The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 3: Kemi Ilesanmi
What if we all name our dreams before following them? This episode we welcome Kemi Ilesanmi, the now-former executive director of The Laundromat Project, the non-profit focusing on the art of the everyday, amplifying community and artists as citizens and change agents.
This show is all about ‘what ifs’, and Kemi operates from that place of abundant possibility. What if businesses invested in their staff, seeding future next generations? What if arts organizations functioned as community assets? Tune in for more.
New episodes available every Thursday.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome back to The Art World: What If…?!, the podcast all about imagining different futures. I’m your host, journalist Charlotte Burns, and throughout the series we’re meeting some brilliant people who can help us explore some big ideas. Asking them to imagine, what if?
[Audio of guests]
This episode we welcome Kemi Ilesanmi, the now former executive director of The Laundromat Project in New York, the non-profit focusing on the art of the everyday, on amplifying community and on artists as citizens and change agents.
This show is all about ‘what ifs’ and Kemi operates from that place of abundant possibility. What if we all name our dreams before following them? What if organizations invested in their staff, seeding future next generations?
As you listen to this, Kemi will be traveling around the world. Where better to start a new year?
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
Kemi, thank you so much for being here today.
Kemi Ilesanmi:
Thank you, I'm so excited to be here. Really nice to meet you.
Charlotte Burns:
So we're lucky to catch you, Kemi, you're stepping back from The Laundromat Project after ten years of being its executive director. And you're heading off on a life-changing adventure from New Year's Eve to New Year's Eve, a gap year through 2023. This show is looking at life's ‘what ifs’. And it feels like you're a person who thoroughly embraces those possibilities. Can you tell us a little bit about where you're going so we can all dream and vicariously live through you for a moment.
Kemi Ilesanmi:
It started off being, “Oh, I'll probably need a break after being an executive director, and somewhere along the way morphed into what if we take a whole year?”. We're starting off in Mexico, then we’re off to India then Southern Italy. In between each trip, we're actually coming home to see family and friends. Then we take off for South Africa and Namibia, then Ghana and Nigeria. I'm from Nigeria and I’ve not spent a month in Nigeria since I was 15. And we're ending, we're in discussion... But we are ending in either Australia, New Zealand or Argentina.
Charlotte Burns:
Oh my goodness. I can't imagine what that feels like. You're stepping back from, you know, you've been working so hard. You've built up this, you know, organization, when you joined, the budget was around $200,000 annually, you were the second employee. You're stepping back at a moment when the budget’s more than $2 million annually, and there are 12 to 14 staff. You have a physical location, a permanent home, a 10-year lease. And there's money in the bank.
So you've worked tirelessly, with your community, with all your staff, to get the organization to this place through a pandemic. And now, instead of feeling that kind of cosh of burnout, you're feeling this sense of radical possibilities. Can you talk about that feeling, what you might expect? Because I know that you have epiphanies on vacation: you came to The Laundromat Project with the idea of becoming its executive director after taking a holiday. And you said to your husband, “I know what my job is. Now I have to go and get it.”
So, what kind of epiphanies might you come back with?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
Oh, I'm so thrilled in the not-knowing what exactly the epiphanies will be. But I believe in facilitated epiphanies, when possible.
I am excited to explore community arts organizations in the countries we're going to, keeping an eye out for interesting spaces. My husband, similarly, is interested in community organizing entities in the countries that we're visiting, which have incredible histories in both of these ways of working, right, politics and art. So being really open to that and meeting up with artists.
The epiphany I had this morning, because I'm very excited about Nigeria—I lived there for nine years as a child from six to 15—I'm really interested in digging deeper into my Yoruba heritage. This morning, I was reading The Times, and they had the second article in about two weeks that touched on the tradition of adire, which is tie dye in Nigeria. And it occurred to me that I could go and spend time learning about this, I could learn to do adire. So that would be completely new. But I think I'm excited to do things that make me think and feel differently. I don't have to be an expert.
Charlotte Burns:
I love that idea. Essentially, what you're also reminding yourself is your potential. And this is something you're very good at doing. So much of The Laundromat Project is about reigniting that sense of creative potential, reigniting that creativity in people.
If you could run the art world, what would you do? What's your what if? How would you get people to do that? Is it engaging with things? Is it making things with your own hand? Is it being in a space where you can be vulnerable? Like, what are the ways that you get people to remember that they're creative beings?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
Hmm, that's such a wonderful question. And you're right. It's one that The Laundromat Project is really focused on. The very heart of it is why we're called The Laundromat Project. The idea was to actually meet people in spaces in their everyday lives and insert ourselves into their everyday lives, like a laundromat, and just say this too can be a place of creativity.
