The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 10: Kemi Ilesanmi

We welcome back Kemi Ilesanmi, the former executive director of The Laundromat Project and one of the standout stars of our first season. In season one, Kemi was just about to head off on the trip of a lifetime around 13 countries, including 10 in Africa. She promised to come back and tell us how the trip changed her ‘what ifs.’ “I'm looking for freedom of movement, freedom of ideas, and freedom of manifestation of those ideas. Right now, it feels like I can only find that by working outside of any singular institution.” 

Kemi talks about creating a “beautiful, joyful, sustainable, cultural infrastructure for Black and brown people across the globe,” and asks, “What if that were possible? And what if I could help with that? And who else could help with that?”

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, Charlotte Burns and this is a podcast all about imagining different ways of doing things.

[Audio of guests] 

I’m delighted to say that we are welcoming back Kemi Ilesanmi, the former executive director of The Laundromat Project and one of the standout stars of our first season. When we last spoke, Kemi was just about to head off on a gap year around 13 countries including 10 in Africa: Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya. And Mexico, India, and Italy. What an adventure.

But Kemi promised to come back and tell us all about how the trip changed her ‘what ifs.’ We talk about histories, about cultural leadership, about freedom, and about time. All this and much more. 

Let’s do it. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Kemi, I'm so thrilled to say here we are in person in New York. In our last interview, we said we were going to hold you to coming back to tell us all about how your amazing gap year went. And here you are, you have held up your end of the bargain, and you are back this time live in the studio. How did everything go? 

Kemi Ilesanmi: First of all, thank you, I'm honored to be a returnee guest. That was a public commitment we made to each other, so really happy to be back. And it was exactly what it needed to be. It was a dreamy, exploratory, joyful, surprising, and just absolutely amazing gap year. I think about it as a gift to myself—I was traveling with my husband, so it was a gift to us.

Charlotte Burns: When we did that show, we were talking about that year that you took as a kind of ‘what if,’ like what if we took that time, what if we gave ourselves that space to dream. And so I was curious about whether you had epiphanies along the way. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: A lot of what I kept reminding myself and giving myself permission was to just be and let things wash over and accumulate. We visited 13 countries over the course of a year. Anything from a day in Lesotho all the way to six weeks in Italy, five weeks in India. 

India echoed through the rest of the trip. I grew up in Nigeria, also a British colony, so connections to India showed up there. Ethiopia and India have a number of similarities, so that was interesting because India was the second place we visited in February, March and they continue to be on my brain all the way through Kenya as I'm eating chapati dishes. 

Charlotte Burns: We just aired an interview with Phillip Ihenacho and we talked a lot about history in that—what objects mean, what it means when history is disrupted and history is taken away. And I guess you thought a lot about lineages of history and the brutalities of history, as you were traveling around.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Absolutely. Every place we travel to has something that shook us out of our sense of self in some way, and that's the beauty of travel. And at the same time, I'm West African, so being along that particular coast was incredible. Nigeria was certainly the heart of the trip for me. We went from Nigeria to Ghana, Benin, and Togo. One of the things we did was the slave route. Each of those countries had a major slave port—several in some cases—sites of memory and return for a lot of folks from diaspora and particularly New World. I'm Black American. My mother is a descendant of enslaved people in the United States, Maryland, and my father's Nigerian. I grew up there and I have a home at Elysia in Nigeria. One of the things that really captured me in thinking about history was seeing how that was narrated on the other side and being able to spend time at various doors of return, doors of no return—there are a lot of plays on this idea of return and not returning. Understanding the roles that different people played in the slave trade as a business, a business of horror and terror, but a business. And the different physical spaces, literally forests, rivers, oceans, dungeons, the architectures of aesthetically beautiful spaces like Cape Coast Castle in Ghana was really deeply shifting. A place of just deep feeling, and trying to navigate that with two histories coming together for me was just one of the things that I didn't know how to imagine, I didn't put together what we're doing until we were in it. That was something that I'll continue to think about and unravel. I don't know all the things I think about that so I'm going to stop here because it was such a…what I'm trying to get at here because it was so, um…

Charlotte Burns: Take a minute. Take a sip of tea.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yes, I'll take a sip of tea. It's something that I'm still thinking about. I'm not sure I have enough to make it.

