Why the New Museum’s Bronx ‘Ideas’ Festival Was Such a Fiasco—and What It Teaches Museums About Their Role in Gentrification

“They had a warning at least,” said Tiara Torres, co-director of
the grassroots, Bronx-based arts collective Hydro Punk, days after
the New Museum’s symposium IdeasCity The Bronx abruptly shut
down, just minutes after getting started.

In July, Torres had run into the New Museum staffer who had
emailed Hydro Punk about participating in the event, held in
Concrete Park, a public space newly rebuilt by local organizers in
a part of the South Bronx undergoing contentious rezoning. The
collective never responded to the email, but Torres explained in
person that Hydro Punk would not be participating—they were
uncomfortable giving the New Museum “our voices,” especially for an
event held on home soil.

But Torres said she would attend as a community member. She
arrived at Concrete Park in the early afternoon of Saturday,
September 21, with a prepared statement. Other activists came too.
“I didn’t know that it was going to be such an action,” she
said.

The Idea Behind IdeasCity

The New Museum’s IdeasCity initiative began in 2011. Early press
releases explained that the initiative took as its “core belief
that arts and culture constitute a driving force behind the
vitality of urban centers worldwide.” The museum has since
organized initiatives in national and international cities, its
native New York included. Each iteration begins with a week-long
residency and culminates in a symposium.

Attempts have been made over the years to anticipate the
suspicion residents of rapidly changing cities might feel toward a
Manhattan institution coming in to talk about their home. Before
IdeasCity Detroit in 2015, for instance, the New Museum released a
“Memorandum of
Understanding” that promised to “honor and value the people of
Detroit by retaining and utilizing both human and material
resources that reflect the demographics” of the city.

Yet no such memorandum accompanied the announcement that
IdeasCity would come to the Bronx, a place much closer to home, for
an event themed “New Ecologies 3755”—the number a reference to the
days left before 2030, when experts believe global warming may
reach critical levels. “The conversations about climate justice and
the arts and culture that have already been happening [in the
Bronx] without [the New Museum],” said Torres, pointing to one of
the key concerns over outside institutions coming into gentrifying
or long-marginalized neighborhoods: that they will claim the work
of grassroots organizers as their own, thus erasing the labor of
black and brown people.

The New Museum is not the first to face opposition from
communities in rapidly changing neighborhoods. In the Bronx, an
urban blight-themed party sponsored by artist Lucien Smith titled
the “Macabre Suite,” featuring trash fires and bullet ridden cars,
touched off huge public anger in
2015, while activists in the Bronx shut down the “It’s the
Bronx” music festival in March of this year.

As wealth disparities in major cities grow and the art world
becomes more critical of its own classism and lack of diversity,
the debate over whether cultural institutions can responsibly enter
embattled neighborhoods has become all the more heated.

Building Tensions 

The week before IdeasCity The Bronx, curator V. Mitch McEwen, an architect and urban
planner who teaches at Princeton, told the New York
Times the goal was to “think through new ecologies” while
“combining art and activism.” This latter aim was achieved with
perhaps more efficacy than anyone had imagined.

Concerned buzz around IdeasCity The Bronx began late in the
summer, after the real estate company South Bronx Luxury began
promoting IdeasCity on Instagram. (The New Museum has “no
connection or communication” with the company, said a
spokesperson.) New developments pegged as “luxury” typically
accelerate steeper costs of living in gentrifying
neighborhoods—and, according to census data, median rents already
grew 45 percent in the Bronx over the past decade—so South Bronx
Luxury’s interest raised flags for activists.

Then, the September 18 New York Times feature on
IdeasCity celebrated river-adjacent Concrete Plant Park as having
“significance as a locale for an event that deals with systemic
inequities, climate change, urban space and water.” The article,
which gave little context on the park’s history, prompted The Point
CDC, an organization instrumental in transforming the park, to
issue a public statement on social media. The Point asserted that
any event on environmental justice in the Bronx should have
involved preliminary planning meetings with grassroots groups and
claimed that only one of the organizations in their environmental
justice network had been contacted about participating. (A New
Museum spokesperson said that the museum had reached out to The
Point CDC about participating in a plenary session for IdeasCity in
June, but had not received a response.)

