SCOTTSDALE, Arizona — As Fox News recently faced fresh allegations of devising and promulgating fake news, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona was installing an exhibition that examines the diverse ways artists are using language to counter propaganda past and present, while also imagining radically different futures.

Language in Times of Miscommunication features works created by 18 American artists between 2016 and 2023, a period of United States history marked by identity politics, divisive language, and alternative narratives.

On one level, the exhibition serves as a guide to recent political strife: Ann Morton’s embroidered Proof-Reading series, for example, was prompted by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, its editing marks cleverly changing the meanings of some of the former president’s most divisive declarations. 

Pick any issue addressed in mainstream or social media during the past decade and you’re likely to find it represented here. There’s Patrick Martinez’s neon on Plexiglas “Nothing Is Up but the Rent” (2021), for example, and Andrea Bowers’s flashing “Abolish ICE” (2018), created with cardboard and LED lights. 

Fortunately Lauren R. O’Connell, who curated the exhibition along with Keshia Turley, didn’t settle for crafting a visually compelling tour of America’s current forays into capitalism, fascism, and racism. Instead, the museum has gathered artworks that address the roots and antecedents of contemporary social injustices, including a trio of sculptures from Jeremy Dean’s Fundament series confronting foundational systems of white supremacy in Florida, the state where recent headlines highlighted book bans and curriculum changes meant to erase the histories and deny the humanity of entire groups of people.

While making the case that lies of omission and commission are a feature, not a bug, of the nation’s systems of repression and oppression, exhibiting artists also create space to imagine futures that move past the nihilism that so much propaganda seems designed to reinforce, in part by centering individual and collective action. 

Inside the museum, viewers see April Bey’s glittering “Welcome to Atlantica (Hotel Room Planet Guide),” a 2019 artist book conceived as a guide to a mythological place where Black culture thrives, and Safwat Saleem’s “Concerned but Powerless: Rough Translation” (2023), a digital video in which the artist talks with his young daughter about words and concepts related to xenophobia. Behind the museum, one of Anna Tsouhlarakis’s (Navajo, Creek, Greek) billboard vinyl pieces from the series The Native Guide Project (2019–ongoing) faces an arts district marketed as a hub for Native art, where it challenges stereotypical views of Native American people while driving narratives of the future. Minimalist black text reading “IT’S GREAT HOW YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT NATIVE AMERICANS ARE STILL HERE” counters popular assumptions about the aesthetics of Native art while questioning art world practices related to land acknowledgments.

William Powhida’s “Possibilities for Representation” (2020–ongoing), an expansive watercolor and gouache installation comprising a timeline of the United States’ political history and several imagined futures, speaks to the existence of propaganda across time with an elegant mix of history and humor, conveyed in part through images culled from the overlapping realms of politics and pop culture.  

Collectively, these artists prompt viewers to question and resist propaganda in its many forms, including frenetic tweets and endless breaking news headlines aimed at creating such a singular focus on the urgency of the now that memories of the past, visions for the future, and the actions they demand, no longer exist. 

Language in Times of Miscommunication continues at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (7374 East 2nd Street, Scottsdale, Arizona) through August 27. The exhibition was curated by Lauren R. O’Connell with Keshia Turley.

SANTA FE, N. Mex. — Until late last week, the Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe (CCA) presented contemporary art and film, including arthouse, indie, and foreign cinema, its historical bread and butter, for over four decades in the high desert. CCA’s closure on the evening of Thursday, April 6, was abruptly announced and enacted. A press release announcing the closure and local media coverage cited pandemic mandates and protocols, changing models of film distribution and consumption, and long-standing fundraising issues as prime movers of this cultural institution’s demise.

But other reasons — including a pandemic-era exacerbation of the nonprofit philanthropy model’s innate structural inequity, shifting artist and donor demographics, and an institutional identity crisis — have received less coverage. According to former CCA Deputy Director April Chalay, who worked for CCA in several positions for over five years, the problems that led to the center’s shuttering have existed for a long time. 

Citing a board-produced list of 11 CCA directors over the past 19 years, which she feels certain is missing some names due to lax record-keeping, Chalay said CCA cycled through executive directors at an unsustainable pace for the past couple of decades.

“A new director every two to three years creates a culture of instability and a huge lack of identity,” Chalay told Hyperallergic.

Under the stewardship of its final Executive Director and Head Curator Danyelle Means (Oglala Lakota) since July 2021, an embattled CCA had been on the upswing programmatically and curatorially. The 2022 show Self-Determined: A Contemporary Survey of Native and Indigenous Artists was included in Hyperallergic‘s list of the top 50 exhibitions of the year.

Demographic changes also played a role. “Not many people will voice ‘I don’t like this because it’s turning brown-er or younger,’ but that’s absolutely what happened when the CCA found [Dayelle Means],” Chalay said. “We had people who started criticizing us and saying, ‘your director is Indigenous and you’re doing an Indigenous show, are you just going to be an Indigenous arts org? Because that’s not what I want to give to.’”

Another issue that plagued CCA was the very nature of nonprofit art grants and donations, namely restricted versus unrestricted giving. As Chalay noted in her interview, most private donations and grants are restricted, meaning that they are earmarked for a specific exhibition or program and so cannot be used by organizations in ways that are most beneficial for long-term sustainability by funding overhead, including staff payroll.  

“The problem with the traditional nonprofit board model is that it relies on a colonial model of philanthropy that’s based on the fact that older white people who come from heritages of wealth have the money and deem an organization important enough to give to,” said Chalay. “We were really hoping to get to the other side of these funding issues to be able to give voice to that [conversation] but we couldn’t get there because our board did not fundraise.”

CCA’s closure also reduces the number of film spaces dedicated to screening foreign, independent, and experimental film in the Santa Fe area to those at the anti-profit No Name Cinema and the largely refocused event space at Jean Cocteau Cinema. 

Artist Ian Kuali’i (Kanaka Maoli/Shis Inday), whose series Ma Ka Ho‘ona‘auao Ā Ma Ka Ihe Paha – By Education Or By Spear (2022) was featured in the Self-Determined exhibition, called the shuttering of the CCA “a massive blow to inclusivity in the arts.”

“Rarely have I ever encountered an arts institution that throws complete support behind the vision of the creators they invite into their space without trying to alter it,” Kuali’i told Hyperallergic. “It is equally rare that we have Indigenous female representation in a contemporary arts executive position, and I’m talking about the broader contemporary arts, not Indigenous/Native contemporary arts … The health of our future generations and communities are deeply tied to representation and visibility.”