Charlotte Burns: You don't have the distance.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I don't have the…I haven’t had a chance to write about it because it is so crumpled in my head. And I do think that was interesting, just being on both sides of the Atlantic and having that story accumulate over a three-week period that we did that slave route.

Charlotte Burns: I guess you're trying to sift through. Maybe that's the point as you think about those histories. Is that still where things are for you? Are you trying to land on a narrative of what that meant for you?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I think it will take me decades longer to land on a narrative of all of what that meant because it introduced new threads to the story. 

One of the things that was also really fascinating that happened particularly on that same route was migration. Because people had moved around. We all know that colonial borders landed on people who were already there, often cut through communities of people, ethnic groups, and folks who had been in trade, conversation, intermarriage, wars, et cetera, for sometimes centuries. Showing up in Ghana and learning that the Ga people which would be people in the Accra region, actually came from Ife, half an hour from my hometown of Elysia. Connections between the Ashanti and the Yoruba, the Fon people of Benin and the Yoruba—which is what I am—Igbo migration routes. I'm familiar with several of the incredible ethnic groups in Nigeria. Some of those histories would show up in other places. Being on the ground and having history narrated to me that continued to make those links was really actually fascinating. 

Also, we visited a lot of palaces and royal homes because it turns out humans love royalty—wherever you go and have created those kinds of hierarchies within communities, since the beginning of time it seems. While I don't subscribe to the, “And we all came from Kings and Queens” version of history—that's not how I need to connect to my African heritage. But there was something really incredible about visiting Abomey in Benin, and the Ashanti Kingdom in Ghana, and Ife in Nigeria, the ancestral seat of the Yoruba, and seeing written lists of who ruled and what kinds of wars that they often led in trying to defend themselves and remain independent of the British, or the French, or the German—there were lots of layers of colonial histories. That was fascinating and would get me every time because they would go back to the year 10,000, the year 1500. Seeing it written was part of my own re-education. A calendar that started in 1200 and brought me all the way to a current Oba in the year 2023 was really powerful to think about those lineages and the continuity because there's so much fragmentation in the histories of Black people. So seeing a line that didn't feel broken was actually really powerful.

Charlotte Burns: How does that feel for you? And what impact that has on the stories you tell yourself because I know you think about the stories you tell and the seeds that they plant. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: It really grounded me in a sense of a longer history that I could point to as opposed to simply feel.

So one of the greatest gifts of the year to me is linked to these lineages—and similar things happen in other parts of the continent—was a sense of my own internal geography shifting. I've lived in the United States for almost 40 years, moving here when I was 15 and prior, birth to six. One of the gifts of the last year was feeling like I moved into the ocean, across the ocean, and I hover somewhere between Nigeria and Ethiopia and South Africa. I read the newspaper. I think about art and artists I want to follow with a different lens. I wake up with questions that concern the African continent, the diaspora, connect to them differently because I got to understand the breadth of the continent. I had lived experiences. My perspective on the world, what feels most relevant and interesting, and the things I want to learn more about. Something about my own inner geography really shifted. That was not something I knew what it would feel like. I don't think I'd have used those words to describe it a year and a half ago. 

Charlotte Burns: It's really interesting because there were questions I had for you last time that I didn't get around to asking you. I wanted to ask you what home is and how we think about home. And I realized probably it has a totally different resonance now. But this is something that's in your career. The way I'd wanted to ask you about that last time was to do with the artist Nari Ward, one of the earliest artists that you'd worked with in your career. What if we can think about home and what it is and how we think about it through art and diaspora and through cultural networks?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Home is such a big container. It took me many years, but for a number of years now, I describe myself as Nigerian and American. I do not hyphenate because they're equal footing to me. One of the things I wanted to explore over this year was to give myself deeper roots to my sense of home in Nigeria, which is a place that I claim, and it's very important to me. However, I hadn't been to my hometown in 20 years because my family lives in a different part of the country and it's actually logistically complicated. Some of that was about wanting to reconnect to it as a place that has an active contemporary art scene. So I timed my whole Nigeria trip specifically to be there for ART X LAGOS and art season—which basically is most of October through early December. Many different festivals, literary, film, carnival. It was incredible because contemporary art is where I've made my life, my own professional life, and being able to thread that back with what was happening in Lagos and in different parts of the continent was so important and so enriching and so fun.

