The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 10: LA Special with Connie Butler and Sue Bell Yank
What if Los Angeles is the future? This episode, Charlotte Burns visits the city for the first of two extra special episodes. We’re at the Hammer museum with its chief curator, Connie Butler, before heading over to meet Sue Bell Yank, who’s executive director at Clockshop. Both are experimenting with how to do things differently and how to make LA a sustainable place to be and to create art. Nowhere encapsulates the need to imagine radical new possibilities more than Los Angeles. “LA is an amazing place to think about what our possible futures could look like,” says Sue Bell Yank. “It's a place that’s at the bleeding edge of a lot of crises, from wildfires to floods. How cultural organizations fit into that is really interesting.” Join us for more.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! Los Angeles edition. I’m your host, art journalist Charlotte Burns, and this is the show asking brilliant people big ideas and imagining possibilities for the years to come.
We’re in LA and for the next two episodes, we’ll be bringing you different, more kaleidoscopic versions of the show. We’re driving around the city interviewing four people we think are reconsidering old models. So, what if LA is the future?
[Audio of a crowd at Frieze LA]
We’re standing in the entrance to Frieze LA. I’m here with my former colleague, the esteemed Melanie Gerlis, Financial Times market writer.
So, Mel. It’s one of your first times to California.
Melanie Gerlis:
Mm-hmm.
Charlotte Burns:
What are the cliches we’re going to bust by the end of the day?
Melanie Gerlis:
It is not that hot. [Laughter] It is not as hot in Los Angeles as I had hoped. They are definitely the best dressers of any art fair I have ever seen.
Charlotte Burns:
Okay, so as a market person, what are the myths about the LA market scene beyond the fair?
Melanie Gerlis:
We’re told it’s very sprawling and very emergent, but it looks pretty together, and everyone’s here.
Charlotte Burns:
Everyone’s here.
Okay, should we get to it?
Melanie Gerlis:
Let’s get to it.
Charlotte Burns:
What do you think, is LA the future?
Max Hollein:
Then the future will be multi-centric. I think it’s invigorating, it’s interesting, it’s energizing, but it’s not the only one.
Charlotte Burns:
Thank you very much. That’s Max Hollein, the [Marina Kellen French] director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Susanne Vielmetter:
I'm Susanne Vielmetter. Los Angeles is already the future, and I've been saying that a long time.
[Laughter]
Jarl Mohn:
I’m Jarl Mohn. It is the future. It’s now and the future. It is the cultural center of the planet. There’s more creativity, more innovation, more adventuresome art in all of its forms here than any other city on the planet.
Charlotte Burns:
What if Los Angeles is the future, Tim Blum?
Tim Blum:
My first instinct is to say we're in deep shit [laughs] because LA is still so tricky. It’s so fantastic on so many levels, and it’s so fucking horrible on so many others. I do feel like with human behavioral change, systemically, if LA is the future, it could be very bright.
Charlotte Burns:
Yes, we’re taking a spin around Frieze LA with some of our favorite people. Before that, we’re escaping the buzz of the stands. We’re going to seek out some calm among the palms with our first guest.
Here we are in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles with Connie Butler, the chief curator of the museum and the legendary organizer of such groundbreaking exhibitions as Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, which took place in 2007 at MOCA LA .
Connie has worked at institutions, including LA MOCA [The Museum of Contemporary Art], MoMA [Museum of Modern Art], and of course, the Hammer, which is on the verge of unveiling the results of a two-decades-long project to remake itself inside and out, including a suite of exhibitions called Together in Time[: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection], drawing on the more than 4,000 works of art in the museum's collection of contemporary art.
Connie, thank you so much for joining me today. I know this is a very busy week in Los Angeles.Connie Butler:
It's a pleasure. Thank you, Charlotte.
Charlotte Burns:
So I wanted to talk to you about a few ‘what ifs.’ Museums have come under a lot of fire in recent years for lots of different things, from their lack of diversity to the sources of funding to their narrow vision of their own capacity.
What do you think, can museums rethink themselves? How are you approaching that at the Hammer?
Connie Butler:
It's the right question to ask as we're all still, I think, emerging from Covid. You have to think of it both on the micro-level of, in my case, kind of curatorial practice and how you generate exhibitions and how those exhibitions can question authority and the notion of the curatorial voice and how artists occupy our spaces to the macro-level of who are these spaces for and really who are the different publics that we serve. And I think that over time the Hammer has really gone from being an institution that really Los Angeles didn't even know was here—and many people don't know that we have been collecting, actually—but just physically, the process of this kind of iterative renovation has been a gradual process of physically opening the museum to its surroundings, making it more visible in the city, making it a real anchor point on the west side of the city, which is not necessarily where all of our audiences, or at least our aspirational audiences come from, but really trying to reach different audiences in the city and thinking about what those publics want.
