Land Grant: Complicating Institutional Legacies

ALYSSA BRALOWER ALLISON ROWE

Figure 1. Billy Morrow Jackson, We the People: The Land Grant College Heritage, 1987. Oil on canvas, 55 x 80 in.Introduction Board of the University of on behalf of its Krannert Art . Museum Commission of the John Needles Chester Fund, 1987-19-1.

In 1987, Billy Morrow Jackson (1926–2006) was commissioned to create the large-scale painting We the People: The Land-Grant College Heritage (1987) for the President’s Office at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where it still hangs in the reception room (fig. 1). In addition to an overview of a multiplicity of activities being undertaken on the UIUC campus, the central elements of the painting are portraits of three of the key founders of the Federal Land-Grant College Act, or the Morrill Act, 50 SHIFT

which was passed in 1862 and enabled the construction of the university in 1867.1 On the left is Illinois native Jonathan Baldwin Turner, who advocated for agricultural reform via public education. Towering in the center is Abraham Lincoln, who holds in his hands a piece of parchment, a document meant to signify the Morrill Act. To the right of Lincoln is Justin Smith Morrill, a Vermont congressman who sponsored the legislation.2 Below these three figures, the university is depicted as a well-oiled machine, with numerous educational and research operations taking place around their looming presence. The Morrill Act established 130 universities on 30,000 acres of public land with the intention of educating farmers and low-class industrial workers in the fields of agriculture, engineering, science, and technology.3 These universities were built on public lands attained by force against peoples indigenous to the land including the Cahokia, Ho- Chunk, Kaskaskia, Meskwaki, Myaamia, Odawa, Peoria, Piankesaw, Potawatomi, Quapaw, and Wea, among many others.4 While often cast as an important accomplishment during the U.S. Civil War, the Morrill Act of 1862 was, as scholar la paperson notes, “truly intimate to war and to the production of a Yankee North American empire.”5 While Justin Morrill introduced the legislation, Lincoln’s signing of the act solidified it into a law that created a foundation for the development of many institutions which have, in multiple ways, erased and diminished Indigenous presences. We the People is one such example in that the painting does not depict these Indigenous peoples or the processes of violence that underwrite Jackson’s vision of the land-grant university. This violent history is wholly erased within the idyllic campus scene and is replaced with the inclusion of a singular primitivist caricature of a Native American man in the lower right corner of the painting. The erasure of lived Indigenous presence on campus, along with the inclusion of this caricature, constitutes a dual act of violence. This caricature—a “portrait” of the university’s former mascot, which was retired in 2007 after decades of Indigenous-led protest for its removal—is used to signify a romantic past amidst the flurry of innovation and progress that is portrayed throughout

1 Muriel Scheinman, “We the People: The Land-Grant College Heritage, 1987,” ExploreCU, accessed September 5, 2018, https://explorecu.org/items/show/11. 2 Muriel Scheinman, A Guide to the Art at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 38-39. 3 37th Congress, Session II, July 2nd, 1862, Ch. CXXX, section 4, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875, 504, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi- bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=012/llsl012.db&recNum=535. 4 Sharon Irish, “Institutional Racism and the Morrill Act,” Digitized Heart (blog), October 14, 2012, http://sharonirish.org/2012/10/14/institutional-racism-and-the-morrill-act/. Edgar Heap of Birds also acknowledged many of these tribes in his exhibition Beyond the Chief, discussed later in this article. 5 la paperson, “Land. And the University is Settler Colonial,” A Third University is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), n.p., https://manifold.umn.edu/read/7ba69a54-7131-4598-9fec- 815890725d91/section/561c45d2-9442-42d5-9938-f8c9e2aafcfc#ch02. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 51

the rest of the scene.6 We the People affirms Jodi Byrd’s observation that “American Indians and other indigenous peoples have often been evoked . . . as past tense presences. Indians are typically spectral, implied and felt.”7 Rather than acknowledge the violence of the founding of UIUC and other land-grant universities—a legacy that still affects the campus today—Jackson’s painting favors a mythic presentation of the university. In its disavowal of this history, this myth reproduces the violent relationship between the university, the land it is built upon, and Indigenous peoples. The fantastical space of We the People casts the land-grant university as a positivistic, utopian space. In doing so, the violence embedded in the promise of a public land-grant institution is erased or refigured as an inevitable episode in the march toward progress. This article traces the logic underlying objects and artworks owned by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign like We the People that, when put on display in a relational manner, assert a fraught but nonetheless critical interpretation of the 150-year history of the university and its relationships to land and Indigenous peoples. We argue these items reveal the legacies of settler colonialism that are still at work within land-grant university systems and question their entitlement to public lands. The objects discussed in this paper were included in Land Grant, an exhibition hosted at the (KAM) from January to June 2017 (figs. 2, 3, 6, 9). The exhibition was the culmination of research conducted in Dr. Terri Weissman and Dr. Amy Powell’s fall 2016 curatorial practicum seminar.8 During this seminar ten graduate students,9 including the authors, spent the semester researching local history, visiting archives, and scouring off-campus university collections with the intention of curating an exhibition from these items. In advance of the practicum, Dr. Weissman and Dr. Powell arranged a series of visits to campus archives and collections including the University of Illinois Archives, the , the University of Illinois Rare Book and

