The Artist-Scholar: Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB)
“We need to stop the galas. We need to stop the begging.”
5 QUESTIONS WITH Rashayla Marie Brown
Artist & Scholar, RMB Studios
Chicago, IL
Artist-scholar Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) manages an "undisciplinary" studio practice through photography, performance, words/writing, installation design, video and film directing. Exploring vulnerability and mastery at the intersections of art history, religion, and popular culture, RMB's work often uses the word and the image to enact a code of ethics beyond mere representation. A lifelong nomad and polymath who has moved 24 times, RMB began an artistic practice as a poet in London, England and the founder of the design company Selah Vibe, Inc. in Atlanta, GA. From 2013-17, RMB served as the inaugural Director of Diversity and Inclusion at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), using lived performance to invert power dynamics at influential U.S. art schools.
RMB’s work has been commissioned by Bemis Contemporary, Omaha; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Rhodes College, Memphis; and Yale University. RMB has presented work internationally at Krabbesholm Højskole, Copenhagen; Turbine Hall, Johannesburg; Tate Modern, London; INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York; Qalam wa Lawh, Rabat; and La Becque, Switzerland. Grants include the Artadia Award; Franklin Furnace; US Dept. of Ed. FLAS in Arabic; and the Mayor of Atlanta's Film Grant; among others. RMB’s full bio and images of her work follow this interview.
1. How has your practice been impacted since the pandemic started?
I am a person who has often called myself the Beyonce of the art world, or the Vagabunda. I have prided myself on having a practice that ranges across almost every type of visual and conceptual art practice from writing to drawing to performance to singing to sculpture and installation to film, and doing it while traveling internationally. My practice has reached a standstill. I have had to turn my energy to saving my home and savings.
2. This pandemic is starkly exposing the inequities in our society, perhaps finally opening the eyes of many who previously did not want to acknowledge the reality. How might artists and creatives most effectively keep this discussion at the forefront and continue to drive it forward?
I cannot say I have sage advice on how to drive forward. I’ve learned in this time that stopping and doing nothing, to observe and be silent, to figure out what needs to be done, to preserve your life and that of your loved ones, is better than jumping in without a good sense of the entire system at play. My intention is to use this time to regroup and figure out why I’ve become such a workaholic at my own expense. I also do not feel compelled to perform revolutionary activity or wokeness. I’m tired.
3. As an educator, what do you anticipate being the long-lasting impacts on arts education?
I think students will finally start organizing to ask why their education is so expensive. There’s no need for arts education to cost as much as it does. I work at one school where every student gets a stipend and another school where 75% of the budget comes directly from student tuition, which burdens domestic students with debt and deceives international students to get their state and parental funding. We need to do better. As a teacher, I’m debating how I can organize with my students to reduce the bloated salaries of the administration and facilities first. Students and teachers can run our own school.
4. This crisis could change the landscape of cultural patronage. In your view, how does it most urgently need to evolve?
We need to stop the galas. We need to stop the begging. The board structure is terrible. I’d say trace the money for all of these activities. If it’s not sustainable, we need to ask where can this money come from if not conservative millionaires and billionaires. Are there ethical millionaires like the Patriotic Millionaires organization and Abigail Disney? How do we align our goals with their financial and political ties?
5. How do you think the sector could facilitate a change of society’s view of arts as a whole?
Artists should stop selling to collectors without resale clauses. If we eliminate the secondary auction market for art works, we will force the hand of the wealthy who influence art taste and institutions and they will invest in whatever we allow them to. You have to follow the money if you want to change anything. Appealing to humanity and ethics has not worked.
Artist-scholar Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) manages an "undisciplinary" studio practice through photography, performance, words/writing, installation design, video and conceptual film direction. Exploring vulnerability and mastery at the intersections of art history, religion, and popular culture, RMB's work often uses the word and the image to enact a code of ethics beyond mere representation. A lifelong nomad and polymath who has moved 24 times, RMB began an artistic practice as a poet in London, England and the founder of the design company Selah Vibe, Inc. in Atlanta, GA. From 2013-17, RMB served as the inaugural Director of Diversity and Inclusion at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), using lived performance to invert power dynamics at influential U.S. art schools.
RMB’s work has been commissioned by Bemis Contemporary, Omaha; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Rhodes College, Memphis; and Yale University. RMB has presented work internationally at Krabbesholm Højskole, Copenhagen; Turbine Hall, Johannesburg; Tate Modern, London; INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York; Qalam wa Lawh, Rabat; and La Becque, Switzerland. Grants include the Artadia Award; Franklin Furnace; US Dept. of Ed. FLAS in Arabic; and the Mayor of Atlanta's Film Grant; among others.
The viral essay "Open Letter to My Fellow Young Artists and Scholars on the Margins" was shared over 10K times online as of 2020. RMB's work and words have been featured in Art Forum, Artsy, Chicago Magazine, Hyperallergic, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Prospect.4 New Orleans, Radical Presence (CAM Houston), and the cover of the Chicago Reader. RMB holds degrees from Yale, SAIC, and Northwestern, trained by Paul Gilroy (sociology), Barbara DeGenevieve (photography), and D. Soyini Madison (performance) respectively. RMB currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Artists Coalition, and is a faculty member at the SAIC and Northwestern University.
(Photo by Nathan Keay)
Rage to Master. The exhibition was initially promoted at the MCA with the following link, image and text below.
Credibility, Viability, Accuracy
Maya Angelou as a Sex Worker
Can't Knock the Hustle, Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 36, 2016
On Mastery
I have already quit smoking.
I have also stopped texting.
I cut off people who abuse or drain me.
I have started chanting.
I drove for 18 hours by myself to get over my fear since the accidents.
I spent New Year's Eve alone in Siesta Key.
It was beautiful.
I want to (re)learn to sing.
Speak Spanish fluently.
Do pushups.
I still eat too much sugar.
On May 24, 2016 at 6pm upon invitation of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, I performed on the occasion of Kerry James Marshall's exhibition, Mastry. Using voiceover acting (a "voice of God" broadcast through the museum PA system), manipulated images controlled by my sister, and a procession of trans and femme folks out of the front of the museum, the performance is an affective and intellectual play on the roles of ritual, collectivity, popular culture, and religion in the way that non-Western cultures and POC artists are "included" in museums.
I chant a Nichiren Buddhist chant. I chastise the audience for leaving "me" out of the canon. I sing the last vocal refrain of Prince's Purple Rain, while leading the procession. I ask the audience what do they know about auction markets. I ask if the recently deceased Prince would be ashamed of us, the visual artists.
I end the performance by reading a contract to protect my work from auction market exploitation and then burn my archive of works that were not protected by this contract. By tracing the current financial exploitation of artists from the historical margins to the myths of modernity and mastery perpetuated in the Western art canon, I propose an alternative reading of art history as coloniality, a perpetually rehearsed performance whereby race and gender take their current shape.
By burning my work, I change the value of works previously sold in a similar edition. This means collectors will need to maintain some awareness of my whereabouts and current production if they wish to resell it at a profit.
Kerry James Marshall was present with his wife, Cheryl. He saw me use this contract. Afterwards, his charity and public work has been "flipped" at auction for record-breaking millions, and he remains uncompensated. He has publicly stated he will never do public commissions again.
We are the masters, if only in spirit. Maybe this is the only place that matters.
Since then, I've performed iterations of this work destroying other photographs at Michelle Grabner's Poor Farm Experiment in Wisconsin and the Icebox Project in Philadelphia, PA. I am now working on a feature-length documentary using portions of this in progress documentary .