There's something really beautiful about that idea of meeting people where they are. And I do still think there's something really gorgeous about just going to that community event and saying we're going to figure out an art project or a conversation prompt that moves us into a space of creativity and generative thinking and generative making and doing. I live in Flatbush in the Ditmas Park section of Brooklyn. We have a lot of musicians in the neighborhood and a lot of porches. A lot of the musicians really wanted to be able to share who they were. And regular porch concerts became a regular thing during Covid, and now continues. So you can just walk down the street and on a Sunday afternoon and possibly run into a saxophone player or a reggae band or whatever kind of music, jazz singers, and there's something really beautiful about the possibility of running into art, just by deciding to like take a little walk in the neighborhood.
And there's something there that I think to be pulled out about just running into, and being a part of people's everyday lives, to the extent that it doesn't seem extraordinary. Right now, it still deserves comment. But what if it was so ingrained that it didn't deserve comment? Of course, I ran into a jazz singer, and of course, I talked to an artist or whatever that might look like in different neighborhoods.
Charlotte Burns:
I love that so much, this idea of kind of bolstering creativity. In a past interview, you said something about, you know, artists are who we turn to in difficult times. And it reminded me of something the actor Ethan Hawke had said that people think that art isn't for them. But actually, when they're heartbroken, they read a poem. If they're feeling sad, they might watch a film like, you know, through art and culture is how we learn to find empathy from others within difficult moments like that.
When we were prepping for the show, I said, what's your ‘what if’? What's the kind of imaginative space we might want to discuss or think about? And you said that your number one dream for our field was one in which POC arts organizations, artists and cultural workers are well funded and can thrive in their own communities. Can you talk a little bit more about that and bring us on to your work with HueArts NYC?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
Before doing HueArts, I never would have guessed that New York City has over 450 arts entities, be they fiscally-sponsored, nonprofit, or for profit, founded and run by people of color. Black, indigenous, Latinx, Arab American, Asian American. Just every kind of person of color. Never would have guessed that. And it just made me so excited to know that there are 450 different seeds and, you know, cultivation opportunities out there around creative arts in the city, just around people of color, so, many others as well, right?
But what also made me take pause was recognizing how many of them were getting by on $15,000, $10,000, $20,000. Under $100,000. The vast majority are not well-resourced.
Basically, at the top of Covid, I was following all the lists of Black bookstores, Black toy shops around the country; there were a number of those lists coming out in the midst of the George Floyd summer of 2020. I started sending those kinds of lists to a few funders and saying: “Wouldn't it make sense to have one of these for New York City around arts?” And very quickly, they turned back to me and said, “Well, that would be amazing. You should do it.”
[Laughs]
And I definitely was not expecting that.
I thought they would hire, you know, someone fancy and get this done. And I had a job running a relatively small grassroots organization through a pandemic. So I was not looking for this project. But I did know that it had to be done. And that it did make sense that it be done by the people who are in that community and running a POC arts organization.
So I quickly partnered with Museum Hue, which had worked with arts workers of color over the years, and Hester Street, which does phenomenal work around community-engaged processes and had worked on New York City's first, and so far only, cultural plan. And we raised the money very quickly from Mellon [Foundation], Ford [Foundation] and the Department of Cultural Affairs—Commissioner Gonzalo Casals was our fairy godfather. And basically, HueArts became my Covid passion project. That's what I worked on for a year and a half. And it went public with our map and our Brown Paper, looking at what we thought the field needed to look at and what we had learned from some of these 450 entities. And it all came out in February of 2022.
It has been so empowering to recognize each other, for people who got to add to the list. Museum Hue now owns the project. From the beginning, I knew that it wasn't the Laundromat’s project to steward for the rest of time. So I wanted to bring in a partner that it did make sense for them to be the steward, and Museum Hue is now working in a New York State version with the New York State Council [on the] Arts, which is incredible.
One of the things that it felt really important to me in that sense of making visible who was here being the step one because, again, I don't think there was any of us that was going to guess 450. And then through the Brown Paper to begin to name, here's where we have strengths. And here's where we have challenges beyond money, because we all know money is a challenge. But also that many of us wanted homes and spaces and brick and mortar, and didn't have them.