6 Robert Warrior, “Vandalizing Life Writing at the University of Illinois: Heap of Birds’s Signs of Indigenous Life,” Profession (2011), 46. Warrior writes, “Most universities with Native-themed sports mascots had ended their use by the early 1980s, but some schools in areas without a visible presence of Native people persisted in their use. Supporters of Illinois’s mascot continued through the decade to hold to the position that having a white student dress in a buckskin outfit and feathered headdress while performing a dance routine having nothing to do with any North American Native dance tradition was a form of honoring Native North American Peoples.” 7 Jodi A. Byrd, “Introduction: Indigenous Critical Theory and the Diminishing Returns of Civilization,” Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xx. 8 The seminar was entitled Graduate Seminar in Contemporary Art: Practicum in Curatorial Methods, and Land Grant was conceived of as an exhibition that would coincide with the sesquicentennial of the establishment of the University of Illinois. 9 Land Grant was truly a collaborative effort, and thus we would like to thank and acknowledge the other members of Dr. Weissman and Dr. Powell’s curatorial practicum: Yue Dai, Evin Dubois, Maria Garth, Michael Hurley, Cory Imig, Lilah Leopold, Jenny Peruski, and Luis Gonzalo Pinilla. We also would like to especially thank Dr. Weissman, Dr. Powell and the staff of the Krannert Art Museum for their insight, guidance, and support throughout the creation of this exhibition. 52 SHIFT

Manuscript Library, the Ricker Library of Architecture, the Krannert Art Museum, and the President’s Office. We collectively considered the information from these visits in concert with literature on contemporary curatorial practices to establish three thematic, intersecting focuses for the exhibition: Indigeneity, land use, and the university.

Figure 2. Land Grant, installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017. Installation view features Billy Morrow Jackson, We the People: The Land Grant College Heritage (1987) installed on the left wall of the gallery, flanked by a transistor panel from the Illiac II (1985); Kevin Hamilton, A Place in Time (2012); and several editions of the Illini Wise student handbooks (1950-57).

These focuses were further investigated by curatorial teams of three or four people, each charged with undertaking additional object research and developing proposals for items to be included in the show. There were some items, such as the archival photograph , Corn and Oats, 1903 (fig.7), which all thematic curatorial groups identified as valuable to the exhibition. Other objects, like a rather ambiguous grey lump of crinoid fossil, were defended by only one person in the room. We used collective decision making to make a final selection of artworks and artefacts based on how they would interact with one another in an exhibition context. Land Grant, and this article, consider notions of both real and imagined university spaces, pedagogical practices, and the university’s complex relationship to Indigenous histories and local landscapes. This complicated history of violence, erasure, and progress is embedded within the land of the UIUC campus and has been re-inscribed and reified Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 53

through many of the objects and archival materials displayed in Land Grant. Central to the exhibition was Billy Morrow Jackson’s regionalist painting, which depicts a progressive narrative of the university as a site of linear betterment; a notion that continues to carry weight. Thus, we endeavored to buttress dominant representations of the school against oft silenced and critical responses by students and faculty, using strategies that read university archives against their grain.10 Guiding our exhibition was Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, which maintains that it is possible to both reproduce the university and to produce a position of fugitivity.11 To do so, according to Moten and Harney, requires “a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization.”12 In this sense, the curatorial method of Land Grant emerged out of a collective orientation and sought to reproduce this orientation within museum visitors. This strategy suggests, as Joshua Chambers-Letson has argued, that what Moten and Harney term the “undercommons of enlightenment,” a minoritarian position that exists within and occupies a fugitive relation toward the university, emerges through a relational practice.13 Land Grant sought to create such conditions, which enabled the university art gallery to become a site wherein the Undercommons could be temporarily located. Following Moten and Harney, we also resisted didactic argumentation, thus refusing to put museum users in a “for-or-against” position. Rather, by interweaving visual histories of regional land use, Indigeneity, and the university itself, we fostered a deeper and more complex temporal scale than that offered by a more binary exhibition model or by looking at any one of these topics in isolation. We begin with a brief account of the history, political stakes, and methodology of the radical and self-reflexive turn in museum curation. We espoused this curatorial approach throughout the organization of the exhibition, most acutely in the selection of Jackson’s We the People, which we removed from its normal home in the waiting area of the President’s Office for the exhibition, thereby reframing and calling public attention to the underlying politics that led to its commission and continued veneration. Taking this painting as a point of departure, the remaining sections contextualize We the People and the other objects included in the exhibition in relation to issues of land use, the university itself, and Indigeneity. Throughout, Moten and Harney’s Undercommons undergirds our

10 Ann Laura Stoler, “Introduction: A Prologue in Two Parts,” Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 3. 11 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 26–27. 12 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 26–27. 13 Joshua Chambers-Letson, “Workshop with Joshua Chambers-Letson After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life” (presentation, Krannert Art Museum, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Department of Latina/Latino Studies, Champaign, Illinois, September 13, 2018). 54 SHIFT

analysis, demonstrating the way in which radical curation can enable a position of fugitivity.

Figure 3. Land Grant, installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017. Installation view features Bea Nettles, Imaginary Prairie (1969) (center) and a core sample loaned from the Illinois State Geologic Survey (taken 2016) comprised of soil, sand, gravel, Paleosol and glacial till, glacial sediment and bedrock, coal and siltstone (bottom right).

