The Cultural Strategist: nico wheadon
the question is less what stories we should be telling and more, who should be telling them?
5 QUESTIONS WITH nico wheadon
Art Advisor, Curator, Educator & Writer | NICO WHEADON PROJECTS; Founder & Principal | bldg fund, LLC
New Haven, CT
nico wheadon is founder and principal of bldg fund, LLC, an innovation platform for BIPOC artists, entrepreneurs and neighbors. She is an independent art advisor, curator, educator and writer who adopts interdisciplinarity as a strategy for building a more responsive cultural ecosystem. An advocate for BIPOC and womxn artists in all endeavors, she uses her myriad platforms to expand the canon of contemporary art, whilst cultivating a community of professional practice and collective care.
Through her consultancy, NICO WHEADON PROJECTS, she delivers cultural strategy and curatorial guidance to artists, cultural institutions, entrepreneurs, foundations and government agencies. An independent curator, nico has produced group exhibitions for international art fairs, and both nonprofit and commercial galleries. An artist-first advocate in these spaces, she works to recalibrate the relationships between BIPOC and womxn artists, and the broader art market economy. An arts writer and contributor to Art Handler Magazine, Artnet News, The Brooklyn Rail, Dossier, and C&, nico’s first manuscript—Cultivating The Cultural Commons: A Toolkit For Civic Engagement Within, Beyond & Through The Museum Space (working title)—is slated for publication in Summer 2021. The book brings together over forty pioneering voices from the field to reflect on canon-shifting practice currently taking place within, beyond, and through the museum space. Nico’s full bio follows this interview.
1. You founded bldg fund in 2020. How has the platform, which “aspires to be an itinerant, worker-owned model that fosters partnership among neighbors near and far to meet the evolving needs of our communities”, interfaced with various communities during this past year of multiple crises?
The BIPOC communities bldg fund serves have historically met and transcended multiple crises with creativity, ingenuity and resilience—our people have fashioned an art of survival for centuries, long before the onslaught of COVID-19 and the comorbid health, housing and economic crises it laid bare for those free from this oppression. So while 2020 indeed marks our formation as an entity, our origin story has roots in the living legacies of the Black radical imagination.
bldg fund is a collaborative engine designed to support projects and ideas that are for, by, and of New Haven’s diverse, BIPOC communities. As potential thought partners on these ventures, we’ve spent the six months since our founding engaging in active listening to assess who comprises these communities, how to best support their ideas, and what our shared needs and dreams are. We do this by literally showing up—when a neighbor has an event, we go. When an artist invites us to their studio, we engage. When local elders share wisdom on the stoop, we absorb. And when we see a challenge, we run towards it—not with prescribed solutions but with empathy.
As we celebrate two years in New Haven, and six months as an entity, we’re now beginning to adapt what we’ve learned into more formal frameworks for thought partnership and advocacy. We recently created a platform, shoptalk, where anyone from our community can book time to share their ideas, challenges, and questions with us. The premise is simple—we are here, and we are listening. Sure, we learn about the broader needs of the ecosystem in which we live and serve in these interactions, but that is an outcome not a primary objective. The goal is to build trust and reciprocity so that, one day, these relationships might serve as the bedrock for future institutions, products and projects, built for us and by us.
2. Your practice highlights interdisciplinarity and cross-sector collaboration. How do you see these practices shaping the future cultural landscape?
I decided early in my career to resist any singular expertise or professional identity. Instead, I adopt interdisciplinarity as a strategy for building a more responsive cultural ecosystem, and prioritize collaborative modes of working that respond in real time to what's happening in culture today. Working across disciplines, sectors and silos empowers me and my collaborators to address shared challenges with a sense of urgency and purpose, plowing through bureaucracy where necessary to impact our communities in immediate yet lasting ways.
As an independent curator, I work with artists to build worlds that respond to our socio-political moment, however, the practice—as it’s been institutionalized—so often dictates that curation take place within a 3-year planning window. As a writer, I build scholarship and community around the work of living BIPOC and women artists while they are still here to participate in the dialogue, artists who are often omitted from, or tokenized by, the canon. And as an educator unclaimed by any one institution, I get to build and adapt curricula from my lived experience of the art world, as it continues to evolve and as I continue to learn from it.
My work is slippery and fluid, and is more concerned with building new systems than it is fitting within, or adapting to, the broken one’s we’ve inherited. I think the future cultural landscape shares these qualities—a built environment, that borrows building blocks from the past, yet resists being constructed in any preexisting image. In my imagination, it is more modular than monolithic, and more oriented towards embodying shared values than it is upholding prescribed hierarchies.
3. You are completing a book Cultivating The Cultural Commons: A Toolkit For Civic Engagement Within, Beyond & Through The Museum Space (working title), designed to serve as toolkit for the sector on cultural citizenship, collective impact, and much more. Could you share an overarching theme gleaned from your research and interviews?
Perhaps I’ll begin with a clarification—yes, I’m writing a book, however, due to the roundtable structure that I’ve adopted, the book is actually being written in community. My goal has been to share authorship with the book’s 44 contributors, which includes artists, curators, educators, philanthropists, architects, programmers and others, such as yourself, engaged in canon-shifting practice taking place within, beyond, and through the museum space.
