images had triggered national outrage during the Obama years. I knew the show had traveled to Portland, so I asked Maya how the opening had gone. And what she said shocked me.
Maya Benton:
I had been approached by a staff member of the museum who said, "We have a problem. The Klan is coming to protest."
Charlotte Burns:
The Klan? That was not what I was expecting to hear. This was Portland, Oregon: to me, almost a brand-name for progressive, liberal politics, with a bustling food scene and famous bookstores. It’s not exactly the first place I’d have associated with a neo-Nazi rally.
Well, how naïve.
Since that chance meeting I’ve read up on Oregon’s history and I had a lot to learn; it’s not just the hipster haven that programs like Portlandia like to portray or poke fun at. It’s a complicated place of extremes - from its weather, to its politics.
So today, we’re going to tell an American tale, focusing on Oregon.
This is Hope and Dread and I'm Charlotte Burns.
Ok, let’s lay down some context for this episode. Here’s a brief-ish history lesson.
Oregon has a long history of explorers claiming its land as their own. In the mid-16th century, the Englishman Sir Francis Drake took possession of a portion of the coast on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I. At that time, there were 125 Native tribes established in the region.
But, it wasn’t until the 19th-century that the land grab became more heated, with the accelerated expansion of the US after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The next year, for instance, Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery traveled to explore the Pacific Northwest. It was a journey informed by a sense of “manifest destiny” — the belief that the US was ordained with the divine right to occupy land from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.
By the mid-1800s, a flood of settlers began arriving in Oregon, many empowered by this belief that they were creating a new utopia.
By 1844, it was becoming clear who the utopia was for: Oregon passed its first exclusion law that year: stating that every Black person attempting to settle would be publicly whipped with 39 lashes, repeated every six months until they left.
Underlying the expansion was the systematic removal of Indigenous peoples. In 1850, for instance, Congress passed the Oregon Donation Land Act, giving free land to certain White settlers and their families.
By the time Oregon joined the Union of the nascent United States of America in 1859, it was the only state whose constitution explicitly excluded free Black people from moving to the state to live, work or own property within its borders.
There was further growth after the end of the Civil War in 1865, when people wanting to flee the South after slavery was outlawed flocked to Oregon, which was by now actively promoting itself as Whites-only.
Looking back on Oregon’s exclusion policies, a former Congressman under President Lincoln, the Hon. John Rogers McBride, said it was progressive: the state had also forbidden slavery, fearing the effect on White labor.
Here’s an extract from a speech McBride gave at the 25th reunion of the Oregon Pioneer Association in 1897.
Voice over by Will Brood:
It was clear that while the new state had no relish for the "peculiar institution" it had equally no desire to furnish a refuge for the colored man in any condition. The mingling of races in any form in this state was objectionable, and the vote was an emphatic expression of public sentiment which protested against any association of the Caucasian race with any other.
Some believers in the doctrine of abstract human rights interpret this vote against admission of free negroes as an exhibition of the prejudices which prevailed against the African who was not a slave, but I have never so regarded it. It was largely an expression against any mingling of the White with any of the other races, and upon a theory that as we had yet no considerable representation of other races in our midst, we should do nothing to encourage their introduction.
We were building a new state on virgin ground; its people believed it should encourage only the best elements to come to us, and discourage others.
Charlotte Burns:
It remained illegal for anyone non-White to move into the state until 1926 or to vote until 1927.
Parts of the state have long been hotbeds for White supremacist activity. In the 1920s, one in 20 Oregonians was a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan—the highest percentage of any state west of the Mississippi.
Today, tensions remain extremely high.
While the city of Portland was host to the nation’s longest continuous Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, eight counties in rural Oregon voted last year to secede— they wanted to become part of Idaho, a state with more conservative politics.
So much of this is about land: who has the right to live freely on it?
But, the very land that’s being fought over is itself under siege, from the changing climate.
2021 was a year of record-breaking weather for Oregon. A winter ice storm caused one of the biggest power outages in history while a massive blaze was sparked during a fire-season that started earlier than ever before. An unprecedented ‘heat dome’ shattered temperatures, killing hundreds while drought caused conflicts over water rights and affected the state’s agriculture.
These issues — racial reckoning, climate change, who owns land, who shapes history — they’re defining not only Oregon, but America today.
So, how does all this relate to the art world? Let’s go back to those protests that Maya Benton saw in Portland, outside Gillian Laub’s exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.
