The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 8: Rashida Bumbray
What if we didn't have to push past human capacity to make work happen in the world? What if we had spaces of incubation that would allow us to then push our imagination to its experimental lengths?
This episode, Charlotte Burns is joined by Rashida Bumbray whose career straddles different realms within culture. A choreographer and curator, Rashida aims to create new spaces of imagination, empowerment, and connection. While the data and the daily realities of the art world can reflect a scarcity, Rashida’s action, notably the recent organization of artist Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat Summit, reflects an abundance that is intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and inspirational. Subscribe for more.
Courtesy of Rashida Bumbray.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and this is a series all about imagining different futures.
With the help of some brilliant people, we look ahead to try to find out what might and could be our reality in the years to come.[Audio of guests]
This episode, we’re joined by Rashida Bumbray, whose career straddles different realms within culture. A choreographer, and curator, Rashida has also worked in big-budget philanthropy, at the organization created by George Soros, becoming the inaugural director of the Open Society Foundations’ Cultures and Arts Department until late last year.
In all aspects of her work, Rashida aims to create spaces of imagination, empowerment, and connection. While the data and the daily realities of the art world can reflect a scarcity, Rashida’s actions—notably her recent organization of artist Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat Summit in Venice—reflect an abundance that is intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and inspirational. It's also unrivaled at a moment in which the broader art world seems to have a lot of complaints. This summit represented new possibilities, showing the way to new futures through history, excellence, and potential. A giant “what if” made real.
Hello Rashida, thank you so much for joining me today.
Rashida Bumbray:
Thank you so much for having me, Charlotte.
Charlotte Burns:
Talk to me about “what ifs.” It seems to me that a lot of your work resides in that realm of imagining new possibilities, building new futures, creating new worlds.
Rashida Bumbray:
I really am interested in what if we were able to actually lead? What if all of the power structures were to move out of the way so that we could actually lead, we could actually gather. And somehow even in the midst of what you described as the statistics really showing that museums are not centering Black women in ways that they should, I think that we’re able to create the spaces that we dream of anyway, and what I think happens over time is that the mainstream catches on.
Charlotte Burns:
So let's tell our listeners a little bit more about the Loophole of Retreat.
Rashida Bumbray:
[Music and clapping]
[Good morning, everybody.
Good morning, everybody.
This was my opening for the first day of Loophole of Retreat in Venice. As part of Simone Leigh’s exhibition Sovereignty for the American Pavilion, we brought together scholars, artists, activists and filmmakers from around the world for a three-day symposium focused on Black women’s intellectual and creative labor.
Did you feel alright? Yes.
Did you feel alright? Yes. [Music].
[Clapping and cheering]
Charlotte Burns:
As part of her exhibition at the US Pavilion, for last year's Venice Biennale—which was a historical participation since she was the first Black woman to exhibit her work in the US Pavilion—the artist Simone Leigh organized a gathering called the Loophole of Retreat.
You, together with curatorial advisors Saidiya Hartman, who's a university professor at Columbia, and Tina Campt, who's the [Owen F. Walker] professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, organized this three-day symposium. And it came from a 2019 convening at the Guggenheim in New York. And the conceptual frame comes from an 1861 autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman who wrote about her “loophole of retreat.” Do you want to describe this more fully for listeners?
Rashida Bumbray:
Sure. I think what made Loophole of Retreat so special was the vulnerability that was present in everything that was shared. It really demonstrates Simone's thesis around Black women being her primary audience. And I think, because there were over 700 Black women in attendance—each of which could have also presented or performed or shared their own practice and work—there was a certain knowing that the presenters had in sharing their work, and it created a sort of warmth that people said actually started on the airplane that when they saw each other and looked at each other and said, “Loophole of Retreat?”
And so I think it was very special before anything happened, but what Lorraine O’Grady said at the end was that she felt that she was speaking to herself. That every joke, every sort of bit of wit—and, you know, if you know anything about Lorraine O’Grady, she's extremely witty—that she felt she never had to explain herself. That everything that she said was understood and received in the fullest way.
And so I think that made Loophole of Retreat sort of a magical dream space. Which is something that I don't say lightly because I don't want to talk only about sentiment. We also asked for feedback. We did a survey of those who attended, and the most used word that was given back in the survey was transformational. Which is something you might not hear after people go to a conference for contemporary art.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. I mean, often the biggest conveners of people are art fairs, and I'm not sure we hear transformational there either, unless we're talking about sleep habits.
So, everyone I've spoken to who's been to Loophole of Retreat, they're ebullient about it, they’re effervescent, they talk about how it was life-changing, transformational, seminal, empowering, and all of these things. And when we were putting together this show—which is really about the “what ifs,” about imagining new futures—I was like, we have to talk to Rashida because this isn't a theoretical. You've taken a theoretical idea, and you are making that space of fertility in terms of seeding the future.