Our current exhibition, which is Joan Didion: What She Means, which is curated by Hilton Als, and I worked closely with him on that show. When Hilton approached us to make that exhibition in 2019, just before Covid, we, as we moved into Covid, we started to think about how we could generate ideas differently and how we might think about exhibitions and how they originate differently. And though the exhibition itself doesn't look very radical, perhaps, the fact is that the regular audience loves it and really responds to this act of reading and looking, which is what Hilton's shows are all about and the kind of curatorial framework that he uses. But we loved the idea of one writer kind of narrating the life of another and as a way, again, of thinking differently about what happens in our galleries. So, I think the question of how to think differently about our institutions is what we're all doing in different ways and how to be more accountable to our publics, really.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you think you've rethought that through your career? What a museum can do, what its role is?
Connie Butler:
You know, I don't talk about it that way, but since you frame it in that way, in fact, I would say yes, because what I have been working on and thinking about for so long is how to make these collections and our exhibition programs, and also the curators and program staff that generate them, look more like the world is essentially what I've been doing, and a lot of us have been doing. And so though, day by day, I wouldn't say I feel like I've done anything radical, the fact is the notion of a MoMA or a Hammer, or a museum of contemporary art representing women, representing artists of color, representing different histories and different narratives in a way that reflects the complexity of our time day-by-day isn't radical, but in fact, it's taken great will on my part and on the part of the institutions I've been a part of to make those changes. So in a way, it does add up to, I would say, at its best, a kind of institutional re-imagining for sure.
I would find it hard to get up in the morning and continue to be committed to the different wonderful institutions that I have worked for if I didn't think what I was working for was institutional change. I mean, I just think that's the only way to approach this work. I'm just not interested in doing it otherwise. And at the Hammer, I'm fortunate enough to work with a director who has set the mission of this place to be committed to social justice, for example, which we are in our programs. And now the challenge, I think is to be as committed to social justice on behalf of our staff and our boards and our publics as committed as we are in a way in our programs. And that's very complicated to do, but that's what we are also currently grappling with.Charlotte Burns:
You said that the, um, experience of working at Artists Space in New York in 1990 when its funding was cut by the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] after the David Wojnarowicz exhibition politicized you. You said you thought of it as a sort of activist way of operating, and I know that's been a long thread in your practice. When we spoke at some stage during the pandemic, you were reading again Yvonne Rainer’s Feelings Are Facts and thinking a lot about how to bridge generational thinking about activism, how different generations can work together in that vein rather than at a clash. That's a big thing in institutions. What do you think are feelings facts? How do you do that? How do you bridge those generational impulses for activism and change?
Connie Butler:
Well, I mean, certainly Yvonne Rainer comes out of that generation of feminism that not only were feelings facts but the personal was political. Right? And I think more and more it's clear that what we're learning from a younger generation of people who choose to work in museums or then choose to leave them is that feelings are facts, that we have to think more about the care of our colleagues and our employees and one another and that is just as important in the work that we're doing as what we put on our walls. And I was saying recently that the work that many of us were doing, say, starting 20 years ago or so, where we were thinking about equity and diversity in terms of collections and exhibition making, that was easy in some ways. I mean, yes, lots of people are still learning how to do that work. But I mean that to me, that's the easy part. You collect more women, you collect more artists of color, you put them on your walls, you make the walls of your museum look like the public, and so on. But much more complicated is to really, from my perspective, more complicated, I guess, is to really attend to the lives and the desires and the ambitions and everything of all of the particularly the younger generation that we are now working with and learning from. They are changing how we think about work, they are changing how we think about work-life balance, and all of that is about attending with care to the fact that feelings are facts. I think, I do.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you bring that into your work? When we spoke about it, I think you were saying that you found the personal being political made more sense, but the feelings being facts thing was something you were like, that was something that you had never brought into work. You know, the idea that your feelings could be part of your professional existence.
Are you personally more comfortable with that now in the way that you operate?
