Curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan 

In computer science, algorithmic models are used to forecast and visualize prospective futures. Beyond recent large language models (ChatGPT) and image generators (DALL-E, Midjourney), modeling is also used in predictive policing, judicial risk assessment, automated hiring, and elsewhere. These models structure our present, projecting worlds marked by radically asymmetrical power distributions.

Invoking the various meanings of “modeling,” the exhibition assembles the work of artists who map the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries and move beyond them in acts of critical world building. Modifying a line from feminist technoscience scholar, Donna Haraway—“It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories”— the exhibition’s title reflects the featured artists’ interest in speculative worlding and in reimagining algorithmic systems. 

Algorithmic worldmaking often unfolds in a “black box”––an opaque space of automated decision-making whose rationale is hidden from public view. The featured artists open up the black box for scrutiny, imagining possibilities for feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.

What Models Make Worlds was originally presented as Encoding Futures at OXY ARTS, the public art space and cultural platform of Occidental College, from September-November 2021. The exhibition is curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, associate professor of technology and social justice at ArtCenter College of Design and Meldia Yesayan, director of OXY ARTS. 

About the curators

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian

Born in Yerevan, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher residing in Glendale, CA. She is an associate professor in technology and social justice at ArtCenter College of Design and was formerly a visiting Mellon professor of the practice at Occidental College. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, was released by X Artists’ Books in December 2022 as the first in its X topics series and edited by Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram. She is the guest co-editor of the spring 2023 issue of Art Papers on artificial intelligence, co-edited with Sarah Higgins. She holds a PhD in history of art from the University of Pennsylvania.

Her writing and commentary have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Performance Research Journal, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Georgia Journal, Art in America, AI Now Institute’s “New AI Lexicon” series, and Meghan Markle’s Archetypes. With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she makes up one-third of Research Service, a media collective that pursues performative and practice-based forms of scholarship. Her current book project considers the role of ancestral intelligence and diasporic worldmaking in emerging technologies.

Meldia Yesayan

Meldia Yesayan is the director of OXY ARTS, the multidisciplinary arts programming initiative at Occidental College. She oversees all aspects of its programming and development, including organizing all exhibitions and programs, facilitating visiting artist residencies such as the Wanlass artist-in-residence program, initiating cross-departmental and interdisciplinary collaborations, and engaging the Occidental community in socially conscious discourse with contemporary arts practices. She is also responsible for developing meaningful and sustained relationships with the Los Angeles area arts communities, including partnerships with local arts agencies, artists, and institutions.

Prior to OXY ARTS, Yesayan was the managing director of Machine Project, a groundbreaking arts collective nationally recognized for its inventive engagement based programming and partnerships with museums and academic institutions across the country. In this role, she led the production of more than 300 public projects and worked with a diverse group of artists across disciplines. Prior to Machine Project, she held leadership positions at Sotheby’s auction house and Muse Film and Television. She is often called on by state and local arts agencies and foundations to serve on review and selection committees for grant and artist selections and has contributed to Art Papers and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a JD and BA from UCLA and is a USPAP certified fine art appraiser.

OXY ARTS

OXY ARTS is Occidental College’s public art center. Rooted in social justice and community engagement, it is a vital public space for discovery, engagement, and learning at the intersection of art, culture, and social movements. OXY ARTS is located in the heart of the Highland Park neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles and is committed to facilitating projects that hold space for complex ideas and dialogue, spark curiosity, and invest in artists and community growth.

No Justice Without Love brings together the transformational work of artists, activists, and allied donors who make up the Art for Justice Fund (A4J) community. The exhibition is an invitation to engage with the Fund’s mission to change the narrative around mass incarceration and disrupt the criminal justice system. Inaugurated in 2017 under the unprecedented philanthropic vision of Agnes Gund, A4J launched with $100M generated from the sale of Agnes’ favorite painting, Roy Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece. This spurred artists, collectors, and supporters to donate an additional $25M to the Fund, which advances policy reform, shifts public narratives on criminal justice, and promotes the leadership of formerly incarcerated people while centering art as a catalyst to propel change.

The exhibition includes work from formerly incarcerated and allied artists alongside submissions by former and current A4J grantees, who have been invited to a Call and Response to express how A4J—and the remarkable community it supports—has affected their practice. In charting the evolution of artists’ practices, No Justice Without Love also presents the ways in which artists and advocates create new aesthetics around humanity, resilience, and self-determination, while elevating themes of redemption, rehabilitation, and transformation.

About the curator

Daisy Desrosiers is an interdisciplinary art historian and the current director and chief curator of Kenyon College’s Gund Gallery. Previously, she was a co-curator of the first MOCA Toronto Triennale, GTA21, and also served as the inaugural director of Artist Programs at the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art. Earlier in her career, she was the inaugural Nicholas Fox Weber curatorial fellow with the Glucksman Museum in Cork, Ireland and a curatorial fellow at Brooklyn-based nonprofit, Art in General. This year she is also part of the Center of Curatorial Leadership (CCL) cohort of 2023. She contributed to the 2021 New Museum Triennial publication and As We Rise (Aperture, 2021). Desrosiers is currently working on a monographic publication about artist Tau Lewis with the National Gallery of Canada.

