RE: FELLOW FEELING
In June of 2020, e-flux’s Art & Education published “ Fellow feeling: A discussion of the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ”, a conversation between Natilee Harren, assistant professor of Art History at the University of Houston, Joseph Havel, the director of the Core Program and the Glassell School of Art, and Mary LeClere, Core’s Associate Director. The goals of their conversation were to discuss the Core Program’s “history and mission, its relationship to the Houston art community, and the importance of creative sustainability.”
Immediately following the publishing of “Fellow Feeling…”, all ten of the 2019-20 Core Fellows met online to discuss the article in relation to our recent experiences in the program. Our conversation below highlights many contradictions to the program’s narration of itself. Of particular focus is an attempt to remove us from the program during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the appropriated, uncited labor of the Core Roundtable, an initiative we created in response to the program’s shortfallings.
In what follows, we, a group of current and recently departed fellows, challenge the program’s central rhetoric of sustainability and community, and collectively think through the administration’s process of exploiting institutional failures to inflict harm. This mode of practicing together informs our return to /roundtable, now an autonomous initiative that reclaims the institution against itself.
Irmak
I have been thinking about what it means that this article was titled “Fellow Feeling,” when no one attempted to reach out to us at any point before publishing it on Art & Education. There are so many heartbreaking things that I could say, but instead, I want to say how I feel about us doing this right now. I feel it is so precious.
This is us practicing together. This mode of practicing together seeks to refuse not only the institution in itself but also the institution of the artist, or that individual subject that the institution seeks to isolate from the rest of the group and community – in our case, from each other – so that they create a structure of enclosure around each of us. In response, we need collective reorganization to map out the institutional tactics of isolation. There is no individualized way out. We need each other.
leo
When we decided to look at the article with Natilee, Joe, and Mary, I did a Google search with “fellow feeling core mfah.” The first link was Core’s piece on e-flux, but the second was an article by a philosopher of ethics, Lawrence Blum, titled “A moral account of empathy and fellow feeling,” which has an interesting relation to the e-flux text. Blum says that “Fellow feeling […] is engaged with the other’s well-being” and that its moral imperative is to alter the conditions of misery or sorrow of others. This helped me understand how the article wants to frame the Core Program and what Core as an institution (Joe Havel and Mary LeClere) wants others to believe about the program.
Ryan
Both of your comments point to an irony that is crucial here: that our experiences in the program are incongruent with Core’s promotion of itself in Art & Education, which is not only celebratory but is, in fact, an advertisement. I think it’s helpful to acknowledge intentionality in all of Core’s actions and seek accountability from them.
Shobun
This conversation is what should have been in that article. Since the pandemic started I’ve found it much easier to articulate the strategies employed by the Core administration because what they did in this crisis moment revealed a lot. Our year was unique for the program in that it was comprised of a majority of non-white and non-US citizen fellows. Though the program was happy to use our identities to promote its diversity, when we raised basic questions about administrative decisions that cultivated a lack of engagement with local communities, Core leadership lashed out through a series of escalating tactics which culminated in an aggressive attempt to weaponize the unfolding global pandemic to remove a number of fellows from the program.
Gustavo
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was back home in Mexico, away from my studio and away from everyone at the program; I watched from afar as the Core administration notified us that the Museum suddenly required our studios to be emptied. We later learned that this was a fabrication. Being a temporary external observer made it clear how little concern the program had for its fellows. I see their demand to empty our studios as a retaliatory measure to get rid of us for critically engaging with the program’s structure. And they did this without considering our health, safety, wellbeing, or immigration status. These actions make it clear that the program’s leadership structure can act with horrendous force without transparency or accountability.
Ryan
The Core Program claims its mission is to support artists and writers who are “working to develop a sustainable practice.” I can’t help but wonder: whose practices are they working to sustain? Individual practices, collective practices, or the practices of a cultural institution and the people permanently employed there? This has become so tragic, especially when you start to consider what they chose to not cite or give credit for in the “Fellow Feeling” article, such as leo’s labor…
Kara
In the interest of naming the violence that has taken place here, leo visioned, developed, and implemented the Core Roundtable, a fellow-led series intended to invite a wider Houston community into the space of Core. The administrators of the program, after consistently not supporting these efforts, repeatedly referenced this work in the “Fellow Feeling” article as part of Core’s programming without ever naming leo or any of the fellows whose work was cited. And there is an important thread there. Often this institutional performance of diversity or inclusivity through the commodification of our identities and our work, goes hand-in-hand with a lack of interest in supporting the individuals doing the work. This is a pattern of explicit erasure.
Ana
And the work of the Roundtable, of inviting the wider Houston community into Core’s space and programming, is so necessary. The program would really improve if it built stronger relationships with other parts of the Houston community and facilitated connections for the fellows arriving from different places in the world to be in this city for two years. Today, artists want a different kind of residency – one that is less insular, and more connected to community. The same can be said of the larger institution, the MFAH. I think both the program and the museum can benefit from listening more to artists, particularly artists of color, about how to construct the kind of spaces that support creative communities holistically.