Connie Butler:
Yeah. You know, it's funny, one of the things I've learned from actually going back and rereading a lot of Joan Didion is that her evolution as a writer, as a journalist was so fascinating in part because one of the things she did and was so good at and was so powerful about her writing is her bringing in of the personal to her journalistic voice. And there are so many writers that have been influenced by that, but I feel like, I think when we spoke before, I talked about how when I was educated in art history, you certainly kept biography, you certainly kept feelings, you kept all of that kind of subjectivity out of your work. It was really important to try to achieve, we were told, some kind of objective voice, which of course, we know now doesn't exist. I mean, it absolutely doesn't exist. The subjective is always there so I've become more and more comfortable and I think I've become a better writer and thinker when I attend to that. It's not about putting my own feelings always forward but just understanding that those things, that all of the biographical, political, social things that we each bring to our work, are present and acknowledging them.
Charlotte Burns:
You've worked on major feminist exhibitions from WACK! to Witch Hunt (2020-2021) and projects, including co-editing Modern Women[: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art] (2010), which was a massive examination of work by female artists in MoMA's collection when you were there.
What if the future or female and non-binary, the data shows that we're still a long way away from that. What do you think the current state of affairs is?Connie Butler:
Well, it was sobering to read the results of your study, honestly, because I think for many of us who really have been working at this for a long time, I would've thought that the statistics were better. But of course, what they proved is that no matter how much good work you're doing, we're overcoming a lot of history and a lot of bad habits in terms of what was collected and shown and so on. And it, of course, depends on the institution, but I am really proud of the fact that at the Hammer, for example, now we have, we really have in the last 10 years moved the collection and our collecting patterns anyway to be fully more or less, to achieved parody based on gender anyway. And we are aggressively and actively and have been for a number of years, the work of artists of color and trying to really bring up those numbers as well and represent those very important histories too.
Charlotte Burns:
Well, the Hammer does have…we see that in the data. We see that it’s not a trend, it’s just an inbuilt part of the mission of the institution. That it’s been a leader in many ways to sort of solidly…it’s not this big firework moment, it’s not always pronouncing itself as that but the numbers are solid and they’re consistent and there’s a year on year logic to them that we can see when we look at the data.
So when you unveil the new building and you show this collection, what are your hopes for what that does? Not only for the audience but for the staff and also the board—you know, these sort of three vectors.Connie Butler:
I think in the case of the Hammer, I think everyone will be extremely proud and not surprised. It has been though and continues to be a process of education over time and I think it's mostly a generational one. You know, a younger generation of collector and philanthropists and supporter completely gets it and is excited about that part of our mission. Of course there's an older generation of collectors who were educated one way and the art world has moved in a very different direction. It's a process of education, a constant process of education. I guess introducing them to different ways of viewing the collection that you can have conversations about. What is our strategy around collecting women artists amidst other conceptual and historical threads like, Los Angeles art or video art, medium based assumptions, things like that. Gender and race are just one lens among many that you put onto your strategy of building a collection. I feel like here we've been having that conversation for long enough that everyone is completely on board and supportive and very excited about it, honestly.
Charlotte Burns:
One of the questions I asked Glenn [Lowry] in our interview was what if you could separate funding from governance? Is that something you think would be interesting to consider?
Connie Butler:
One of the questions and the constant conversations we've been having since Covid is exactly this question, how could we imagine different kinds of income streams for nonprofits and museums? And it's one thing that I find very hard to imagine because it really means rebuilding how these places function from the bottom up, or maybe from the board down, in a way. And I think it means redefining who is on your board, that philanthropy is just one piece of it but that other kinds of representation, other skills, other cultural points of view need to be represented on your board just as much as the people who really bring in the big money. And that I think is gradually happening on boards.
I think at the Hammer we've been really privileged in some ways to value a very curatorially driven program that sometimes mounts exhibitions that are not popular with the public necessarily, or there are aspects of them that are not but as soon as you have exhibitions that generate an enormous amount of attendance, you do get very addicted to that. We're fortunate in that our attendance doesn't provide an income stream so we're not dependent on that as a bigger institution might be. I do dream of just filling our galleries with dance and performance and just seeing what would happen and seeing who would come. And I still believe that you can make exhibitions that are like that where there is maybe there are no objects, maybe there's…and we've done this, actually we have done it. I think those moments where you can rethink what happens in your galleries are so exciting. But it's hard to do them without thinking about where those funding streams are gonna come from.