Talk to me a bit about the hopes in planning the summit and the threads now that you take forward. What were the “what ifs” that you were trying to get? You mentioned this idea of moving past power structures. What do you mean by that? And what are the other things that you were hoping to do in building it?
Rashida Bumbray:
Well, one of the things that I noticed in my work, especially within philanthropy and the intersection of art and human rights, was that the far right were very much in collaboration.
I went to Sarajevo for a conference, and it was called Art the New Battlefield, and there were all these artists from the Western Balkans. It was a week after Trump had been elected in the fall of 2016, and I had this overwhelming feeling that we were not communicating with each other as artists and as curators about what it meant for people all over the world to have practices in the space of fascism and of closing societies.
And so it became an obsession for me to connect artists and thinkers around the world who perhaps we are powerless in terms of support and money than, you know, the fascists that are connecting. But in terms of imagination, in terms of ideas, in terms of problem-solving, that we were much richer. And so it made me start to do work around connecting people around the globe. And why I say this in terms of Loophole of Retreat is that the dream of Loophole of Retreat was that it would be a truly global program of Black women and femmes from the depth and breadth of the African diaspora.
We were able to have participants from across the US and Canada, throughout the Caribbean, Brazil, from the UK and other countries in Europe and then, of course, participants from Africa. We built this sort of global platform for a dialogue that would really allow us to speak to each other, which I think is just as important as speaking to power or dismantling power.
Charlotte Burns:
So let's talk a little bit about what it achieved. You said it surpassed your imagination. What are the threads you take from this?
Rashida Bumbray:
It was really not lost on me that my own daughter and Simone's daughter and so many young people who are really the next generation of artists and thinkers, as well as children, were there sharing space with people like Lorraine O’Grady. That, to me, was so profound because, again, they heard and understood each other. For everyone in that room of multiple generations, it was something that we could never understand the profundity of until being in the space and actually seeing it happen.
One of the things that Lorraine O’Grady also said was that we are no longer alone. This movement is unstoppable. And she really spoke about the fact that for many of her generation, that there was a sort of fear of isolation. And that Loophole of Retreat made manifest the larger kind of community and connections that we can no longer pretend are not there.
Charlotte Burns:
How do you carry that forward? Is it something that would be iterative? Is it more something that lives, you know, within each of you and now in informal networks?
Rashida Bumbray:
I think it absolutely lives in informal networks. We are also wanting to make a book, which would be a really important way of documenting what happened there. There is something really important about the archive and so we're focused on the archive now and how we can submit it to the Smithsonian, possibly the Schomburg [Center for Research in Black Culture] in the New York Public Library.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you think there would be another Loophole?
Rashida Bumbray:
Absolutely. I think we've been afraid to sort of name it. People were saying, “Oh, how long did it take you to plan this?” And we said, two years. And then Simone was laughing and she said, 20 years, “Like, because this is like Rashida's full career—these relationships, this way of thinking, focus on performance.” We don't want to make the next one just because we should. We wanna make it because there's an urgency. And we also are really just trying to determine where the next one should be physically. We've talked about it being in the Global South, which I think would be ideal.
Charlotte Burns:
Let's talk a little bit about the Global South. As part of your work at Open Society Foundations, you built a strategy enabling the organization to become one of the leading arts funders focused on the Global South. And you did this with key buy-in and support from the organization's leadership, its global board of directors and the Soros family, who are the founders of the organization.
I wanna ask you about how you did that and why you did that. For people who don't know, you were the inaugural director of the Cultures and Arts Department appointed in 2019, after being the senior program manager of Open Society's Art Exchange since 2015. You recently left the role in late 2022.
What I was really interested in—and I think this is a thread of this conversation—is that there's a really practical part of this. It's not just an idea. You made it happen and then oversaw more than $70m going to artists, museums, organizations and projects working in social justice and human rights in the Global South and also in the Western Balkans and Belarus.
So talk me through why the Global South and then talk me through that kind of really practical thing of getting buy-in and making it actually happen.
Rashida Bumbray:
Even one of the ways that we thought about this work of the restitution of African cultural heritage was really thinking about what does it mean to return cultural knowledge production to its context of origin. And so for me, you know, I think there's a larger thesis that is rooted in the idea of Pan-Africanism, which thankfully I was a beneficiary of being born in the late ‘70s, and the Black Arts movement, which looked at the connections between Black and Brown people around the world, created an alternative space for telling our stories. Those are the things that allowed me to step into the art world with a sense of belonging and, equally a sense of being an outsider. I wanted to bring that same perspective to philanthropy, of really what does it mean to support artists and arts organizations in the place where the ideas are generated, but much of the resources are not found?