Curating and the Undercommons

In the late 1960s and early 1970s a number of artists sought to challenge and galleries through the creation of art projects that analyzed and took positions on political museological issues like gender representation and the role of capitalism in the display of art.14 Though the term that emerged to describe this style, “institutional critique,” has since been debated, there is little question about the pivotal role work in this vein had in expanding the variety of materials and methods practiced by contemporary artists and in the ways many curators, museums, and artists understand institutions and their roles

14 Alexander Alberro, “Institutions, critique, and institutional critique” in Institutional Critique an Anthology of Artists’ Writings Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 3. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 55

within them.15 For example, in her essay “How to Install Art as a Feminist,” Helen Molesworth articulated the difficulty and importance of mapping “discursive formations,” such as feminist or postcolonial theory, into “the spatial logic and requirements of the museum.”16 The physical and social forms of institutions shape and even direct the trajectory of inquiry and research outcomes.17 With Land Grant, we created an exploratory mode of display that translated the discursive into the spatial and visual by physically positioning sanctioned works like We the People alongside activist, feminist student publications, forcing the viewer to consider the materials foregrounded by the institution. In The Undercommons, Moten and Harney build upon traditions of black radicalism to argue that American universities embody neoliberal institutionalism through their emphatic insistence on professionalism and notions of civility that are defined based on white, European codes of conduct.18 Even direct antagonism against the university through critical scholarship legitimizes the institution’s individualistic modes of operation. As they observe, “. . . to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, which is to recognize it and be recognized by it.”19 Instead, Moten and Harney propose the Undercommons as a fugitive alternative that is not confrontational but rather a radical, collective, sociability achieved through “prophetic organization.”20 As a student-centered curatorial collaboration, Land Grant enacted Moten and Harney’s arguments both through our shared collective approach to the labor of exhibition making and in our deliberate selection of artworks, documentation, and artefacts of other non-professionals, with a particular emphasis on items that demonstrated resistance to expectations of civility. Land Grant rejected chronological exhibition expectations or a singular theme, collapsing multiple timelines: that of agricultural time, the canon of modernism, and university history.21 This curatorial position can be seen as a practice-based exploration

15 Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (London: May Fly Books, 2009), xiv. 16 Helen Molesworth, “How to Install Art Like a Feminist,” Modern Women, eds. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York: MoMA, 2011), 499. 17 Paul O’Neil, Lucy Steeds and Mick Wilson (eds.), “Introduction,” How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 21. 18 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 30–32. 19 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 105. 20 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 28. 21 This curatorial approach was also informed by Claire Bishop’s recent work on “dialectical contemporaneity,” a “museological practice and art-historical method” that is divorced from the market- driven interests of the art world, takes a stance on political issues, and most importantly, is a curatorial framework not built upon exclusively Western worldviews, histories, and epistemologies. Claire Bishop, Radical Museology, Or, What's Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Berlin: Walther Koenig, 2013), 9, 27. 56 SHIFT

of ideas similar to what Mark Rifkin articulates in Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Rifkin proposes that temporality is not a “fact” as Western scholarship claims, but rather a colonial epistemological construct that is used to organize and articulate life on earth.22 Rifkin writes, “The supposedly objective givenness of simultaneity, of an unfolding mutual now, depends on a historic conception of time as an unfolding, universal line of development.”23 Rifkin takes umbrage with the way that domination of Native people is interwoven into modernity, placing Indigenous peoples and colonizers into a shared “presentness” and thereby normalizing settler- occupation and its continued effacement of Indigenous ways of being in-time.24 Land Grant sought to trouble settler-time through the inclusion of documents and artefacts that call the university’s treatment of Indigenous people into question. The display of colonial artifacts for public audiences was one of the primary objectives of early museums and continues to be an important facet of contemporary museological practice as institutions around the world install, reinstall, and reframe their collections today. Though many institutions posit themselves as reflexive and “post- colonial,” there remain an alarming number of museums that re-inscribe colonial violence though their display design, signage, and storytelling techniques.25 One such example is the endurance of public monuments that uphold white supremacy and settler colonialist fantasies, whose removal has been increasingly demanded by multiple organizations.26 Decolonize This Place, organized by the MTL+ collective, has called for the removal of the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History. The statue, which is city-owned and occupies public land, was rendered in 1939 by James Earl Fraser. It depicts Theodore Roosevelt on horseback, flanked by a primitivized depiction of a black man, who is half-clothed, and a non-descript Native American chief.27 Of their call for the removal of this statue, the MTL+ collective argues that this action “[points] beyond the artistic tradition of ‘institutional critique’ and exceed[s] a single-issue or single-site activist campaign.”28 As the MTL+ collective

22 Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 8–9. 23 Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 19. 24 Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time, 8. 25 Two examples often cited within museum studies include the Royal Ontario Museum’s 1989 exhibition Into the Heart of , which employed a tone of irony and sarcasm that undermined the exhibition’s aim to offer a critical perspective on the colonization of Africa, as well as the opening of the Musée du Quai Branly in 2006, which uses display techniques such as dimly lit cases and a “jungle-inspired” architecture to house artifacts acquired in the French colonies during colonial expansion. 26 A related example is the call for and eventual removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia which was employed as the symbol of the “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally that broke into a riot in August 2017. 27 MTL+, “A Questionnaire on Monuments,” October 165 (Summer 2018), 119. 28 MTL+, “A Questionnaire on Monuments,” 122. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 57