Special thanks to Jimmy Wu for inspiring the exhibition title.

Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning is the follow-up to Indisposable: Structures of Support after the Americans with Disabilities Act, a three-year collaboration with more than thirty artists and scholars that emerged as eight online chapters each addressing the urgent questions of the moment where COVID-19 pandemic and demands for racial justice laid bare that some lives – especially disabled, queer, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) – are deemed disposable. These chapters serve as a unique archive of the ways in which artists and scholars responded to the intertwined histories of ableism and racism, delving into the profound questions of what makes our lives livable? How do we afford our own existence and what happens when we cannot? Who creates the means by which we survive; or, were we ever meant to survive? Where are we seen as disposable, and why?

Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning extends these conversations and questions by focusing on two topics critical to all eight chapters: care and mourning. The artists of Indisposable address the difficult work of not just how to care and to mourn for those deemed disposable but how to activate that work into tactics for insisting on our indisposability.

The artists in the exhibition are committed to resisting the oppressive ideologies of bodily productivity and “normalcy” that have been used as markers of human worth. Their work offers audiences the chance to consider new tactics for care and mourning, activist strategies emerging from within and uplifting communities living in precarity.

Indisposable: Structures of Support After the Americans with Disabilities Act is a multi-module exhibition that will roll out as a series of online events over the course of 2020-2021 and will culminate in a physical exhibition to open in the gallery at a later date.

Drawn from some of the leading artists and scholars addressing the lived experience of disability today, Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA addresses the urgent questions of our moment where pandemic and demands for racial justice intersect, insisting on answers to several questions: What makes our lives livable? How do we afford our own existence and what happens when we cannot? Who creates the means by which we survive; or, were we ever meant to survive? Where are we seen as disposable, and why? How can we insist on our own indisposability?

Through a range of media including photography, performance, and video, artists and scholars address how the support structures for life (health insurance, housing, food security, and education) are insecure at best for far too many people. COVID-19 and the continuing effects of white supremacy expose an ideological landscape where some lives, particularly those lived at the intersection of disability, queer, and BIPOC communities, are deemed disposable. However, precarious support structures are neither a new revelation nor a new crisis, but rather a continuation of a past which both predates the ADA and has not yet passed. And yet, these ongoing crises also highlight the generative humanity of people who create support structures on a small, local level through art, mutual aid, and interdependent communities. Indisposable prompts us to rethink, in exciting and inclusive ways, how human value is constructed in order to explore the life-sustaining practices emerging from embodiments often deemed disposable. With disability as the binding thread throughout, this exhibition is most importantly about how we raise each other up collectively, interdependently, materially, and with joy.

For Which It Stands is an evolving physical and online exhibition platform featuring contemporary artists who use the iconic American flag, loaded with centuries of convoluted history and exclusion, to create new symbols of national identity. Amid a highly volatile political climate and rise in white nationalism across the country, these artists assert their place and affirm the multiplicity of the American experience while addressing issues including police brutality, systemic racism, socioeconomic disparities, patriarchy, and misinformation.

Between 1838 and 1917, over half a million indentured workers were taken to plantations in Guadeloupe, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and elsewhere, intended as replacement labor following the abolition of slavery. Their subsequent experiences and those of their descendants revealed their sea voyage as a place of destruction and creation, a concept Torabully termed “Coolitude,” after Aimé Césaire’s “Négritude.” East and South Asian migration to the Caribbean is marked by violence similar to (but not the same, and not equal to) those of the system of slavery that preceded it. And like enslaved and formerly enslaved people, these migrants were and are also engaged in “wrecking work.” Blows were struck to the Hindu caste system, patriarchy, and other systems of power, new forms of culture and knowledge emerged, and, more often than not, better material living conditions for subsequent generations resulted.

The artworks that comprise everything slackens in a wreck demonstrate both this long, continuing history of survival and the particular contours of the artists’ lives and their necessary choices within the various spaces they inhabit in the Americas. Margaret Chen (Jamaica/Canada), Andrea Chung (USA), Wendy Nanan (Trinidad and Tobago) and Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Guadeloupe) share a lineage in indentureship, and each contends with the complex legacy of this heritage over a century after their ancestors boarded ships headed from Asia to the Americas. They grieve and criticize the enduring, destructive impact of processes of colonization, but in their practices—whether giving new life to old discards or proposing new ways of looking—they also recognize migrants’ determined survivability. They find and activate productive opportunities in the midst of crisis.

Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana explores one of the most critical issues of inequality and injustice facing our nation today through the lens of a population too often overlooked. With an alarming rise in rates of female incarceration, this exhibition seeks to build awareness of the crucial issues that impact women before, during, and after incarceration. The exhibition presents works from more than 30 artists who created new pieces based on the personal stories of 30 formerly and currently incarcerated women: persisters. Stories of loss, hope, despair, survival, triumph, and persistence are shared in a variety of forms, demonstrating simultaneously the universal struggles faced by communities impacted by incarceration and the personal resilience of each woman featured.

