Quincy: You’ve had a busy weekend!
Steffani: I know! Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut (isn’t “Atheneum” such a sweet name for a museum—in honor of the goddess Athena? Apparently, the founder originally wanted to call it a “gallery,” which wouldn’t have had the same ring). I had the pleasure of hearing my friend and collaborator Brandon Lopez perform a solo set in front of a gargantuan Frank Stella painting. I also spoke about my solo exhibition there to a really nice group of visitors.
Today, I was scheduled to participate in a gallery discussion at Columbia University in connection with
Wayward Signs, a luminous two-person exhibition (also featuring the calligraphic drawings of writer Renee Gladman) curated by art critic and writer
Zoë Leigh Hopkins. The show has been in the works for well over a year, and is one of Zoë’s final campus projects before graduating this spring. Exhibitions like this can be such a pleasure to develop—the extended curatorial process creates an avenue for long-term conversation. The plan was to bring our friends and communities into this exchange in a public forum.
Earlier this week, I met with Zoë to let her know I had decided to withdraw from the public presentation. In light of the
renewed academic boycott of Columbia, I knew this was the right choice. And yet, my feelings were mixed.
Q: I bet. Can you elaborate on how your feelings are mixed? Was the complication figuring out the right thing to do, or was it more practical and more about how to withdraw? Several other people are involved, so changes in the program affect other people’s programs.
S: The answer is definitely all of the above.
First of all—and maybe this is just an algorithmic thing—but when I search online for “Columbia” and “boycott,” the list of results begins with the organized rejection of Columbia law school graduates by Republican employers. I have to wade halfway down the page before finding the progressive boycott, which is intended to put pressure on Columbia administrators and ostracize the university from normal academic interactions in light of their extraordinary capitulation to Trump administration demands this month, among other failures. Given the rhetorical success of the conservative boycott, I have to wonder: if the Republicans arbitrarily chose Columbia to be a symbol of the radical left gone awry, why use these students as a punching bag for the left, too?
Meanwhile, I’ve spent time this week editing my contribution to a roundtable discussion about radical art education for a forthcoming publication. The deadline was today, as a matter of fact, and I finished working on it this morning. So I’ve been reflecting particularly acutely on the conviction I so often state—that “all politics is the politics of the room” (I quote my own professor Gregg Bordowitz)—and that the literal or metaphorical classroom, inside or outside the university, can be a place where we imagine and model how to come together across difference. I’m not sure that an academic boycott contributes to that goal.
And then there’s the fact that many of us hold so much love and warmth for the sacred learning communities that universities foster and produce. It is at the university that I first encountered the legacy of black radical study that inspires my work today. It is at the university that many of us have created or found or sustained intellectual and creative refuge and sites of imagination and conspiracy. The public talk between Zoë and myself, perhaps reaching like-minded artists and students, may well have extended this kind of conspiracy within the institution. Who knows what we might have hatched up in that special space?
Finally, there's the question of what role, if any, “mixed feelings” should play in the decision to participate or not participate in a boycott. I have been thinking a lot about how to acknowledge and affirm that “there is no nuance in genocide” (a catchphrase among my community on the left)—while also acknowledging and affirming that reasonable people disagree—in good faith—about the right next steps forward? How do I participate in the boycott without contributing to a culture of finger-pointing and name-calling (if I had a dollar for the number of times I’ve heard “fuck Columbia” this week—repeated so often it has almost lost its meaning) and easy targets? (Trust me, Columbia is an easy target: it’s much easier to agree that “Trump is bad” than it is to say that Palestine must be free, and the wide ranging support I’ve received since announcing my reasons for cancelling the talk, including endorsements from galleries and collectors, underscores this.)
I will share an unpopular opinion. I do not believe that solidarity is the only choice, the automatic choice. I do not think that shared ends, however good, should always justify nebulous means, or that pointing out that the means are nebulous means I am rejecting solidarity. In fact, I don’t believe in unilaterally rejecting “nuance” in the name of political urgency; call me old-fashioned, but I think disagreement and dissent are valuable. I believe that teasing out fine distinctions is valuable, essential. I know that my entire life is, in some meaningful way, nothing more and nothing less than a fine distinction in relation to the totality.