Maya Benton:
All of a sudden we find out that the alt-right is coming to protest.
Having been raised by Holocaust survivors as a first-generation American, I'm particularly sensitive to the history of the Klan and my own feelings of threat and vulnerability when I hear those words. Alt-right and neo-Nazi are not just abstractions or part of America's history, but are also a part of my own family's very painful history. And I thought, okay, well, this is going to be a learning experience.
Charlotte Burns:
The photographer Gillian Laub spent 10 years documenting racially-segregated proms in the rural community of Montgomery County, Georgia. The schools there were segregated until the 1970s, when they were forced to integrate. But, social interactions remained separate. There was the White homecoming and the Black homecoming. The White prom and the Black prom. This was happening very recently, while Obama was President.
Maya Benton:
The kids were being taught to be a race. Interracial couples weren't sold tickets. In these small towns, prom is everything. These are the primary maturation and coming-of-age rituals for this community. These are kids who've been in school together since they were in kindergarten, but they can't dance together. They can't celebrate together.
Charlotte Burns:
The New York Times ran an article on the photographs in 2015, which brought more attention to what was happening. The town was pressured to integrate the prom. All of this felt like progress but, when Gillian went back to the town, she was met with a new reaction.
Maya Benton:
The town's sheriff tried to grab her cameras, took them from her arms, ripped them out of her while she was screaming and was shoving her. And it was really violent. She was rejected by a lot of the White people in the community.
Gillian was criticized for bringing these stories to light and bringing them national attention. It started with who are you, you Yankee, coming in and questioning our traditions? But very quickly, she would start to get these threatening calls. They found out she was Jewish. It became you Yankee kike N-loving bitch. All of the hatred just turned into this big ball. And while it masquerades as a protection of tradition, it's an easy way to avoid having to recognize profound racism for what it is.
She went back again to photograph the community and she realized she had to tell the story in a different way. And she wound up making a film called Southern Rites (2015) that was produced by HBO and John Legend, who also wrote the music for the film.
And so the exhibition is about the segregation and the integration, and also a racially-charged murder. Justin Patterson was a young unarmed black man was murdered by a white town patriarch. So the film is also about the trial and Norman Neesmith, who was the white town patriarch who murdered Justin, wound up getting one year at a minimum security detention center.
And so the film is about the proms and the homecomings and segregation and integration, but it's really about racial violence and how communities in America are contending with these really painful divisive pasts.
Charlotte Burns:
Maya says she and her team built a timeline of events for the town as part of the exhibition. But it is difficult to pull history into focus when you are in the middle of it.
Maya Benton:
It's all this back-and-forth, and back-and-forth. But you stand back and you see progress.
One of the young Black men from the town, he was playing soccer on the soccer field at the high school. He was an 11th grader and he found a hangman's noose suspended over the goal. And so he took a photograph of it. He posted it on social media. And he basically said, "This is the shit that's happening at my school." And he went and he reported it. And he was then suspended for misuse of technology.
This plays into this kind of school to prison pipeline and the way in which Black people are punished as witnesses of the injustice that they're experiencing. And you see how the powers in charge are re-entrenching these racist views. But those views were always framed as tradition.
It's very hard to step away from tradition. You inherit these narratives from your family, from your parents, from your community. And it takes a lot of courage and strength and fortitude to create a path that is different from the one that has been provided for you.
Charlotte Burns:
I wondered how it felt, for Maya, standing on the street, watching this.
Maya Benton:
There was this often repeated Martin Luther King quote about, "The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice." I kept thinking about it as I was watching the protesters. I don't even want to call them protesters, they were just kind of alt-right neo-Nazis, expressing their view of what America should look like. I mean, what were they protesting? They were protesting the presence of any narrative other than a White narrative.
But I was thinking about this Dr. Martin Luther King quote. And that was something I thought about when I organized the show, because there were these constant moments of change and hope, and move towards justice, and then it would go two steps back, and then it would go two steps forward. Is it two steps forward, one step back? Two step forward, one step back, Or is it really two forward, two back, two forward two back? And you see the rise of antisemitism and the rising tide of fascism all over Europe. And you start to wonder about that quote. Or are we in this endless cycle?
Charlotte Burns:
When I interviewed Maya, I don’t think either of us could have imagined that this show would be broadcast while Europe was again at war. Now, we watch for news from the Ukrainian President Zelensky—a Jewish man whose grandfather took up arms against the Nazis, of whose family several members died during the Holocaust — as he leads his nation against Russian invasion.