That became incredibly grounding to a sense of home because I already had a deep personal connection to Nigeria, to the continent, but being able to knit that was something that is so defining for me in my life in the United States, which is my career, which is in the contemporary art and has been now for over 25 years—I started at the Walker [Art Center] in 1998. That was really thrilling. 

I participated in a first-time performance art festival called Continuum in Ibadan, which is a couple of hours from Lagos. A woman named Amber Sijuwade—who grew up here in the States, but is bicultural—had moved to Ibadan and worked with Jelili Atiku, a performance artist, a Nigerian Yoruba man. Amber found me on Instagram, and said, “Oh, I see you're traveling to Nigeria and coming through Ibadan. Will you be here around this festival?” The dates she offered were the dates I was planning to be in Ibadan. Of all the times and all the years and all the months of the year, it was that week. So I said, “Yes, I'm there and I'd love to participate.” And getting to go…Ibadan has a long importance in the modern, the story of modern Nigerian art in the 50s and 60s. Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence were so enamored of a short visit they had to Ibadan for a show that they came home to the United States, sold all their stuff, and moved and spent almost a year in Nigeria with Ibadan at the center. That's how important it was. Amber and Jelili really wanted to remind Ibadan of what it had been and what it could be and of the art and the history that lived right there. 

Artists came out. I got to meet all kinds of young, exciting artists doing performance, which performance, Egungun, masquerade, performance is a part of Nigeria and West Africa's incredible cultural history, but not necessarily through a contemporary art lens, right? It just has other ways it shows up. So being able to pull from that, being able to deal with issues of migration, queerness, gender, and all the things that these incredible, oftentimes much younger artists, like 20s, 30s, was really fantastic. And I could not have imagined that six months prior when Amber, DM'd me and I was like, “Yeah, I'd love to come.” [Laughs] And that's the sort of thing, being open to that and knowing that those kinds of things were happening in a very beautiful, homegrown way and that I could contribute and be part of it and experience it was what I tried to always remain open to while we were traveling. People were so incredibly generous to me and would invite us to things and open their studios and it was just incredible. And that just happened over and over again. 

That was just one particular story about Continuum. But that was part of what made the whole continent home for me. Koyo Kouoh who runs Zeitz MOCAA [Museum of Contemporary Art Africa]—which was a place we got to visit—and spent time with a curator, Thato Mogotsi who again, sends a note “Great! Why don't you come to the museum? We can have lunch and I'll take you around.” Amazing. Beautiful. But Koyo, I read a quote of hers where she talked about, and I'm not getting it exactly right, but I exist in the continent and the continent exists in her, right? She is a child and a woman of Africa and the whole continent is hers. It's a very Pan-African viewpoint, which I share. And I've come back with a sense of the whole continent being mine. Nigeria is a place I can point to and it's my home base. I love it, but I also have a deep connection now to Akron, the beautiful art, and other ways I got to experience that city and the way that Ethiopia has its own sense of the world. They have their own calendar, they have their own time clock. We all know they have their own food. [Laughs] That was really incredible to be able to immerse myself in that. 

