Xaviera Simmons: Crisis Makes a Book Club

About

Featuring new monumental projects, Simmons examines how the conditions of the United States’ empire and the art industry are shaped by the construction of whiteness, labor politics, and institutional failures that are both intentional and deep-rooted.

Simmons addresses these histories by drawing throughlines between European art historical forms, language, landscape, and photography as a witness. Towering figures, video, and animations occupy chromatically coordinated gallery spaces, while large scale photographs of sculpturally composed flowers encircle a monolithic structure covered with hand-painted text written by the artist. Together with a billboard-sized graphic on the Museum’s facade, Simmons’ works tether form to sensuality, desire, and movement to underscore white American dominance and capitalism as intertwined mechanisms that uphold the vast reach of the United States’ empire. The framework of the exhibition includes critical language that directly amplifies the need for action in lieu of representation as an indicator of change. This political and rigorous discourse is accompanied by moments of pause and respite.

Simmons also presents a large projection in the distribution area of the La Jornada and Queens Museum Cultural Food Pantry that visualizes the work of the pantry and acknowledges the societal conditions of capitalism, wealth stratification, and financial manipulation from which food pantries are born. During the exhibition, multilingual questions will engage pantry organizers, volunteers, and patrons, and their responses will be updated periodically. Through this work, Simmons acknowledges that the necessity of food pantries can only be countered by accountability and large-scale systemic change in this nation.

The exhibition’s title, Crisis Makes a Book Club, reflects on the stasis of reading groups, podcasts, listening sessions, and other non-active movements offered as a stand-in for true action in the presence of state-sanctioned violence and death. The exhibition includes the long lecture, a series of day-long multilingual readings of works by invited writers. Thousands of books will also be distributed, including titles that contend with social histories of the United States and the far reaching systems that persist as a continuation of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous colonial damage and white terror.