ARTS & CULTURE Dreams of the continent

By EMELINE BOEHRINGER

“Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities” at the DePaul Art Museum explores a forgotten nationwide solidarity movement. The future was on Lucy Lippard’s mind in 1982. That year, the art historian, critic, and organizer christened the opening of all-star art collective Group Material’s New York exhibition “¡LUCHAR! An Exhibition for the People of Central America” as “an art for the future . . . preparing a voice and an image for the dreams of the continent, a vision for the revolution for when it comes.” In another two years, with an eye toward that revolution, Lippard—along with a group of co-organizers, artists, and activists—would set in motion an ambitious, unprecedented project aimed squarely at Reagan-era violence and imperialism in Central America.

Known as “Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America,” or “Artists Call,” for short, the movement formed around an extraordinary mobilization of people, ideas, and resources that would bring 31 exhibitions, performances, readings, and screenings to 27 cities across the United States and Canada. From famous artists like Alfredo Jaar, Martha Rosler, and Nancy Spero, to local activists and grassroots organizations, Artists Call imagined a pan-American solidarity through the monumental e orts of thousands of participants reflecting on war, insurgency, and massacre in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

In the short term, Lippard’s dream of the future seemed to be on the horizon. In the long term? Almost 40 years after Artists Call, the project’s incomplete, uncatalogued archive lay untouched and ignored at the Museum of Modern Art’s archives in Queens, where it was unearthed by curator Erina Duganne in 2017. Significant artworks had been destroyed or lost. Information about participating artists was scant. A list of exhibition venues, events, and actions was nonexistent. “The art world forgets,” commented Lippard in early 2022, at the first iteration of “Art for the Future” at the Tufts University Art Galleries.

Now on view at DPAM, “Art for the Future” resurrects Artists Call thanks to five years of archival work by Duganne and cocurator Abigail Satinsky. The exhibition, which includes archival material, replicas of lost work, stand-ins by participating artists, and contemporary commissions, probes a particular moment in which art was figured as a mode of political work, a form of information, imagination, and insurgence that should, and must, transform public conscience.

This orientation, which relied on a prophetic belief in razor-tipped awareness, agency, and action, infl amed in a post-Vietnam War era, locked in a vision of the present crackling with possibility. Some of the most striking archival material is graphic, appropriating the language of advertising and propaganda.

Alfredo Jaar’s We’re All Created Equal (1984), related to a now-lost work originally shown in an Artists Call exhibition, juxtaposes the phrase, “We’re all created equal. After that, baby, you’re on your own,” originally printed in a Fortune magazine ad espousing the American fantasy of capitalist individualism and progress against a black-and-white photograph of U.S.-backed Contra rebels trained to overthrow Nicaragua’s new Marxist Sandinista government. U.S. intervention, for Jaar, is a violence shared by the sink-or-swim spirit of American exceptionalism and an ironic counterpoint to the extractivism and exploitation propping up the country’s economic prosperity.

Other materials beg for action through the visual hallmarks of popular solidarity and war flyers. Carlos Cortéz’s ¡Fuera! No necesitamos mas tropas! (1984), one of two artworks sourced from Artists Call activities in Chicago by DPAM associate curator Ionit Behar, shows four woodcut faces creased in worry, hands outstretched to push back black gun barrels. Drawing on Cortéz’s print work for the Industrial Workers of the World, the poster ex-

R“ART FOR THE FUTURE: ARTISTS CALL AND CENTRAL AMERICAN SOLIDARITIES”

changes Jaar’s wordplay for straightforward address. In photographs sourced from the archives of artist Mary Patton, Chicago artists—including Cortéz—block the entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago with banners and posters including devilish icons of Reagan, authoritarian political advisor Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the menacing French firing squad from Goya’s The Third of May 1808.