And so one of the other ways that we talked about this was historically underfunded communities. Which, you know, when you think about Africa, which has an incredible art world, there's so many curators that come from the continent. Simone and I were both lucky to work with the great Bisi Silva, who passed away a few years ago now, on her Àsìkò [Art School] program, which was essentially a program for artists and curators around the continent. And she brought us to be lecturers there, and it was really influential for both of us to really understand that Bisi could have gone and been ensconced in any museum in Europe, but she chose to stay in Lagos and create a contemporary art center. And she chose to create a space for critical dialogue among artists from the continent who were otherwise, I would say, a bit isolated from each other specifically. And that is not the case now, thanks to much of the work that she did.
But for me, the focus on the Global South was really about, one, this idea of problem-solving. How do we solve some of the problems around climate justice, racial justice, et cetera? And always, it's about going to the person most impacted by those issues, who would have the most imaginative response to how to solve them.
Charlotte Burns:
One of the things that you sent me as part of our research was a video by the Open Society Foundations and it's called Embracing the Arts in an Era of Reaction. And you say in that video: “Art is more important than ever in this climate. Authoritarians are quite clear about the need to shut down artists to defund artists. And so I think as people working for social justice and human rights, we also need to be clear of the power and agency that artists hold in society so that we can actually create spaces for freedom of expression when the authoritarian governments are actually pushing for their silence.”
Do you think philanthropy can solve that?
Rashida Bumbray:
I think philanthropy can participate in a solution. I think George Soros is a very specific, incredible contributor to this space as someone whose money is not coming directly from injustice. There's been a sort of radical set of priorities there for many years around things like decriminalizing sex work, for example.
And so I think it was such an important space for me to imagine what happens, especially artists that are not connected to the market in a direct way, who are doing important work in society, in their communities. How do we support them in robust ways? You know, how do we ask them to not run around the world to do their premieres so that they can gather enough cash to come back and do the local work that's important to them? How do we give them the support to actually work deeply in the ways that they want to? I think that philanthropy has lots of potential and I don't think it's the answer, but I think it's one prong in a set of solutions.
Charlotte Burns:
So having been inside that kind of massive organization in terms of scale, budget, ambition, what were your kind of learnings? Because I'm sure for you, that was a kind of “what if,” like, what if philanthropy can do this? What if we can invest in the Global South? What if we can, you know, bring heritage back to Africa? What did you learn? What are the things that are going to make change?
Rashida Bumbray:
Well, I think speaking about the Global South is always interesting to me because there's a certain problem-solving built into the way that people are able to make work, but also make sure that that work has functionality and relevance. That's something that the art world can learn from—not because everyone has to make a socially engaged practice by any stretch—but that I think if people trust artists, then there are ways that artists are able to create new pathways, create new understandings that I think take us and raise the political imagination together.
So Faustin Linyekula, the choreographer, who's from the [Democratic Republic of Congo] DRC, is a great example. He went to study contemporary dance in Nairobi, and when he came back to the DRC, he really wanted to create his own space and he created Studio Kabako, which is a space for contemporary dance. And what he learned was that he had to actually train dancers if he wanted to make a company there, and so he built a sort of residency.
But one of the other things he realized is to be relevant in Kisangani, he actually had to provide water. He realized that clean water was an issue and he provides even now water for up to a thousand people per day. Because he realized that contemporary dance, in order for that to be a focus, he also needed to make the space itself relevant to the city where it resided.
So that's an example to me of someone who is like at the top of a conceptual dance practice but also thinking about how to solve problems that, you know, economists are being paid to solve unsuccessfully.
Charlotte Burns:
So you've collaborated with Simone on lots of projects, including her first critically acclaimed solo exhibition, You Don’t Know Where Her Mouth Has Been, in 2012 at The Kitchen, where you worked at the time. You curated her 2014 Creative Time project Free People’s Medical Clinic, which explored the intersections of public health and racial consciousness and of women's work.
In 2016, you worked together on the immersive dance performance Aluminum, or “aluminum” as Americans would call it, at Tate Modern in 2016, and obviously Loophole of Retreat and various other things.
There is talk that Simone is looking more deeply into setting up her own foundation and that you might be involved in that in some way. Is that something you can talk about, like your next collaborations with her?
Rashida Bumbray:
Well, we really just want to find out how we can create the structures that we need to make the kind of work that we want to do possible. Emily Mello, who was the curator at the New Museum when Simone made The Waiting Room (2016)—which was a different iteration of the Free People's Medical Clinic—is working on the foundation now and really just trying to get it set up and institutionalizing it in the ways that it needs to be.