I've always thought about the Atlantic Ocean because I had ancestors who crossed that on purpose—my father migrated to the United States—and of course, I have ancestors, I'll never even know their names, who did not cross on purpose but did indeed cross. The Atlantic has always had deep spiritual meaning for me out of that. Spending time in India, particularly in Kerala, which is the very south of India, and getting to visit the Kochi[-Muziris] Biennial. They had a lot of artists from the Swahili coast and from different countries that are in the Indian Ocean. And then we spent time in South Africa. So when we hit Durban and that section where Indian Ocean, we spent time in Kenya and ended up in Lamu, which is on the Indian Ocean, and just trade and connection to countries, particularly India—I told you it echoed through the trip. It again reoriented me to a sense of a different ocean that also has had an impact on me, my continent, in ways that were important. And I just never thought about the Indian Ocean in that way, and those trade routes and how it shows up in the food we eat and the architecture I was sometimes seeing, and the ways that land, migration, exchange, and conflict have just been part of the human experience and journey since we could walk and go out and discover and allow our curiosities to lead the way, which can then tip into greed and a lot of other ways that humans show up in the world. But it again just really shifted my sense of the world and how it connects and opened up different homes to me.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I can't imagine having had a year how you can absorb those really profound experiences that it sounds like you've had into your life. You left after a big change for you professionally. You stepped down from running The Laundromat Project. It was a big turning point in your career. You went on this gap year. You've come back. How do you absorb everything, all of those different experiences, and take it into your practice going forward?

Kemi Ilesanmi: That's a very good question. I just assume that's going to be the rest of my life, that this experience will reverberate sometimes in ways I might expect and control and sometimes that I won't. 

And so here's a secret. So, I was leaving a job that had been such a deep part of my identity for 10 years, and I was on the board of the LP for 5 years prior to that, but part of it is that I wanted to give myself a new identity. I knew it would be important for me to not just leave and then what am I going to do? But actually give myself a break, yes. But also give myself an avenue to just think about the world differently and think about myself differently and also invite other people to think about me differently. Not just, “Oh, you're the former executive director of this organization,” but also that, “Oh, you're the person who took that trip and saw these things and shared them,” which I love doing and was really important to me to be able to do that. 

So I do feel like I have a different identity that I feel and that I had a say in creating a sense of a different entry point for conversations for myself. And that sense of the world just opening up and different links and connections opening up are the ways that I think a lot of this will show up. I have followed so many new ideas that were introduced to me.

Charlotte Burns: Were you feeling in danger of burning out?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I generally don't think of myself as having been burnt out. I think it was really tough the last few years because of Covid. It meant the last two to three years were the equivalent of ten years, in the sense of the level of stress and complexity of the job in that time. I was very tired and so were we all. It's hard not to be tired but because I already had a sense of when things were ending, it allowed me to pace myself differently. I already knew how long my job was. And I was like, “Woah, this section of it is a lot harder and tougher than I thought it was going to be.” But I had a sense of internal pacing.

Charlotte Burns: You knew it was a 10-year.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I knew it was a 10-year job. So I was like, I guess the last three years are going to have a marathon quality, which is not what I was expecting. But I always had a minimum of a week, sometimes two weeks off every freaking quarter for the entire 10 years. It was part of my self-pacing. So there was always an escape valve. So then the year was a different unit but it was related to, “Oh, you just worked really hard building something for 10 years, so maybe two weeks isn't going to be enough.” A year!

Charlotte Burns: Makes sense. [Laughter]

You talked about The Laundromat Project being a 10-year job. You're someone who is good at numbers. You're a data person. You like to measure things. As you look ahead, how are you thinking about this next phase of your career? As much as you want to talk publicly about what you want to do.

Kemi Ilesanmi: One of the things I don't currently have about the next phase is an exact horizon, timeline on it, which I find interesting. I've usually thought in five-year increments through my career. When I was at the Walker, it was my first time working in an art institution. I don't have any art degrees except that I learned everything on the job. 

I realized, “Oh if I want to make this art career, I have to stay for a minimum of five years to make this legible to somebody else.” And ever since I've thought in five-year increments career-wise. 

Charlotte Burns: That's interesting because it's traceable back to fitting into an idea of having the right credentials. So in a way, are you freeing yourself from that now?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yeah, there's some sense of freedom for that. So I know that I am not looking for another institutional job. That's not what this next phase will be. I'm looking for life-freedom, time-freedom, geography-freedom, the freedom to follow different passions. 