I also believe that the invitation to think and act collectively is also an invitation to renew our trust in each other, a trust that is precious precisely because it is voluntary. At its best, solidarity requires coming together and coming together again and coming together again to remind ourselves why we have yet again made the choice to come together. I think about how scary it is to hold hands with another—knowing that when your hands are held, they are also tied. It is an extraordinary test of faith.
Q: I ruminate about the problem of political nuance all the time. I continue to replay a conversation that unfolded around the table at a dinner we went to recently. Someone noted that politics is simply a numbers game. During last year’s election cycle, the Trump campaign rallied the numbers while the opposition grappled with nuance and divided as a result.
S: Yes.
Q: So back to your choices around Wayward Signs. You truly did have the whole bag of mixed feelings.
S: The whole bag. I also had to consider the fact that the exhibition is already on view; it was conceived and installed before the renewed boycott was announced and opened just after. Because changing your participation in a project after it is already on view / published / presented is complicated. Ask me how I know. You don’t have to ask, because you already know: during the 2019 Whitney Biennial, a group of artists announced their withdrawal from the show.
Q: Yes, of course.
S: And even as I admired the spirit behind their choice, I was aware that it redirected attention toward them as individuals and away from the consensus-building effort underway among the larger group. I was also aware that the withdrawing artists had already benefited from their participation in the exhibition—their work had been documented, appeared in reviews—whereas for an artist whose contribution was a performance yet to happen, for example, withdrawal would have very different contractual and financial and reputational stakes. All that is to say that withdrawing from a physical exhibition is easier said than done—there are practical and ethical complications, especially in a shared gallery and carefully curated show.
Q: Did the organizers support you?
S: Interestingly, I never heard a word from the director of the Wallach Gallery, to whom I directed my initial withdrawal message. Later, I realized that rather than indicate that a scheduled event had been cancelled on the gallery website, they simply deleted all traces. A conversation with a friend this afternoon reminded me that this is too often the price paid by artists of conscience for their justice-informed decisions: erasure.
Zoë, the exhibition curator, on the other hand, was absolutely supportive. Cancelling the program created an opportunity for us to extend our collaboration into new territory, learning from one another as we co-drafted a new, joint statement of withdrawal.
Returning to the question of solidarity I mentioned earlier, I want to share this beautiful thought passed along by artist and thinker Ashon Crowley earlier today. Please excuse the extended quotation.
"who is we?"
i love a good aphorism-a pithy statement that is accepted, common truth. and "who is we?" is a black aphorism. it's usually stated incredulously because, as nene said, "why am i in it? see how i get thrown in stuff? i didn't even do nothing." i like "who is we?" because it underscores the fact that sometimes, we is a choice, we is a decision, we cannot be coerced, we has to be given of one's own will and volition.
i've been thinking about this because of a parable. jesus, according to luke, was talking to the homies and some unnamed dude was like, how can i have eternal life? and jesus was like did you read the law? what does it say? and dude is like, love god and love your neighbor as you love yourself. and jesus was like, yes. and so then dude is like, gotcha! probably was looking at his friends like watch this watch this watch this. he says, ok, but who is my neighbor?
it's like buried in the question "who is my neighbor" is the idea that he couldn't possibly be expected to love everyone, he couldn't possible expected to hold everyone in regard. because the law said to love neighbor as self, that would then mean neighbor disintegrates the distinction between us and them, making we. it's like he's asking, incredulously, "who is we?"
and, according to luke, jesus tells a story about a man walking down the road and getting attacked and robbed and beaten and needing care. and he said that some folks-religious, spiritual, leaders in their community-saw dude in need of help but decided to cross the street and keep walking. they didn't want to get involved. but a third person, a samaritan-someone unexpected in the custom and culture because they were considered by some to be apostates and not religious nor spiritual at all-stopped to help the dude, take care of his wounds and then give him lodging for as long as necessary, and paid for it with no cost to the one attacked. jesus asked dude who he thought was the neighbor and dude says it was the one that showed mercy, that took care of him. and then he said yes, now do that.
