In 2024, as in past election years, many museums helped register voters and served as polling stations. Some museums mounted exhibitions celebrating political engagement and exploring the democratic process. But many pundits are warning that our current version of democracy itself may be in danger, and research suggests the public may agree. If so, what’s next? How can we expand our thinking, before defaulting to the easy (and frightening) prospect of autocracy or authoritarianism? In today’s post, James Leventhal, Executive Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in San José, relates how his staff worked with artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats to explore more speculative options for the future of democracy.
—Elizabeth
Elizabeth Merritt, VP, Strategic Foresight and Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums.
When we were first invited as the ICA San José to host Jonathon Keats’ Future Democracies Laboratory, I imagined it to be part of a broad-stroke provocation, a major production. But, in the end, I saw that it was the small things—the stories, the little acts—that mattered. Facing a political discourse emphasizing mass deportations and undermining the faith in elective procedures, these were important lessons for us as an institution focused on caring.
Jonathon Keats and I worked together on one of his very first museum projects entitled REVISIONS Jonathon Keats: The First Intergalactic Art Exposition (2006), installed at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, CA. Inspired by Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992), Keats helped the Magnes initiate a series of programs where contemporary artists were invited to reinterpret or engage with the collections of one of the oldest Jewish Museums in the US. Two decades later, Keats has now seen scores of institutional projects and a 360-page hardbound catalog from Hirmer Verlag entitled Thought Experiments: The Art of Jonathon Keats (2020, edited by Julie Decker and Alla Efimova).
When we decided to do the Future Democracies Project at the ICA San José, we scheduled it to coincide with the 2024 election. The installation consists of two workstations that harken back to a certain machine nostalgia, equal parts Star Trek stage set and 80s office aesthetic. Designed and built in collaboration with San José State University professor Steve Durie and SJSU students, the workstations process and predict representative election results based on visitor input, returning data sets for the students to study. With its welcoming, engaging spirit, I saw the project as essential and aligned with my desire to bring a sense of broad community engagement into the work that we were doing at the ICA San José.
As Keats writes:
In the United States and around the world, democracy is in peril. Caught up in partisan gridlock, and often indulging in corruption or bigotry, all too many politicians are unable or unfit to govern. What if we automated governance, generating laws without legislators? What if citizenship were expanded to enfranchise nonhuman animals and plants? These are some of the core questions addressed by The Future Democracies Laboratory. This immersive exhibition is the first public showcase of the lab’s provocative experiments, undertaken initially with San José State University’s student body under the guidance of Digital Media Arts adjunct professor Steve Durie.
In addition to working with the university, supporting local artists, and being a platform for learning, it was my hope that the project would be able to reach out to a broad population. But doing so would mean working within the nuances of the San José community.
San José has long been a multiethnic city of immigrants, from the global workers drawn to Silicon Valley today to the farm workers who came here in previous generations to do necessary labor on the fields and orchards. The 2012 US Census American Community Survey reported San José’s self-identified race/ethnicity as 33.2 percent Hispanic, 32.8 percent Asian, 27.6 percent white, 2.8 percent African American, and 3.6 percent other, with English spoken at 43 percent of homes, Asian/Pacific Island languages at 26 percent, Spanish at 24 percent, and others at 7 percent.
Trauma runs through the histories of many of these communities. This goes back to the earliest arrival of the Spanish in the area, who used violence to control local populations. (For more on this history, look into the incredible exhibition California Stories from Thámien to Santa Clara at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, which unpacks the brutal legacy of the Catholic missions.) After the Chinese settled in the region based on the railroad building of the nineteenth century, European-descended locals burned down San José’s Chinatown in 1890, destroying property and livelihoods. During the Second World War, Japanese Americans, many of whom had started to take ownership of the farms they had come to work on, were sent to internment camps, with their property taken from them to be sold. In the 1970s, Vietnamese populations forced to flee US aggression in Vietnam made their way to the region, with San José now being the largest population of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam.
As we began meeting with community and arts leaders a year out from the installation of the Future Democracies Project, we started to see how histories like these would impact its reception. Many of our advisors felt the exhibition would not resonate in their communities, because they had grown up without a sense that democracy was “for them.” In many cases, their parents had grown up disempowered or under communist rule, and did not value elections as a result, or even feel certain that democracy was a realistic idea. Friends described parents or grandparents watching Fox News all day, already questioning the resolute status of voting in this country. The perception that democracy was not working was already mainstream, in a sense. We realized it was not through the kind of provocation we had in mind that we would provide the kind of broadest welcome to which we are committed.
To achieve this welcome, concurrent with Keats’ exhibition, we also opened Allegedly the worst is behind us, a group exhibition curated by the ICA’s Curator and Director of Public Programs Zoë Latzer that highlights the practice of twelve contemporary artists who pursue personal and collective acts of rebuilding fractured memories and stolen histories. We created a space where everyone can see themselves in the picture(s). This collection of stories, in a sense, by artists of disparate backgrounds has received a positive critical response, and been welcomed by all of our audiences. We also launched at the same time a large installation on the facade of the ICA by local artist Oscar Lopez entitled “Without Them is Not Us,” in partnership with Local Color SJ. It is a tribute to the farm worker labor organizing movement, showcasing the iconic figures of Cesar Chavez, Larry Itliong, Dolores Huerta, and Philip Vera Cruz.
Our opening event was packed. In response to the Lopez project on our facade, a local troupe of dancers offered to do a ritual and performance for the opening event, to bless our proceedings, and to pay tribute to the labor movement and all the stories we were sharing. In this time, we found that it was the people—our neighbors, our stories, our shared humanity, and our need for mutual support—that was redemptive. These are difficult times for us to measure the effectiveness of our democracy with so much propaganda and disinformation circulating, but our stories remain, our connections, the little acts that matter, rather than deliberate provocations.
On the evening of November 7, the Thursday following the election, we did a shared project with San José State students and educators led by Jonathon Keats, and in partnership with the San Jose Museum of Art. In small groups, we did hands-on activities exploring the themes of the Future Democracies Laboratory. The students came from varied backgrounds, like one person in my group who was from Vietnam and needed to use Google Translate when presented with terms like “freedom.” It was interesting to hear their perspectives on that concept in particular, which they proposed was in fact oppressive, because it forces people to work too hard. For these students, the idea of freedom was associated with the accumulation of money. With Keats’ guidance, we created models using found materials as a springboard for shared dialogue.
It was the working together that felt like a healing balm: reminding us that, in our togetherness, we find each other, even when our systems fail us. All of which reinforced for me the importance and power of the work we do for our local communities—put best by the Buddhist saying a colleague recently recalled to me, “Tend to the garden you can reach.”
This post was originally published on here