On 1 March President Zelensky tweeted: “To the world: what is the point of saying <<never again>> for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar? At least five killed. History repeating.”
Babyn Yar was one of the largest mass graves in Europe in the Second World War. Nazi Mobile Killing Squads murdered 33,771 Jewish people during a two-day massacre at the ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv in 1941.
So, what good is it, knowing history? What value is there in knowledge if it fails to equip us for change?
Maya Benton:
A friend of mine had curated a show about war and someone in a position of supervision over her head suggested that it was a real bummer.
It was deemed by important members of the institution—directors and trustees—that this photo history of war was just too depressing. But, if you had a video at the end of Bob Hope, singing and dancing and entertaining American troops that people would leave, feeling uplifted.
Now this seems so preposterous, and yet I think we all do it. I think we all do it in wanting to have this redemptive message at the end and clinging to this narrative of bending towards justice, progress coming, progress being inevitable. Who doesn't want to believe in progress? Who doesn't want to believe that all of these painful divisive things are on their way out?
It's tempting when you do an exhibition to talk about this redemptive moment. And you see this also in Holocaust museums, right. How do Holocaust museums end? It's usually with the story of the acts of the righteous people who risked their lives to save people, because you can't just end with, "And then they were all murdered, but a few people survive." It's incredibly painful and it's a dark view of humanity. And so there are these redemptive messages.
Charlotte Burns:
If history is the narrative that people fight over, land is what people go to war for, and the two — history and land — are almost inseparable.
In the 19th-century when Oregon was being sold as this ‘utopia’, White settlers would receive 320 acres of land, and those men would double that once they married, according to a law passed in 1850. This was land taken from Native people—and that was just one of the many ways in which the Indigenous were systematically disenfranchised, displaced, or worse.
The “Rogue River Trail of Tears”, for instance, in 1856 saw the forced removal of Indigenous people, as part of the federal government’s Indian Removal Policy. That took place during three decades of continuous conflict between Whites and Native tribes that started with the Cayuse War in 1847 and resulted in Native tribes being forced onto and confined to reservations. What was theirs was no longer theirs. To use a contemporary term, it had been “annexed”.
So, how do you deal with the ongoing repercussions of these land grabs, especially in a state founded on being a White utopia? Particularly when that historic racism has been perpetuated by modern ‘urban renewal’ programs that tear through poorer communities?
For arts organizations, this is a real question: they are often part of a wave of gentrification that further displaces people.
Of course, that’s a fact that shocks and dismays many that work in these sorts or organizations. But what could possibly be the solution? Look the other way and pretend it’s not happening?
Well, for one organization, they decided simply to give the land back.
In 2020, Portland’s Yale Union transferred ownership of its building and land to the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, a non-profit that promotes and supports American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian arts and cultures.
I asked Flint Jamison—one of two artists who co-founded Yale Union–what the original mission of his organization was, and how that evolved into the land transfer.
Flint Jamison:
It's the tale of two cities. As we're reckoning and trying to navigate our own history and our complicity in that, like what can we actually, tangibly do? How do you change this or do we just gentrify and develop because that's ultimately what art is?
Charlotte Burns:
Obviously in 2020 you completed the transfer of the ownership of the land and the building. I know that those conversations originated in 2018: you'd had a couple of quite difficult years: the co-founder of Yale Union had resigned for personal reasons, there were question marks about that. He was replaced by Yoko Ott, who passed away in 2018. So, there were a couple of really dark years for Yale Union, in between those two major events, you guys initiated the conversations. It sounds like a very, very turbulent time and amidst a very volatile moment in America. How do you think about that moment now?
Flint Jamison:
In 2017, with the US tax cuts and Jobs Act that paved the way for the Opportunity Zone and the massive gentrification of a lot of urban neighborhoods. Yale Union is located inside of an Opportunity Zone and everywhere you looked there was a crane or two or three.
And to whatever extent we're the bleeding edge of gentrification, I think we definitely felt complicit as 2018 rolled around.
I grew up on the stolen lands of the Crow peoples and Yale Union specifically is located on the trading lands of Multnomah, Chinook, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tualatin, Molalla, and other Indigenous peoples. We're really beholden to our own racism.