Simone would really love to decouple Loophole of Retreat from her artwork. That's really one of the main reasons why the foundation has become interesting and important for us is like, how can we do this work, and it doesn't have to mean that there's a biennial happening or there's a survey show and that the Loophole of Retreat can continue to be its own entity, which would not necessarily mean that people were also coming to see an exhibition.
I think Loophole is actually a problem-solving endeavor in and of itself. For example, it wasn't reviewed in The New York Times or Artforum. There was a piece written by Rizvana Bradley, who was one of the speakers, in Artforum. But it was more of a sort of response to the review that we got in Hyperallergic.
And so, you know, while that was sort of, I don't want to say it was disheartening, I think it was something that we were not shocked by, but we were sort of surprised by. But it sort of also emphasized why Loophole of Retreat was actually necessary.
Charlotte Burns:
Why do you think those things weren't reviewed and why wasn't that surprising? and would you need a review? Would that matter for future iterations?
Rashida Bumbray:
First of all, it does matter. Let me say that. In terms of the role of criticism, the role of these major publications as an archive, right? Because I think we know that certain things happen because we go to The New York Times and we read about them. And so I think for people to have to go to social media to kind of see that this was as major as it was, I think, is a problem.
I don't want to say I understand why it wasn't reviewed, but I think I understand that taking on our own authorship is sort of a central thesis for Simone. The Loophole of Retreat is really not asking why the appropriate platforms don't exist for Black women intellectuals, but really taking on the task of building the platform.
And so I think there's a way that it's a response before we even knew that we wouldn't have these kinds of reviews in the mainstream publications. But it also really speaks to this idea of the need for diversity within editors and the people who make decisions. In The New York Times, there was a dinner party and they said, “oh, the main point of discussion at this dinner party was the Loophole of Retreat.” So it's sort of a weird kind of like footnoted thing that usually you would be able to click on the actual review for what that is.
Charlotte Burns:
That's so interesting because it was one of the most ambitious projects that's taken place in the art world in recent memory.
Rashida Bumbray:
Absolutely.
Charlotte Burns:
Not only ambitious in terms of the sheer size of it. I mean, gathering 700-plus people on an island in Venice is not the easiest place to gather people, it’s not the easiest number of people to bring together, especially when it’s from so many different countries. So even just logistically, it's audacious.
And then to have three days, to have a robust program to intermarry, academia, performance, dialogue, dinners, the livingness of it all is, it's an intellectual endeavor. I initially wrote to you for the Burns Halperin Report. We do these data studies and the numbers are, they reflect mainstream tastes and that's what we document. That's the data that we look at. But there is a scarcity and there is a sense of fighting for more space and trying to take up more room and actually, what Loophole of Retreat did, it seemed to me, was just take up the space and be its own thing.
Rashida Bumbray:
One of the other things that Simone has said—and Simone is about 10 years older than me, and so she has a different relation to the generation just above her—and she talked about the fact that so many Black women artists that she met when she first moved to New York in the early 1990s had never had a museum show. They only were showing with the Black galleries, Kenkeleba [House] Gallery, which is very important. Obviously, we know about [Just Above Midtown] JAM now, thanks to the exhibition at MoMA.
There's a sort of recovery happening right now in the art world, a recovery project around all of the practices that the mainstream art world missed. It's not a new thing for us to continue to create our own spaces, to create our own practices and work, even if the mainstream art world does not participate in that process. And I think that this is sort of an example of it being situated at the most…the height of the art world, right, at the Venice Biennale connected to Simone's incredible pavilion, the American Pavilion.
So I don't think of it as a marginal gathering by any stretch. I think that what happens is really that it takes time for people to catch up. But we can't wait for that, right? We can't wait for them to catch up in order to continue making our work.
The first time I was interviewed about Simone for The New York Times, they asked a question about, “oh, isn't it great? You know that Simone's having such a big year?” And what I said was, “Simone has always been making this and thanks for joining us.” Basically.
I'm glad that the wool has been lifted from everyone's eyes, but she's been having this kind of practice and it's not been marginal to any of us. This kind of work really propels us. And that propelling happens in many different spaces. Those things are not disconnected. Even just the incredible, intergenerational and globally diverse show that Cecilia Alemani made for the Milk of Dreams, you know, all of these things are really, I think, ahead of their time. And I think it's our responsibility to keep going even while they catch up.
Charlotte Burns:
Another reason I think Loophole is so interesting is that it’s intergenerational fostering. It was so many things that we are not seeing in other parts of the art world that are needed.
I don't know if the art world will catch up or if it just separates. If that sort of money, you know, the market has taken over so much of the art world, I wonder if…We always assume that these things evolve together, but I don’t…do they? Do you think they do? What if they separate? What if the art world becomes, you know, much more closely tied to markets?