And the LP, of course, had just signed a lease in March 2020 at the top of Covid. So we understood that very well. And it had taken us 15 years to get to that point. Even though our name… the dream was in the name. The Laundromat Project states our dream. It was that we wanted a home. And it no longer needs to look like a laundromat, which we now think about metaphorically, but literally, our dream was captured in our name. And it still took us 15 years to get to a place where we have a long-term lease. And there's still a dream of perhaps owning something more permanent in the future.
So just being able to state our dreams was something that we talked to in some of our community conversations with other people of color-run arts entities. And very infrequently are we asked to dream. Instead, we're asked to solve problems. There's an expectation of prices, and very little of an expectation of dreaming and possibility. And that was something that felt just in the naming that we exist, and that there are so many of us, and then capturing some of that dreaming in our Brown Paper was part of the seed that I'm hoping to plant so that there can be other dreams that can be manifest.
In my life, personally, just my personal philosophy, you have to name dreams so that the universe can figure out how to help you make them happen. So if we don't invite people to even name the dream, they can't get to where they need to go.
Charlotte Burns:
And what happens to people when they name their dreams? What's happening to these organizations? What process—that kind of alchemy of this project?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
A lot of people just looked up on the map, like who else is around me that I may not know, so that they can start connecting to each other. We, none of us—and people of color know this very well—we don't get anywhere by ourselves. But sometimes we don't even know who the other people are to band together with. So that was one of the biggest things we've just been able to make ourselves visible to ourselves.
And then it gives us, when we're talking externally and meeting potential funders, we actually have something to point to. And it's data. It's actually, I'm not dreaming this. These are the folks who are down the street. Just being able to give people those tools to have a stronger conversation. Those are some of the possibilities that we're already hearing about.
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
I want to talk to you, after this in a second, about that human-sized dreaming and how it leads to much bigger things. And I mean human-sized as opposed to sort of algorithmically sized.
But first, I want to talk to you about data. Because when people talk about The Laundromat Project, they talk about community, they talk about grassroots. They talk about possibility, artists and neighbors and neighborhoods. But they don't really talk about data. And when I was doing research for this, I was thinking you're a kind of data nerd.
By the time you'd become director in 2012 of Laundromat Project, for instance, you said that you had a lot of data about all the artists of color working across communities in New York.
HueArts NYC is a data project. And it's something you reference as one of the key findings in the Brown Paper. You say that “the dearth of data and metrics on POC arts entities in New York City is significant and remarkable, creating barriers to truly comprehensive field knowledge, visibility and impact. It is one of the main contributors to the lack of POC arts funding, representation, real estate and decision-making power in New York City arts and philanthropy sectors.”
So data is something you're very focused on. And a lot of organizations don't want to look at that data. It's something that feels intimidating. It feels like it may lead to processes that aren't human-sized. And so I was just thrilled to see that you're a data head, and I suspect that behind these, key findings, there is something of a plan to bring about more data. We know there's a dearth of data; what data do you need? And what are you going to do with it?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
No one has actually called me a data nerd, so I really appreciate that.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
It's a highest compliment.
Kemi Ilesanmi:
I accept. I take it as such. And shout out to Sade Lythcott of the National Black Theater and Kyoung Park of [Kyoung’s] Pacific Beat. They were both on our advisory committee and were very focused on the possibilities of data.
One of the things that I'm always saying to my staff is, “We have our own data. We have the data,” whatever that might be. Like, we did a fundraising campaign, what happens when? We've been doing this for 10 years, what have we learned? Here are the artists we're working with; what are the trends? What are they looking at? And I'm constantly looking for those ways to, like, quantify, qualify, like a lot of the data I'm interested in is qualitative data. But it's just the idea of looking, recognizing and making things legible. And data helps to make things legible so that you can figure out the next step.
And one of the things that goes with the data that I'll say that I really focus on is sort of that idea of, you know, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there, did it make a sound? How do we make this public and visible so that it does make a sound? So I made sure we had a PR budget. It wasn't big, but there just needed to be a PR budget so that we could get articles and move things out in the world. So one of the, for me, some of that is socializing an idea so that it is no longer a niche idea. Some of that is being able to inspire ripples that I can't predict. I may never know about, but if they don't even know the thing, then they can't be inspired to do whatever version of a ripple effect that might happen in the world.