So if we didn't have to think about that, it would be terrific, but it's not our reality at all. And I think, I am really interested in these new models. I don't know how they yet, how they will affect or how they apply to museums, but the new models that a lot of artists are pioneering where they are collaborations with fashion, the music industry, all these ways that artists are getting into product and different kinds of revenue streams. I think it's interesting. I mean, I don't love it all the time and I don't love the product that happens as a result of it necessarily, but museums are gonna have to be open to more of that, more and more of that. You know, I think of like the Hirshhorn Museum example that they announced recently of this reality TV show, whatever that is gonna be. And being, admittedly a little horrified, but then understanding that we gotta loosen up a little bit and experiment with some of these models and do it with care for the artists, but we will go extinct unless we are open to other revenue streams and other ways of generating interest in the public also.Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, it's interesting because everything that gets you closer to product keeps the market in the center of it all. And that's just a fraught thing. It’s like you sort of feed the beast and then the beast becomes bigger and that becomes the norm. There's this real sense of wanting to be less product focused, of not caring so much about the art object and it's come up in every interview in a different way; This dream that everyone seems to have of being less object-centric.
Connie Butler:
I mean, I personally think we're just, and you've probably been hearing this from other people, but I personally think we're in a very conservative moment in the art world and we really saw it during Covid where people had a lot of money to spend and were perfectly happy to buy art virtually sight unseen, certainly without seeing things in person. We benefited because a lot of people gave us gifts of paintings. But honestly, I've never seen so much painting in such a short period of time and it's all about object. And when that happens, I think things get interesting in other parts of the art world. I mean, it just is true, you know, that artists find other ways to move around that and subvert that, but the old model of sort of like rejecting the market, there's too much money around. We've gotta think about ways of collaborating with it, not only resisting it and protesting it because we will be left dinosaurs if we don't. But I don't love the object focus of the current moment. I think it's really boring.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, especially with your background, which is so much…your beginnings, especially in sort of more dance there, more ephemeral forms.
The idea that the market will grow after a museum show is a myth actually. Like when you look at the data of what impact museum shows have on the market, it's not that significant unless a series of factors aligns. So why do museum stage object shows?Connie Butler:
Well, I mean, artists make objects and they will continue to but I know that what we do doesn't have that big of an effect on the market because the market is too big right now. And it's so collector driven. The museums really have very little to do with it in a certain way.
Artists still want what they feel like is the validation of the market. They still wanna show in museums, I'm happy to say, you know, it's incredibly gratifying. I think we can offer something. I mean, speaking of care, we can offer a kind of curatorial attention and care to it and we will always show objects. I love objects. I'm very object based. I realize that when I'm talking to some of my younger colleagues who maybe like they love the archive, for example, or they love the writing or they love the activism, they love the social justice mission at the museum. They're not so interested in the objects, even though they love the artist, you know? So it's, I think that's changing too.Charlotte Burns:
Where do you find art? Where do you look yourself? You're talking about things that cut through. Where do you look?
Connie Butler:
Well, I'm a little bit perverse but maybe it also has kept me fresh in some way and my eye a bit fresh in that I still love to go to the Documenta that everybody hates. You know, I still found the last Documenta and the one in Athens, I found them incredibly generative and powerful and was really moved by them in part because of the sort of anti-market stance that they took. And I find that just going to exhibitions like that, that really try to reposition how you're looking at the work, what the curatorial voice is—like with the last one, where it was curated by a collective of artists and then it was an exhibition of many collectives. I thought it was really powerful and inspiring at this moment when we're all trying to figure out ways out of the conservative moment, this market driven moment that we're in. I look at places like that.
I still really value the work that a lot of younger galleries do. And in Los Angeles we have some really interesting ones. There was recently a wonderful collaboration that Bridget Donahue and Hannah Hoffman and Nina Johnson, I think, and a number of women-run galleries did from LA and Miami and New York and all over. They collaborated on a exhibition of Rochelle Feinstein, this wonderful New York painter who has been, not overlooked, but she hasn't had as big a career as she should. And they collaborated on a sort of like cross-national exhibition and show of her work. And those young women, I think are creating a little bit in their own way of a different model of how to have a gallery program or certainly Kibum [Kim] of Commonwealth and Council. I mean, those guys run their space like an artist run space, even though it’s a commercial business of course, but it's also a community. They really put that community first in terms of their identity and I love that.Charlotte Burns:
Another question of you, which is what if museums aren't the future? I'm asking this because you were a fellow in the 2020 Center for Curatorial Leadership Program. So the program is a kind of cohort of national curators who are…it's quite prestigious thing to be accepted into the program, and it's a sort of career rethink moment and most people are at some stage paired with someone who becomes a mentor. They shadow that person. Typically it's within museums. You made the decision to take a mentor outside museums. Your mentor was John Palfrey of the [John D. and Catherine T.] MacArthur Foundation, which I thought was really interesting because we're in this moment when foundations and philanthropy in general is such a literally rich area of the art world and an entirely newly empowered industry that's only going to get bigger because there are so many more artists thinking about legacy and we've been in this big market moment of enormous wealth, and artists are considering how to use that wealth. Why did you wanna look outside? Why did you wanna look at foundations? What did you learn from that?
