ARTchivist's Notebook: Dimensions of diversity
I reflect on the legacy of artist Leo Rabkin and how ensuring diversity in art history means accounting for more than identity and circumstance.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of visiting the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation in Portland, Maine. You may know them because of the generous monetary prizes they award annually to distinguished art writers, but they also steward the legacy of Leo Rabkin, a multi-disciplinary artist who counted Ad Reinhardt, Sol LeWitt and Betty Parsons among his friends. Although Leo found himself at the center of the mid-20th century New York art world, he has been strangely neglected by art history.
Art historian and curator Susan C. Larsen, the first executive director of the foundation, gave a public talk about Leo: a wonderful, personal account of his life, highlighting not only the way his work reflected the changing currents of his time, but also how he used art to build community and connection throughout his career. He and his wife Dorothea were great admirers and collectors of folk art and his own work often employed everyday materials — paper, fabric, string — alongside “fine art” media. The works are often richly colored, playfully designed, and human-scaled: many of them are intended to be held in the hands rather than hung on a wall. He was fascinated by color and light and fashioned beautiful translucent pieces, reminiscent of Light and Space art, out of plastic and resin. But unlike some of the artists of that movement, who sought to strictly control a viewer’s retinal experience, Leo’s pieces all seem grounded in a more open-ended engagement. There is a palpable friendliness to his art that is disarming and doesn’t come across in photographs.
This openness, as well as the sheer variety of ways in which he worked, have made his legacy difficult to characterize in a way that art history and the market easily understand. He did not have a signature “style” that makes him instantly classifiable. He wasn’t strictly an Abstract Expressionist, a Minimalist, or a Conceptual artist (although his work shows traces of all those things and more). For those of us — archivists and writers — whose work is to organize, classify, and describe, artists like Leo pose a challenge. They are more likely to be left out of history or shunted into some byway simply because their output doesn’t fit neatly into existing systems, categories, and frames of reference.
Although Leo was a well-off white man who knew all the “right” people at the epicenter of the art world, he was still left out of art history. The beguiling work he created makes clear that we lose much when we fail to recognize, not only artists marginalized because of their identities or circumstances, but also those who bucked the logic of a market that prizes consistency and repetition over evolution and exploration. Assuring a more representative historical record and a richer cultural heritage involves accounting for all kinds of diversity, inside and out.
Divers news
My mom and Ruth Asawa
I had the good fortune to be a guest critic for Carolina Miranda’s “Art Insider” newsletter at KCRW last week, writing about “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective” at SFMOMA, which I saw with my mom. I think it’s the first time I’ve written about seeing art with her, and it may be the least comprehensive and most personal review I’ve ever done. Like Asawa, my mom is a survivor of WWII American concentration camps; their stories really resonate in our present moment of illegal detentions and civil rights violations.
A documentary close to my heart
There are a few tickets left for a free screening of Out of the Picture, a moving documentary about art critics, at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York City on May 19. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with editors and critics Hrag Vartanian, Jeneé Osterheldt, and Camille Bacon, and moderated by Carolina Miranda. I’ll be there - hope to see you there, too!
For those on the other coast, Out of the Picture will also be shown at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles on June 10, and will be followed by a panel with cultural critics and journalists Carolina Miranda (she’s everywhere!), Steven Vargas, and Tre’vell Anderson, moderated by Oliver Wang. Tickets are available now: General admission is $10, free for students and also for ARTchivist’s Notebook subscribers with the code PICTURE25. Hope to see you there!
And a podcast…
You may remember a few issues back I announced the publication of the report Topdogs and Underdogs: Critics of Color and the Theatrical Landscape. If reading that tome was too much of a commitment (and I don’t blame you if it was), now there’s a podcast! The first season of the Critical Minded Podcast explores the challenges faced by theater critics of color with host Steven Vargas and guests Naveen Kumar, Jose Solís, Brittani Samuel and others. Free and independent criticism is integral to democracy. I hope you’ll check it out.
Preserving and defending DEI
People are fighting back against the demonization and erasure of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts by the current administration.
The Society of American Archivists Diversity Committee has issued a heartfelt Statement on Nationwide Attacks against DEIA Programs and Initiatives. Here’s a poignant line:
We as a country and a profession are facing a crisis regarding memory–how and what we document, preserve, and provide access to, and how we relate to each other as human beings.
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Committee is collecting project documentation for a directory of DEI/EDI initiatives as a means of preserving this valuable work. Content can be submitted without being made public. Learn more here, and submit your work here. It’s too bad this is only for academic libraries, but at least it is something. As the ACRL announcement says:
For those unable to submit initiatives directly, we encourage librarians to archive their work using the Internet Archive to safeguard these contributions. By archiving initiatives now, future advocacy can build upon existing work rather than starting from scratch.