suggests, curatorial or activist gestures need to move beyond isolated gestures. At the Art Gallery of Ontario, for example, curatorial efforts by Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik have shifted one third of the museum’s gallery space to display Indigenous artists and rendered all wall texts in the newly rehung J.S. McLean Centre for Canadian and Indigenous Art in Anishinaabemowin, English, and French.29 In Subject to Display, Jennifer A. González examines the curatorial logics of primitivizing museum exhibitions through the lens of race discourse to demonstrate the ways that visual and other cultural regimes produce racialized subjects.30 Both living beings and material objects can constitute racialized subjects via a process González identifies as epidermalization, “a process . . . in which the object is positioned in history, in a collection, in the marketplace, or in a museum display as racially defined.”31 Modes of display often reproduce and thus reify the iconography of a particular racialized subject position.32 A form of installation art that González conceives of as a “situational aesthetics” emerged as one response to such modes of display, in which an artist will recontextualize existing objects and/or spaces in order to expose oppressive modes of display and processes of subjection. Installations by artists such James Luna, Renée Green, and Fred Wilson seek to challenge a history of racialized violence that is perpetuated within cultural institutions. Our research and curatorial strategy within Land Grant was influenced by such activist movements and curatorial efforts. We sought to demonstrate the ways these gestures can work within the parameters of the university art museum itself, reconfiguring the space to be a site of both resistance and refusal—a space that allows for art objects, archival materials, and the installation itself to contextualize one another. The university art museum is a unique space as a nexus in which multiple publics, disciplines, and learning outcomes are realized. While clearly related to the work of civic museums, the institutional situation of university art museums creates distinct circumstances for exploratory exhibitions. Two key facets of the university art museum are the museum’s emphasis on teaching and curricular research and a museological focus on creating a space that, ideally, guarantees academic freedom.33 As we discuss below, in the context of the unjust firing of Steven Salaita, these tenets of the university and university art museum are fraught in practice, but nonetheless serve as an idealistic foundation that is

29 Ted Loos, “A Canadian Museum Promotes Indigenous Art. But Don’t Call It ‘Indian.’” The New York Times, July 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/arts/design/art-gallery-of-ontario-indigenous- art.html. 30 Jennifer A. González, Subject to Display (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 3. 31 González, Subject to Display, 5. 32 González, Subject to Display, 6. 33 Anna Hammond, Ian Berry, Sheryl Conkelton, Sharon Corwin, Pamela Franks, Katherine Hart, Wyona Lynch-McWhite, Charles Reeve and John Stomberg, “The Role of the University Art Museum and Gallery,” Art Journal 65, no. 3 (Fall 2006), 26. 58 SHIFT

fundamentally different from the aims of civic museums.34 Moten and Harney articulate this tension in their observation that “it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.”35 A similar duality is at work within the broader history of land-grant institutions, where enlightenment-era values are undercut by the legacies of settler-colonial violence that continue to shape culture today.

‘Settled’ Lands and Agricultural Occupations

These curatorial priorities manifested in Land Grant through the troubling of the logics made concrete by the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, which established a claim to Illinois land on the tail of a series of treaty “negotiations” with the Indigenous occupants of the region.36 These negotiations were complicated by the fact that many Indigenous peoples entered into these conversations with an epistemological framework that did not include the concepts of land ownership espoused by colonizers.37 Even historians like Mr. J. Seymour Currey, who demonstrated prejudice towards Indigenous peoples in his writings, acknowledged the dubious validity of the terms and tactics used by government officials when establishing treaty documents. As Currey noted in his 1912 publication on Illinois treaties, “The provisions of these treaties were often not clear to the ignorant chiefs, who, after the agreement was made and ratified, would raise objections and demand another council . . . The odds were all against them, with their unstable conditions of land tenure . . . and the keen, often unscrupulous wits of the government agents on the other side.”38 As this quote illustrates, even as treaties were being negotiated, the American government officials guiding these processes were apt to be deceptive and misleading. The immediate challenges to these treaties when they were drafted indicate the debatable legality of documents that were essential to the founding of land-grant institutions and settler-colonial communities at large.

34 Hammond et al., “The Role of the University Art Museum,” 26. 35 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 26. 36 Frank R. Grover, “Indian Treaties Affecting Lands in the Present State of Illinois: A Paper Read before the Illinois State Historical Society.” Springfield, 1915, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112104139060. 37 Shaw, Herman, and Dobbs argue that “although indigenous perspectives can be widely diverse, they are often rooted in a common epistemological standpoints.” They go on to explain that a widely conceptualized Indigenous worldview does not share the concept of land-ownership as it is understood in the Western sense but rather views land as a part of as dynamic, interactive relational systems. Wendy S. Shaw, R. D. K. Herman, and Rebecca G. Dobbs, “Encountering Indigeneity: Re-Imagining and Decolonizing Geography,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 3 (2006), 269. 38 J. Seymour Currey, Chicago: Its History and Its Builders: A Century of Marvelous Growth (Chicago, IL: S. J. Clarke Pub. Co., 1912), 202. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 59

The questionable legality of these treaties and the subsequent 1862 Morrill Act is an example of what Ariella Azoulay calls “paper-regulated destruction,” by which she means that the circulation and administration of world-changing documents— bureaucratic forms, seals, signed certificates—renders certain histories as inevitable processes that ultimately protect and legitimize the perpetrators of colonial violence.39 Jackson’s We the People further exemplifies this paper-regulated destruction through the way it situates the document of the Morrill Act in the center of the canvas. The document reads as both figure and ground, operating as a piece of legislation and as a glowing, white light source that radiates around the statue of the Alma Mater. This dual function exemplifies the uncertain grounds on which the Morrill Act was ratified. Jackson’s work can be found across the University of Illinois campus, from the aforementioned President’s Office to the Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences library. Jackson received his MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign in 1954, and taught there as an art professor from 1954-1987. Known primarily for his mural commissions, including works done for the Illinois State Capitol and the Bureau of Reclamation, Jackson painted his oil landscapes of the Midwest prairie in a realist manner but took liberties in his representation to create emotional and atmospheric effects. Jackson’s use of realism within a compressed temporal and spatial plane is in line with 1930s regionalist painting, a style that promoted a pastoral myth of the Midwest as a land simultaneously occupied by migrant agrarian workers, growing industry, and a preserved rural landscape. Judith A. Barter has observed that Regionalism “was an art that attempted to retain cultural history and be modern at the same time.”40 This dichotomy is at work within the logic of We the People. While the three historic figures, Turner, Lincoln, and Morrill, dominate the central space, a variety of figures occupy the foreground, demonstrating a range of forms of labor enabled by the land-grant institution. On the left, Turner holds open a book that exposes a nondescript field of green. In it, four figures in clothing reminiscent of 19th century prairie life wander into the “blank page,” a space that suggests that prior to the arrival of homesteaders the lands of Illinois were void of occupants. This depiction of agrarian life and migration is surrounded by representations of modern day industrialism, including space exploration, engineering, and large-scale farming. This shift from an agrarian past to an industrial present is in line with other hallmark works of Regionalist painting. Take, for example, the panel Midwest in Thomas Hart Benton’s mural America Today (1930–31), which Alvin Johnson, the director of the

