Session 1 with Ceci Moss:
Collective List of Questions

This session took place as part of the Rethinking Structures Book Club, co-hosted by Carla + WCCW. Sign up for our next session HERE.

Session #1 was lead by writer, curator, and educator, Ceci Moss, and focused on the text As radical, as mother, as salad, as shelter: What should art institutions do now? As a group, we imagined a collective set of questions for 2021. The through-line across the questions is a focus on care, connectedness, transparency, and a continued push towards equity in the arts. (see the list below).

As Ceci Moss explained regarding her book selection, “As radical, as mother, as salad, as shelter: What should art institutions do now? compiles responses to a survey distributed to curators, museum directors, artists, and writers in the wake of Trump’s election to office,  and it asks big picture questions about the role and value of art institutions during a crisis. One question in the survey is simply “How can art institutions be better?” As we move into a new presidency and new year in 2021, I’m hoping we can revisit this text as a jumping point to imagine new, visionary forms of arts organizations, going far beyond “better” into the entirely revolutionary.”

During the session, 100 attendees broke into breakout rooms to do just that. As small groups, attendees developed a set of questions in response to this prompt: If As Radical was written in January 2021, what questions would the survey include? As a group, work together to draft a new question (or more) for 2021.

What resulted was a list of over 80 questions that the group read aloud together as a way of collectively cementing these questions, and creating a shared starting place to begin to imagine solutions together. This list is intended to be shared and circulated, and represents the collective imagining of the artists, curators, writers, art workers in attendance:

• How can we use this moment to negotiate the concept of art as a practice versus a product? How, as stewards, might institutions, curators, and artists lead this?
• Is there a way to nurture the institution as a practice?
• How might we change infrastructure so that creative agency shifts more to the artists involved?
• Who does your institution position as the stewards of its work and mission?
• How do we negotiate labor within the institution as one of creative agency?
• What would it mean for your institution to be managed from the ground up?
• How might the role of the curator or tastemaker be more dispersed and diversified now? How does that relate to the tension of the public’s opinion and the curator’s vision?
• How can we shift formal systems within institutions to be informal? What action does that take?
• How can art institutions create governance structures that are democratic, inclusive and anti-oppressive?
• How can arts organizations become spaces for artists and activists to work together?
• How can institutions that are steeped in bureaucracy provide opportunities to reimagine new hiring/personnelle structures?
• How can arts funders be more accountable? (less trickle down from larger institutions, more capacity building of smaller ones)
• How can we preserve fair wages when we know that the pool of funding for the arts will be much less in the aftermath of the pandemic? 
• How can we as arts workers in positions of privilege, use our power towards collective good on an individual level (to help support and uplift the work of BIPOC communities)? 
• How can art institutions become intergenerational community support systems?
• How can art institutions address white supremacy within the framework of the institution?
• How can we support people when their career is threatened by challenging systems? 
•  How can arts organization model anti-racist practice and spaces?
• How does your institution deal with internal critique and dialogue? What are the stakes at which staff are not anonymous when voicing concerns?
• How can we create a member-run non-profit that is not run by a board?
• Can art institutions come up with their own radical framework (what does it mean to be radical in your institution both individually and via collective, communal spaces? what does being inclusive mean? Accessible? etc.)
• When can we create space to ask the question: Who knows how we can best be organized right now, for this moment?
• How can curators actually engage with communities and know the histories that have cultivated who and what the community is?
• How can communities define themselves in a way that is mutually respectful and telling of both the institution and the community itself?
• What would it mean for all institutions to be run by artists?
• How much time per week are you spending creating a more inclusive institution? 
• What does it mean to be part of a network of institutions? How do you understand the value of one organization over another?
• How can we create more open feedback between institutions as workers travel between them?
• How do we turn institutional competition into radical institutional collaboration?
• How can art institutions learn to anticipate and be proactive rather than reactive?
• How might we focus on focusing on humans above systems?
• How can we use controversy as a jumping off point to start discussions? 
• How can institutions become brave spaces (truly opening up to “uncomfortable” conversations with the communities that they serve)? 
• How can we create spaces for re-evaluating our definitions of what radical acts are in a more collaborative and supportive system?
• How can accountability be more of a baseline measure/value for art institutions? 
• As we continue to divest how do we stay grounded and foster spaces that are more generative? 
• How can the art sector become more symbiotic to serve the collective well-being? 
• How can arts institutions prepare for a future when we can be together (in-person)?
• How can larger institutions better partner and provide mutual aid and support smaller ones ?
• How can institutions divest? 
• Can we convert public art institution assets into housing? Can we convert land from public institutions back into land for colonized people?
• What are you doing to ensure diversity and representation at all levels of your institution? 
• How are you taking care of your employees and ensuring their mobility? 
• How can an organization foster a high-trust environment?
• Can and should art institutions offer a space for healing?\
• How do you locate yourself within your institution’s hierarchy and what power do you think you wield?
• How can art institutions be consistently intentional about giving back to the community beyond temporary public reactions and “trendy” acts of care?
• How can we retain the accessibility that online connections have given us while also acknowledging the value of in-person experience / knowledge?
• How can art institutions be more self-reflexive in identifying their communities and revising their commitments to them?
• How can we use the pause of the pandemic to reflect and envision the future we want to have? What opportunities are afforded by reopening after the pandemic shutdown? 
• If you were to take apart an art institution today – what would you salvage? What would you scrap? What would you build?
• How does your institution deal with critique and what are the stakes within your institution to participate in critical dialogue?
• How do you create long-standing, sustainable social spaces for healing?
• What does accountability look like?
• What kind of institution do you want to participate in?
• How does dissolution of the walls of the “arts institution” open up new language to reimagine the dynamics of the art world?
• How do we shift the power dynamics between institution and public to get input from the community? 
• Could art unions be a way towards equity?
• How does a connection with a local community make way for a larger national community?
• How do we celebrate multiplicity?
• Who are we operating for? How do we act as a bridge?
• How can more transparency break down barriers and power structures?
• Can an art institution/organization function without a board? If so, what would leadership and funding look like without the funding of a board? 
• Can we take the opportunity to re-evaulate how art plays into toxic narratives of individualism and explore healthier, collaborative alternatives?
• How can we as a community overcome our tie to individualism to open the door for more voices to be heard and make more space for change and progress?
• What would be the methods of getting collective buy-in for something like a fee schedule, similar to CARFAC in Canada?
• In terms of transforming arts institutions and art ecologies, is incremental change possible? Or do we need to burn it down?
• What is the role of art institutions in crisis?
• How can institutions confront their “old” structures? And while in those structures?
• What do art institutions look like post-hierarchy? 
• Imagine the future of art institution’s organizational structure? What does it look like through the position of our engagement with it from the outside? 
• What would an active way for communities to hold institutions accountable look like? As being part of the institution, and not from outside? 
• How do communities take an active role in generating substance of art institutions?
• How do art institutions take an active role in communities that they are paying lip service to?
• How do institutions take part in a larger cultural ecosystem?
• How can art institutions support artists as workers? 
• How can art institutions use political weight to legitimize art as labor?
• What does creative and cultural mutual aid look like?
• How can art institutions do Land Back? Reparations? 
• What does community ownership of institutions look like?
• Can the language surrounding art institutions provide more agency to those involved? 
• Are there ways we can build sustainable community that exists beyond the institution? Have we settled into a routine?
• How do we build trust between each other and an institution and its public?
• Are institutions willing to walk into a future where institutions are abolished?
• How can art institutions integrate public, long-form dialogue into their programming at all of its stages (inception, execution, reception)?
• How can art institutions stop contributing to gentrification and displacement?

Ceci Moss is a curator, writer, educator, and founding director of Gas. Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, The Wire, CURA, and various art catalogs. Her first book, Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu, was published by Bloomsbury. She is a lecturer in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts.

More by Ceci Moss