And I'm thinking of this particularly because I just edited the show with Cecilia for this podcast and she talked about value. What if the value of art and what art can do, what art is, becomes increasingly taken over by the financial value of art as decided by the market?
So what if they do become decoupled? Do you think they do catch up? Or do you think there is just a separateness?
Rashida Bumbray:
In most cases, they are separate. So even the distinction for me around performance, for example, it was really important to me that performance be central at Loophole of Retreat. Not just because performance is often decoupled from the market, which it is, but also because performance has such an impact on intellectual production.
So, you know, I think there have been parts of the art world, especially having been a curator at The Kitchen, which is focused on experimentation, there were only certain times where there was an overlap with the market in the work that we did. And usually, that was when we had exhibitions in the gallery. And usually, that was if there was some kind of two or three-dimensional work.
And it always meant that they needed, even if the artist was, you know, working with a great gallery and being successful in that arena, they also needed, in a dire way, a space for experimentation.
So I feel like there's a way that the market can't be successful unless these other spaces are also able to flourish because these are the spaces that nurture artists.
There is a sort of mutuality that's inherent here that I think, on some levels, the art world understands, and that's why there's so many residencies. Because otherwise, if people just made the same painting over and over, which we do see happen, right—if you have a bad dealer, super extractive, that can happen—but I think where we stand as curators is really to allow for something else to happen, which we know is really the richness of peoples’ practices and also the humanity of artists is such an important focus, I think, for the art world, which sometimes can become crude.
For me for example, I don't like going to art fairs. You mentioned art fairs, but I try to stay away because I feel like it's such a, you know, it's kind of like the darkest part of our work. And so I feel like…
Charlotte Burns:
Have you ever been to an auction?
[Laughter]
Rashida Bumbray:
Well, that too!
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
That’s competition.
Rashida Bumbray:
But anyway, I just say that to say that I don't see them as, like, in competition with each other. For example, if Simone did not have the commercial success that she had, she couldn't say, “I'm gonna actually pay for Loophole and make sure that it happens,” right? Or she may not have gotten the American Pavilion, for example, to be able to make this work that is completely expansive.
And, you know, we have to credit Cecilia with that too because she gave her the High Line Plinth project for Brick House (2019), which was the first time she had that level of support to work at that scale, which then allowed her to not only send Brick House to Milk of Dreams but also make the larger, incredible works that she made for the pavilion.
So I think there is an interdependence that I don't want to not acknowledge and also not highlight. Because I think even for me, there is a space where the market is important, but I think we have to de-emphasize it because I think there's a certain way that the crudeness of it can also crush the important aspects of art and the actual value of art, the actual social, political and transformational value of art.
Charlotte Burns:
There's always been spaces of creativity that the mainstream has always overlooked. Something that seems newer about this moment that we're in is that kind of collision of market success and new platforms.
And this is something we looked at a little bit in Hope & Dread, our documentary show related to that is the fact that we've had this historic moment of the expansion of the art market, the rise in prices and for certain artists—Simone is one of them, but there are various others, Julie Mehretu, Hank Willis Thomas, Michael Armitage—really using that money and platform and power to imagine new possibilities and create change, to circumvent those power structures.
That's always been there, but the scale of it—because the market scale is different— seems different to me. Does it seem different to you?
Rashida Bumbray:
It is different. Derrick Adams, for example, has a residency in Baltimore called The Last Retreat [The Last Resort Artist Retreat]. What makes it important is that artists become what they need to become to create the things that they didn't have. And I think it's usually because of a failure of the art world itself to create those things.
So, for example, why is it necessary for Simone to consider a foundation? It’s because in order to do Loophole of Retreat, that may be necessary. And it's because Loophole of Retreat may not always have the Guggenheim or the American Pavilion to open the space for its existence. And I think this is the same thing that you see Theaster Gates or Derrick Adams or Julie Mehretu thinking about, and Kehinde Wiley also with the Black Rock Residency in Senegal. I think he's also building one in Lagos. It's really like creating something that there is a deficit for and filling that gap.
And I think unfortunately because institutions, again, may be slower to build themselves or adapt—like museums, for example, may not adapt fast enough—that it means that the artist has to become the institution. And I think that that is both great and I think it's also a sort of, tragedy is a strong word, but I think it really speaks to this idea of the art world being obsessed with the market.
And also, failing artists, even artists who have reached this level of success, have to consider what they need to build to make sure that they're not the only ones. And I've heard artists, especially in the Global South, for example, like a Sammy Baloji, also from the DRC, saying it's a miracle that he even exists. So the fact that it's a miracle that Sammy Baloji exists means that Sammy Baloji is gonna build a biennial, [Lubumbashi Biennale]. And it's because we understand that there needs to be a pipeline and we're gonna build it if it doesn't already exist.