39 Laura Elizabeth Shea, “Ariella Azoulay: Potential History of the Archive: The Micro Study of a Macro Institution,” Kritik (December 1, 2017). https://unitforcriticism.wordpress.com/2017/12/01/ariella-azoulay- potential-history-of-the-archive-the-micro-study-of-a-macro-institution-response-by-laura-elizabeth-shea/. 40 Judith A. Bartner, “Prairie Pastoral” in America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s, ed. Judith A. Bartner (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2016), 49. 60 SHIFT

New York School for Social Research, commissioned in 1929 (fig. 4).41 The mural is comprised of ten panels that relate to American life in the early 1930s, ranging from depictions of the deep South to coal mining in the West and dancehall culture in the East. The panel entitled Midwest depicts the cultivation of land and the labor necessary to create the lush wheat fields that are synonymous with Midwest pastoralism. A logging scene on the right side of the canvas demonstrates the transformation of the land during westward expansion, while the left shows wheat fields amidst a modern grain elevator which, it has been observed, looks like a skyscraper on the horizon, collapsing ruralism with modern industry.42

Figure 4. Thomas Hart Benton, Midwest, panel from America Today, 1930–31. Ten panels: Egg tempera with oil glazing over Permalba on a gesso ground on linen mounted to wood panels with a honeycomb interior. Panel e): 92 x 117 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of AXA Equitable, 2012 (2012.478e). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

41 “Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural Rediscovered,” accessed June 26, 2018, https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2014/thomas-hart-benton-america-today. 42 Randall R. Griffey, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, and Stephanie L. Herdich, “Thomas Hart Benton's America Today,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 72, no. 3 (Winter, 2015), 28–29. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 61

In order to unsettle such idealized depictions of farming and industry seen in Benton and Jacksons’s paintings, Land Grant began with the video work Submerging Land (Act One: Between the Bottomlands & the World) (2015) by Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross, which challenges the world-changing legislative power of the Morrill Act and the past 100 years of agricultural practices in central Illinois (fig. 5). This video work opens with a long shot of endless rows of corn filmed from a car window while radio weather and commodity reports drone over the white noise of a vehicle moving at a considerable speed. As fields pass by, the radio is replaced by the voice of a female narrator who reports, “This is a story about vision, about seeing lines, deciphering a composition, and tracing systems. It is also about the ability to suspend belief, to see a different past and future. It’s about perception of the long-term kind.”43

Figure 5. Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross, Submerging Land (Act One, Between the Bottomlands & the World), 2015. NTSC digital video.

Over the eleven minute twenty-three second video, the viewer is moved between footage of corn processing, fields of crops shot from cars, and farm machinery. The imagery is contextualized by a voiceover that explains, amongst other things, components of the Morrill Act, such as how the act permitted states to sell land allotments to create universities, thus divorcing land from its materiality into abstract capital.44 Ross and Griffis’s video emphasizes the materiality of the state and the land that the university

43 Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross, Submerging Land (Act One, Between the Bottomlands & the World), 2015, NTSC Digital Video, Champaign, IL, https://vimeo.com/28668090. 44 paperson, “Land. And the University is Settler Colonial,” n.p. 62 SHIFT

itself is built upon, rather than the abstract market system that fuels it.45 In foregrounding Ross and Griffis’s artwork at the beginning of the exhibition (fig. 6) and situating Jackson’s We the People on a decentralized wall space in the gallery (fig. 2), we sought to demonstrate how university art museums can take up Moten and Harney’s call to go beyond critique by encircling, thus enveloping “settled” ideas of the institution and fugitive “unsettling” understandings into a single space where they bounce off one another.46

Figure 6. Land Grant, installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, 2017. Installation view features Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross, Submerging Land (Act One: Between the Bottomlands & the World) (2015) and a vitrine with mineral samples loaned from the Illinois State Geologic Survey, including Fluorite, Calcite, Barite and Benstonite.

While the Morrill Act partitioned lands upon which to build colleges, land use and accumulation continues to be an important trait of modern research universities.47 One of the main aims of establishing land-grant universities was to generate experts in agriculture who could settle the lands of the state, thus further entangling the university in

45 “RR05: Ryan Griffis/Sarah Ross, Between the Bottomlands & the World,” Regional Relationships, accessed September 15, 2018, http://regionalrelationships.org/rr05/. 46 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 19. 47 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 19. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 63

the politics of colonization. The Morrow Plots corn fields located in the center of the UIUC campus attest to the continued importance of farming and agri-business at the college. The two historic cyanotypes of the Morrow plots included in Land Grant document the early days of what have since become the oldest experimental agronomic research plots in North America, including “the oldest continuous corn plot in the world,” which have even been designated as a National Historic Landmark.48 The Morrow Plots were established in 1876 for the purpose of studying soil and crop management and have continued to be used as a site for agriculture query, with the rest of the college campus expanding to surround them.49

Figure 7. Photographer unknown, Morrow Plots, Corn and Oats, 1903. Cyanotype. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives, Image 0007443.