Connie Butler:
It's interesting to me that you know that because actually my cohort was the 2020 cohort, so we fell victim to Covid and my internship, so-called, never happened but the reason that it interested me at the time, and it still would, is because at that time, so in 2020…In 2019, we were starting to really see this shift in the direction of foundations and foundations, very conservative ones like the Ford Foundation and Mellon [Foundation] and so on, doing really important social change work and going into these institutions, these museum institutions, and sort of forcing our hands in a good way, tying funding to hiring diverse curators, doing collection work, really trying to make some of the systemic change that was happening and being called for in the culture. I was curious about the MacArthur who have their eye on leaders in all kinds of fields and one of our oldest and most respected foundations. I was really just interested to see what the thinking was there—and I know he's a relatively new leader of MacArthur—how a younger generation new leader is sort of turns the boat, towards a new mission.
Charlotte Burns:
Would you consider working in that area or is curating too much part of your practice?
Connie Butler:
No, I would consider that program, CCL, which is so wonderful, is partly about curators at pivotal junctures in their career where they're beginning to think about leadership in a different way and moving into museum directorships for the most part. It's something that I have mulled over for myself of course but I'm very curious about foundation work and think it could be tremendously rewarding and really a continuation for me of a lot of the work I've done. Again, trying to make change and just working at it from a different, a slightly different perspective.
In a discipline like curatorial work, I do think there is a time when you have to recognize that you can't always know about the new in the way that you did once. And I don't think I'm there yet, but I'm fully aware that there will come a moment perhaps when one should just step back and let a younger generation take over. I'm still really interested in working with emerging artists and I do it all the time. I just think that the foundation perspective is one that, where you could still do a lot of similar thinking and a lot of the intellectual work from but from a different part of the field.Charlotte Burns:
A lot of people in the museum sector that I talk to say, curators and museum leaders of smaller institutions say that for them at some stage, it would've been a goal, a dream, a career objective to be a director of a major institution and that for some of them that's shifting because, as a museum director said to me a couple of years ago, no one wants to be a museum director anymore. It's a terrible job. And they said because it's not terribly well paid, but it's quite stressful. It's attracting the worst people like politicians.
Did you want to be a director of a major museum? Do you still want to be, or are you in line with the other director who'll remain anonymous and say, maybe not for me?Connie Butler:
It still is. It's so exciting to me. I mean, look you go to any of the museums from ours to MoMA to LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art] where I was over the weekend and it was packed. I mean, museums are places that people want to be, and we know that from the statistics, right? We know that the museum as a gathering place, as a social space has tremendous relevance for the culture still and for a younger generation. So the idea of stewarding and being in leadership of these places is still super exciting. I think it's an incredibly difficult time. I do, I know. I mean, nobody's having very much fun at the moment, but change is slow and hard and not always fun. So potentially, yes. [Laughs] Potentially, yes.
Charlotte Burns:
If you had a vision board, what would you manifest? What would be that dream job?
Connie Butler:
Oh my God, Charlotte, I didn't expect you were gonna ask me these questions. Well, for me, still, the audience of artists is central. They are one of our core audiences always. So thinking about what artists wanna see and find urgent is still really exciting to me. And vision board, I mean…yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you believe in that? Do you believe in manifesting your dreams? It's something that's come up in our podcast with other guests like Kemi Ilesanmi talked about it quite a bit. You have to name the thing.
Connie Butler:
Well, you know, I have enormous respect for what she has built and if that works for her, I would try it in a minute. I'm not a big vision board person. I think what I've done over time is to manifest by doing, and I'm a very intuitive person and I process as I go. So I think that's how I've worked. I mean, when I came to the Hammer, I had my own ideas about what the program needed and what I wanted to do here. And fortunately, with the support of my director and the rest of the team and stuff, we've made change in it.
Charlotte Burns:
Let me ask you two questions to finish this out. One is what if LA is the future?.
