Anisa Tavangar

Anisa Tavangar is a PhD student in the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University, where she studies the enduring legacies of colonial approaches, primitivism, and ethnography. She aims to uncover new strategies for ideological and physical presentation of African art with a priority on object stewardship and institutional adaptability. Anisa works as a writer and curator at For Freedoms, an artist-led organization that seeks to bring the voices of artists into public discourse. Through For Freedoms, she has led and curated exhibitions, programs, and initiatives with partners across the country highlighting mass incarceration, the Indigenous Land Back Movement, the values of prison abolition, supporting emerging artists, and more. She is a cofounder of the Guggenheim Greenhaus, a futurist thinking initiative out of the Guggenheim Museum and has presented on the capacity of beauty as a conduit for justice through the Slow Factory Foundation, Bend Design, and the Association for Baha’i Studies.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in September 2022.

GM: What was your path to your current career, as well as your job at For Freedoms?

AT: In college, I studied art history and Africana studies. But even getting there was a process. When I was little, I always felt drawn towards art and beauty, but was also really curious about how race and injustice exist in our world, and wondered what I could do about it. It wasn’t until college that I saw how these worlds collided. I learned about artists, institutions, curators, and figures who were working at the center of justice movements within the art world, which was so exciting and animating. In terms of my work at For Freedoms, I ran into Hank Willis Thomas at an art fair in New York. I talked to him about some of the work that I had done and shared my appreciation for his work. He asked me if I wanted to work at For Freedoms, and I thought, “Yeah! You know what, I should!” At the time, I was freelance writing and running digital media for artist’s studios, galleries, and various organizations, and that’s what I began doing at For Freedoms. From there, the role grew into curatorial and writing projects, which was very special.

GM: Could you discuss some recent projects you’ve worked on through For Freedoms?

AT: In 2022, I would say that my most significant project was the special exhibition I curated at Expo Chicago, which was a really fun and special project to do. This was during our exploration of “Another Justice: By Any Medium Necessary” , so investigating what it means to produce another justice -- what does it mean to envision alternatives to how justice is commonly understood or practiced and how can artists be a part of that process? In conjunction with that, we had a booth at the Expo that was titled “Another Justice. ” The idea was to visualize the values of abolition through the work of four Chicagobased artists – Anwulika Anigbo, Maria Gaspar, Jazmine Harris, and SHENEQUA. We presented these artworks at the fair, which was also exciting because art fairs are really commercial. They’re meant for galleries to present works that they want to sell; they’re not really curatorial spaces. Maybe there’s a process of discovery as you’re walking through, but that’s not the intention of a fair. So, this was also our way of thinking about how For Freedoms participates in this type of space. How do we approach this model of an art fair that still feels distinct and like us? We had a curatorial statement on the wall and an exhibition text, which is also very rare in an art fair. It was just such a fun opportunity to not only connect with these artists and build relationships with them, but also have these really critical conversations within the fair space. [The usual] art fair audience is people who can more or less afford art. Not everyone is there to buy of course, but many are, and who can afford to do that? (Continued)

There’s a specific subset of people [who attend art fairs], whether we’re looking at race or class, so it was also an exciting and intentional way to introduce prison abolition to perhaps a new audience of people. [It exemplified] the spirit of bringing people together and having a compassionate environment through the works of these really wonderful artists. [Another recent project is] the Google Image Equity Fellowship, which For Freedoms did in conjunction with Google and alongside Free The Work and Aperture as co-partners. I was one of our For Freedoms team members who went through the portfolios of many wonderful, talented artists. For that project, it’s really about recognizing that we have so much to give and offer, and thinking about how we can, along with other institutions, pool our resources and encourage young artists of color to make beautiful work.

Left to Right: Maria Gaspar, SHENEQUA, Anisa Tavangar, Jazmine Harris, and Anwuilka Anigbo. Photo by Jim Brodie

GM: How do you practice or advocate for creative activism, and why is it important to you?