The photograph Morrow Plots, Corn and Oats, 1903 is an image of a white man in a sun hat and bowtie, standing in the center of a large cornfield (fig. 7). The man in the

48 R. T. Odell, W.M. Walker, L.V. Boone, and M.G. Oldham, The Morrow Plots: A Century of Learning, Bulletin no. 775 (Champaign, IL: Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, August 1982), http://hdl.handle.net/2142/28415, 7. 49 Odell et al., “The Morrow Plots,” 8. 64 SHIFT

image, Dr. Cyril Hopkins, assumes a position of authority: arms crossed across his chest, surveying the lands before him. Though Dr. Hopkins was one of many researchers studying in the fields, his stance speaks to the ownership he feels over the space he inhabits.50 Unlike early American landscape paintings that include small representations of Indigenous peoples to attest to the “wildness of the land,” Dr. Hopkins occupies a central position in a man-made landscape, referencing the way that European settlers took up the task of controlling and dominating the land in line with the type of labor depicted in Benton’s Midwest. Similarly, the photograph Morrow Plots Soil Sample, 1904 documents two white men in formal jackets and hats performing gestures of scientific research for the camera, bestowing their civility onto the earth (fig. 8). The inclusion of the archival Morrow plot photographs alongside other objects resituates these documents within the violent history of settler colonialism, calling attention to the misalignment between the university’s performance of white, European civility and the barbaric acts that tilled the soil for the university’s existence.

Figure 8. Photographer unknown, Morrow Plots, Soil Sample 1904. Cyanotype. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives, Image 0007548.

50 E. Davenport, “Cyril G. Hopkin” in Science 50, no. 1295 (1919), 387–88. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 65

Though none of the official materials about the Morrow Plots mention it, the cultivation of corn in Illinois predates the arrival of European colonists by centuries.51 Corn has long held an important role in the diet of the Indigenous peoples of North America. In Haudenosaunee agricultural tradition, for example, corn is one of the Three Sisters, a group of complementary crops of corn, beans, and squash grown together for the mutual benefit of all three plants. 52 Unlike the mono-cultural agricultural approach of the Morrow Plots, the large-scale commodity farming depicted in Ross and Griffis’s video piece, or the organized rows of crops represented in We the People, Indigenous gardening practices are grounded in reciprocal, kinship relationships with the natural environment.53 Land Grant made the erasure of Indigenous land practices visible by showcasing objects that reference colonial approaches to land ownership and displaying them alongside works like Griffis and Ross’s video, which directly questions Western agriculture practices. Our curatorial decision to have the audio from Ross and Griffis’s work project into the gallery aimed to ensure that all objects in the exhibition were viewed with a critical eye, thus complicating the colonial land practices exemplified by the Morrill Act whose legacy lives on in the continued land use practices at the university today.

Authoring the Fugitive University

We the People renders Illinois’s legacy as entrenched in the advancement of agriculture and technology, and promotes diversity in the university’s curriculum and student body. At the same time, Jackson’s painting upholds a vision of the land-grant institution and its figureheads as benevolently patriarchal. As a means of unsettling this proposition, we included two examples of experimental pedagogical projects that emerged from within the university space itself. These examples, the Whole University Catalog and the Blueprint for Counter Education, challenge such formulations through democratic experiments in knowledge production, wherein students worked with their faculty to design course content. This spirit reverberated into the Land Grant exhibition through a mode of collaborative curatorial choices and shared authorship that, as Moten and Harney argue for, celebrates self-organized, illicit, and fugitive acts of study.54 Study allows for

51 Sunmin Park, Hongu Nobuko, and James W. Daily, “Native American Foods: History, Culture, and Influence on Modern Diets” in Journal of Ethnic Foods 3, no. 3 (2016), 171. 52 Melissa Kruse-Peeples, “How to Grow a Three Sisters Garden” in Native Seeds, May 27, 2016, https://www.nativeseeds.org/learn/nss-blog/415-3sisters. 53 Shaw, Herman, Dobbs, “Encountering Indigeneity,” 269. Cajete describes how these practices reflect broader Indigenous approaches to science: “Native science is also about mutual reciprocity, and which presupposes a responsibility to care for, sustain, and respect the rights of other living things, plants, animals, and the place in which one lives.” Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe: Clear Lights Publishers, 2000), 79. 54 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 29. 66 SHIFT