Connie Butler:
I've always thought LA is the future. [Laughs] One of the really exciting privileges of working here is that geographically where we sit on the Pacific Rim and with our relationship to Mexico, to Canada, to Vancouver, to the centers of artistic practice around the Pacific region, I think there's enormous possibilities still in terms of the collection and program. There's so much that we can do and we've done a bit of it. But that's always what's excited me about working in LA. It isn't about looking to Europe, which in so many ways, one could say broadly speaking represents the past and what people always say about this city is that it has more creatives—and I use the word guardedly—but more creatives per capita than like any other city in the world. And it's kind of true. You feel it when you're here and that's why so many galleries are moving here, that's why people are so excited and giddy to be here, I think. I'm not entirely sure why they're all here, but they're coming and I think it's because it's a place of possibility and I do think it's about the future.
Charlotte Burns:
A last one to round us out, which is something I ask most of our guests. What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and the one that gets you out of bed in the morning?
Connie Butler:
The one that keeps me up at night is about maintaining in this art world some kind of hold on curatorial integrity amidst all of the forces that are quite frankly against it. All of the forces of conflict of interest and the market of trying to be really true to what artists are making, what they wanna see, what they want to think about, making sure that that guides our program. I mean there are many things that keep me up at night, but I would say that is one of them.
And how to also stay ahead. I mean, we're an incredibly competitive environment. I've chosen to work and been lucky enough to work at really leading institutions but what comes with that is you gotta stay on top of your game because there are a lot of people who want these jobs. Making sure that our program is honestly the best contemporary program in this city and I'll just go ahead and say that I think it is, and maintaining that position, understanding that MOCA, LACMA, that we're all doing great things in different ways, but that keeps me up a fair amount at night too.
And what gets me up in the morning, and it just amazes me every day practically, is that I just love the work. I really do. I'm still really excited about what I see happening in this city. The art that I see, I'm really excited to intellectually engage with it and I hope I don't ever lose that, but I definitely still have that, and that's, that's what keeps me coming to work.Charlotte Burns:
Connie, thank you so much. I appreciate how much time you've given me. As always, it's such a pleasure to talk to you.
Connie Butler:
It's a pleasure to talk to you and I have such enormous admiration.
Charlotte Burns:
Okay, so we've just walked through the courtyard at Clockshop, which is a beautiful oasis in the middle of the city. So can you situate us? Where are we in the city?
Sue Bell Yank:
We're in the northeast part of LA in a neighborhood called Elysian Valley, or sometimes it's called Frogtown. We're right up against the Glendale Narrows section of the Los Angeles River.
Charlotte Burns:
So we're now at Clockshop with its executive director Sue Bell Yank, the writer, curator, and former public school teacher, who is a passionate advocate for a greater understanding of the power and relevance of art in our society.
Clockshop as an organization is basically a ‘what if’ proposition in real time. It collaborates with artists, activists, researchers, educators, curators, institutions and neighbors to reframe how the community engages with public space, creating portals through culture to revisit the past while looking for ways to reimagine new futures.
Sue, thank you so much for joining me.
Sue Bell Yank:
Thank you. Delighted to be here.
Charlotte Burns:
It's the first anniversary of your taking this role, so happy Valentine's anniversary.
Sue Bell Yank:
Thank you. Thank you.
Charlotte Burns:
You said when you were hired that “public space is a precious resource in our city, and most Angelinos do not feel like they have any power over the development of their own neighborhoods. We believe that through arts and cultural programming, we can not only highlight the importance of this land to generations of Indigenous people and immigrant communities, but also stimulate how we might imagine our city working better for all of us in the future.” And you'd said that over the next two years you were gonna expand and enhance that work with artists and communities. Can you talk a little bit more about what that looks like in reality?
Sue Bell Yank:
Sure. One thing I've noticed in my 20 years living in LA is that there are so few places to gather that don't involve a transactional relationship with a place where you're either buying something or you're there to purchase a service or a good, or whatever but a place where people can actually just come together from all different walks of life in public space and interact, cross-community with one another. And I think that's incredibly important for social cohesion and for wellbeing for our city. A lot of the work that we've done leading up to this massive project that we're undertaking right now, which is our cultural asset mapping called Take Me To Your River: Stories from Northeast Los Angeles. It's really about listening to understand what communities would like to see in their public spaces and how they would like those spaces to be activated in the future.
Charlotte Burns:
So tell me about the project Take Me To Your River, the cultural asset mapping.