One of the things that really drove me in putting HueArts together was a dream of what it might look like for a young person of color, let's say, a young Black woman who is starting an art career—curator, registrar, there are options. She wants to make a life, a professional life, working with culturally specific, as in people-of-color-run arts organizations, in New York City or even around the world or country.
Right now, that feels like, you know, that's 50 years. Someone is like, this is what I want to do for 50 years. This is where I want to invest and be a part of and dream and grow. That, in this moment, would feel like an incredibly bold statement. And it shouldn't.
I am coming into this conversation with a lens that says that is a valuable life and professional goal. I did not work for a POC arts organization until I took the helm of the LP at the age of 42. And I love the places I've worked, I learned a lot. But there's something that has deepened in my practice, and the way that I think about my professional life, and what I have to give the world really came into crystal clarity working at a POC arts organization. So I didn't know what I was missing until I was in it.
It doesn't have to be everybody's path. But I do believe it deserves to be a path that feels viable for young people of color in the arts. That, ultimately, is my goal. So to be able to make that path visible, legible and possible, we have to have strong POC arts organizations. There's got to be more than five. And they have to be different scales, different niches, around the country. So if you want to live in a smaller town, you get to be at the National Underground Railroad Museum [Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center] up in the Buffalo area, or, “I love heat. I'm going down to the Project Row Houses in Houston” or the Bay Area, you get to be at the African American Center or the East African Arts Alliance [EastSide Arts Alliance].
So beginning to name and thread together and know that if I'm going to pick up and move to Oakland, so that I could be, you know, at such and such organizations—Self Help Graphics [& Art] in LA does amazing work and has been a part of a Latinx community there for years. Well I need to know that they'll still be here, and that I'll be paid in a way that allows me to have a family, because that's when people leave. It's when people start having families or just having those greater adult concerns that you have at 30 and 35 and 40, that you didn't have at 20. And you're like, oh, shoot, I need to actually be paid, so I can like send my kids to college to do these kinds of things, and have a life where I don't have roommates for the rest of my life.
So if we can't resource organizations to be able to hold on and retain and build out our staff, and this field from that space—talk less of the ways that we can support artists and the dreams you might have about the work they do, when we get them, which is the next, obviously, a related layer. But my personal dream is like, wow, wouldn't it be beautiful if a young Black woman who's entering the arts right now, if she wants, could make a 50+ year career in POC arts organizations and not feel like she gave up any kind of professional development or material supports. Because I'm sure that she'll feel satisfaction about the artists she gets to work with. I'm not worried about that part. It's can you have a life?
Charlotte Burns:
How far away is that? How possible is that, at this moment in time, do you think?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
I caught a glimpse of it at the Loophole of Retreat in Venice, which was a gathering of 700 women coming together under the auspices of Simone Leigh being the first African American woman to represent the US in the Venice Biennale. And she worked with Rashida Bumbry, Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman to put together an incredible three-day program with lectures, films, performances, and just time to be together on our own island. We had our own island. And it was our intellect, our creativity, our beauty. The fashion was awesome. Really, it was awesome. [Laughter]
One of the things I loved, it was such an intergenerational space.
They had actually partnered with Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Clark Atlanta [University], which, jointly under Dr. Cheryl Finley, run a curatorial program at a historically Black set of colleges. There were about 20 of them there, who were either current students or very recent past students, and they introduced each of the speakers. And every single time one of them would get up and say, “I'm such and such from Spelman”, “I'm such and such from Morehouse”, the entire room would erupt as if we hadn't just heard introductions of the previous. We were so excited that there were 20-something young Black folks who wanted to be in this career, and they got to do this incredible three-day symposium at the age of 20, when those of us that were 50 were in tears at our happiness to be there. I can't even imagine.
Charlotte Burns:
That is so powerful. So you had this moment where you could envision it. And now you're obviously one of the people who's helping build that.
I guess this is the same space, this is that same imaginative space that you were discussing, bringing people together to dream. You're coming off this tenure, the successful tenure and the organization and you have handled this transition with such grace. People keep saying you have to ask how they handle that transition because it's a model. Because it hasn't been about you leaving.
Usually, if a museum director leaves, it's about the buildings they built and the money that they fundraise and the wing this and the acquisitions there. Whereas you leaving has been about naming the next director. It's been about that continuum of the project. It's been about the next step dreams. And you're creating that space within the transition, I want to ask you how you did it?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
It has been so interesting to navigate a transition. So the interesting fact, and it is literally fact, is that the day I took the job, I thought it was a ten-year job. I had dreams for the organization. And just knowing again, I was employee number two, I was like, it's gonna take ten years just to get where I'm going. Something that more than one executive director said to me when I first came on board was, oh, it's gonna take you about two to three years just to figure out what your job is. So I was like, well, I need the other seven just to do whatever I figured out in the first three years. So I came in with that frame.
