‘I Could Integrate Both Worlds’: How Black Lives Matter Cofounder Patrisse Cullors Uses Dance to Bridge Art and Activism

“You know,” said artist and activist Patrisse Cullors, standing
on the backlot of Paramount Pictures Studios in Los Angeles during
the Frieze art fair last week, “the electric slide is for every
family party, every family gathering. And I’ve done the electric
slide with black folks all throughout the country, and in London
and Australia. We all know—when someone starts it, we all start
together, and that kind of symbiosis is so beautiful.”

Moments later, she was leading a group of fair-goers, some of
whom were slightly confused, through the dance, and not everyone
knew what to do. At the start of each daily session, Cullors would
announce that this was a performance called Fuck White
Supremacy, Let’s Get Free. Wearing bluetooth headphones and
listening to a live mix by DJ Nameless, who was there on the last
two days of the fair, some attendees stumbled along until they
learned the moves, while others just wore the headphones and
watched.

It’s hard to disrupt the aspirationally commercial,
class-conscious energy of an art fair. Just yards away from the
dancers was RuinArt Champagne’s well-appointed pop-up bar. Cullors,
however, had the advantage of at least being away from the main
Frieze tent, and her dance unfolded on a wide street free of cars,
amidst a movie studio backlot built to look like New York City. Her
gesture, while carefully planned, was very simple, and required
only that people wanted to let loose for a little while.

Cullors, who cofounded the Black Lives Matter movement with
activists Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, was best known for her
activism before she entered the University of Southern California’s
MFA program in 2017 and began performing and exhibiting more
widely. She first performed Fuck White Supremacy, Let’s Get
Free in August 2019 in the parking lot behind the ltd
gallery in Los Angeles.

At the time, she had sculpture and video in a three-person
exhibition at the gallery tiled “Economies.” (“Oh not to think
about money!” the press release read. “The glow of billionaires,
misty skin clear eyes […] what immunity has been granted beyond […] the law.”) At the time, pictures of children in cages at the border
were circulating in the media and Cullors remembered “looking at
those images and just feeling helpless. I wanted to do something
that brought us together.”

She called up Shirley Morales, ltd’s founder, with an idea for a
participatory performance: dancing against white supremacy. “I
think part of the efficacy of a government that makes people feel
helpless, is that people then don’t feel like they can act,” she
explained. On the invitation she circulated on social media,
Cullors wrote: “From police brutality to mass shootings, our
collective psyche is stressed and worn,” adding that dancing could
“help regenerate our serotonin levels.” She expected 10 or 15
friends to come dance with her; over 200 people eventually arrived,
and did the electric slide for two hours.

Morales, whose gallery often shows emerging artists, proposed
Fuck White Supremacy, Let’s Get Free to Rita Gonzalez
and Pilar Tompkins Rivas, the curators of Frieze Projects in Los
Angeles.

Gonzalez, head of the contemporary art department at LACMA,
initially hesitated when Frieze LA director Bettina Korek asked her
to curate for the fair, worried that doing so could be a conflict
of interest. But she agreed to curate alongside Rivas, director of
the Vincent Price Art Museum, allowing the colleagues to extend
their past collaborations. (In 2017, they organized “A Universal
History of Infamy,” which surveyed the diversity and complexity of
current work by Latinx and Latin American artists while
demonstrating the absurdity of telling one marketable story about
these artists’ works.)

At Frieze, they wanted to give platforms to artists who might
not otherwise be at the fair. “We were feeling empowered—which is
something we typically don’t have—to say, we want to make this
choice, these are the artists that we would like to see,” Gonzalez
said.

They situated Cullors’s performance in front of a series of
colorful backdrops the artist Gary Simmons made in 1993, inspired
by his research into African American filmmakers. Among the most
arresting is Roots (1993), painted to resemble the
Ethopian flag, except the Lion of Judah carries the Statue of
Liberty’s torch in place of his usual scepter.

“But it’s not cheap to be here,” Cullors pointed out, alluding
to the exorbitant fees charged to visitors (general admission on
Saturday or Sunday was $125; tickets to view the special programs
only—meaning, tickets to see artworks exclusively outside the main
tent—were $60 on Friday and $25 over the weekend). “It’s really for
the folks who are here,” she added. “I’m identifying with a
completely different audience than I would in the activist
space.”

This is something she has been thinking about lately: how to
negotiate different audiences and platforms. On February 5, at The
Broad, she performed Allegories of Flight, in which she
wore a shimmering bronze-colored jumpsuit and large wings made from
found fabric. She led her audience on a procession from the museum
to a grassy plaza beside it, where a sound installation explained
Measure R, a state ballot initiative that calls on California to
“to develop a plan designed to reduce jail
population and incarceration.”

At Frieze, the wings Cullors wore were installed at the entrance
of a small shop in a faux backlot brownstone, and “Yes on R”
t-shirts made in collaboration with the South Central shop Kutula
were available for sale.

“I’m trying to have a bigger conversation about social
conditions, and sometimes I’m having that conversation in a really
pensive, sort of introspective kind of performance,” Cullors said.
“And then sometimes it’s really extroverted—like, let’s get up and
dance together.”

She points out that Fuck White Supremacy, Let’s Get
Free works well in large part because it is not for or
about Frieze: infectiously energetic images from the ltd gallery
performance are currently on two billboards on Sunset Boulevard,
thanks to the City of West Hollywood’s Arts Division.

“I feel like I get the most impact out of my work when it’s not
just sort of a one off performance, when multiple people across LA
city are involved in the process,” the artist said. “I could
integrate both worlds, my art world and my protest world.”

The post ‘I Could Integrate Both Worlds’: How Black Lives
Matter Cofounder Patrisse Cullors Uses Dance to Bridge Art and
Activism appeared first on artnet News.