Our board of directors had bankers and developers on it and everybody had a competing opinion about what to do with the adjacent parking lot of Yale Union and whether or not that should become a hotel or mixed-use retail building.
It wasn't until Yoko Ott, who was a woman of color herself and was raised in Hawaii, that's when we initiated the conversation with NACF and Lulani Arquette.
We started a conversation to discuss with them whether or not they would want this land and building asset, which has an exchange value of plus or minus $5 million. The term land transfer is very specific. We haven't used gift or donation: we don't necessarily feel that the land was ours to begin with.
Repatriation has its own baggage. Maybe a better term is rematriation, which Lulani and NACF use.
Charlotte Burns:
So, why rematriation? I asked Lulani Arquette, a Native Hawaiian, who is President and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.
Lulani Arquette:
We were both matriarchal and patriarchal in Hawaii, but the women really had a strong standing in the community that was more collaborative, and communicative and tolerant of difference, in contrast to sometimes the patriarchal society that's more about power and control and the goal’s more important than the process. And rematriation, the process is just important, sometimes more important than the goal.
Charlotte Burns:
Lulani is really rethinking what a cultural space could be, based on practices of Native communities.
Lulani Arquette:
The pace that we're moving now in society is so fast that often we don't have time, myself included, to engage in that kind of deep reflection and mindfulness, which is why in the Center for Native Arts and Cultures, we're intentionally building spaces of healing and reflection.
Where I come from in Hawaii, we're surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, the ocean is the healer. Urban environments are increasingly becoming battlegrounds, especially here in Portland.
In native communities, tribal communities have sweat lodges in Hawaii, we do ho'oponopono and Lomi Lomi's healing practices. We're intentionally creating it. That's in addition to a lot of our programming that we'll be doing. People get inspired by artists and art making and creativity. So, along with all of the art making space we're going to have these intentional places.
Charlotte Burns:
For Yale Union, which had covered its operating costs by renting its building for wedding receptions and photoshoots, the transfer of land meant the dissolution of the organization. I was curious to know how Flint felt about building something up just to dismantle it?
Flint Jamison:
Yeah, it's complicated, sure. There's a feeling of triumph, one, not only in the production of culture over the last decade, but also in this act of transfer of capital. Abolition sometimes feels really wonderful. But yeah it doesn't come without more feelings of loss and some conflicted feelings of possession.
Charlotte Burns:
Change isn’t easy, even for those trying to create it.
We’ve heard a lot about growth and accumulation in this series so far. For arts organizations it can be difficult to situate themselves in the present, rather than looking backwards at how to preserve a past that’s gone, or forwards, to a future that’s endlessly expansive.
Flint Jamison:
Yeah, also to check our own instinct to self-preserve and to archive and to keep our ideas and our own culture in perpetuity.
Charlotte Burns:
This is a series about power—which means it’s also about history, land and resources. Some artists are recognizing that the exponential growth of culture has created a hoarding instinct of resources and of space, money and time.
And yet, there’s something painful about history dissolving, leaving little trace; letting entropy do its thing.
Flint Jamison:
Exactly. It's right where we're at, right now. It questions all sorts of value. To shrink or to get out of the way, it's not built into capitalism.
I want to say, Charlotte, this isn't a formula, the Yale Union thing. I grew up a Christian, an Evangelical. I do not want more right and wrong in the world necessarily, but we started this conversation by checking our own ambition and deciding that listening to other voices was valuable.
Charlotte Burns:
Less shouting, more listening. There’s hope in that.
I asked Lulani if she felt positive about Portland’s future.
Lulani Arquette:
There's this sort of sordid history, and I do think people can change, you can grow and I know Portland in particular, is a progressive city, but there are still quite a few rural areas in other parts of Oregon that still have a lot of work to do and are still very racist. And I think that presents a lot of complications.
So for example, when we had all the protests over the summer for four months every single night that were led primarily in Portland, when you really looked at those, they were not people of color, they were primarily White supporters, allies, in some cases and then smaller populations of Black and other Indigenous people trying to be supportive, right? So, that was kind of complicated.
And then what happened is, you would have the sort of groups on the extremes of each of the political sides that come in. So what the media reports is chaos. They misrepresent really what's happened here; in most cases, they were actually kind of peaceful protests. It wasn't the original intention of people that were trying to do the work. It was these other groups that came in and created chaos.
Charlotte Burns:
And how has that changed the community? Because, of course, Portland has gone through, like everybody, the pandemic, and then, like a lot of cities there were protests— but Portland was really a focal point. Now you've been walloped by climate change with these enormous heat waves.
