The Luminary partners with The Racial Imaginary Institute for “nwl,” a new exhibition from Kelly Kristin Jones

For months, The Luminary interim executive director Stephanie Koch and The Racial Imaginary Institute program manager Simon Wu have been having conversations about whiteness: what it means, how it’s used, and how it is—and more often isn’t—talked about. Those conversations have resulted in The Luminary’s new fall exhibition, nwl (an acronym for “nice, white ladies), on view October 8 through December 10 at the Cherokee Street art gallery. Ahead of the exhibition, which features both new and existing works from Chicago-based artist Kelly Kristin Jones, we caught up with Koch to talk about how nwl came to be, Jones’ work, and the conversations they hope to spark.

Tell us about how this exhibition came together. 

I was in conversation with The Racial Imaginary Institute, which is a roving project dedicated to, among many other things, investigating whiteness. It was started by Claudia Rankine, who is an amazing American poet, and they now have a full roster of curators and writers and thinkers who are thinking about how whiteness is embedded within our society. They also have a lot of different other projects—for example, they’re currently considering nationalism. They work with a lot of different institutions through exhibitions and conferences and books. I was in conversation with them about having something at The Luminary, and just over those conversations with Simon Wu, who’s the program manager of TRII, it seemed like it would be really great to dedicate time to an exhibition. Whiteness is a really complicated topic in America for a lot of reasons, but I think one of them is that it’s not as embedded within conversation as Blackness is. If you go through texts on race and politics in America, there’s such a conversation about what it means to be Black in America, but there’s not that many works on what it means to be white in America. That in itself was quite a challenge, just thinking, How do we visualize whiteness? How do you visualize whiteness when whiteness is the center?

How did you settle on the right artist for this project?

I have an artist-curator relationship with a Chicago-based artist, Kelly Kristin Jones, and her work has really developed in a really strong way. When we first met in, I believe, 2017, Kelly was thinking very much about public monuments in a really broad sense. That was after Trump’s election, when monuments really came onto the national stage. A lot of Kelly’s photographic works were thinking about what it would mean to remove monuments and doing that through both in-camera and digital tools like healing the landscape, removing them through Photoshop, and then also using different kinds of in-person collage to mask them. So that was very much a conversation about the public sphere. But she’s recently taken a turn into thinking about more subtle depictions of whiteness, the white supremacy that’s more embedded in everyday life and objects that you might find in your domestic space, images that are in pop culture such as catalogs, just these smaller moments that aren’t quite as spectacular as a large monument of Andrew Jackson or something. It just seemed like a really great way to think about a different shade of the conversation that is a little bit more subtle, a little bit more complex. So we invited Kelly Kristin Jones to do a solo show. 

What does your partnership with The Racial Imaginary Institute for this project look like? 

I would say The Racial Imaginary Institute is definitely a thought partner. I think that’s the first way to think about our collaboration. The questions around race in America are always complicated, but when you are thinking about whiteness, like I mentioned, it’s quite slippery. There’s just not a lot of language or logic around that notion. Like if you’re looking for a bibliography of what writers are talking about whiteness, it’s much shorter than about Blackness or any other kind of identity in America. So we were having a lot of conversations for many months about how we even tackle this. What are our questions? What’s the approach? That in itself was immensely helpful, just because there’s not a ton of conversation happening in the world. There’s a lot of texts about white fragility that talk about how white people can approach their position in society, but there’s not a lot of texts that really dig into the flows of power. How is this constructed? How does it exist today? How do white people understand their identity? There’s not a lot of language around that. I would say we were in discussion for six months. Then the other [way we work together] is just programmatically. Simon is working on having a conversation with Whitney Dow, who’s a filmmaker based in New York who has been a close collaborator with TRII. As a white, male, cis artist, he’s probably most well-known for The Whiteness Project. It has multiple parts, but I think that the aspect that’s most well-known is him interviewing dozens of white people on how they understand their identity, because that information really hadn’t been collected before. There’s a lot of data on people of color, but there’s not a lot of data on white folks about how they understand their position in society. So a very strong aspect of what they’re bringing is organizing and facilitating that conversation. 

On that note, tell me about the accompanying programming for this exhibition. 

We’re working on finalizing a date for Kelly and Whitney’s conversation. Then we’re going to be working on a curator’s tour that will be towards the end of the exhibition, probably the last day of the exhibition. That is the programming that we have planned. It’s a shorter exhibition, just eight weeks.

