LOOPHOLE OF RETREAT: CONVENING OTHERWISE
Simone Leigh and Rashida Bumbray discuss an intertwined practice of building cultural infrastructures with care, friendship, and generosity, with Laura Raicovich Simone Leigh and Rashida Bumbray
Laura: An important aspect of the conversation I have witnessed unfolding over the past several years between the two of you, one that has been ongoing for a very long time, has been about building cultural infrastructure. You’ve both been enacting ways of working, being, and doing that does not abide by established rules. And that’s profound. Building infrastructures that allow for undoing and remaking, like the Loophole of Retreat, is so necessary.
Let’s start by going back to the first Loophole of Retreat. What inspired you to organize the conference in the first instance at the Guggenheim in 2018?
Simone: Building this platform was a very natural process at the Guggenheim because I was so supported there. It was one of the most organized museums I’ve ever worked with, and I was very close to Katharine Brinson and Susan Thompson. I had some experience with the Guggenheim’s commitments to education because I used to interact with their Education Department as a children’s art teacher when I worked for Studio in a School.
Originally, I thought I’d call “Loophole“ “Carte Blanche” because I wanted to have a conference that didn’t have a focus on Blackness or really anything specific, in the title, and that didn’t really have a title at all so that people would have to focus on the authors instead of some specific idea. I wanted to address the absence of the intellectual work of Black women as fodder for the making of and experience of art. In the artworld there was this assumption that if I’m talking about my life, then “it’s about gender.” If I’m talking about my life, then “it’s about race.” It follows that these are specific minoritarian concerns and, therefore, unnecessary, or special interest at best. That’s a smear that’s been used for so many years. I’m tired of that. I also have made a point of describing Black women as my primary audience. I realize in retrospect that this was the first step to building a platform. There were very important theorists—Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe—who were not considered as essential for contemporary art as say Foucault or Hannah Arendt. They were saying and doing things so pertinent to so many folks working in the art world. Outside of a few interventions, for example Leslie Hewitt and Omar Berrada’s critical sessions over at Cooper Union (Intra-Disciplinary Seminar public lecture series), these women were largely being ignored as core curriculum by the Art world. ( … )