Charlotte Burns:
Let's talk a little bit about performance. I was watching some of your performances. I so enjoyed it. It's such a great way to prepare for an interview. I was transported from a cold winter’s day to this really imaginative, energetic space that you create in your performances. You were nominated for the prestigious Bessie Award in 2014 for being an outstanding emerging choreographer. Together with the Dance Diaspora Collective, the performance of your work, Run, Mary, Run (2012) at the five-day residency at the Whitney Museum [of American Art] of pianist, Jason Moran and his wife, the operatic singer Alicia Hall Moran was listed as one of the best performances of 2012 by The New York Times, which said that it was rooted in motion and music and memory entwined, based on the tradition of the ring shout. Tell us more about this performance, which is an amazing performance.
Rashida Bumbray:
Thank you. I have to shift to being an artist Charlotte in 30 seconds…
[Excerpt from Run, Mary, Run]
[Rashida Bumbray: You got a right, you got a right!
Chorus: You got a right to the tree of life.
Rashida Bumbray: But you got a right!
Chorus: You got a right to the tree of life.
Rashida Bumbray: Run, Mary, run!
Chorus: Oh, Lord!
Rashida Bumbray: Run, Martha, run!
Chorus: Oh, Lord!
Rashida Bumbray: Hail Mary, run, I say!
Chorus: You got a right to the tree of life.]
Run, Mary, Run is a work that really uses a sort of magical realism framework to approach the ring shout.
And the ring shout is a traditional dance which was done and is still done actually in the American South, specifically in the Sea Islands, the low country of Georgia and South Carolina. But it really is a sort of universal form that was developed by enslaved people from all over the African continent.
So the ring shout features dancers moving in a circle counterclockwise, and we are singing call and response songs, which are spirituals that reference the Bible, but they're also telling people, you know, how to escape enslavement into maroon communities.
What I've been able to do is really bring it into contemporary context. And we use hip hop as well as funk music mixed into the spirituals as a way to talk about the conditions. For example, there's a song that says, “Loose horse in the valley. Tell me who gonna ride 'em?” And the original spiritual says, “King Jesus gonna ride 'em.” But when we performed in 2012, we said, “Trayvon gonna ride 'em.” And it was months after Trayvon Martin had been killed. It was also Mother's Day that day at the Whitney. And so you could see people start to weep in the audience. And we know that the art world, that doesn't happen a lot. Like the art world is a cold place usually. And I think we have a sort of formality in the way that we are used to dealing with performance.
And it even surprised me, honestly, the level of emotionality that happened that day. But it really is a forum that was built by our ancestors to respond to these conditions. You know, the sort of hellish terror of the plantation. And I think it has an important relevance today in terms of how we survive, you know, living through times that are not unsimilar.
Charlotte Burns:
In the performance lecture on “On the Necessity of Attending to Black Healing,” which was part of a convening organized at the Met [The Metropolitan Museum of Art] curated by Sandra Jackson Dumont—who's another podcast guest—around the Kerry James Marshall exhibition. And again, this was another very powerful performance that you gave.
I wanna talk a little bit about that idea of healing and this idea that the choreography you do, rooted as it is in this vernacular, interrogates that sort of healing, initiates healing.
Rashida Bumbray:
Well, I think that we have been a part of a media culture that, through showing Black death, has really been using that as a way to justify the humanity, and that racial justice is a worthy cause that everyone should join in on. And I think there's a way that that has been successful.
As a person who has that specific DNA of people, you know, who were tortured and lynched and all of the things that we still see with police brutality, there's a sort of re-traumatization that happens when witnessing these things, hearing about them, talking about them.
And so, for me, I've been really focused on a moral obligation to attend to Black healing. Also, as a way, as I said, to resurrect the forms that belong to us, that were designed to respond to this context. Many times there's a sort of underground nature to these practices, and usually, you have to be initiated to experience them. And so I think for me, it took me a while to be comfortable, not just performing these things in public spaces or in contemporary art spaces or dance spaces, but really to understand that this idea of hidden in plain sight had a functionality when these kinds of practices were outlawed, right? When the drums were banned after the Haitian Revolution, for example. But right now, who are we hiding these things from? And I think it can be ourselves oftentimes.
[Excerpt from a performance during the lecture, “On the Necessity of Attending to Black Healing”]
[Music playing]
[Cecily Bumbray singing: I surrendered my beliefs and found myself at the tree of life
Injecting my stories into the veins of leaves
This is an excerpt from my performance entitled “On the Necessity of Black Healing.” Here you will hear me dancing with Zulu anklets made of the tops of aluminum cans. A gift from Simone Leigh.