Per(Sister) originated at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University under the leadership of museum director Monica Ramirez-Montagut with assistance from Laura Blereau, and was developed in equal partnership with Syrita Steib and Dolfinette Martin with additional support provided by Operation Restoration and Women with a Vision.

Persister-Artist pairings:

Persister Andrea Martin with artist Henrietta Mantooth; persister Bobbie Jean Johnson with artist Rontherin Ratliff; persister Carmen Holmes with musician Keith Porteous; persister Chasity Hunter with filmmaker Kira Akerman; persister Danielle Metz with artist Sheila Phipps; persister Desiree’ Morrison with artist Ron Bechet; persister Dianne Jones with artist Nubian OmiSayade Sun; persister Dolfinette Martin with artist Carl Joe Williams; persister Dolita Wilhike with artist Epaul Julien; persister Earlneishka Johnson with artist Lee Deigaard; persister Fox Rich with artist L. Kasimu Harris; persister Gilda Caesar with artist Keith Duncan; persister Kimberly Shields with musician Margie Perez; persister Kiwanda Nelson with musician Kimberly Rivers-Roberts AKA Queen Black Kold Madina; persister Kristina Lopez with artist Ana Hernandez; persister Lea Stern with artist Devin Reynolds; persister Mary McLeod with musician Lynn Drury; persister Nicole Edwards with artist Maria Hinds; persister Ruby Barnes with musician Sarah Quintana; persister Shai Parker with artist MaPó Kinnord; persister Shondolyn Murray with the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra; persister Syrita Steib with artist Anastasia Pelias; persister Tonja Isaac with artist Amy Elkins; persister Tremica Henry with artist Butch Frosch; persister Tywanda Major with musician Lynn Drury; persister Veronique Williams with musician Spirit McIntyre; persister Wendi Cooper with artist Tammy Mercure; persister Wilkeitha Washington with the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra; persister Yolanda Ford with artist Ryn Wilson; persister Zina Mitchell with artist Cherice Harrison-Nelson. Additional artists include persister Brandi Holmes, Allison Beondé, jackie sumell, Taslim van Hattum, and The Graduates.

Image caption: Amy Elkins, Expectant Mother (Pink), Expectant Mother (Blue), Mother and Newborn, Mother and Son, Mother and Young Children, 2019, digital chromogenic prints on paper, 25 ¼ x 21 ¼ inches each, installed on Southern Magnolia, 2019, artist-designed wallpaper, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, New Orleans.

Utopian Imagination brings together works by artists who are imagining our existence on an imperiled planet. With the understanding that (radical) love is the answer to the violence presented in Perilous Bodies, this exhibition recognizes the difficulties of the task ahead. Utopias are increasingly hard to imagine in a world torn asunder by conflict. Using science fiction to frame this interrogation, this exhibition presents objects, bodies, vessels, and fragments created by artists over time that when pieced together, offer a vision of a future that includes all of us.

The Utopian Imagination exhibition trilogy concept was developed by Jaishri Abichandani.

Image: Cannupa Hanska Luger, The One Who Checks & The One Who Balances, 2018 Courtesy of the artist, Photo credit: Chip Thomas, Ginger Dunnill

Through the theme of Utopian Imagination, the trilogy of exhibitions in the gallery’s inaugural year create a trajectory toward a more just future. The first exhibition, Perilous Bodies (March 4 – May 11, 2019), examined injustice through the intersecting lens of violence, race, gender, ethnicity, and class. Radical Love responds to the first show by offering love as the answer to a world in peril.

Love, in the context of this exhibition, is defined by a commitment to the spiritual growth and interconnectedness of the individual, their community, and stewardship of the planet. Guided by the powerful words of bell hooks, “Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives.” The works in Radical Love are grounded in ideas of devotion, abundance, and beauty; here, otherness and marginality is celebrated, adorned, and revered.

The Utopian Imagination exhibition trilogy concept was developed by Jaishri Abichandani.

Essays from the curators

Radical Love by Jaishri Abichandani

An Ode to Love by Natasha Becker

Image: Athi-Patra Ruga, Umesiyakazi in Waiting, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and WHATIFTHEWORLD. Photo: Hayden Phipps

The trilogy of exhibitions in the gallery’s inaugural year offer varied interpretations on the theme of Utopian Imagination. The exhibitions bring together a diverse group of international artists who draw on craft, activism, data visualization, and agitprop to point the way to a more just future.

Perilous Bodies, the first exhibition in the series, includes photography, sculpture, video, installation, and performance by artists using their own cultural traditions to address oppression. Exploring societal violence fueled by xenophobia, racism, class, and gender inequality, these  artworks make powerful statements about ideas and realities we are quick to turn away from: black bodies, refugee camps, the detritus of borderlands, broken earth. Through these works, the artists seek to transform a world in peril into one we all want to live in.

The Utopian Imagination exhibition trilogy concept was developed by Jaishri Abichandani.