This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

This is what we want to write for the theme. This is also known as wall text. The number of this text is around 200-500 words.

 alt_ /

Alt_ market is a functional art installation that transforms abandoned spaces into a communal free market where members of the community can give and take, thus creating a temporary communal shared economy.

We are artists, but our reach goes beyond artistic expression with ambiguity. We base our efforts on thorough research to make sure our projects—even at their most unorthodox—root art in the real and produce tangible, measurable impact.

Daniela Oliva and Sergio Zamora /

"Let us be plural."

"E.H. GOMBRICH
LA HISTORIA DEL ARTE"

 Riley J. Yaxley /

Death to the Imperial Museum


“It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world.”
-Ariella Aïsha Azoulay


“I am confident that the Guggenheim is stronger than ever before, and incredibly well-positioned to emerge successfully from the challenges presented by 2020,” said Nancy Spector, former artistic director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Foundation, in a public statement on October 8, 2020. Also in this statement, Spector announced her resignation after more than three decades at the famed art institution.1 She dodged accusations of racism from guest curator Chaédria LaBouvier—the first Black curator in the Guggenheim’s history—who organized the ground-breaking exhibition Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story. LaBouvier challenged the Guggenheim in a Twitter thread that later went viral saying she had to constantly battle for her autonomy, proper credit, and acknowledgement from the Guggenheim when it came to her curation.2 Spector’s resignation came after an investigation led by independent law firm Kramer Levin found no evidence that LaBouvier was “subject to adverse treatment on the basis of her race.”3 Yet, LaBouvier did not participate in the investigation—which was initiated by the museum’s board of trustees—fearing retaliation after being threatened by a board member in May of 2019 who warned her “not to go up against the Guggenheim.”4

In August, The Guggenheim released a 13-page diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) action plan amidst pressure from the public and A Better Guggenheim, an anonymous group of museum employees, saying the museum would amplify the voices of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color. Yet, the museum appears more concerned with eschewing blame and exculpating Nancy Spector’s reputation from LaBouvier’s claims, illuminating the institution’s chronic inability to enact its commitments to racial equity. The Guggenheim museum’s concerted effort to discredit LaBouvier against the backdrop of the their public statements proclaiming the institution is engaged in anti-racist work is likely unsurprising to many museum workers. During my time leading diversity and equity work at the Art Institute of Chicago, I often returned to Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, where she writes that diversity work often becomes about “generating the ‘right image’ and correcting the wrong one.”5 Even though the investigation proves little to nothing about Spector’s behavior since LaBouvier did not participate in the process,  the Guggenheim exalts the findings of the Kramer Levin investigation in order to correct the “wrong image,” that Nancy Spector, a member of senior leadership—was racist toward LaBouvier—to generate the image that the museum is staunchly committed to DEAI, and therefore, racism has been relegated to the museum’s past. We are presented with a catch-22 scenario where the institution wants us to believe that anti-racist work is fervently underway while simultaneously telling us that there is no truth in LaBouvier’s testimony of the Guggenheim’s racist culture. Which leads me to the core questions of this essay: What do we do when nonprofit art museums continually refuse to reckon with their racist histories and fail to meaningfully engage in racial justice? Can we reform art museum’s racist, imperialist, and colonial histories and present? How do we decolonize museums and envision new ways of engaging with art and culture? Is this even possible? And, If not—as I claim in this essay—then what alternatives to the imperial museum can we imagine together?

