How to Be a Culture Worker in Times Like These

As a Gen Xer, I grew up with the mantra “think globally, act locally.” Today, however, the tsunami of antidemocratic and oligarchic actions inundating the United States and many other geographies is decidedly global, overwhelmingly so. The trickle-up potential that acting locally once promised has clearly failed.

To fight back, we will need a polyphony of divergent yet parallel efforts. This will require us to reinvent culture work, transforming it so that we might look closely at deeply held “truths,” even when they provide comfort, and at long-maintained methods and behaviors that no longer serve us.

How is a culture worker to contribute in times like these? What follows is a lesson I learned during Trump’s first term. When I resigned my role as director of the Queens Museum in 2018 over a variety of problematic events that unfolded in the aftermath of Trump’s first election, I had to face a difficult reality: In the midst of a stressful period toward the end of my tenure, my husband said to me, “You may never work at a museum again.” I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach, the air knocked from my lungs. Having spent 20 years inside cultural organizations, this seemed an impossible outcome. It challenged my vision of myself, my identity, and how I thought I might contribute to the world. Who would I be if not a culture worker laboring inside museums and other arts nonprofits? I knew the liberal model of singular leadership at the helm of institutions was deeply flawed; any culture worker knows that the work of institutions is a profoundly collective act masked by the hierarchies of organizational charts and inequitable pay. And yet this was the only work ecology I knew; my imagination was limited by my own life experience.

Yet the more I thought about it, the more I knew that this was exactly the choice I had to make. I had to break from a situation in which I could not hold the values I prioritized. Perhaps I could realize some of the ways I’d wanted the institution to function outside its walls.

Thus began a trajectory that has brought me far more than I could have imagined in that gut-punch moment that broke open my imagination to the possibilities of working otherwise. I hope it has also broadened the ways I contribute to the urgencies around me. Not all change results from as dramatic a set of circumstances as those I experienced at the Queens Museum, but the seismic shift in my day-to-day work made me vastly more attuned to the various complicities I had been negotiating every day at the museum. It also made me see my world anew, levering open a whole set of imaginaries about what
is possible in cultural work.

SHORTLY THEREAFTER, in 2019, the Warren Kanders controversy unfolded at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Kanders had served as vice-chair of the Whitney’s board while he owned a military gear company called Safariland that sold body armor, tear gas, and such with the tag line “less lethal solutions.” Once artists and culture workers learned that the tear gas Safariland produced was being used against asylum seekers at the US border with Mexico; against Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri; and in Palestine against everyone, they led the movement to have him removed from the board.

What unfolded in the aftermath of these revelations holds a valuable model for how change transpires. In my book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (2023), I wrote about how the microcosm of change that manifested at the Whitney did not align with hierarchical theories of change. Rather, in this situation, journalists were writing critical articles; staff were questioning their roles at the museum and making their concerns known to its leadership; activists staged protests in the public spaces of the museum and elsewhere; many unknowable conversations and conflicts ensued behind the scenes; and several artists demanded their works be withdrawn from the Whitney Biennial. Some of the people involved in these actions overlapped, others did not: In fact, many were skeptical if not downright hostile to the tactics employed by others. And yet, Kanders eventually resigned his position, in response to these collectively generated pressures. A variety of tactics, working in parallel yet not in tandem, produced pressure and power.

All this made me think back to a conversation I had years ago with Rhoda Rosen, a white Jewish South African woman who had been part of the African National Congress (ANC) in its fight to end apartheid. She recounted being surprised by the timing of the regime’s fall: It happened amid disagreements over tactics, at a time when she felt as though the internal unity of the resistance was becoming atomized and dispersed. It was then that the wall of apartheid fell. And so it was for the US Civil Rights movement. The sheer variety of groups working sometimes in concert but more often in parallel with one another was remarkable: There was the NAACP, the Black Panther Party, SNCC, SCLC, the Nation of Islam, the Weather Underground, and CORE, among others—often taking fundamentally divergent approaches and tactics. And yet, change came.

As a culture, and particularly within movement-building, there is strength in heterogeneity. The friction between differing lived realities and tactical approaches makes the overall message stronger. It makes space for more people to enter the fray. Productive conflicts can emerge to strengthen positions. Working in parallel rather than explicitly collaborating has the effect of resisting the flattening of messages into sound bites. It allows perspectives to exist in all their complexity, and encourages solidarities to form in spite of difference. If we honor the advantages of being uncoordinated, might we also alleviate the proverbial “circular firing squad”?

Amid a profusion of attacks on free speech, human rights, and civil liberties; the dismantling of basic public goods and services; and threats to a democratic and Constitutional order, our individual and collective responses are increasingly urgent. Many of us are asking ourselves deep questions about how to act, both personally and within institutional work. To avoid consequences, should we pre-conform to restrictions we believe are coming? Do we opt for sleight of hand over overt resistance in order to protect what we have, to survive to fight another day? Or do we disobey? Take the bigger risk, make the bolder statement, resist openly—possibly inviting greater retribution?

IF DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM are at stake to the degree I and many others believe they are, we have no other choice but to resist, to refuse compliance with what we know is unjust. The contributions of cultural and knowledge institutions to democracy means that they must hold powerful, even “dangerous” ideas. This is also why they become targets. What role do they perform under autocracy and oligarchy? There is no museum or library that can fulfill its stated mission in the absence of self-determination and an active civil society. Without these, their reasons for existing collapse, obviating their social and educational functions. Resistance may take many forms, but what is essential is that we enact a refusal to obey, and particularly to refuse to pre-comply with what we imagine might be coming. How we each might do that and in what circumstances is where the finesse lies.

I want to suggest that a multiplicity of resistances is most likely to produce the change we need. These can come together only via networks of solidarity drawn from shared interests, permanent or temporary. Which does not mean we’ll agree with or even understand our allies fully. In her recent and important book, Imperfect Solidarities, Aruna D’Souza makes the case for honoring the reality of incomprehension, highlighting this condition as a strategy for survival as well as for more complex and effective solidarities. She writes, “To be able to act together without full comprehension, to be able to float on the seas of change: What would a politics based on that capacity look like?”

While I don’t know the answer to this question, it is clear that a perfectly harmonized chorus is not possible, and is potentially undesirable. After all, homogeneity is exactly what demagoguery desires. A polyphonic chorus can say so much more.

One of the more demoralizing aspects of the current moment is the way that what’s coming seems to be a fait accompli. How might we make justice seem inevitable instead? It won’t happen by way of a universally-agreed-upon, least-common-denominator approach: That is a recipe for failure. Rather, through a cacophonous pileup of disobedience, we too can become inevitable.