I had been on the board for a number of years so I had a sense of what the organization could be. There were a couple of different key moments for me, because, for me, it was always about, what's the dream if you can't begin to live it in some format. And the things that I imagined, which were not all crystal clear but became clear over time—and part of it were just experimenting and trying things and going “that, not that.” But I knew that we had the possibility of some really beautiful community building, creating a class of community artists in New York City and driving change in the city through that group. Being a good neighbor.
So one of the things that I wanted to do early on was to just make sure that I was building our capacity. It seems so boring. But one of the best decisions I made about a year in was to hire a grant writer. I hated writing grants. If we had kept me as the grant writer, we would still be a $200,000 organization. Literally, that was the trade-off. So the trade-off feels like, “Oh my God, you're gonna pay someone $50 or $60 or $75 an hour? How could you do that? Like you can write, you're a good writer.” No one said this, to me, it's more an internal dialogue, But there is this sense of scarcity. And literally the trade-off was, well, we can be a $2 million organization in 10 years, or we can still be a $250,000 organization, and I'll write those grants for the rest of time. But we'll never get to live our dream. We’ll always be right below scale that would allow us to really dream.
So that was one of my early best decisions, as far as I'm concerned. Because I worked with someone who worked with us for about six or seven years, her name was Jessica Svenson. Thank you, Jessica. And one of the grants she helped me write, about three or four years in, was to hire someone to be our director of strategic partnerships. And she later on became our deputy director. And that person turned out to be Ayesha Williams.
So in our first interview, Ayehsa says to me, because she at the time she was working at Lincoln Center running their arts program, she said, “Don't let the Lincoln Center name fool you, I can get down there and really make things happen.” And I just took notice, because I was like, “Oh! Okay!”
She has just jumped at every opportunity. She has been such an incredible partner. So two years in, she was promoted to deputy director and this whole time for her and the director of programs, who was then Hatuey [Ramos-Fermin] and is now Catherine Green, I wanted to make sure that I was helping to create people who could be leaders in the field going forward, very much inspired by the Studio Museum [in Harlem], because there's so many amazing people of color who have gone through, in particular, their curatorial program of the Studio Museum.
But I also went through a very long and storied series of fellowships and internships at the Walker Art Center, which is how I started my journey. So I really take seeding the field with amazing people as a part of my job. So I was kind of like, well, you guys are probably going to be recruited and move on to other things and I want to make sure you understand budgets, and you understand strategy, and you can think like a leader and really bring that to the table. So we formed a leadership team. One of the things that a lot of people talk about is a sense of the loneliness of this job. And that's not untrue. But I have made it my duty to not feel lonely, to figure out how to be in community with other people, so that I can take some of that away, because it's too hard a job to do by myself. And Ayesha was part of that group.
So once I realized that it really was 10 years, then started having conversations with my board, immediately, they were like, “Do you think Ayesha would want this job?” And I was like, “I don't know but I sort of was thinking the same thing.” [Laughter]
So it was a very collective, very organic welling. And we kind of went to her and said, “This is sort of what's on our minds, what do you think?” And of course, she had to absorb that I was leaving, and then kind of track what the possibilities were and how they could affect her life. Very quickly she understood and saw the possibilities and stepped into her moment with such beauty and grace. And since March, we've been in discussions and passing on knowledge and pulling her into meetings. But the other day, she actually brought tears to my eyes because I was like, “We have to have a meeting. You know, we only have eight more weeks. I have to pass this on and do this…” And she said “Kemi, you're not going to finish. You're not going to pass on everything you need. It's going to be fine. We will be fine and we know where you live.” And I burst into tears. [Laughter]
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
I want to ask you about this, because a thing that you lean into is this idea of people being very complex, that emotion is a huge part of your job. It seems that you lead with that, in every sense.
It's not what you hear, in most places of work. How did you decide that that was the thing? And how do you have the confidence to bring that into your practice?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
I think part of it was that I didn't feel I had a choice. Because very early on I ended up in discussions that immediately tapped into emotions. People were bringing me what looked like simple problems, but underneath were emotions about, “Well, I want a title change or a raise”, or “I'm having trouble with this other employee in these ways.” Whatever the case may be, there was always emotion under it.