The Guggenheim is a particularly useful entry point for us to think through these questions because colonization and its impacts, including resulting wealth inequalities, can be clearly traced through its foundation and museums’ philanthropic history. The Guggenheim Foundation and Museum emerged from and continues to exist because of the enormous wealth of the Guggenheim family, which was amassed through mining and smelting industries in the US and Global South during the early 20th century. In recent years, activists and scholars have lamented US museums’ failure to show the connections between American corporate profits and the US’s long string of military interventions in the Caribbean and Central America. In addition, they have pressured museums to rebuke toxic philanthropy and focused largely on changing how museums collect, preserve, interpret, and present BIPOC cultural and artistic histories.6 7 8

However, these strategies are largely concerned with rehabilitating the museum, not dismantling the racist, colonial systems that have made their existence possible. This can be seen in the multitudinous diversity initiatives that have cropped up in the past decade that invite BIPOC and other marginalized people into the museum to help the institution improve its exhibitions—while often exploiting these same people for their emotional and intellectual labor within their institutions. Similarly, museums have attempted to reckon with “toxic philanthropy” in recent years. Coordinated campaigns by activist groups such as Decolonize This Place and P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) have forced Whitney board member Warren Kanders to resign after reports revealed his company Safariland manufactured tear gas that was used against Central American asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border and pressured the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Tate Museums in London to refuse philanthropic gifts from the Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma intentionally fueled the deadly opioid crisis in the US.9 While some of these developments ameliorate museums’ harmful attributes, they are fundamentally incapable of challenging the museum’s existence as an imperial institution. My aim is not to say that these are not useful strategies for mitigating institutional violence, but more so to illuminate how we often further entrench art museums as self-existent institutions and fail to account for their origins in imperial conquest. In fact, the Guggenheim’s DEAI Action Plan appears to clearly affirm my argument as they sheepishly admit that “the actions outlined in this plan cannot dismantle the structural inequities within our society or undo the ways in which institutions like ours have benefited from such inequalities.”10 So, how can we imagine solutions to decolonize art museums that actively work to dismantle the structural inequities within our society and undo the ways institutions like the Guggenheim have benefited from such inequities?

We need new strategies, ones that aim to entirely dismantle legacies of colonial and imperial violence and not merely ameliorate them incrementally. In his essay, “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argues that rich and powerful people have little use for history other than as raw material to build a monument to their own greatness, while “only those who are crushed by a present circumstance and who are determined at all cost to throw off their oppression,” have any need for a critical relationship to the history that has produced these circumstances.11 The history of the nonprofit art museum is often mythologized and told exclusively through the lens of the wealthy patrons whose names and legacies are enshrined within the museum’s collection and emblazoned on the gallery walls. This not only obscures the violent, extractive forms of capital accumulation necessary to build privately held art collections, but also,the way in which human capital has been expended in the invention of—and continues to be an expense in the persistence of—the nonprofit art museum. We need to develop new, critical relationships to the history of art museums. I draw on theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s concept of “potential history” as an imperative and strategy to unlearn imperial violence by resisting notions of progress and, instead, creating “slowed down spaces for repairing, providing reparations, and reviving pre-colonial patterns,” and recovering pre-imperial forms of co-citizenship not predicated through violence and exclusion.12 Instead of making grandiose motions forward (DEAI efforts that are focused largely on improving the museum’s abstract future), I propose that strategies for decolonization and racial justice must return to the moment of imperial violence from which our institutions emerged. We must document alternative histories that account for those who have been crushed in order to make the museum possible. We will continue to affirm the imperial arc of art museums and will be unable to envision what justice and the repair of torn worlds might look like if we do not first reckon with the conditions necessary for the birth of these institutions, particularly grappling with the ways resource extraction, Indigenous genocide, the exploitation of workers, wealth inequality, and financial capital all made the museum both possible and necessary. 

