Dia Recommends: Digital Content
For this new series, Dia Art Foundation invites its staff members to share their recommendations for in a certain category of content that they have recently enjoyed.
Sophia Larigakis, Editorial & Publications Assistant
During last summer’s uprisings for racial justice, while some institutions opened their lobbies to protestors, many landlords (and museums) boarded up storefronts in earnest. Destruction of property, this gesture suggested, is more horrifying than the innumerable Black lives lost to police violence. Looted (2020–21), American Artist’s intervention into the Whitney Museum of American Art’s website, wherein images of the collection are temporarily replaced by plywood textures to imply the “boarding up” of the institution, highlights the macabre irony of the notion of “looting” in the context of the museum. Stolen, pillaged, looted—the works in traditional Western museums are often “collected” by way of colonial violence, or are displayed without crediting or compensating BIPOC artists, such as in the scandalous, canceled Whitney show Collective Actions. American Artist’s simple-yet-disruptive work calls into question the ways in which white supremacist, capitalist society deems certain acts of violence, such as colonialism and police killings, acceptable and condemns others, such as righteous revolt against these systems.