Sue Bell Yank:
It really hearkens back to a lot of our work over the past eight years on the Bowtie parcel right next to the Los Angeles River. It's one of the few pieces of public land that has direct access to the river in this beautiful area of the river called the Glendale Narrows, which is soft bottoms—so there's a real ecosystem that is growing. It's a piece of land that's owned by California State Parks and it has not been developed into a park for about 20 years that it's been owned by the parks. Clockshop began working on that land in 2014 as a result of a series of conversations we had done about the future of this neighborhood and the future of the LA River in Northeast Los Angeles. That resulted in dozens of artists projects and cultural and community events, family events that took place on that site and was successful in gathering momentum amongst the community and amongst government agencies as well to start being able to have funding for that to eventually become a state park for this region. We know that it will open up the access to many, many more people. We also know that these communities surrounding that park are rapidly changing and are undergoing a lot of gentrification and displacement pressures, which are likely, unfortunately to be accelerated by new Green Space.
So part of what we really feel like is a role that we can play as an arts and cultural organization is to make sure that we're capturing the histories specifically of the communities that are at highest risk of displacement but also making sure that those cultural practices and stories about this neighborhood are being captured for future generations.
So this project is an oral history project where we're collecting histories and images of this neighborhood as it currently exists. We see this as being a foundation for artistic research, for projects into the future and lay the foundation for what the future programming that we do looks like in this neighborhood.Charlotte Burns:
That's really interesting because it's sort of a conundrum of creating the nicest space and then being aware of what that brings with it, which is that displacement of the community you're trying to serve.
Sue Bell Yank:
I think as any organization that is working with and on public land needs to acknowledge is that we're, we're working on stolen land. Specifically many of the state parks sites that we're working on have been historically very important sites to Indigenous peoples, but also were stolen from those peoples and basically given to the Southern Pacific Railroad, which created a lot of toxic soil in those spaces that then now have to be mitigated in order to have state parks there.
Understanding what these lands originally meant to the original inhabitants of this place, we recognized as incredibly important. But we wanted to have a series, kind of, in this current era that we're in, where I think there's much more momentum around talking about land back and co-stewardship agreements with Indigenous tribes or different kind of mechanisms, rather than conceptually is this, you know, an important thing that we all should be talking about? We're like, yes, of course it is, but what practically can we do? We see that as a role that we can play in terms of trying to push that edge and push organizations that work with public land to be sure that they're in conversation with the First Peoples of this land and what the stewardship of those places looks like in the future. We're trying to be a really good ally in these conversations.
Part of, I think what was so interesting about the dreaming land back into reality series was bringing in that intersectional element. So not just thinking about Indigenous land return, but also how that intersects with Black land theft historically, which of course happened throughout LA County and throughout the nation. But looking at some of those specific cases like Bruce's Beach that have been successful and how that can be a much wider policy of reparations that could be adopted or pushed for.
Charlotte Burns:
I'm really interested in hearing how you see Clockshop as a cultural organization taking that role because stewardship of land is related to climate change and the climate crisis. How can it become the domain of culture to help find solutions to these enormous problems?
Sue Bell Yank:
Absolutely, we partner with organizations that do incredible on the ground work in the sort of very technical and logistical strategies of how we transition to renewable fuels and really try to support those people and partnerships as much as we can. But, I think in order for people to feel a real investment and a real pathway towards their own advocacy there, it's necessary to have a kind of social and emotional investment in the land that you live on and a really a deepening understanding of how those infrastructural decisions affect you directly. Why there's a drought in California, why the groundwater aquifers aren't filling dates back to the original decisions to channelize the river in the 1930s. And to me, that is a role that a cultural organization can play, you know, revealing histories, revealing questions. Then you start to really gain that emotional connection to that place and then you wanna fight for it and you wanna fight for its future.
Charlotte Burns:
Right. One of the organization's core values is to reimagine expertise based on a belief that we learn best through non-hierarchical dialogue. So what if expertise weren't linear? What does that look like?
Sue Bell Yank:
That's something that we've always thought about since the very beginning of Clockshop, how expertise can manifest. There's the lived expertise of living here next to the river for your entire life and seeing its changes. And I think through our cultural asset mapping project, that is gonna be a huge part of the expertise that we're hoping to uplift to the surface. There's expertise for how you move policy through governmental agencies that make it really difficult to do that sometimes. And absolutely, I think we believe strongly in the expertise of artists too and that ability to really kind of provoke that discussion or that thinking in broader audiences.