Throughout the rest of this essay, I perform a cursory analysis of the Guggenheim family’s history—specifically the accumulation of their vast wealth through open-pit mining in Leadville, Colorado. I use this history as a case study of the imperial origins of the art museum and as an example of the critical relationship required for us to begin the process of repairing centuries of harm. This process of historiography allows us to return to the moment of imperial violence and counteract our imperial impulse toward the future. Once we understand that the nonprofit art museum is a necessary feature of imperialism that preserves the worlds destroyed though imperial and colonial violence, we are able to begin the, perhaps more worthwhile, process of recognizing pre-imperial modalities of art that do not require discrete, collectible, and displayable objects whose intrinsic value can be fleshed out regardless of the world from which they have been detached.13 How can the concept of potential history—of creating slowed down spaces for repairing, providing reparations, and reviving pre-colonial patterns—allow us to understand the use and purpose of art before the museum was codified as essential and indispensable to the preservation and interpretation of the past? Azoulay is adamant: “decolonization cannot be limited to discrete objects, museums, or archives, and cannot be substantial as long as the people from whom all this wealth was expropriated are not allowed to lead the process.”14 The following analysis of the Guggenheim family’s history and their philanthropy is an attempt to trace from whom their wealth was expropriated in order to begin the longer project of dismantling existing systems of philanthropy and power and imagine bona fide strategies for decolonization that actually move us toward justice.  

A Colonial & Imperial History of the Guggenheim

The Guggenheim family’s legacy continues to live on through the global chain of world-renowned art museums and foundation, yet this philanthropic legacy conceals the family’s less-than-admirable history in Leadville, Colorado: appropriating natural resources and poisoning the earth and water, contributing to Indigenous genocide and the dispossession of native lands, and the exploitation of workers. Poet, scholar, and artist Jennifer Scappettone documents the history of the Guggenheim family in her essay “Smelting Pot,” explaining how the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was built through the global flows of capital, the exploitation of the elsewhere. This concept of the “exploitation of the elsewhere” deeply informs the work of this essay, emphasizing how art institutions are rooted in imperial violence and enacted through the collection, preservation and display of artwork. Drawing parallels between the Guggenheim family’s mining operations in Leadville and the construction of the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building in New York, Scappettone illuminates how open-pit mining spurred the family’s evolution into the leading financial capitalists in the world’s metal market, controlling over two-thirds of the world’s copper, silver and lead by the beginning of the World War I, and enabled them to build the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Because the Guggenheim was established through the wealth of a single family rather than a small community of devoted philanthropists, the museum and foundation are a unique example to understand the scope of the violent processes of capital accumulation and their impacts on the earth, workers, and Indigenous populations.15

Leadville’s history is inextricable from the genocide and dispossession of the Ute tribes in Colorado, who frequented the headwaters of the Arkansas River for nearly 500 years, visiting the area that would become Leadville after the discovery of gold brought a flood of prospectors in 1858. Motivated by the discovery of gold and silver in the San Juan Mountains, the US government negotiated with the Ute tribes and eventually forced them to sign the Brunot Agreement in 1873, which allowed miners access to more than 3.7 million acres of the Ute reservation in western Colorado and diminished the Southern Ute lands, depriving the tribe of seasonal camps, and annual elk and deer harvest. White settlers coveted the Utes’ land outside the ceded territory and settled the land over the next decade, forcibly displacing the tribe to Utah.16 Leadville was officially incorporated five years after the Brunot Agreement was signed and rapidly became a mining boomtown, mushrooming from a few hundred residents to approximately 30,000 in less than a year. However, the town’s fortunes changed rapidly when the United States, facing an economic panic, repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893 and caused the price of silver to plummet. Leadville later recovered from the crash, propelled by rebounding prices and an agreement between miners and managers on a new, lower wage structure that allowed more miners to remain employed, as well as a push for mining corporations to expand their production of gold, copper, zinc and lead.17