Lulani Arquette:
It kind of reminds me of the name of your show here, Hope and Dread. At times we're very hopeful and then at times, it's just dreadful. I mean, it's just, we're not, nothing's happening, we're not progressing.
So I mean, it's again, living in sort of that duality of, you move a few steps forward, and then you move 10 steps back again.
The city leadership and the state leadership in some cases could be stronger. At some point, people that are in current positions of power have to just stand up and make tough decisions about things and it's not going to make everybody happy. I mean, it never will, we're too divided.
Charlotte Burns:
We keep coming back to land in this episode; how space has been taken, given back—or shared.
One organization navigating with this now is PICA, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. It was founded by an artist in 1995 as an alternative space to museums, many of which were focused on art from the past. For years, PICA was itinerant but it moved into a permanent space in Portland’s Northeast Eliot neighborhood in 2017.
Here’s Kristan Kennedy, its co-artistic director and curator of visual art.
Kristan Kennedy:
The building, because it is in a historic Black neighborhood that's already been gentrified and has seen a lot of trauma, it was basically relegated a blighted community. Houses were razed for a big hospital. And then, there still 40 years later, sits an empty lot where that hospital expansion was supposed to be built. So there's a lot of pain and trauma in this neighborhood. And the vestiges of that time are almost completely erased.
Over the years, it became clear to me that the city had been Red-Lined. So there was immense political power being put into keeping communities of color in certain neighborhoods, not delivering resources to those neighborhoods.
There is the founding story of Oregon, as a White utopia. That was the advertisements that pioneers that were moving here were sending out to the rest of the United States saying, "Come to Oregon. It's a White utopia."
All of that history is still felt here, but it's so buried under a neo-liberal, progressive-valued, White-dominated population that for myself, as a White woman, you have to really listen to other people and other communities that have lived here to understand what is really happened here and how it still manifests itself today.
And we have this highway expansion that's trying to happen right in our neighborhood now that would radically impact the environment, impact several predominantly Black grammar schools. And there still seems to be this push to do it in the name of ‘progress’ and not really pay attention to the concerns of the people who live here—and the history of it happening again, and again, and again.
I would say we know it's a quintessential American tale. It's how America was founded. We are colonizers. We are settlers. We impacted Indigenous people in this country, and we still are to this day. We destroy land. We use capitalism as a kind of bomb. So I think it's our everyday condition, and it always has been.
Charlotte Burns:
For PICA, the key is to pay attention to history as it recurs, and try, if possible, to do things in different ways.
Kristan Kennedy:
So we also knew that we had to share the space specifically with Black artists and Black artists that were self-determining their own work, their own way of being, and their own way of forming institutions or anti-institutions.
So we have a program called the SPACE program, which is exactly what that sounds like, lends our space to other organizations to present. And we offer presentation support like producing and technical assistance. And we also share our space with an artist and educator Sharita Towne, who runs a project called the Black Art Ecology of Portland.
It's about sharing and turning over some power and resources to artists in the community.
Charlotte Burns:
It’s important to remember that, of course, it doesn’t take an institution to create culture within a community—it already exists.
Kristan Kennedy:
There's of course rich communities of all kinds of different people who live here, experience a lot of joy, are really successful, have their own way of being and living even amidst this condition.
Ashley Stull Meyers:
There've been Black and Brown communities here doing their thing and making it for generations. And the enormous erasure in talking about how White Portland is all the time, is something that really bothers me and that I want to work to undo.
Charlotte Burns:
You’re hearing from the independent curator and critic Ashley Stull-Meyers, who wants to bring focus to a different side of Oregon’s history—one of resilience and creativity.
Ashley Stull Meyers:
I've been in Portland for about six years at this point. It's the biggest thing since the moment I arrived is like people were preemptively apologizing to me about how painfully White Portland is.
I find out-of-town guests that come to Portland to sort of see what's going on are like, "Oh my gosh, everyone was right. They told me how White Portland was, and I went to Portland and I didn't see a non-White person for days." And that always makes me laugh because I'm like, that absolutely means you didn't leave within like a three-mile radius of downtown.
It's true that a lot of Black and Brown communities have been forced out of city center, the way that Portland has grown and gentrified. There are pockets, there are communities of Black, Brown and Asian folks that are whole vibrant communities.