an active, open-ended intellectual pursuit that values sociality as a form of education.55 It is an ongoing practice with no predetermined learning outcomes, one that occurs beyond the limits of a semester or even the hours cramming before an exam. Moten and Harney explain that increasingly, mandatory assignments, administrative duties, and other forms of labor required of the university actually impede one’s ability to study within the university.56 Such requirements are depicted in We the People, where incoming students move in a centralized procession around Lorado Taft’s bronze sculpture, Alma Mater (1929). Students in the painting enter the university in street clothes but emerge on the other side of the statue as graduates in uniform caps and gowns. Jackson rendered his painting in the style of Thomas Hart Benton and the Regionalist art movement of the 1930s, a narrative style that responded to the Great Depression. This stylistic choice signals a return to idealistic and conservative values during the 1980s and raises questions about the reassertion of Turner, Lincoln, and Morrill as beacons of equality in public higher education in that decade. These figures are conflated with notions of futurity as they are surrounded by laboring students. One man works at a now-outdated computer; another figure works at a drafting board; and a central figure, a young African American woman, is shown gazing through a compass. The student body is depicted as heterogeneous in terms of gender and race, which doesn’t reflect the actual demographics of the university at the time. For example, a 1982 survey entitled UIUC On-Campus Student Enrollment by Curriculum, Sex, Race, and Residency reports that of a total of 26,260 undergraduate students, 11,632 students identified as women, 54 students identified as Native American, 981students as African American, 1,043 students as Asian American or Asian Pacific Islander, and 418 students identified as Hispanic, while 23,479 students identified as Caucasian.57 Furthermore, contrary to Moten and Harney’s open-ended notion of study, these figures also demonstrate education as producers within a system where the act of study concretely reaffirms the vision of a progressive university. This depiction is parallel to the Regionalist impulse to incite desire in viewers for a past that had already disappeared, or, in the case of Jackson’s painting, an idealized university space that never actually existed.58 As previously noted, a main objective of the Morrill Acts was to establish universities that focused on agriculture and technological development. The 1862 act states, “The leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to

55 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 110. 56 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 114. 57 On the survey, the only options for reporting gender were “Men,” “Women,” and “Unknown.” “UIUC On- Campus Student Enrollment by Curriculum, Sex, Race, and Residency,” (Fall 1982), data gathered by the Division of Management Information. Accessed on June 26, 2018. http://www.dmi.illinois.edu/stuenr/ethsexres/ethsex82.htm. 58 Bartner, “Prairie Pastoral,” 29. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 67

agricultural and the mechanic arts. . . in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.”59 With this impetus in mind, the educational mission of land-grant universities is embedded in the aims of the U.S. imperial project:60 agricultural industrial development, creating infrastructures and technologies that regulate and manage populations, and an investment in militarization and defense. Indeed, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira argue, “the state of permanent war that is core to U.S. imperialism and racial statecraft has three fronts: military, cultural, and academic.”61 Within this configuration, the university is a site in which culture wars play out and where multiple histories and knowledges about the United States are shared and contested.62 The university, Jodi Melamed argues, is a site that reproduces settler-colonial logistics through an administrative violence. Like Azoulay’s notion of “paper-regulated destruction,” the management of bodies and the linkage of human rights to property- ownership work together to obscure social relationships.63 Melamed goes on to say that despite being obscured, these social relationships are ever-present, regardless of whether administrative powers recognize them. Social relations are, therefore, a fertile ground for refusal and the shaping of alternative networks that circumvent universities’ administrative power. This is made clear in Moten and Harney’s observation that capitalizing upon “the necessarily failed administrative accounting of the incalculable” is an effective strategy of resistance in academia.64 In Land Grant, the university operated on three levels: through its physicality as a real space, the university as an imagined space, and as a network of social relations. Within the context of the exhibition, two examples of counter-cultural ephemera were exhibited as a means of suggesting other alternative forms of producing knowledge. The first, the Whole University Catalog, considers the three levels on which the university operates from a student’s perspective. The publication—an homage to the Whole Earth Catalog, a 1968 countercultural publication that provided resources for lifestyles rooted in a holistic, environmentally conscious, and DIY ethos—was produced as the final project for an undergraduate Heuristics course offered at the University of Illinois in 1969 by Dr. Heinz von Foerster, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Biophysics. As a collaborative project, the Whole University Catalog emphasized social relationality rather than the pursuit and development of individual, completed projects.

59 37th Congress, Session II, July 2nd, 1862, Ch. CXXX, section 4, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, 504. 60 paperson, “Land. And the University is Settler Colonial,” n.p. 61 Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, “Introduction” in The Imperial University, eds. Chatterjee and Maira (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 7. 62 Chatterjee and Maira, “Introduction,” 7. 63 Jodi Melamed, “The Open Secret of Racial Capitalist Violence.” (Presentation, The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Champaign, Illinois, March 27th, 2018.) 64 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 35. 68 SHIFT

Whole University features an array of information, including manifestos that call for education reform as well as information about everyday student life. Other images reveal the students’ own awareness of university infrastructure. Several pages of the catalog visualize administration through banal photographs of nondescript hallways, classrooms, and closed administrators’ doors. The Whole Earth Catalog presented a vision of daily life as one part of a global ecological system. Similarly, the Whole University Catalog creates an image of the university as a designed social system intended to output a “model” student. In many ways, it calls out the model of education that is advocated for within We the People. While much of the publication is humorous, spreads such as “The University Game” depict the university as a closed system, where players begin at “registration” and move through a series of classes, parties, and graduation requirements to make it to the outside world.65 In a similar manner, Jackson’s We the People features representations of a diverse student body and a variety of career paths. The central graduation procession illustrated in the painting exemplifies the limited educational system that von Foerster and his students sought to undermine. Central to von Foerster’s experiment are questions of knowledge production, participatory and collaborative practices, and inquiry into the formulation of social space within and outside of university settings. The Whole University Catalog emphasizes the creation of alternative means of understanding or navigating space through participatory practices. Within Land Grant, the Whole University Catalog was displayed on the same wall as We the People, creating a dialogue between the two takes on forms of higher education, both of which are out of reach. A second experimental pedagogical project from that era, the Blueprint for Counter Education (fig. 9), offers another proposal for an alternative mode of education—one that is primarily visual.66 The Blueprint is the product of Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s research at the California Institute of the Arts, where they sought to create an alternative model of higher education that worked within and against existing curricula. Stein, Miller, and their students created a portable education tool: a boxed set containing a curriculum guidebook called the “shooting script” and three posters displaying a networked model of theorists and movements. Designed by Marshall Henrichs, the posters maintain a DIY-aesthetic and reference Dadaist and Futurist collage. Stein and Miller, much like von Foerster, created the posters through an iterative drafting process with their students and teaching assistants, whereby the multiple versions of the poster were collaboratively synthesized into a singular version.67