The Guggenheims got their start in Leadville when Meyer Guggenheim, patriarch of the family, bought one-third ownership in the A.Y. and Minnie silver and lead mines, for $5,000.18 By 1888 the two mines were making about $750,000 a year and produced the wealth necessary for Meyer Guggenheim to purchase a controlling interest in the Holden Smelter in Denver, Colorado, where his ore was refined, start the Philadelphia Smelting and Refining Company, and begin building a new smelter in Pueblo, Colorado. The family’s mining interests expanded in the coming decades as the Guggenheims took controlling interest of American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), purchasing mines, smelters, and refineries across the US and in Latin and South America, and they took advantage of cheap Mexican labor effectively avoiding the McKinley Tariff Act of 1890. Between 1914 and the US entry into World War I in 1917, US copper production nearly doubled, and copper prices nearly tripled before government price limits were initiated, significantly growing the Guggenheims’ net worth.19 According to the Colorado Geological Survey, the mines in Leadville and elsewhere in Lake County have been stripped, at present-day-prices, of $12.5 billion in gold, silver, lead, copper, zinc, and molybdenum since 1860. Although metal prices declined after World War I, forcing many local mines to close, causing production to fall by more than two-thirds, and it never recovered. In 1999, the ASARCO Black Cloud Mine, which produced lead, silver, gold and zinc, ran out of ore and closed, halting all mining in Leadville. In 2007, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold announced that they would reopen Leadville’s Climax Mine, boosting hopes that the re-opening would remedy the region’s lingering depression since the mine’s closure and solve Lake County’s 11.2 percent unemployment rate and sluggish real estate sales.20

After more than 135 years of exhausting the earth and the environment, Leadville’s population decreased to a tenth of its size in 1880, and the Environmental Protection Agency declared the town as part of the California Gulch Superfund site. The Superfund site currently encompasses more than 15 square miles and contains more than 2,000 mine waste piles, releasing hazardous levels of arsenic, zinc, lead and cadmium into the soil and groundwater.21 Municipal Judge Neil V. Reynolds, a fifth-generation resident of Leadville, describes mining as a “community of occupation, not a community of place,” which Jennifer Scappettone further emphasizes, writing that “when the extraterritorial interests of capital begin to lay claim to zones of copper bonanzas at home and abroad, the ‘natives’ of a place are often divested of the rights to the soil beneath their feet. That soil is then churned beyond recognition, and the so-called overburden (material deemed un-capitalizable) is unleashed into the air and water table that enters the local bloodstream.”22 The Guggenheim family and other notable businessmen such as Marshall Field and Charles H. Dow made their millions by occupying and appropriating the natural resources of Leadville, displacing the Indigenous populations, polluting the land and water, and exploiting the wage labor of miners. Once the land’s resources were depleted, the mines closed, and the earth wounded, Leadville’s population saw little of the wealth it created, facing dire economic circumstances when the Climax mine closed, devastating schools and the wider community. The mine had paid 85% of Lake County taxes, impoverishing the county and destabilizing the community’s ability to fund essential public services when it closed in 1995.23 Lake County has not financially recovered since. 

Meanwhile, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established in 1937 for the “promotion and encouragement and education in art and the enlightenment of the public,” and endowed to run one or more museums.24 Two decades later the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum was built to house Solomon R. Guggenheim’s art collection, memorializing not only Solomon Guggenheim, but the model of resource extraction on a novel border-blasting scale that built his family fortune.25 The Guggenheim’s philanthropic legacy expanded globally since the early 20th century as the museum became a franchise, expanding with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi—which re-commenced construction after long delays in 2019—and the foundation’s endowment grew to nearly $100 million. In 2019, the activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) protested the Guggenheim’s Sackler Center for Arts Education, urging the museum to cut ties with the Sackler family whose company Purdue Pharma has been accused of misleading doctors and patients about the company’s drug OxyContin, which has fueled the US opioid epidemic and has claimed more than 200,000 lives.26 Private WhatsApp chat messages between members of the Sackler family revealed that they discussed contacting various museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, who received major donations from the family and asking them to release short positive statements about the family’s philanthropy to clear the Sackler name.27 While the Guggenheim never issued a public statement, the scenario reveals the often unsaid implication of philanthropy as a public relations tool to exonerate the wealthy of their wrongdoing.