What can people expect to see in nwl? Jones will be showing both new and previously shown works, correct?

Yes. There are works that I believe go to 2017. Those existing works are the monument images that I described, the different projects that Kelly was doing when she was moving through Chicago, through Georgia, through different parts of the United States, and seeing public monuments and using digital and camera tools to cover them. So it kind of looks like there’s a slight glitch, but they’re masked. Kelly has also been working on a project all over the U.S., but [she was also able] to be in residence in August. So there are some new images that she made in St. Louis, and it’ll be an installation that is focused on hands. There’s these beautiful images of different male monuments, and they’re cropped to just show their hands. There’s a very consistent way that their hands are displayed in terms of how it projects their image. She’s also juxtaposing it with images from this amazing book from a charm school in the 1950s that shows different members of the charm school class. The way they pose is quite similar. So in the cropping of just their hands, you can see a similarity. I think the argument that Kelly’s trying to make is that there’s a proximity there. There’s a transference of how one performs their position. So that is a new work, and it has images of St. Louis-based public monuments. There’s also this part of Kelly’s practice where she’s very much a collector. She’ll collect items in abundance. I think part of that practice is just to show trends and gather many data points. A lot of these arguments that she’s making are about how white women perform their power and how they put themselves in proximity to that and maintain it. It’s over and over again that she’s seeing this imagery. She has this amazing collection of white women posing next to public monuments. I think in her collection right now she has maybe a few hundred of them that she’s been collecting from eBay, from various antique stores—she actually got one here in St. Louis. She hasn’t quite figured out the best way to display these, but she’s going to start with a single pair to think through these questions of how you display these images. So that’s going to be there as a start of something new to come in a future exhibition of hers. 

Tell us a bit about the sculptural work Jones will be bringing to nwl.

Kelly is a very technical photographer, both in digital and film, but she’s moved recently in the last few years into sculpture. And again, it’s bringing in that collection practice. She’s been collecting these white pedestals, similar to what we might see on the Supreme Court’s architecture or any early municipal government architecture, for quite some time. She’s found a lot of the smaller ones. They’re usually plastic, not marble, and they’re all from white women. There’s just a very large collection of them, and Kelly’s going to be arranging them into a large sculpture work. That accumulation reveals an interesting trend. What Kelly’s trying to put forward there is these ways that America has relied on Greco-Roman architecture to establish itself within this lineage of thought and government and power. Even though it’s a relatively new country, it has some authority in all these ways. You’ll see that same architecture in plantations. You’ll see that same architecture in new builds in Hollywood in the 1920s. What do you do to establish yourself as a person of power? You look towards this architecture. It’s an interesting move for them to be, in these small plastic ways, within domestic interiors. That is a newer iteration of a project that’s been running since last year, but it’s going to be installed in a new way.

It should be really interesting to see how these elements come together and the conversations they prompt.

It’s definitely going to pose some interesting questions. Something I wanted to offer Kelly is like—You’re not going to solve all the issues of whiteness in one exhibition, but hopefully it gives you a place to figure out what your questions are.

What do you hope visitors gain from this exhibition?

There’s so many things. It’s quite a complex conversation, but I think that what I want to bring up is just that this is a conversation that needs to be had. There’s so many conversations happening right now on multiple levels, on reparations in America. There’s different arguments to be made for that that this show isn’t really working with. But I think in order to have those conversations on a real level, we need to talk about all the different positions on the field. And so far it’s really focused on the experience of people of color, but it doesn’t get too much into the circumstances that made that still exist today. So I think what we want to bring up is that this is an important conversation that needs to be had by everyone, and it can’t just be on the burden of people of color to have these conversations. As a Black woman from a Black family, we talk about whiteness a lot. It affects our lives. But I don’t think people who identify as white are having those same conversations. It needs to be everyone that comes to the table.

Is there anything else that you want folks to know about nwl?

I think that what I want people to know is that The Luminary is aware of this condition where galleries feel very unwelcoming, and the conversation that we’re trying to put forth is quite complex. But what we’re aiming to do is make the space feel inviting. Hospitality is definitely a word that we’ve used a lot in the last year. How do we make the space feel more hospitable and warm? Because we want people to feel that they can trust us to hold these conversations and that they can be a participant in them. So that is something that’s been on our mind. How do we make a space more inviting to all kinds of members of our community? The arts can feel quite small and only available to a few. We’re not going to solve it with the show, but it is something that we’re constantly trying to think through, how to make the space feel that anyone can come and feel that they can show us themselves.