what dude wanted to know is, who am i responsible for taking care of, who am i responsible for showing love to? and jesus doesn't give identity markers or nation borders of those who are in and out of the concept of neighbor. instead, he says the neighbor is the one in need, the one to practice being neighbor to. you become neighbor when you become we with the so-called other, when you make yourself vulnerable and expose yourself in the service of care and concern.
i think about this parable a lot. because in so many different ways i read so many different kinds of justifications for making distinctions between "us" and "them," i hear so many different versions of, "who is we?" because to answer the question with integrity and honesty, that we is all there is and that any attempt to make distinctions will only ever produce more violence, is to have to contend with the fact that there are so many different ways to say they're not like us and i'm only concerned for us, or us first, or us primarily. but the distinctions between them and us can always change in politically uncertain and dangerous times. worrying about here first and not there doesn't contend with the fact that what happens there is here too. it's we, even when we try to pretend it's not.
one is not a neighbor because one lives in close proximity to others. one is neighbor because they enact, and behave as, and practice being neighbor. it is not an easy pursuit but it is a just one, a holy one, a spiritual one. and everyday is a chance to take up the ethical demand and answer the urgent call to become we.
In the end Zoë and I decided to work together on a statement that reflected something of our shared ambivalence and deep hope - for learning together, for imagining our way beyond this foggy horizon.
Again, I felt so much uncertainty. About tone and diction and poetics and clarity. I had to trust Zoë, who posts regularly on social media, to find the right note, one that would reach the audience she knows so intimately. I don’t usually post on Instagram; I have a little bit of “I don’t even go here” syndrome even having a square on my feed. She knew exactly what she was doing, and I learned so much from her.
Last week, I sometimes felt resentful of the amount of time I spent researching and writing and reflecting—but I know this reflection is precisely what the boycott was intended to incite, and I am grateful for it. As I drafted, I kept thinking about something Kameelah Janan Rasheed said during the Artist Publishing Practicum last month—that the writing we do in community is also a form of publishing, that her service to her family as the designated writer of obituaries is a form of publishing. I lost my cousin this week, and I know the labor of publishing in community so well, too well. Maybe writing a public announcement like this is a similar form of service. It is not for me, it is for us.
Here’s what Zoë and I came up with:
RE: Cancellation of the April 6, 2025 conversation between Zoë Hopkins (GSAS ’25) and Steffani Jemison (CC ’03) at Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University
We know this: it is dizzying to hold an ethic and epistemology of recalcitrance and refusal within the university as it exists today. As Columbia student and alum, we know that the material and ideological apparatus of the university has long been at odds with the kind of insubordinate work so many of us have set out to do with each other on campuses, work which threatens the violently corrupt ground on which the university stands.
As a Columbia student (Zoë) and alum (Steffani) working and thinking in conversation, we live with the strain of this contradiction: the institutions that bring us together are the very institutions that restrict and repress our work. By “our work” we mean our lives. By “our,” we mean all of us. As Huey P. Newton taught us, “I am we....I, we, all of us are the one and the multitude.”
We will always insist on ways of knowing ungoverned by the stranglehold of the ivory tower. We express our unwavering support and love for all those participating in the boycott against Columbia and other universities that have demonstrated more allegiance to the state and to their finances than their students. So too do we extend our hands in irreducible solidarity to international students who are being intimidated, targeted, and abducted, and to students in Gaza who have seen all of their universities burned.
Boycotting is a strategy—an expression of solidarity and act of collective faith in the future we hold together. It is a way of lea(r)ning towards love. Saying “no” and refusing to speak is a way of discoursing. Study is what we do together—as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney remind us—and so to study is to be in solidarity. At the bottom of it all, we reach toward each other and as we do so, we reach toward an utter renewal of the conditions in which we learn with each other.