Charlotte Burns:
Ashley isn’t saying that there isn’t a problem, but she is saying that the narrative needs to shift, and it goes back to the city’s foundations–in the land–once again.
Ashley Stull Meyers:
The way that Portland is structured, the way that it has grown. The way that it has gentrified to displace different non-White communities is frustrating and worth talking about. And I think it just needs to be a part of the whole history, and it's not as simple as, “Portland's painfully White”.
There's no one more resilient than the Black families that have lived in Portland for generations, the environmental racism that they've experienced has been pretty wild; the relocation that they've experienced has been pretty wild. But there are some areas of Portland that are really hanging on, and vibrant.
It's the best thing in the world to talk about, and I would rather talk about that.
Charlotte Burns:
At the end of an interview with the conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas for a different episode—the next one, actually, on artists creating change—I happened to ask him a question about Portland.
Despite living on the East Coast, Hank’s first major survey show was at the Portland Museum of Art, where his neon installation of the words ‘Love Overrules’ hung on the facade of the building for all to see—and he’s done several other projects there since.
Was Hank’s relationship with Portland just one of those random things, simply a coincidence?
Hank took a deep breath and then told me a story that brought us right back to Gillian Laub, by way of land and gentrification.
Hank Willis Thomas:
I grew up actually with Gillian Laub's husband, by coincidence. We were both African American boys in a gentrifying neighborhood in New York, and witnessed the class shift over us, so to speak, where certain people were able to kind of assimilate into that society, and others didn't.
I think part of my ability to assimilate has been critical to my commercial success, and maybe part of my inability to assimilate is why I've not reached the peak commercial success of others.
But, as I have kind of grown up and gotten to travel the world as an artist and go places where people who look like me don't often get to go, or are seen as suspect, it's somewhat like being invisible where also ... a lot of times you're not seen, but you can also have impact. You can move things around.
It was really awesome to have a survey show at the Portland Art Museum because of the legacy of the state. To put "Love Overrules" on the front of the museum which is still lit in spite and in light of all that has happened over the past year and a half.
I pray that in the hearts of the people who are walking past with anger and spite and rage, this institution, they see "Love Overrules" glowing on the front of this building, that the poetry is not lost.
And they're thinking about the little idea of a track coach, who thought that he can modify a sneaker so his team could do better in the 1960s, that would ultimately become the largest corporation in the world, Nike.
It's pretty nuts to think about how a little dream—and someone's creative spark—can make things a little bit better can have such a huge footprints, for better and for worse, on society.
And, that my work that was inspired by that — me and Tyson and other Black kids, walking the streets in New York and people getting robbed for the Nike and Air Jordan sneakers — was the impetus for my interest in looking at popular culture and critiquing it.
So, things go full circle and I just feel very privileged to be able to watch, to have that perspective.
Charlotte Burns:
Isn’t it tempting to end on this note? Hank is leaving us in an optimistic place, hopeful for change.
Things do indeed go full circle–and with that in mind–I want to go back to something Maya Benton said earlier in this episode. She mentioned a Martin Luther King quote: "The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice", and this idea we cling to, of redemption, tying up all the loose threads and going to bed happy.
Something I realized when I put this episode together was how often people spoke about progress being made in ‘pockets’, or steps forward only for steps to go backwards again in a nonstop dance where progress is seized, spun around only to be snatched away again.
And yet, it is tempting to tie this episode up in a tidy bow. It’s hard to avoid the allure of resolution.
We want to feel hope–that’s one half of the title of the series. But, does it make for too clean an ending?
I asked Maya whether she felt hope or dread.
Maya Benton:
The honest answer is dread, but it's this instinct to want to say hope, because it's like the Bob Hope at the end of the war show dancing to entertain the troops, which I find so horrifying.
I would like very much to say hope, and I recognize the impulse to say hope. I don't feel that. I don't feel that. I feel that we are in a pretty dark time.
I'm going to have to go with dread, although I want to acknowledge the natural human instinct to find something hopeful and redemptive, and I leave room for the possibility of the arc bending towards progress and justice.
I hope I'm wrong.
Tune into Hope & Dread every second Wednesday and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts.
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Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&.
The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Robert Bound is our associate editor.
Holly Fisher mixed and edited the sound.
Additional research and support has been provided by Julia Hernandez and Ali Nemerov.
Additional voice-over by Will Brood.
Music by the inimitable Philip Glass.