Artist, activist, and MoMA educator Shellyne
Rodriguez had initially agreed to appear on a panel at IdeasCity
(and participated in the IdeasCity podcast). “I was sort of
asleep at the wheel about this,” she acknowledged, explaining that
there were “two strains” of resistance that mounted in the days
leading up to the event.

On the one hand, there was the conversation Hydro Punk ignited
about whether the New Museum should come to the Bronx at all. On
the other, there was the conversation about the crediting and full
inclusion of Bronx-based cultural organizations.

A Meltdown

By Friday, September 20, participants began to pull out.
DreamYard Art Center said they would no longer participate in “what
has turned out not to be a collaboration, but something in which
DreamYard’s name has seemingly been used as merely a means to an
end.” Artist Xaviera Simmons, who organized a panel on
deconstructing “what whiteness actually is,” said “it would be both
insensitive and counterproductive to host and be a party to a panel
on white privilege” under “the current circumstances.”

The afternoon of the event, as McEwen worked her way through
introductory remarks, Torres initiated a mic check, projecting her
voice loud so that the other activists in attendance could repeat
and amplify her words. But McEwen quickly offered her the actual
microphone and Torres went to speak on stage. “New Museum has never
invested anything in the Bronx,” she said. “Their name erases the
work of black and brown people who have died on this land.”

She continued uninterrupted until a museum staffer asked her not
to swear—which felt, Torres recalled, “kind of like telling me to
tone police myself.”

When she finished speaking, she moved to hand the mic to
Shellyne Rodriguez. According to Torres and Rodriguez, New
Museum staff protested, though the museum’s spokesperson says that
McEwan handed over both the mic and stage to the activists. Either
way, Rodriguez continued sans mic, projecting her voice as others
spoke over her, and NYPD officers who had been stationed near the
periphery of the park moved closer. Minutes later, McEwen announced
that the event was over.

In the statement the New Museum sent to Artnet News and other
organizations who asked for comment, the institution reiterated
that “we wholeheartedly support V. Mitch McEwen’s curatorial vision
for IdeasCity” and claimed that recent Ideas City programs had
“advanced thinking in significant directions.”

A two-page statement McEwen posted to Twitter on Sunday,
September 22, attempted to provide context on the now-canceled
event: “When New Museum invited me to curate the 2019 cycle of
IdeasCity, I knew that this would be the first instance of Black
leadership in that program, since its founding in 2011. I decided
that I would only take on the yearlong role if New Museum proved
open to using the IdeasCity platform to pair the typical focus on
the future of cities with a year-long focus on dismantling white
supremacy and centering Black and brown ideas of
transformation.”

While The Point CDC had criticized the “top-down” planning
process for not adequately deferring to local expertise, McEwen
said that the event was “not about the Bronx or for the Bronx.
These were panels and events, organized mostly by Bronx grassroots
leaders, that one expected to be thoughts on the planetary.” She
went on to explain what she had hoped would come of the event:

I was hoping to invite the IdeasCity audience—as arbitrary, art
geeky, and policy wonky as that audience may be—to hear directly
from those doing the day-to-day work of making another world
possible. As far as I can tell, in New York City today, those
leaders are mostly in the Bronx.

However, savior narratives are so prolific, so dominant, that
this paradigm was easily garbled in every retelling.

McEwen ended with questions, including: “For those few
organizations and people who bravely organize and support
themselves without being compromised—how do we contact and learn
from your vast and deep intelligence without being extractive?” The
terms “few” and “support themselves” framed remaining
un-compromised as both a rarity and economically precarious.

Push Back

Torres, whose collective Hydro Punk has been hosting art events
that champion local artists and musicians as well as offering
political education workshops since 2014, is not sure there is a
non-extractive way to enter the Bronx. She added that, given that
the newly unionized New
Museum staff were threatening to strike if their protracted
contract fight remained unresolved, even if the event had been held
at the museum, attending could have required Bronx organizers to
cross a picket line.