I worked at the Walker, the whole world was my oyster to put a show together. And that was beautiful, and I got to learn and connect and travel, and all of that. Fabulous. Then I moved to New York and got a job at Creative Capital Foundation, and we worked with American artists or artists in America, so very much a national viewpoint. And I thought that was really interesting. And while I was at Creative Capital, I joined the board of the Laundromat Project. Very local concerns. It was about neighborhoods, it was about the city of New York—which was a new city for me and I loved it. And then I actually became the executive director and continued to learn about and fall in love with all kinds of nooks and crannies all across New York City. And now I'm really interested in going back outwards globally. And I think by the time I got to Creative Capital and was shifting to LP, I actually did choose to work locally. I wanted to be able to catch the subway to see the thing I was working on and not a plane or a train. So that's exciting to me. 

I know that I'm really interested in the African diaspora. I'm very interested in the continent. New York is still home, so that still feels very true and relevant to me.

But being able to spend more time, being able to be professionally of use on the continent, there's a lot of room to try new things. 

So I don't know all the ways that I can be relevant. It needs to be something that feels useful on the continent. And I think there's possibilities there, which I will continue to investigate and discover. But being able to create those kinds of ties, I think of myself very much as a builder and a connector. But that's again that sense of a shift in geography, wanting to find a new space to be useful in some way. 

I spent particularly my 10 years at the LP really trying to build connections, and Hue Arts [NYC] was the culmination of that. The counting and Brown Paper of all the POC founded and led arts organizations in New York City, that was about building connective tissue, showing us to ourselves, and naming our own strengths and our own challenges on our own terms. So it was about that kind of connective tissue building but being able to do some of that work across the continent feels like there's something there. Because I so deeply believe in the collective process and the ability to go far together. 

Charlotte Burns: How exciting. I think if anyone can do it, I think you will show everybody the way. How are you beginning that? I'm imagining you've begun it. How are you thinking about that?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Some of it was literally just writing the list of who I met because I was just going. We would come home in between but mostly we were on the road so some of it was just making something legible myself. We're spreadsheet queens. We share that, Charlotte. So I have a lot of spreadsheets about who I met, organizations I got to visit, some that I didn't get to visit but would love to. Different people doing different kinds of things. So some of it's just list-making. Initially, right? Just “Oh, okay.”

Charlotte Burns: You've got to love a spreadsheet. You've got to love a spreadsheet.

[Laughter]

Kemi Ilesanmi: Just being able to start making those linkages and connections, “Great. Let me figure out how to be helpful.”

Charlotte Burns: And I guess that's giving you a lot of energy and propelling things forward. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: Yeah. 

Charlotte Burns: For you, it's always been about those kinds of seeds. You'd said in our last show, your personal dream was, wouldn't it be beautiful if a young Black woman who's entering the arts right now, if she could make a 50-year career? You're just expanding that vision, essentially looking at building out careers, more geographically, essentially, building out that network.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I'm very interested in building institutions and building infrastructure. That is something that I feel most excited doing in Black and brown spaces in the United States, which is still of interest to me, and on the continent. And that's the thing, when I think about what the equivalent now that I have of the 50-year career, as I'm trying to build it for myself. I'm 25 years in. When I link that idea of building that 50-year career for this young Black woman in POC organizations here in the States, even as I try to do a version of that for myself, I'm similarly interested in what does it look like to build infrastructure that works, a net that works on the African continent so that our culture be preserved. It can also experiment and build new things connected to or not connected to what came before. I'm really interested in spaces like [Professor] Lesley Lokko's Africa[n] Futures Institute which she just started in Ghana, which is about that, Africa is the future. What does that look like? And she's doing it, looking at that through an architectural lens, and Koyo is looking at it through—in a totally different part of the continent—the lens of contemporary art, and [Museum of West African Art] MOWAA in Benin City is looking at that through what does West Africa have to offer to this conversation about what culture is? And Zoma Museum, which is in Addis Ababa and is a really beautiful place looking at issues of the environment. They have a farm and a cultural center, and a school—one space. They have built a compound using traditional architecture techniques. All those ideas being able to bubble up, but how do we do this in a way that they get to be part of this cultural scene for as long as they are relevant? I don't necessarily believe that everything needs to last forever, but sometimes people end up having to close down their dreams a lot sooner than they plan to. And yes, some of them do need to last as close to forever as we can get to but they need different kinds of supports to make that happen and different kinds of infrastructure. 

