“This recording is an institution.”
This annunciation, originally found in the liner notes of Black Arts Movement founder Amiri Baraka’s album “It’s Nation Time,” is enough to gather the collectivities we will continue to call the institution into a single sentence and disperse them as an open form. Is the duration of the record, 40 minutes or so, the life of this institution, or is the duration the space of the sentence itself? Is it a permanent shift, as in the founding of a nation, or a syncopated nation-time we are newly able to enter? Is this text an institution and every reading a re-constitution of it?
Is the institution the instrument, in other words, or the performance of the instrument? We take it up and set it down again; it is a mode we must practice, an act we must perform.
This proposition opens up the idea of the institution, while stripping away its sedimentations as the object of our critique, to become the instrument of not just critique, but creation - as forceful as a secession, an announcement of a new nation out of this present state. It's Nation Time and this is an institution. The violence of the time has arrived, and along with it the urgency of action. In this mode we gather to propose prefigurative institutions, forms able to re-envision worlds around them.
Prefigurative practices in general - coming out of autonomous politics first - assume that the form of one's organizing must be inseparable from the eventual goal. In other words, if we create a structure based on individual competition and success, or one of horizontal power and shared resources, of justice and love, we are also "instituting" that in the world. The structure manifests something that we believe as well as forwards a kind of ideology. The forms we adopt as institutions, or those we agree to participate in, speak to the assumptions we have about the world. In discussing institutional forms and futures, we are equally considering the form and futures of a world in light of our present crises.
Prefigurative Institutions (an incomplete list)
Counterpublic is a triennial civic exhibition set in St. Louis that aims to reimagine civic infrastructures towards generational change. Co-founded with Lee Broughton. (2021-)
The Luminary is an expansive platform for art, thought, and action founded in St. Louis, MO. Co-founded with Brea Youngblood. I departed as Executive Director in 2022. (2007-)
MARCH is a journal of art & strategy that features an annual print edition alongside an active online platform commissioning essays, interviews, and experimental critical writing with a global perspective. Co-founded with Sarrita Hunn. (2020-)
Temporary Art Review is an international platform for contemporary art criticism that focused on artist-run and alternative spaces. Co-founded with Sarrita Hunn. (2011-19)
Common Field was a national network of independent spaces, projects, and arts organizers. Founding member. (2015-2022)
Monaco was an artist-owned cooperative gallery in St. Louis. Initiator and founding member. (2017-2024)
Post Literate was an art book publisher and record label. Co-founded with Brea Youngblood. (2011-12)