Charlotte Burns:
So, Sue, you have lived with and we all watched the footage of the terrifying images of the LA River bursting its banks. We're used to seeing it in drought conditions and all of a sudden this terrifying abundance of water floating through Los Angeles, causing devastation and yet not replenishing the drinkable water of the city. I imagine that that brings you as an organization closer to the questions of how to live with the river.
Sue Bell Yank:
There’s a big question that we’ve been thinking of a lot which is about the future of the river itself and how it’s become this flashpoint in discussions around climate change in the future, is kind of the future of the river and that it’s not really possible to de-concretize it and bring it back to its completely natural state but how do you find a balance? And I think that’s always and interesting question that we’re struggling with, is like, how do you find a balance between the people who live next to the river and their needs, the river itself and it’s ecological needs, and then our needs as a society facing climate change and what we need in terms of water and water recapture and all of those things. So I think those are like the big questions that we’re thinking about right now.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, just a small thing. [Laughs]
So, Sue, a question about Los Angeles now. What if LA is the future?
Sue Bell Yank:
I think that LA is an amazing place to think about what our possible futures could look like. It's a place that is at the bleeding edge of a lot of crises from wildfires to floods to crises of climate. We have an enormous housing and homelessness crisis but I think also, I'm hopeful, some more political will nowadays to try to do something about that. How we address these crises and how we think about a more livable city in a really smart way is gonna play out in the next five to ten years here and how cultural organizations fit into that, I think is really interesting. In LA I think there's arts and cultural organizations in every arena trying to push that forward or to propose counter-narratives to what have you, capitalism, commodification of land, the way that we move through our city and there's artists here and arts organizations that are doing incredible work proposing a different way of thinking about these crises.
Charlotte Burns:
I was struck this morning driving along. There's this sense in when you're in LA that you can really see the future. And there's this sense of hope and possibility and then there's this also this sense of like, wow, it's such a great place to set a post-apocalyptic movie. [Laughs] It's sort of both.
Sue Bell Yank:
[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think there's so much beauty that reveals itself slowly to you over time in this city and on the surface like the river itself, you know, on the surface you sort of think about Terminator and you think about the race scene in Grease and it really does look like this sort of post-apocalyptic landscape with a natural force that's completely divorced from any nature. But then you get to know the city more and you understand there's other parts of the river that have great blue herons and beautiful native willows that are growing up through the concrete. None of that is gone, it has been paved over in many places. But there is a balance to be found between the natural environment and our communities and the way we think about interacting with one another.
Charlotte Burns:
So, my final question for you, what is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and the what if that gets you out of bed in the morning?
Sue Bell Yank:
Oh gosh, that's a good one. I mean, the ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night is what if I'm the last generation of my family that's ever gonna be able to afford to live here? Are my children gonna have to move to another city because LA is just not possible to live in anymore? I worry about runaway housing costs or any cost of living types of things and just think about how much if that's affecting me and my family in our relatively privileged position, you know, how extremely stressful that must be for so many people in this city. And I worry about that, you know, in the future I worry about it sort of carving out the underbelly of the arts in Los Angeles. Artists will not be able to afford to live here, small organizations will not be able to afford to stay afloat. And then what happens when you have only LACMA left or something? It's a much less dynamic place. So I do worry about that.
What gets me up in the morning is really the incredible people that I know working in the arts and working adjacent to the arts and thinking about these new ways that we can work together and support one another. We're part of the LA Visual Arts Coalition and we did a bunch of really successful fundraising together. We're talking about getting healthcare for all of the different workers that work in all of our organizations.So, working in coalition and in collaboration with all of these folks at many other disparate organizations has been incredibly rewarding and that gives me a lot of hope for how we can move forward as a city. I feel like there's an enormous amount of collaboration and generosity in supporting each other, especially in our field.
Charlotte Burns:
Thank you so much, Sue.
Sue Bell Yank:
Thank you, thank you.
Charlotte Burns:
Thanks so much to Connie Butler and Sue Bell Yank for joining us and sharing their ‘what ifs.’ Join us next time when we visit the LA studio of artist Cauleen Smith and chat to Kibum Kim, a partner of Commonwealth and Council gallery.
Kibum Kim:
Because of just like how inherently inefficient and nonsensical this place is, it leaves a lot more room for more organic, odd things to happen and I think that's where a lot of the magic comes from.
Cauleen Smith:
We're at like a moment where if we don't decide that we really are the future and that we really can figure out how to do things differently, I am worried about LA’s future.
Charlotte Burns:
I can’t wait for another LA special on The Art World: What If…?!
The podcast is brought to you by Art&, the 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.