What if that were possible, and what if I could help with that, and who else could help with that, and what do we need to be able to create a beautiful, joyful, sustainable, cultural infrastructure for Black and brown people across the globe?

Charlotte Burns: What if that were possible? What if? Where is that working? Where do you see, “Okay, that's where part of that works. That's where we need this support. That's where that infrastructure is thriving.” What are the elements that you can pull in your mind and see that those aspects are potentially working well?

Kemi Ilesanmi: So one of the things that I'm really excited about learning is that Hue Arts has actually getting to expand from New York City to New York State, and now they're starting the slow process of making that a national initiative, right? So that kind of infrastructure, building of data connectivity because at least for the initial Hue Arts it was partially about making connections between the groups, right?

Charlotte Burns: Being visible.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Being visible to each other as much as to funders, supporters, and people who love the arts. It was all of those things at once. Similarly, some of the places I just mentioned, all of those are those infrastructure moments and people are working against some really serious challenges to make all of those things happen. And a place like Zeitz MOCAA, one of the things they have is a global advisory council. People who can support all over the globe and not just one's geographically local audience. So being able to spread that out, both to allow ideas in and support in, as well as people who can take the ideas that are happening and move them outside, feels really important. That's some of that seed, taking things and seeding them in different places and inviting that in. 

One of the things that also became really clear is how much artists are building their own infrastructure. Yinka Shonibare [CBE RA] has a gorgeous residency space. He has two, one is on a farm about an hour and a half from Lagos, and one is in central Lagos—and actually, artists and residents who come spend half of their time in the urban setting and half in a rural setting. Of course, we know about Black Rock [Senegal] and Kehinde Wiley, who's also building a space in Calaba, which is his homeland in Nigeria, building Black Rock Part 2. Elias Sime, who is one of the co-founders of the Zoma Museum in Addis. El Anatsui is building something in Accra, and there's a whole section of Ghana being built out by artists. There's a photo center, decant center, dot.atelier, which is a gallery. All of these are being started by artists who have success in the market, have Western profiles. That's a part of their currency and an asset that they have and are using that to build infrastructure at home.

Charlotte Burns: It's a really interesting renegotiation of power because artists have never had more money and power and yet in a way, the market couldn't care less about the artists, and yet the artists have taken that moment, some artists, and siphoned off their own power and some of them to fill the gaps as they've experienced them and it's a really interesting renegotiation of power within a system that doesn't care, really, about that. It's really fascinating. It's a totally new phenomenon, which is entirely propelled by the money and the system but the money would never have created it.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Absolutely. And we know that's happening here. Titus Kaphar with NXTHVN. And it's Black and brown artists—at least that's what I'm tracking and caring about and paying attention to—who are really taking matters into their own hands and taking the assets that they have, which is their own sense of purpose mixed with their own creativity and turning, yeah, the power of the market on its head to do the thing they most want to do. And in a lot of cases, they drag their galleries into it.

Everywhere on the continent somebody is doing something. Sometimes they're really young artists and sometimes they're long-established. Of course, El Anatsui really, the art market discovered him in his 60s and 70s and he's “Okay, great. Guess what I'm going to do with this sense of “discovery,” in quotes. I'm going to make space for other artists.” Oftentimes I felt like artists wanted to do something for themselves from 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 50 years ago. 

So ART X LAGOS Art Fair. So commercial, right? It's an art fair. They have a prize. They give, one living in Nigeria and one from anywhere in diaspora. They then partner with [Guest Artists Space] G.A.S. Foundation, which is Yinka Shonibare's space. And the diaspora artist comes and gets to spend a period of time in residency in Nigeria. And the Nigerian artist gets a residency in his UK space. So everybody gets to move around and connect to each other. That particular model was really exciting to me because one of the things that I heard a lot from a lot of different artists was, and I know this from my own family, restrictions on movement, visa access. Being able to even travel on the African continent. 

