Kleefeld Contemporary reimagines the museum
On December 2, Material Concerns featured the third of a three part artist lecture series for the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum. Artist Dyani White Hawk will led a discussion titled, A Lineage of Innovation on her use of innovative materials. Last month, RLn featured Doris Sung’s Sm[ART]box project in the first of the series. In part two, Maren Hassinger presented Nature Sweet Nature. The multi-disciplinary artist discussed her career and practice which connects the industrial and natural worlds while incorporating dance, performance, sculpture and collaboration.
The lecture series supports a fundraiser that aids the acquisition of works by black, indigenous, people of color artists and makers of difference. Ticket holders were updated on significant renovations and improvements from the museum’s expansion leading up to the re-opening and sneak peeks into the construction progression as they enjoyed an up close and personal vantage of the transformation of the museum.
Though Kleefeld Contemporary focused its program on material innovation, director Paul Baker Prindle suggested that the idea that mainstream contemporary art foregrounds innovation in productive ways should be critically examined.
Baker Prindle explained that market driven contemporary art is part of a genealogy that descends from from Clement Greenberg, a New York City art critic who said ‘the only good art is art that is avant-garde, that is at the forefront, that is privileging the new, the next, above all else.’
“There are many artworks that are part of that narrative,” Baker Prindle explained. “But what has been challenging is that that narrative has come to dominate how most people think about and look at art.”
Baker Prindle offers a different criterion by which to value contemporary art.
“We ought to be asking this,” he said. “‘New to whom? Innovative according to what?’ What is so exciting about what we’re trying to do with material innovation is to acknowledge the set of questions is far broader and deeper than the questions we’ve asked perhaps in the past, or that particularly mainstream, let’s be frank, white majority run cultural institutions have been asking over the last decades.”
Kleefield Contemporary posits that the job of a museum is to make resources available to artists and art viewers to engage with those questions with as much or as little help from the museum as they want, rather than answer these questions for them.
Dyani White Hawk, a visual artist and independent curator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, explained from the perspective of her praxis of art how problematic the ways contemporary art is valued.
White Hawk posited the way that we show and curate work, the way that work is written about, all of those things need to be constantly moving and innovation needs to be happening within those fields or we stagnate.
“That stagnation is usually the way history has played out so far,” White Hawk said. “A certain cultural group or a certain cultural perspective has been elevated to high art or good art. This is a detrimental path to society at large because what we get to see or experience, the growth of humanity would be stunted if we weren’t pushing back and innovating and thinking about how we’re telling those histories. We need to be constantly innovating in order to do that.”
In her lecture, the award winning artist will narrate how she has come to incorporate glass beads into her paintings while calling attention to the history of trade beads in Indigenous culture. Her work is in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Tweed Museum of Art, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and Akta Lakota Museum, among other public and private collections.
White Hawk said she looks forward to this talk because her practice is an innovative one within the contemporary art world. She utilizes materials and established artistic practices from within her cultural arts practice.
“I didn’t invent any of it,” she said. “I’ve inherited moments of innovations from my ancestors. The prolific use of beadwork in plains culture and in Lakota artistic traditions that came from the moment that seed beads became available through trade and women on the plains incorporated those beads into already established artistic practices. That was a moment of innovation and now in the Americas people look at beadwork and they automatically think about native folks, native arts, that’s how wildly incorporated that moment of innovation became within our culture … but they’re trade items from Europe.”
White Hawk said the applications of beadwork, quillwork and cultural art forms have been happening since before there was a contemporary art scene “on this land base.” By utilizing those items White Hawk ensures they are seen, recognized and respected in all spaces as opposed to just the Native arts gallery. She elaborated, the innovation in that move is more about pushing back against the hierarchies that have deemed art by particular people done within particular mediums as one thing and pushing back against the hierarchies that say this is art, this is fine art and this is something other.
“That’s the moment of innovation in the work,” she said. “The beadwork is not innovative in the fact that I’m not making it up, I’m borrowing from those innovative traditions.”
Kleefeld Contemporary Evolves
Kleefeld Contemporary recently edited its mission statement, an edit that followed a reconsideration of the museum and the community it is supposed to serve.
“We’ve moved away from talking about the museum as a building but rather talking about it as a community of people,” Baker Prindle said. “[The museum] thinks of itself as a community with a building.”
Baker Prindle said so often when you hear nonprofits talk, they often discuss the community they serve — and staff is frequently part of that community. The museum, he noted, is not just powered by volunteers, staff, visitation and investment, it’s powered by the conversations that both the staff and community are having together in front of art. This plays out in small ways, like adjusting their social media approach by resiprocating to people when they send messages.
One of the changes to occur is the inclusion of community members in the decision making process when it comes to acquisitions. Kleefeld Contemporary will put online a slate of artworks they are interested in for people to give their opinions on which artworks they think the museum should acquire. Kleefeld Contemporary also offers educational resources to the community through their Artist Series Videos on YouTube with Plugged-In Virtual Connections videos and the Art Encounter series.
The museum has questioned every decision it has made for reopening, keeping the community in mind. For example, they are building new restrooms with no gender designation and private fully enclosed stalls and a common wash basin. Baker Prindle noted that many non binary and transgender people are afraid to go to public restrooms. The new facilities also have a lactation suite.
“I’m glad CSULB is thinking this way,” Baker Prindle said, citing ideals such as making sure the museum’s furniture is ADA compliant, or having quiet hours for people who live on the autism spectrum. “All these things are to [help] people participate.”