One of the things I feel I've learned just in life, was you take the power out of things by naming them. And I do believe both Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, in particular, have kind of spoken to this. You have to name the fear; you have to name the thing. And there's a power in naming. Again, making these visible and legible. So that you can then decide what to do with the thing that you just named. But if you don't even name it, it's just kind of in the room, affecting how people show up and how they respond.
Charlotte Burns:
How would you scale that? If you were running the Met[tropolitan Museum of Art]? How would you scale the lessons you've learned from a nonprofit? And I'm only saying the Met because it's one of the largest institutions. How would you scale that learning, bringing people along together, when there's so many people?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
That is a question that I am going to answer speculatively. The largest organization I've worked in is the Walker Art Center, so nothing even remotely like the Met numbers. And yet, I do feel it's a really important question, right?
Some of the things that I think we have done that I think can be scaled creatively is, number one, creating connective tissue between folks outside of crisis. You can't suddenly be in crisis and think, “Now we'll bond and become best buddies,” when they have nothing to build on.
So one of the things we do, and we've been doing for years—and it is one of my absolute favorite rituals, traditions at the LP—is we have a weekly staff meeting and once a month, except August and December, we have a reading group and someone on staff, from intern to ED and everyone in between, rotated over the year, gets to select a poem, a podcast, a magazine article, a chapter from a book that we all get to read together and talk about. And I've learned so much from that. And we also have an icebreaker at every meeting, which I know, again, sounds really simple, but we've gotten to learn all kinds of fun things about each other over the years.
Now that we're together, again, we are doing a monthly happy hour because we don't all work on the same days in the same way. And we were doing a quarterly art opening. You know, that's what a company picnic looks like. But once a year doesn't cut it.
We also do a lot of collective staff training around things that we want to understand collectively. We had a session with a woman named Piper Anderson, who is amazing and who was our Radical Imagination fellow last year, around conflict and communication. We were back in the office by then, but continuing to build out what trust looked like and felt like to us and tending the roots. Trust is hard to build and easy to dissipate. So you got to keep up the work. And just giving ourselves collective tools around communicating, workstyles, all those things that just kind of help you continue to learn about each other, and hopefully in a fun way, or a way that is certainly generative. It isn't always fun, but certainly a sense of we're doing this and we're in this together-ness has to be part of the system.
We also provide coaching for all of our staff. I was the first person who got coaching at the encouragement of one of my board members, six or seven years ago. And then over the years incorporated every level of permanent staff or full-time staff. So now everyone has access to a coach. It's a significant investment of money and time. But, here's the beauty of it. Everybody has someone to turn to with an external lens on what they feel they're going through. But this is a lens on our professional life. I can go and say, “This happened at the office and this person said this. And this is what I think is happening.” And my coach goes, “Or, maybe that's not it.” [Laughs]
Having an external person that we all get to talk to, reflect with and think about our work life and journey, has been worth every single dime we've spent, and it is definitely a significant financial investment. For me, it feels like part of the professional development of caring for folks, and allowing them space to grow without judgment.
Charlotte Burns:
I think that's so marvelous. It's so unlike the art world that I've worked in. [Laughs] I can't imagine what that would feel like. That’s so fantastic. And it comes back to your point of, you know, seeding the field and creating better structures.
There's a lot of stuff around funding I want to ask you. So the initial concept for The Laundromat Project was to own and operate a laundromat, using those funds to run the non-profit, which is a really novel way of thinking about ownership and about space and about community. At the time the funds weren't in place. So you pivoted, becoming a sort of decentralized, citywide organization. And then, like you mentioned earlier, this idea of being a laundromat as a gathering space became more of a metaphor, realizing that not every project needed to actually exist in that realm.
And something you've done at The Laundromat Project is this idea of giving away grants to artists to be artists, to live—artist-directed funds that are unrestricted. And you guys started doing that in April 2020, with the Creative Action Fund for the alumni network, then of $500. And now that’s something that's in your practice, these micro-grants to artists in BedStuy, where The Laundromat Project now has its permanent base.What we're talking about really is how you support artists. What can we do to think more creatively about funding in terms of supporting artists at every level of the art sector?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
I worked at Creative Capital for eight years. And that's where I got really first introduced to thinking about money in a creative, innovative way. When I think about artists of color—Black, Latinx, Asian, indigenous, Arab American, all the folks—I know in my bones that they are vastly under-collected, under-written about. And how do you move to a space of abundance, which is something we think about at the LP. How do we create spaces that are for us, while also being like we deserve to be at the Met, and we're going to do the thing at MoCADA [Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts] and Recess and certainly Studio Museum, which is a major player, etc. So I'm always thinking on parallel tracks, I don't only feel like we need to be in the kind of tried and true predominantly White spaces. Although I appreciate that.