“As much as they want to help and be saviors, it’s not
responsible,” Torres said. “The more I think about it, it just felt
like we were in a test tube.”

Rodriguez, who has been involved with Take Back the Bronx since its 2011
founding, agreed: “There is no responsible way, given the context
that we are in, for New Museum to come to the Bronx to do anything
right now.”

Beyond new development and rising rents, what is happening right
now in the Bronx includes the Southern Boulevard rezoning project.
The proposed rezoning could allow residential development in areas
that are now primarily occupied light industrial businesses. The
city claims that the goal is to increase affordable housing and
economic development, but the real estate website The Real Deal
already predicts that rezoning
will bring a “development boom.” Residents worry that, without
proper protections, the net effect of rezoning will be
displacement.

Cultural events hosted by outside organizations can put
community members in the difficult position of having to choose
between principles and participation. “People on the outside have
to realize that when they come in, they’re actually creating a
wedge in the community that’s already facing a lot of challenges,”
said Gregory Jost, a Bronx-based researcher and organizer who works
at the Banana Kelly Community Improvement
Association. “It turns into a divide and conquer mechanism,
just like the rezoning [itself] would be. Do you want to be at the
table and negotiate and see what you can get, or are you so opposed
to the entire process that you just say ‘no, I don’t want to
participate at all’?”

Jost, who has written compellingly about how national grassroots
organizations fought redlining by acquiring the bank data that
showed structural racism, believes that adequate data can “unify a
vision” for activists. He also belongs to the group Designing the We, and contributed to their
traveling exhibition, “Undesign the Redline,” which
presented information on how racism became structural while
inviting viewers to give their input on how the exhibition could
better reflect their local experiences, reshaping depending on what
city it was in. The exhibition aimed to acknowledge how profoundly
local displacement was, while connecting different communities
affected by similar forces.

Still, tensions over whether and how to participate have been
sharp. When Take Back the Bronx disrupted and shut down a
Department of City Planning workshop in June, City Limits reported that certain
local attendees were frustrated with the group’s hard line. “I
agree with them,” one retired teacher in attendance said.
“However, they want everything to stay the same and I am not happy
with that. If we participate we can be part of the change. And if
the changes happen without us, we cannot complain.”

“We are having a seat at the table of our own
displacement,” Shellyne Rodriguez fired back to City
Limits.

A Shift in Perspective

The Detroit-based artist, musician, and activist Bryce Detroit applied to IdeasCity New
Orleans, held this past April, because he wanted to better
understand the affinity he felt for NOLA and its African diasporic
identity, even though he had never spent time in the city. During
the five-day residency, he indeed experienced a culture that
resonated with African legacies in certain Detriot communities, but
he said he also felt pressured by IdeasCity’s organizers to come up
with environmental justice suggestions for New Orleans.

“At the most, we can share what’s going on in our respective
hyper-local scenarios,” said Detroit. “It’s super problematic to
enter a city and then ask artists who are not native to that place
to do a quick analysis of the place and then come up with
suggestions-slash-solutions for that place.”

He believes established art institutions can potentially enter
communities like the Bronx respectfully—at least “in the land of
hypotheticals,” he observed. “Yet it takes such intentionality. You
gotta have a curator whose practice is actually rooted in
grassroots social justice. It must be. You can’t be a person who is
skilled at being adjacent to these issues, but in real life has no
connection to the people on the front lines.”

The planning process, Detroit says, has to start with grassroots
social justice and cultural leaders. “The institution inviting
those people has to make it very clear: We’re actually looking at
you as the responsible party to tell us not only how to enter, but
what is the way that we can actually be a benefit to the place that
we’re going to be.” The “folks on the ground,” he said, must also
be the ones “responsible for creating the way that the narrative
rolls out.”

To do this, museums would have to change their own staffing
structures and begin to dismantle their own internal hierarchies.
“But that is a major culture shift for institutions,” Detroit
concluded.

The post Why the New Museum’s Bronx ‘Ideas’ Festival Was Such a
Fiasco—and What It Teaches Museums About Their Role in
Gentrification appeared first on artnet News.