According to New York Times correspondent James Brooke’s 1997 article “Wealth of Mine Barons Turns to Dust at Source,” the Guggenheim family made a single donation of $25,000 to Leadville’s National Mining Hall of Fame in 1989, its only philanthropic gift to the town, despite extracting silver and lead worth $420 million from Lake County.28 However, Brooke poses the wrong question when he asks, “Why not a Guggenheim Leadville?” Would a Guggenheim satellite location in the town where they exploited the earth, the workers, and displaced Indigenous peoples until it became unprofitable erase and repair this history of violence? No. Instead, I propose that we must develop a critical relationship to philanthropy, using potential history as an imperative to document how art museums like the Guggenheim were financed and made possible through systems of capital that treat the earth, matter, and human beings as exploitable objects. We must acknowledge the imperial origins of the art museum—as a substitute for worlds destroyed through Indigenous genocide and dispossession, appropriation of the earth’s natural resources, and the exploitation of workers. Once we do this, we can return to this moment of origin and begin the necessary and grueling work of imagining what justice could look like and what institutions could replace the imperial museum. Decolonization requires that we refuse to enshrine the legacies and genealogies of racial and colonial violence within the art museum and, further, to destabilize the global flows of capital that enable the construction and continued existence of art museums through the exploitation of “elsewhere.”

The Death of the Imperial Museum & Imagining New Futures

Considering this specific history, I want to return now to the question I asked at the beginning of this essay: Can we reform the art museum’s racist, imperialist, and colonial histories and presents? I’m doubtful. At least not under the current model of philanthropy. As a professional fundraiser, I often joke to my friends that I wouldn’t have a job in my ideal world. The philanthropic industry wouldn’t exist in my ideal world. But that still leaves the question, what does a world without philanthropy look like and conversely, if the nonprofit art museum can’t be rehabilitated in its current iteration, how do we dismantle the museum? Foremost, my aim in this essay is to illustrate that art museums are unable to meaningfully engage in anti-racist work or decolonize themselves because the encyclopedic, collecting art museum is only made possible through violent capital accumulation. Attempts at reform will likely only mitigate these forms of harm while failing to address the root problem: that the museum can only continue to exist if vast economic inequality persists. As museums become more dependent on private philanthropy as public funding declines, they become increasingly beholden to wealthy patrons and trustees at the expense of their broader constituency. Thus, I’m weary of the recent surge of museum’s committing to diversity, equity and inclusion when few of these plans aim to address the “soft power” wielded by these overwhelmingly white, wealthy patrons and trustees—whose wealth is made possible through the exploitation of workers and the earth—to direct the activities of the institution and stymy meaningful change that could level hierarchies and reimagine the museum’s existence.29

While I recognize that a single essay can never dismantle ongoing systems of imperialism and colonialism, my hope is to emphasize the need for comprehensive historiographies of our institutions that identify the peoples who were and are exploited in order to make the art museum possible. Only when we identify the victims of the museum’s imperial and colonial violence can we engage in the longer project of justice, giving agency to the most affected communities to determine what reparations are owed after generations of dispossession and exploitation. What would it mean if members of the Ute tribe and other Indigenous peoples and generations of mining town workers and residents were given authority to determine the fate of the Guggenheim? I like to imagine it would mean the abolishment of the foundation and museum conglomerate as we know it. I use abolition here to stress the importance of decolonization strategies that do not recapitulate the violent historical processes that led to the emergence of the imperial art museum. Therefore, abolition, as I use it here, is not a reactive, destructive process that aims to disappear the museum from our cultural lives without grappling with its history; Rather, abolition of the museum is a question of how dominant understandings of cultural, material and artistic histories are constructed by the imperial museum, and how we can envision new relationships to these histories within and outside of these institutions—entrusting the people most harmed and disenfranchised by these institutions with the agency to determine the fate of the imperial museum.