An overarching theme is that this work of transforming people, communities, institutions, and systems is slow work. It’s arduous work. And for many practitioners of color working in majority-white institutions, it’s dangerous work. As a collective of practitioners from diverse backgrounds effecting change from our various positions within the field, the theme is interdependence, and that this slow, arduous, dangerous work is most effective when advanced through a collective impact model. But again, I don’t want to speak for the book—I’d rather it speak for itself when it’s out later this year! Folks can sign up for book news here.
4. The Arts Funders Forum 2019 research program showed that the cultural sector has been experiencing a crisis of relevancy, mostly as a result of underdeveloped narratives about how the arts address and contribute to solving our biggest global challenges. And we know from research that rising generations want to be involved with entities that champion community, social justice, diversity, and equality. How do we correct this --- what stories should we be telling?
It’s complicated. From where I sit, the question is less what stories we should be telling and more, who should be telling them? I’m an advocate for “for us, by us institutions” and think the priority within the sector should be empowering and resourcing communities to tell their own stories. For far too long, mainstream cultural institutions have traded in the pillaging, (mis)interpretation, and commodification of objects that don’t belong to them, which carry stories that are then subsumed by the dominant historical narrative. So there is some reparative justice that needs to transpire in our “foremost” cultural institutions and, at the same time, new spaces—alternative spaces—must be built and resourced, that aren’t burdened by these particular legacies of colonialism and institutional racism.
I’d also like to see more cultural nonprofits perform an audit of their mission-program alignment. So often, that narrative—which is packaged and sold for fundraising and development purposes—rarely, or inauthentically, shows up in the program with the depth articulated in the grant. For me, the relevancy question can be addressed through this exercise. If the mission isn’t aligning with the program, and if the program isn’t impacting people’s lives in measurable ways, then changes need to be made—pure and simple.
Lastly, arts institutions often place the burden on artists to carry the political voice of the organization, however, an exhibition that discusses the prison industrial complex is not the same as that host institution articulating its own position on (and relation to) the issue, and then working to embody its values through its program.
When it comes to championing social justice, institutions need to prioritize this work in their annual budgeting exercises, and translate their “thoughts” and “prayers” for the victims of institutionalized racism into policy and action.
5. We are engaged in ongoing calls for systemic and structural change across the cultural sector. How should the field best integrate the many events and lessons of the past year?
Here is some low hanging fruit—put your solidarity statements into action! If you’re an arts institution that stands in solidarity with AAPI communities, publish your action plan for how your solidarity shows up in your practices, program and governance. If you’re a cultural organization that condemns racism on social media, take the next step to publicly discuss how your organization is actually antiracist. And if you’re a museum that stands in support of Black lives, yet laid off your educators of color at first sight of an economic downturn, consider these actions, what reconciling them would require, and then make that happen. This isn’t rocket science—it’s merely fleshing out your lip service with some meat and bones.
The Path Forward interview series, an initiative of MCW Projects LLC, investigates how cultural leaders are re-envisioning the future.
nico wheadon is founder and principal of bldg fund, LLC, an innovation platform for BIPOC artists, entrepreneurs and neighbors. She is an independent art advisor, curator, educator and writer who adopts interdisciplinarity as a strategy for building a more responsive cultural ecosystem. An advocate for BIPOC and womxn artists in all endeavors, she uses her myriad platforms to expand the canon of contemporary art, whilst cultivating a community of professional practice and collective care.
Through her consultancy, NICO WHEADON PROJECTS, she delivers cultural strategy and curatorial guidance to artists, cultural institutions, entrepreneurs, foundations and government agencies. An independent curator, nico has produced group exhibitions for international art fairs, and both nonprofit and commercial galleries. An artist-first advocate in these spaces, she works to recalibrate the relationships between BIPOC and womxn artists, and the broader art market economy. An arts writer and contributor to Art Handler Magazine, Artnet News, The Brooklyn Rail, Dossier, and C&, nico’s first manuscript—Cultivating The Cultural Commons: A Toolkit For Civic Engagement Within, Beyond & Through The Museum Space (working title)—is slated for publication in Summer 2021. The book brings together over forty pioneering voices from the field to reflect on canon-shifting practice currently taking place within, beyond, and through the museum space.
nico is an adjunct professor at Barnard College, Brown University and Hartford Art School, teaching at the intersections of art history, creative and cultural entrepreneurship, and museum studies. Her scholarship centers artist- and community-led innovation, and manifests art history’s contemporary relevance in our evolving cultural ecosystem. Beyond the classroom, nico has designed professional development curricula, for nonprofits and for-profits alike, that are informed by her unique perspective as a practitioner working across sectors.
A thought leader in the field, nico currently serves as: a board governor at the National Academy of Design; an advisory board member for Lubin School of Business’ Transformative Leadership Program; a guide at the Institute of Possibility; and a cohort member of Arizona State University’s Readying the Museum initiative. In recent posts, nico served as Inaugural Executive Director of NXTHVN (2019-2020); Inaugural Director of Public Programs and Community Engagement at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2014-2019); Curatorial Director of Rush Arts Gallery (2007-2010); and Curatorial Assistant at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2006-2007). nico holds an MA in Creative & Cultural Entrepreneurship from Goldsmith's College University of London (2011), and a BA in Art-Semiotics from Brown University (2006).