One of the biggest news stories while I was there was in the fall, Kenya is planning to allow anyone with an African passport to come into Kenya without a visa. It was huge news on the continent. Huge. Because that is just not, still not the norm on the continent, talkless of trying to get into the UK and United States and anywhere in the EU. There's really that sense of restricted movement and the stress of that. People get invited to shows, don't know if they can go because what if I don't get that visa or what if this happens? So for G.A.S. Foundation to say, “We're going to figure that out. We'll get you to London,” that's actually a gift worth far more, including the residency, because it's about this cultural exchange, but being able to facilitate continued movement is huge.

Charlotte Burns: It’s like a residency plus, like if a typical residency takes away the stress of thinking about the economics and the logistics of daily life. What the G.A.S. Foundation is doing is also taking away the stress of movement, and in the process, becoming an expert in that, which will therefore become another continuum in the community.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Absolutely. That kind of knowledge-building through experience is incredibly important and can make life so much easier for artists who want to be able to move around. That is one of the things that—if you're in the US or the UK or EU, you take for granted—that ability to move and seek new information and take your curiosity. And our governments, and our visa processes, and our immigration policies shut people out on many levels, not just for artists, but this is how it shows up in the cultural sector.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: I wanted to just ask you another question about leadership. You started at the Walker, you've been an executive director, you're such a believer in the collective. I'm curious, would you want to run an organization? Would you want to be a singular leader? We're in a moment where lots of people of your generation who could be stepping up don't want those jobs. A lot of people that I'm talking to, they don't wanna do those jobs. Do you wanna do those jobs? Would you want to be that big director of that big thing? It seems that there's a kind of crisis around singular leadership, singular director roles.

Kemi Ilesanmi: I absolutely 100% do not want to do that job. Full stop. I really hope that there are enough good people, visionary, bold folks who do want to do those jobs. And I will do my best to support them because I do, I really honestly do hope we will continue to have incredible leaders in the field. And some of this for me, just personal, I just want a different lifestyle and I want to be able to follow my passions in a different way than an institution allows. And I loved my 10 years at the helm of The Laundromat Project. I have no complaints. It wasn't a reaction to that. That was a particular chapter and that chapter is done. And now, one of the things I love about getting older is now in my 50s, I couldn't follow that little thread of interest 20 years ago, but could I create a life where I could now decide I want to spend a month in Ibadan, there's no one that says, “No, you can't do that,” because you're expected to ‘fill in the blank’ is actually what's most important to me and my gift to myself in this time period of life. Like, I have however many decades left to continue to do work. I'm committed to artists. I'm committed to culture and cultural infrastructure. I have commitments that feel very real to me and they don't have to be lived or come to fruition through institutions directly, or at least not me being at the helm. I think I would probably work with and in partnership and support of a whole variety of individuals, organizations, entities, institutions. But I'm actually looking for freedom of movement and freedom of ideas and freedom of manifestation of those ideas, and right now, it feels like I can only find that by working outside of any singular institution.

Charlotte Burns: I think that's part of the crisis around leadership is that it doesn't feel as possible to do that within an institution and even if you could, that you may not have the support of the institution in implementing some of that or that there's a backlash or a vulnerable moment. 

How do you support the leaders who want to do that then in that moment? The people I'm talking to are saying that they feel a little more vulnerable in this moment. How do we better support the leaders who do want to do those things?

Kemi Ilesanmi: For me, the answer always goes back to building a net that works. So it's connecting, helping them be with each other and connect to each other because some of that problem-solving just happens with more brains and more souls and more ideas in the room. Yes, the other parts of the ecosystem have to step up, so I think about brain trust and networks. And how to set up spaces that there can be that connectivity. So again, the reason that we made sure we had community conversations as part of our Hue Arts process was so that people could connect to one another. Sometimes it's just learning from each other but just again, creating a space and a time out kind of space where you can bring dreams and challenges becomes important.

I just feel like we can only save ourselves. And then we can decide together how to leverage other kinds of things. 

