But these times are different and I am unlike anyone to ever work there. I would have lost my opportunity to curate the show I had come to the museum to create. Normally someone like me, a Black person who would not assimilate, would have been silenced for good. Often people celebrate “first Black …” appointments while failing to consider the internal dynamics, the realities of existing in these white workplaces. But after I spoke out about some of the racism at the museum, Reich told me my fellowship would not be extended and that my exhibition would not happen.Īs the first Black person working in the curatorial department and only Black staff member outside of a front-of-house or administrative role, I was alone and unsupported. Earlier in the spring they had moved Imagine Otherwise to fall 2021 and told me they would ask the Gund Foundation to extend my fellowship, which was slated to end in March 2021. In retaliation, interim director Megan Reich and chief curator Courtenay Finn quietly cancelled my exhibition. ![]() ![]() In staff meetings I also highlighted various racist practices I experienced in the museum from my coworkers, senior management, and the board. I had previously spoken to the press about the lack of curatorial competency and the internal culture of racism at the museum. In late August 2020 I began the fight to get my exhibition Imagine Otherwise(a multimedia group exhibition, which thinks with Christina Sharpe’s groundbreaking book In the Wake On Blackness and Being, to express the boundlessness and fierceness of Black imagination and love despite ongoing anti-Black violence) back on the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art’s (moCa) exhibition schedule.
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