I do think having communities of practice, communities where folks get to get together is important. So one of the things that we're really excited about, about having our space in BedStuy, is having a space where we can say, every third Wednesday, come on through and hang out and you're going to find other incredible artists, or just a neighbor who's interested in these conversations. To come together and find each other and just have unstructured joyful time over food, these are things that we think about.
[Laughs]
And then for us giving people money to be that person—to be who they need to be, to make what they need to make, to create the spaces they need to create—does feel so central. At some point, you just have to say here are the resources. Money is one of the resources. Space is another huge one. Time is a different one that I find the most elusive, actually.
What I love about a space like the LP or Recess or some of these other spaces that I think are seeding artists of color in particular with money, space and time, is that we're in the flow of life—their lives.
And the more that we can put money into the hands of artists which, Ayesha is starting a strategic planning process, I know it always sounds boring, but it has been so incredible. The two processes I've gone through the LP, and I'm really excited for her process next year. And the central question is how do we build the LP as a community asset that builds wealth and possibility for all of our community, not just ourselves? And I think asking oneself that question—if every organization and arts entity asked themselves that, wow, what answers might that lead to? Because we're not all going to have the same answer. But I do know that money, time and space will be part of those answers.
Charlotte Burns:
That is so interesting. Part of the HueArts Brown Paper, you found that, you know, through the data, but we know this, is that POC-arts entities face extra challenges in securing adequate funding in comparison to predominantly White-led arts entities. And that, those entities are extremely resilient and resourceful in the face of that long history of structural bias and under-investment. I guess it's kind of what you've been talking about, which is this sense of teaming together, of community, of seeding the future and abundance. How important is that sense of believing in abundance?
Kemi Ilesanmi:
For me, it has been critical. It's been critical in my life. And it's been critical in my professional practice.
I believe in writing things down. I believe in saying things out loud so that other people can join the dream, or assist and facilitate the dream, or ask you hard questions that sharpen the dream.
And that mindset of abundance and possibility, for me, also feels really critical. And we've tried to lean into that, and really pulled it up as a value for the organization. So it is written, we know that this is something we lean into. A staff member can go, “Are we being abundant right now?” So we can hold ourselves accountable to a different way of thinking, and assuming that there's always a possibility. Sometimes things come up and we just lean into, “Okay, that seems crazy. And then it's like, wait, wait, but what if it isn't? How might we get there?”
So, for me, part of feeling comfortable—more than comfortable, excited about the possibilities for the LP after my 10 years—is that there is money in the bank. There are new dreams to dream. There is a space. There's so many things that could happen. And I don't have to be the person who does it all. And because the organization grew in so many dramatic ways, I’ve run about three to four to five organizations in those 10 years. [Laughs]
Every few years, it was something completely different; it was on a continuum. But managing 12 to 13 people is not the same as managing three. But wow, $2 million was not the same as $200,000. And it had new complexities and thoughts. So I'm just like, “Oh, my God, the possibilities are incredible.” I don't have to do it all. And that's something I really believe. I'm not doing the whole journey, I'm doing my part of the journey. And I feel really good about that. I'm like, I leaned into abundance, I leaned into the possibility. I built up to this spot, and Ayesha is going to take it to the next place. And I'm going to be at home. And I'm going to be there because I'm going to be a friend and supporter going forward. I'm certainly not severing ties forever, they’ll just be informal. But wow, I just already, like, have goosebumps at what I might be hearing. And so my favorite thing is that I'm going to be surprised. Like, “I wouldn't have thought of that. That's incredible.” “Wow, are you going to try that? That's great.” “Please. I can't wait to see where this goes.”
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
But you've lived this practice, you know, you're not just saying, “If we had money, we'd give it away”. You literally did that. You were given $2 million out of the blue by MacKenzie Scott. You received an email that you thought was spam, like a lot of people. And you've said it was your MacArthur Genius moment, this moment of recognition in which you were seen and supported and not asked to do anything other than what you already were doing best. And your first instinct was to give away the money.