AT: I don’t know if I would call myself an ‘activist’; my aspiration is that I am an organizer. Many of the methods of activism are a piece of that, but the way I try to model creative activism is by being authentic in who I am and how I’m approaching the work that I do. I love art and art history, but I approach these through the lens of abolition. The values of abolition require creating communities that will flourish in ways that we haven’t imagined before. From my perspective, that means [creating] access to both beauty and art. Not that art in itself is going to change everything or is the [sole] answer, but [recognizing] that art might be the way of channeling the values that we hope to realize. As a writer, curator, and graduate student, [I want to] think about the power of images in conjunction with the magnitude of what justice might look like. [This] helps me align the work that I do and centers how I hope to participate in the world.

GM: You recently became a PhD student in Art History at Princeton University. What do you plan on focusing on through your graduate studies?

AT: I wanted to do this program as an extension of some of the research [I completed] as an undergrad. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the presentation of African art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Essentially, looking at that collection and wondering how it got to be a collection, its relationship to African art history as a discipline, and the impact of the specific physical environment on the work of contemporary art that’s in the space. The short conclusion is that it’s not good. (Laughs) It’s based on primitivism and ethnography, which are really obsolete modes and methods that we wouldn’t accept these days, but are so ingrained in the ways that institutions function. Being in grad school, my hope is to continue the work of mining and uncovering the impact of primitivism, ethnography, and colonialist approaches on the presentation of African art in western institutions. But with that, [I want to] think about the ways that these works are being presented today, if current foundations are obsolete, and if so, what can they be replaced with? What are the values of the future that we can center in thinking about the future of museums? […] I think that one of the challenges of this work is how overwhelming it is. In my undergraduate thesis, I was looking at one room, in one museum, in one city – it was so specific, and yet it felt like an endless project. I think that’s one of the daunting challenges of talking about decolonizing or restructuring art museums. The scale is so massive and the problem is so complicated, often manifesting itself in ways that are subtle or elusive. It’s going to take a lot of us doing this work to realize new museum systems.

Photo by Edwina Hay

GM: What are your hopes for the upcoming midterm elections?

AT: My hope for the midterm elections is voter turnout. When I think about my relationship to politics, it’s a complicated one. I personally am not registered for a political party. I don’t think that politics or politicians will save us, but I definitely think that whoever we elect can possibly mitigate harm for a short amount of time. I see politics as an opportunity to practice collective voices and actions; voting is a way of expressing your right as a citizen and participating in something that is so much bigger than us. It’s not the final or only step, but is one piece of a really large web of collective and social action. I hope that as things feel like they are not only on fire, but also so strained, tense, painful, cracking, splitting, and all of these horrible things, that people will still want to participate and not disengage.

Photo by Jim Brodie

Photo by Leila Yavari

GM: You are also a co-founder of a climate and environmental justice initiative, Guggenheim Greenhaus. Could you talk about your involvement with this project?

AT: Guggenheim Greenhaus is a project that I got involved in through Tony Patrick, who is a member of the For Freedoms family and a wonderful, intelligent thinker and creator. Through Tony’s vision, we created this opportunity to bring the values of futurist thinking into the museum space. Through the wonderful Education and Public Programs department at the Guggenheim in New York, we’ve hosted a series of workshops and programs for all staff members, from interns at all four Guggenheim museums across the world, to museum board members. [The project is] meant to invite people at varying levels, all of whom are stakeholders in their own ways, to think about the type of museum that we want to build. What would the museum of our dreams look like in twenty years, and how do we get to that point? What do we want to take from the present moment into the future, and what do we want to build to be able to bring into the future? It’s a really wonderful project and initiative [that allows us] to think about museums in a whole new way, where it’s not just about leading with curatorial work and having other departments follow, but thinking about the ecosystem of the museum as a living, growing, organic entity. What does it look like when all of these different pieces work together in harmony?

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