I am accompanied by my sister, Cecily on vocals and Axel Tosca on piano.
Only to find that stories like forests are subject to seasons]
For me, I really wanted Black people specifically to have access to our own healing forms in a time where we really need them. And I think that these songs, as I said, like the genius of Black repetition, these songs actually have embedded in them a certain tenor, a certain functionality that is meant to be healing. So, for example, the ring shout would be traditionally be done all night. They call it a watch night. So you would come out of that experience transformed.
That is the kind of thing that I want to activate for the audiences and also for the participants. And I think it's a scary thing sometimes to have this kind of spiritual vulnerability. But at the same time, I think it's really important because I have a connection to this material to not only present the material but also to be intentional about the function of it.
Charlotte Burns:
It reminds me of what you wrote for the Creative Time volume, Making Another World Possible. Your article was called “The Low End Theory: when they go high, we go low.” And you talked about the rise of fascism and the fact that as autocrats rise, you were focused on who is falling. You said, “I'm sending myself underground.”
Rashida Bumbray:
I mean, I think so many of our practices that sustained us happened underground. So my aunt, for example, who was a member of the Black Panther Party for many years while my mother was in college, she was underground. And the FBI showed up to my mother's college and followed her around for a few days, and my mother was terrified and she called my grandfather and she said, “These people are following me.” And he said, “They're looking for your sister. If they approach you, just tell them you don't know where she is.” And that's what happened and they left. But I think what was important for us also is what was she doing during that time.
And a lot of what she was doing was strategizing. She ran part of a free breakfast program, which we know is the roots of why there's free breakfast in public schools now in this country, is the work of the Black Panther Party. And she also was teaching people how to defend themselves, how to use weapons.
And many of her friends had to leave and be in exile. She had to be underground for some time. And I think this kind of subterfuge is what is necessary many times because our movements are under attack. But also it's because there's a certain incubation space that's necessary to develop things that are not meant to be visible yet.
For example, the work that Simone did with the Free People's Medical Clinic was focused on the United Order of Tents. We were so honored to have Annette Lane—who is a great-granddaughter of Annetta Lane, who was the founder of the United Order of Tents—at Loophole of Retreat and the United Order of Tents functioned as an underground society, a secret society of Black women nurses.
And the reason why they needed to be underground, they started working during the Civil War in the tents to actually provide healthcare to the Black soldiers who would not otherwise have had nurses. And so, you know, there are ways that we have to develop the things that support our communities underground because, one, they're not supported, but oftentimes they're actually under siege or under attack.
So for me, this idea of going underground that I wrote about was really about how do we learn from the practices of artists who are not allowed to be visible. Like the Belarus Free Theater is a really important organization for me, not just because of their work, which is spectacular, and they've won many awards for their plays, but because of their strategy. The directors, Natalia [Kaliada] and Nicolai [Khalezin] had to leave and have been living in exile in the UK for many, many years. And it meant that they had to conduct all of their rehearsals on Skype, for example. And that people who came as part of the audience actually had to risk being arrested every time. So they would meet in an undisclosed location and then walk to where the performances would be held and they knew that the police could break in at any moment. And actually, recently, the company had to be completely extracted out of Belarus. But this is a strategy and it's also a way of being that they shared with other theater companies around the world. They traveled to Australia to work with Indigenous First Nations communities. They worked throughout the Western Balkans, they worked throughout the former Soviet Union in Ukraine, for example, obviously not now.
We have so many kinds of underground spaces that I think have been so generative but also protective. And I'm really interested in that. And also interested in how there are safe spaces to share those kinds of practices.
Charlotte Burns:
So, Rashida, I'm gonna ask you a few “what ifs,” but before that, what's next for you?
Rashida Bumbray:
Well, I'm actually forcing myself to take a break. Which I'm very excited about. And one of the things that I'll be working on is the Loophole of Retreat book. We're sort of thinking about the structure and format now, and also starting to fundraise the archive.
And then also returning to my practice as an artist because in doing this sort of, I'll call it a residency within philanthropy, I was able to continue my practice because of great friends and curators like Sandra and Simone who invited me into spaces for my own work and also in collaboration.
But I do have a lot of ideas that I want to push forward in my own dance work and choreography.
Charlotte Burns:
I love the fact that you said I'm taking a break and then went on to detail what sounds like quite a lot of work.
[Laughter]
I'm not sure your definition of ‘break’ is totally accurate, but it sounds amazing.
Rashida Bumbray:
I know. My husband would agree with that.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Okay. So to round us out, let's talk about some “what ifs.” If you could change three things about the art world, what would you change?