Kemi Ilesanmi:
It was incredible. To receive the money to know that it was unrestricted. We gave them our bank account information on a Thursday, and by Monday, we had $2 million in the bank. I mean, there is just something head spinning about that. [Laughter]
That sense of generosity. They said they had done their research and were really inspired. Ms. Scott was, you know, we were one of her lists that year. And it was a huge focus on arts organizations. It definitely was just indescribable. And it made us feel seen. There was just a sense of such deep affirmation. So that was just beautiful and it did feel, it just felt affirming.
And my automatic instinct, I really cannot describe it as any other way, so I immediately started thinking, how do we give some of this away? Because other people helped us get here. How is it that if we win, everyone in our community wins? What would that look like?
One part of that was, what can we do with this $2 million that will feed our community and feed the LP for the next 50 or 100 years? What's the decision we can make about this $2 million that will make us categorically different in a way that we are leading, but how will it expand our possibilities? So that's the $1.8 million, right? Are we gonna buy a building? Who knows, but it's meant to be a conversation about building wealth for our whole community in the long-term. And that's a discussion that Ayesha is going to get to lead going forward.
I started doing a back-of-math-envelope, talking to a couple of board members, and was like, I think $200,000, if we broke off 10%—which is tithing in church—it'd be great to give away $50,000 in the same way that we received the $2 million. And we thought, should we do 10 organizations? And then we talked about it and it felt like $10,000 to five organizations would have more meaning. We wanted to be other people-of-color-based organizations.
We sort of thought of ourselves at 2012, when I first became executive director; if someone had called and given us $10,000, I would have been over the moon. We wanted it to be money that was meaningful. We wanted to be organizations that we'd have a connection with. We wanted it to be city-wide, because our focus has been and continues to be city-wide, with main focus on central Brooklyn and BedStuy. So those are some of the things we're thinking about for that.
Then we started writing lists. Who had been all the staff? Interns? We had to go digging, “We're like, who was that girl? Remember?” [Laughs]
And we obviously gave it to all of the artists who had passed through and been part of the LP up until that moment. People, someone wrote back and said she was fixing her mother's roof. Someone bought a desk, her first desk, and she was really excited about it. Several people used it for projects. Someone, you know, went to a spa. Like people did whatever it is they needed to do. And it happened to arrive at the end of the year. So it's sort of in that, you know, holiday season. So it also just happened to be well timed. Because it took us a while to go through all the process.
The other thing I'll just say that hasn't, you may not even know about this, is for the $1.8 million, we invested it, right? Because we want to make sure our money is working for us, while we think about and dream about what to do with it. We worked really hard to come up with an investment policy, which we had never needed before, that helps to create the world.
So we both avoid things we don’t want: no tobacco, no fossil fuel, no prison industrial complex. But we also have invested in funds that invest in community development all around the country. We found a bank, Amalgamated Bank, that can help us think in that way, and we broke off a piece of it to put in our local credit union at the Brooklyn Co-Op credit union that invests only in our neighborhood of central Brooklyn--like they support homeowners and small businesses. So I like to think that some of, $10, of the LPs investment or $1,000 might be, you know, in that new coffee shop that happens to open up on the corner. That we helped make that happen. So we wanted to make sure that our values showed up in all the ways that we were going to spend and invest this money. So again, if we win, how can the rest of our community win as well?
Charlotte Burns:
There's so much more I want to ask you. But I guess what I'm going to have to try and get you to commit to is to come back in a year because I think that this conversation will be so different when you've traveled all around the world. And you will be bringing so many more ‘what ifs’ to us. I sort of feel like we're sending you off to an island with all of these big dreams. And it's very exciting. It's been a super inspiring and enjoyable conversation, Kemi. Thank you so much for being our guest.
Kemi Ilesanmi:
Thank you so, so much.
Charlotte Burns:
Thanks so much to Kemi Illesanmi for taking the time to talk to us before she headed out on her trip of a lifetime.
Join us next episode, we’ll be talking to the curator Cecilia Alemani, who was the artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale, the biggest exhibition in the art world.
Cecilia Alemani:
We want to see museums more diverse. We want to see museums and institutions represent the world as it is, which is certainly not a White world. But how do we get there? Is it by calling out? Is it by doing the hard job of doing exhibitions that might not be as popular as Damien Hirst? What are the solutions that are gonna get there?
Charlotte Burns:
That’s next time 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.