Looking back at these efforts, from a future very di erent from the one Artists Call envisioned, is to be haunted by failure. Conflict, war, violence, and political repression continues to reverberate in Central America, as do the discrimination and exploitation of Central American immigrants in the U.S. The more visionary work in “Art for the Future,” counterintuitively, rejects the future, standing instead as linear fact, insu cient to hold Central American aspiration and possibility. Sabra Moore’s Reconstruction Project (1984), a collaborative re-creation of a rare surviving Mayan codex, links the 16th-century destruction of Mayan culture with the killing of roughly 200,000 Guatemalans by U.S.-backed military regimes. “Victims of history,” writes educator and artist Josh Rios, “disrupt the fiction of progress as an upward bounding temporality where tomorrow will always be better than today.”

The curators of “Art for the Future” gesture toward the disruption of linear time in the organization of the exhibition as well, mixing archival materials with contemporary work, which also serves to correct another failure of Artists Call—the almost complete lack of work by artists from Central America, an oversight that Behar attributes to geographic and cultural barriers, as well as to the few and precarious venues for art in countries ravaged by violence. It is also the result of specific blindnesses and affordances of a group, including commercially successful artists, wading into politics while balancing desires both radical and market-driven. In confronting this complex legacy, “Art for the Future” is less about promoting the archive of Artists Call than the productive confusion that surrounds the passing into history of any imperfect project whose aim remains incomplete, for which the future is no longer a horizon but an ethos.

In this way, Lippard’s assessment is truer than ever—the work continues to be for a future, just not the future we live in. If anything, today this future feels more remote, in a world where awareness and attention, once imagined as a sphere of political progress and action, is saturated and sold, diffused and stripped of its relationship to reality. Hans Haacke’s U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983 reads like a metaphor for this condition. The bare, eight-foot wooden cube, stamped with black text reading “ISOLATION BOX AS USED BY U.S. TROOPS AT POINT SALINES PRISON CAMP IN GRENADA,” is perforated above eye level with rectangular ventilation holes that reveal glimpses of an inky, black interior. The exterior delineates those known unknowns— the facts of interrogation, torture, abuse, intervention, extraction—that leave a trace to be followed, and a cause to be made visible.

The internal vacuum is stripped of sensibility, featureless and unintelligible—the achievement of power to erase the possibility of sight itself. Inside the box are the unknown unknowns, hundreds of thousands of lives erased from the face of the earth, the total obliteration of futures, the absence of sight, attention, history, or understanding. The feat of Artists Call and “Art for the Future” is in its various tracings of this boundary, all shadows of an empire whose dissolution remains the dream of the continent. v

Come Out, Come Out

my dead tells me that girl needs the earth so i make her a cup of black tea my dead tells me that girl’s going too far so i pack a flashlight i don’t think traveling in the dark is a bad thing but we don’t have the best memory we come from folks who go & forget how to return we come from folks who build wherever they land she has built a home in this dark is it bad for me to do anything other than bring her candles and tell her it is beautiful her living thinks it’s more than bad it is evil they think i am the dark a devil a murky path they call me the names they called my mother

By Venus Ayalani

and my dead are furious they call me the names they called my grandmother and my dead rise from the bottom of some ocean they call me the dead and just like that i am treading water struggling to catch my breath both here and drifting if i was the names they call me by i’d swallow them whole and disappear but no i am here hungry for a place to return to me & her do the searching together me & her split bread while we wait me & her buy tea lights for this home we make it as pretty as we can and maybe that is the bad thing we made the dark so beautiful she doesn’t want to leave

Venus Ayalani is an aquarius rising from 79th. The hood’s favorite griot. Tapping into some cellular memory; their poetry is a conjuring / is veneration / is time traveling / is to be left at the altar. Sometimes, Ayalani doesn’t write the poem at all. Sometimes they just sit in front of a journal with a pen in their hand, listening, as their folks tell the stories themselves.

This Poetry Corner is curated by Raych Jackson. Rachel “Raych” Jackson is a writer, educator and voice actor. Her poems have gained over 2 million views on YouTube and have been published by many— including Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, The Shallow Ends, and Washington Square Review. She co-created and co-hosts Big Kid Show, a monthly variety show in Chicago. Raych’s debut collection EVEN THE SAINTS AUDITION (Button Poetry) won Best New Poetry Collection by a Chicagoan in the Chicago Reader fall of 2019. RAYCH-JACKSON.COM

A biweekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

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