I want to imagine what the abolishment and dismantling of large, encyclopedic museums might look like: Imagine a community-elected board tasked with redirecting institutional resources. What would it look like if bloated museum endowments were divested from financial instruments designed to extract wealth from workers and dispossess people of their property and, instead, were spent down and redirected towards initiatives identified by these communities, rather than perpetuating a model of charity that enables wealthy individuals to determine which public services are funded? Imagine the possibilities if we interrupted the cycle of multi-million-dollar capital campaigns earmarked for “starchitecture” construction projects financed through institutional debt.30 The museum consumes future income as debt in the present and, when the museum inevitably faces revenue shortfalls, the organization enacts austerity policies—laying off staff in order to be able to continue paying interest to creditors. Imagine a world where organizations are beholden to their communities and staff, rather than the interest of creditors. Imagine what it might mean for museums to repatriate the looted objects from their collections, returning them to the communities from which they were taken. What pre-imperial relationships to art could be revived through this process, allowing communities to be the caretakers of objects among which their inherited knowledge and rights, protective social fabric and safety, happiness, sorrow and death are inscribed? Imagine what could replace the encyclopedic art museum if the vast resources required for their existence could be redirected: a network of community-based organizations governed by community-elected board members that foster creativity and storytelling, steward the cultural histories of localities, and celebrate art as a relationship to oneself, to others, and to the world. Imagine the death of the imperial museum.



1 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Press Office. (2020, October 8). Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Announces the Departure of Nancy Spector, Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator [Press release]. Retrieved from https://www.guggenheim.org/press-release/solomon-r-guggenheim-foundation-announces-the-departure-of-nancy-spector-artistic-director-and-jennifer-and-david-stockman-chief-curator

2 Holmes, H. (2020, June 05). The Guggenheim's First Black Curator Is Denouncing the Museum's Treatment of Her. Retrieved January 09, 2021, from https://observer.com/2020/06/guggenheim-museum-chaedria-labouvier/

3 Kinsella, E. (2020, October 08). Veteran Guggenheim Curator Nancy Spector Has Been Cleared of Racial Bias Allegations-But She's Leaving the Museum Anyway. Retrieved January 09, 2021, from https://news.artnet.com/art-world/guggenheim-nancy-spector-out-investigation-ends-1914195

4 Pogrebin, R. (2020, October 08). Guggenheim's Top Curator is Out as Inquiry Into Basquiat Show Ends. Retrieved March 25, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/arts/design/guggenheim-investigation-nancy-spector.html

5 Ahmed, S. (2014). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (p. 34). Durham, United States: Duke University Press.

6 Hochschild, Adam. “The Fight to Decolonize the Museum.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, December 15, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/when-museums-have-ugly-pasts/603133/.

7 Shoenberger , Elisa. “What Does It Mean to Decolonize a Museum?” MuseumNext. MuseumNext, February 11, 2020. https://www.museumnext.com/article/what-does-it-mean-to-decolonize-a-museum/. 

8 Greenberger, Alex. “'We Don't Want Dirty Money': Decolonize This Place Protests Warren B. Kanders at Whitney Again, This Time in Warhol Retrospective.” ARTnews.com. ARTnews.com, November 18, 2019. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/decolonize-this-place-kanders-whitney-nine-weeks-of-art-and-action-12207/.

9 Leah, R. (2019, March 26). Dirty money and museums: Refusing Sackler family donations is just the beginning. Retrieved March 29, 2021, from https://www.salon.com/2019/03/26/dirty-money-and-museums-refusing-sackler-family-donations-is-just-the-beginning/

10 Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion. (n.d.). Retrieved March 29, 2021, from https://www.guggenheim.org/foundation/diversity-equity-access-and-inclusion

11 Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations, 1876, http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEENietzscheAbuseTableAll.pdf.

12 Azoulay, Ariella Aisha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso Books, 2019.

13 Ibid

14 Alli, Sabrina. “Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: ‘It Is Not Possible to Decolonize the Museum without Decolonizing the World.".” Guernica. Guernica, March 20, 2020. https://www.guernicamag.com/miscellaneous-files-ariella-aisha-azoulay/.