So referring back to the Brown Paper that we did, we started with, “Hey, the city needs to figure out how to bring a hundred million dollars to the table,” which is still a dream, but it's something that's now named. There are several different points in the report, but the one we cared about collectively was about spaces. So a lot of organizations that are Black and brown don't have physical spaces and want them. Wanting it just wasn't getting people any closer to the reality and capital in New York City, of course, is always going to be challenging. But Hue Arts last year did a multi-part teach-in helping bring conversations together about examples of where this had happened, what they did, how people were thinking about it. So again, it was pulling together, “Hey, this is something we all want to do and all want to figure out. Let's start having the conversations. Let's make sure we invite the funders in the room to listen in.” I don't think any of this is overnight work, but it's work that has to be done together. It has to be made some level of public and then together you figure out which levers to pull when and how, because I'm not saying do it yourself and bring your capital together. There may not be enough in that way but if you can then collectively figure out who else—government, private, et cetera, including things that you may not have thought of—to bring to that conversation. I just think it happens together, and it's just far more powerful and speaks to the next generations of cultural workers in a way that doing it singularly just does not. So I believe very deeply—I think John Lewis, among others, may have talked about this—you do your part to move the conversation and the structure forward. I don't have to do all of the work, but I do need to do my part, and collectively is where that doing my part can happen.

Charlotte Burns: Last time you said, “What if we named our dreams?” And so maybe this time we could say, “What if we named our dreams together?”

Kemi Ilesanmi: I love that. I love that.

Charlotte Burns: I love that too. 

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: It's so much fun talking to you. It's always so interesting. Thank you for giving us this time. 

What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night, Kemi?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I knew this question was coming. And I thought I had an answer. 

Charlotte Burns: Did it keep you up at night?

[Laughter]

Kemi Ilesanmi: [Laughs] It probably did. It probably did. I was like, “How can I be profound?” 

[Laughter]

I think the ‘what if’ in my most honest version of this question, the ‘what if’ that keeps me up at night right now is what if I don't figure out how to be useful. I just want to figure out how to be useful. It's a very important thing to me and my sense of self.

Charlotte Burns: Why is that so important to you? Has that always been important to you?

Kemi Ilesanmi: Enough of the time because I think for me it's about the commitment to doing my part. I feel like I can identify some of the things I've done. And the future is always a little misty and mysterious and I'm still in an exploratory phase of exactly what that looks like. But I want, it's so important to me to live in a sense of purpose. So it's about identifying a way to be useful because I can't be the only person who identifies it as useful.

Charlotte Burns: Is it something that you identify? Is it like, “I feel I was useful?” Or is it if someone says to you, “That was useful, thank you.” How do you measure…

Kemi Ilesanmi: I think it does need to be two-way for me. Part of it is not being self-led. “Hey, I did that thing, don't you think it was useful?” No, it actually is about it being a two-way street of, “Wow, I felt good, that was good and interesting to do,” which doesn't mean not hard and having it reflected back that, “Yes, that was. It made a difference in moving us forward collectively.”

Charlotte Burns: That must be a little harder now that you're not in an organization, because there must be fewer immediate external metrics, less feedback on those things. So, you must be in a process. I imagine, that's a slightly more ambiguous process of figuring out what use is, what that means.

Kemi Ilesanmi: 100 percent correct.

[Laughter]

Charlotte Burns: What's the ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning?

Kemi Ilesanmi: I think the ‘what if’ that probably gets me up in the morning—and I did just come from a month in Maine—is the beauty of the world, despite all of the ugliness. There's always still beauty.

Charlotte Burns: As someone who's just spent a year traveling, I think you've probably seen a lot of the beauty and some of the underlying horror as well, and juggling all of that.

Kemi, thank you so much for being our guest. Our first repeat on these ‘what ifs’. Thank you very much for joining us today. 

Kemi Ilesanmi: Thank you.

Charlotte Burns: Thank you, Kemi.

Kemi Ilesanmi: Thank you for your patience.

[Musical interlude]

Charlotte Burns: Such an inspiring conversation as always. Thank you so much to Kemi Ilesanmi for sharing the story of her travels. Next time we’ll be joined by Allan Schwartzman.

Allan Schwartzman: I think the market is poised for a big fall. So it's more ‘what, when’ than ‘what if.’ Is that a right way to say it? It's more ‘when’ than ‘what if.’

Charlotte Burns: Do join us. All that and more 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. 

Follow the show on social media at @artand_media.