Qais
In the article, they talk about Houston’s diversity, that it’s a city of immigrants. Yet by negligence or by design, the program doesn’t allow that community in the door. This issue was the seed of the conflict between the administration and this group of fellows. Somehow, our questioning whether there might be more space for engagement with a wider local community was taken as a threat to their relationship with the donors who fund the program, and, in a larger sense, a threat to this program’s cultivated exclusivity.
Will
And I think it’s worth linking that to the application process. The residency is technically one year, but you can apply for an extra year, and I think the kind of work that’s made difficult by not having the security of a guaranteed second year is the community building, long-term work that tries to make new solidarities in the city at large. Instead, whether through the emphasis on donor engagement over public interaction, the refusal of open studios, or the enforced enclosure of the space of the Glassell School, the program reinforces the city’s perception that it’s exclusive, that it’s about taking resources from the city and funneling them into a privatized experience where artists helicopter in and leave despite staying a uniquely long time for a residency.
Nilou
Can we talk about what happened during the most recent reapplication process? This year Core decided to mandate an interview for all fellows wanting to return for the second year. We’ve been told from past fellows that interviews, historically, have been used selectively to target and punish anyone who’s criticized the program administration. This year, interviews were scheduled, absurdly, during the first days of what had just become a global pandemic. The email notification concerning the interviews was the very first correspondence we received from the associate director of the program after the shutdown, and in those interviews, some of us were told that it would be better not to come back, that our year was the “most disruptive, unproductive, and disrespectful” year the program had ever had. And yet shortly after, the institution went on to claim ownership over the “product” of our collective labor in “Fellow Feelings.”
Kara
My interview felt targeted and belittling in a way that was shockingly uncollegial. There’s no clear criteria to say that if you fulfill the obligations of your contract, then you will pass through to the second year. It’s left at their discretion and it does something really specific to allow them to hold that discretion. I feel like there’s something we’re getting at here around the way that the institution enables individual abuse of power and the way in which such abuses tend to be enacted on the most marginalized and vulnerable individuals inside of these institutional settings.
Will
These things are consistently excused as trivial oversights, but they’ve happened before and reveal a pattern of questionable values at the administrative and institutional level. It’s often difficult to know whether or how to separate the two. And the “revolving door” of the program – the fact that fellows come for two years and then a new group of fellows replaces them – means that institutional memory is thin and only exists for the administration, allowing them to repeat the same abuses of power. These abuses could be as explicit as neglecting to extend leo’s visa during the pandemic, or as subtle as scheduling a dinner with program donors during the middle of the Core Exhibition that consequently required artists to leave their own opening – which is arguably the only publicly accessible event for artists to share their work within the program’s term.
Shobun
This is gaslighting and it’s structural. Our request to remain at the opening for its duration out of respect for the community who showed up to support us was met with a completely disproportionate threat. They both insisted that this was all a scheduling error, even though it had happened repeatedly year after year, and told us that if we had an issue with it, then “perhaps this program was not the right fit.” And there was the continual pretense that being told to pack up and permanently vacate our studios was a miscommunication when there was clear evidence that this was, in fact, a concerted effort by core administration to eject us from the program amid a global crisis. It was only by mobilizing as a community that we were able to successfully counter this effort.
leo
As I hear you, I can’t help but think more about my personal experience with gaslighting by Core; they neglected my emergency visa request and consequently ejected me from the U.S. This, amid a pandemic, was framed as a series of small administrative “hold-ups…” I hadn’t thought of it in these terms but I wonder: Did we all just undergo a traumatic experience?
Ryan
Yes, unfortunately, I think so. I recently spoke with another Core alum and shared some of the experiences we just outlined with them. This person became very emotional because I think, for the first time after hearing our collective experience, they were able to acknowledge how traumatic their own experience in the program was. In fact, I’ve spoken with several alumni over the past few months. My understanding is that many feel similarly: that the Core Program can be generative and full of opportunity and quite traumatic and abusive.
Kara
Although what’s beautiful here is that we are going through this together. We’ve all been through this in other institutional contexts where we were made to feel like we are the problem. People have come through this program and have been made to feel that way because of being isolated and alone. And this time, we’re not. We’re here; we’re together, we’re having this conversation. That changes everything.
leo
Can we hold onto that? Are we making an agreement that we ain’t gonna let anybody fuck us over anymore? And I mean it in the sense of the /roundtable… The time we give to each other is so precious. I just want to name this for the sake of knowing that we are doing this, constructing the alternative in itself, you know? And, yeah, sorry I… my fellow feelings are very touchy right now. Fellow feeling love.
Published on November 8, 2020.
Errata: On November 9, 2020 it was noted that Natilee Harren is not a former Core Fellow as indicated in previous versions of this writing. This information has been corrected.
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