Rashida Bumbray:
Okay, so the first one is a very personal “what if.” As someone who has overworked for so many years, I really thought about this idea of “what if we didn't have to push past human capacity to make our work happen in the world?” And this is really the one that keeps me up at night because the work that I've invested in was sort of coming from the idea to inception and, like, pushing forward. And I think that that is so valuable and I do it for myself and I do it for artists. And I also think that there's a way that I've been able to be super successful in that. And there's also a way that I've been extremely burnt out. It always seems like an uphill battle to create a space where there is none.
And so, for me, I would love for there to be the possibility of creating new spaces and having those spaces supported without necessity of overwork. Does that make sense?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, the way that you just detailed your own break makes me think that it’s a work in progress.
[Laughter]
Rashida Bumbray:
True.
Charlotte Burns:
Perhaps we'll get there.
What do you think we need to do? Or is that what you're going to be working out?
Rashida Bumbray:
We sort of talked about it with the fact that artists themselves are building retreats, residencies, spaces for rest, sabbatical, and thinking and strategizing. And I think the Loophole of Retreat is a great metaphor for that because when Harriet Jacobs escaped from slavery and she was in this crawlspace for seven years, she thought of it as a generative space, a space where she could watch her children, a space where she could write and strategize and think.
And I think that that was a space that we wanted to create again for the Loophole of Retreat. And I think it's a space that everyone deserves. We really deserve spaces of experimentation, spaces of incubation. And that is sort of the “what if”; what if we actually had that? What if we actually had the resources, the space? And these spaces were created with people who had imagination that would allow us to then push our imagination to its experimental lengths.
Charlotte Burns:
It seems like Loophole of Retreat did that, and then the next step is how to make it not a one-off. But I imagine that in the act of doing that one event, which was obviously the second iteration, you have imbued it in the imaginations of 700-plus people who attended and so who have the imagination, who have the resources or can have access to them.
I imagine that part of that answer is in collective work?
Rashida Bumbray:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think some of it is a shift in reality. How do we actually build the necessary spaces that allow us to feel what we felt at Loophole? Because people keep saying, “I'm still in the Loophole of Retreat,” and I think that means that we're carrying that with us.
And that seems to be like a spiritual, emotional, intellectual space. And then I think there's the physical spaces, which, thankfully, someone like Legacy Russell, who is now leading The Kitchen, is providing those kinds of spaces for artists.
And so I think that there are ways that, as we carry Loophole of Retreat, each of us, into our own spaces of work, into our own spaces of making, that we continue to be generative enough to share so that we can create a community of space for imagining, a space of creating everything that we need and everything that we desire for our own wellbeing. And also for the progress of our field.
Charlotte Burns:
That was one thing you would change about the art world. Do you have two more things you'd change?
Rashida Bumbray:
Well, I think I said this one at the beginning. I think it would be great if people would get out of the way and let Black women lead. That seems like a pretty straightforward one because, when we do, I mean, it sort of speaks for itself what happens. And so I think that that's really the one that I think most boggles my mind about the art world. And I'll say equally for philanthropy as well.
And these different spaces where certain power resides at the top, there's a reluctance, right, to hand it over to Black women. Not because it's some kind of charity or gift, but because we know what we are doing. When we see someone like Sandra Jackson Dumont leading the Lucas Museum, we have full confidence that that'll be a space that is nurturing and imaginative and pushing our field.
When we see Legacy Russell running The Kitchen, we know that it will be imaginative and generative. The more that can happen, I think the art world will be, one, in good hands, but also that we can really shift out of this space of recovery, which I think we're in now, where we have to make exhibitions to talk about the things that were done that the art world really dropped the ball on and failed on.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. Especially because that's still happening as you point out.
So, your third thing? What is the “what if” that motivates you?
Rashida Bumbray:
The “what if” that motivates me is what if they were to get out of our way? Because I think we have found ways to do it with everything in the way. And so that's what motivates me is that once people actually concede power or realize that our liberation is intertwined and allow Black women to lead, we fly.
Charlotte Burns:
Rashida, thank you so much. I’m so glad we made this happen. Thank you so much for making the time.Rashida Bumbray:
Thank you, Charlotte.
Charlotte Burns:
Big thanks to Rashida Bumbray for taking the time out to chat and for letting us hear some of her performances too.
Next time, American Artist, who makes thought experiments mining the history of technology, race and knowledge production.
American Artist:
What if each artist sort of had a focus of research and you couldn’t have one that someone else was already doing? So all of the possible topics that could be explored in art are sort of delegated to different artists and they’re guaranteed to have work because they have this thing that they’re given that only they can do.
Charlotte Burns:
Join us then on The Art World: What If…?!
This 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.