15 Scappettone, Jennifer. “Smelting Pot.” e-flux. e-flux, 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/dimensions-of-citizenship/178281/smelting-pot/.

16 Jonathon C. Horn, "Brunot Agreement," Colorado Encyclopedia, last modified November 24, 2020, https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/brunot-agreement.

17 Encyclopedia Staff, "Leadville," Colorado Encyclopedia, last modified July 07, 2020, https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/leadville.

18 Smith, Jr., Douglas M., 1988. "The Black Cloud Story", Geology and Mineralization of the Gilman-Leadville Area, Colorado, T. B. Thompson, David W. Beaty.

19 International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 4. St. James Press, 1991.

20 Raabe, Steve. “Reopening of Climax Mine Welcome but Not Heralded in Leadville.” The Denver Post. The Denver Post, May 3, 2016. https://www.denverpost.com/2011/05/27/reopening-of-climax-mine-welcome-but-not-heralded-in-leadville/.

21EPA Region 8, and Linda Kiefer, FIFTH FIVE-YEAR REVIEW REPORT FOR CALIFORNIA GULCH SUPERFUND SITE LAKE COUNTY, COLORADO (2017). https://semspub.epa.gov/work/08/100001832.pdf.

22Scappettone, Jennifer. “Smelting Pot.” e-flux. e-flux, 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/dimensions-of-citizenship/178281/smelting-pot/.

23Brooke, James. “Wealth of Mine Barons Turns to Dust at Source.” The New York Times. The New York Times, November 4, 1997. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/04/us/wealth-of-mine-barons-turns-to-dust-at-source.html.

24“History.” The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Accessed January 14, 2021. https://www.guggenheim.org/history.

25Scappettone, Jennifer. “Smelting Pot.” e-flux. e-flux, 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/dimensions-of-citizenship/178281/smelting-pot/.

26Moynihan, Colin. “Guggenheim Targeted by Protesters for Accepting Money From Family With OxyContin Ties.” The New York Times. The New York Times, February 10, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/09/arts/protesters-guggenheim-sackler.html. 

27“Sackler WhatsApp Chats Reveal Reliance on Museums to Clear Family Name.” Artforum. Artforum International, December 23, 2020. https://www.artforum.com/news/sackler-whatsapp-chats-reveal-reliance-on-museums-to-clear-family-name-84726.

28Brooke, James. “Wealth of Mine Barons Turns to Dust at Source.” The New York Times. The New York Times, November 4, 1997. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/04/us/wealth-of-mine-barons-turns-to-dust-at-source.html.

29Zarobell, J. (2017). Art and the Global Economy. Oakland: University of California Press.

30Michael, C. (2015, April 30). The Bilbao Effect: Is 'STARCHITECTURE' all it's cracked up to be? A history of cities in 50 buildings, day 27. Retrieved March 22, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/30/bilbao-effect-gehry-guggenheim-history-cities-50-buildings



Full text

 Simon Tatum /

As a person born and partially raised on Grand Cayman, a small island in the English-speaking Caribbean, I have grown interested in investigating ideas around identity politics and cultural exchange within my visual art practice. My interests have led me to focus on the topic of tourism and tourist advertisement strategies within my current graduate research. I have been dreaming about re-evaluating the visual tropes of tropical tourist destinations. I want to see representations of non-Western cultures (specifically Caribbean cultures) re-imagined through the exploration of symbolic materials and the new curation methods of twentieth century tropical souvenirs produced by Western countries.

The strategy for my recent research incorporates found objects, fragments, collected materials, images, and videos from my international travel to Western countries in conjunction with visual tropes from historical tourist products like advertisements and souvenirs. Moreover, I hope that my works will be collected by small art institutions within the Caribbean. I want the works to be inherited by future generations and seen as examples of critical evaluation towards Western countries and their relationship to my community (the global Caribbean).

 Erika Holum /

"Self-Portrait, Summer 2019"

"The Good Hours
of the Day"