65 Heinz von Foerster, The Whole University Catalog, 1969, n.p. 66 In 2016, an online archive and inventory of the Blueprint for Counter Education and its multiple iterations was made available to the public, see http://blueprintforcountereducation.com/ 67 Maurice Stein and Larry Miller, Blueprint for Counter Education (New York: Inventory Press, 2016), 2. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 69

Figure 9. Land Grant, installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017. Installation view features a core sample loaned from the Illinois State Geologic Survey (2016), posters from the Blueprint for Counter Education (1970) and a concrete canoe designed by the Boneyard Yacht Club, loaned from the Engineering department.

Blueprint’s aims and critiques are in line with many counter-education projects of the late 1960s, as noted by Lorraine Wild and David Karwan, who wrote that “New interpretations of art, literature, sex, music, and cinema . . . became paramount to the campus learning experience, and as a result it could be hard to decipher where the ‘classroom’ began and ended.”68 Scholars have also connected this piece of countercultural ephemera to larger developments in cybernetics at the time, envisioning the posters along with the companion guidebook as a sort of analogue form of hyperlinking.69 However, it is noteworthy that Stein and Miller conceived of these posters as a “constellating configuration,” a notion that was also employed in the installation for the Land Grant exhibition. The design of the three charts disorient timelines built around canons of modernism and postmodernism, offering three different networked models of

68 Lorraine Wild and David Karwarn, “Agency and Urgency: The Medium and Its Message” in Hippie Modernism (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 53. 69 Paul Cronin, “Recovering and Rendering Vital: Blueprint for Counter Education at the California Institute of the Arts” in Blueprint for Counter Education, by Maurice Stein and Larry Miller (New York: Inventory Press, 2016), 52. 70 SHIFT

thinking through the material. Despite their constellating quality, the charts retain a right- left orientation, where modernism on the right is a “meditative environment” and post- modernism on the left as a “participatory environment.”70 This highlights one of the main limitations of the charts: regardless of their dynamic design, they remain static in their use and uphold disciplinary binaries as well as a predominately Eurocentric canon.71 Indeed, while each of the three posters has a unique design, rhythm, and emphasis, in each chart, political theorist Herbert Marcuse and media theorist Marshall McLuhan are positioned as the central figures of study. The Blueprint for Counter Education is remarkable in the multiple ways that it calls attention to its own limitations and failures. Although scholars have framed this project as utopian in nature, Stein and Miller emphasized its shortcomings within the introduction to their Shooting Script, the publication that accompanies the posters. There they note several issues with their final product of the Blueprint, including questions of relevance over time and the posters’ blatant omissions. Furthermore, despite all the possible intellectual connections one could make using these posters, they remain largely opaque as educational resources. The posters require the user to already be familiar with many of the topics they chart. These shortcomings reflect that the Blueprint did not intend to completely replace a university education. According to Julie Niemi, “Stein and Miller never saw the charts as an alternative to the classroom or as something that would replace a college education. For them, Blueprint was a new way to navigate academic institutions and a new framework for developing a radical, critical path through them.”72 Rather than aim to reject a university education outright, Stein and Miller sought methods to reorganize the university’s curriculum and to create tools for study that would take place outside of, but still dependent upon, university infrastructure. Both the Whole University Catalog and the Blueprint are ambivalent in their position to the university. This ambivalence is a form of fugitive study as outlined in The Undercommons. As Moten and Harney write, one’s position in relation to the university must be “in but not of.”73 Moten and Harney’s recognition of a relationship that is not merely “for-or-against”74 the university is also in line with Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the ambiguous relation between physical and social spaces.75 These models of alternative pedagogies disrupt the narrative of progress put forth by Jackson’s We the People by producing a social space founded on creating open-ended possibilities that emerge from

70 Stein and Miller, Blueprint for Counter Education, 10–11. 71 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Blueprint for a Blueprint” in Blueprint for Counter Education, by Maurice Stein and Larry Miller (New York: Inventory Press, 2016), 18. 72 Julie Niemi, “Blueprint for Counter Education at Cal Arts,” accessed June 25, 2018, http://blueprintforcountereducation.com/archive/Blueprint_for_Counter_Education_at_CalAr.pdf. 73 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 26. 74 Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond” in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 9. 75 Henri Lefebvre, “Social Space” in The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 68–168. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 71

multiple iterations and outcomes rather than a factory-like production of knowledge. The interest in focus on the university as both a real and imagined space for the Land Grant exhibition stemmed largely from examples of the social dimensions of the university demonstrated in projects such as the 2009–10 exhibition Beyond the Chief, curated by Robert Warrior and hosted by the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Indigeneity and the Ever-Present Role of Colonialism on Campus

From February 2009 to September 2010, Robert Warrior curated the public art exhibition Beyond the Chief by Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds on the campus of UIUC. The project comprised twelve aluminum panels resembling road signage, an iteration of Heap of Birds’s Native Hosts series. The works were installed in front of the American Indian Studies, African American Studies, and Asian American Studies buildings, as well as the campus cultural houses.76 The signage depicted the names of a dozen Indigenous peoples whose homelands fall within Illinois state lines: the Peoria, Piankesaw, Kaskaskia, Wea, Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Odawa, Myaamia, Quapaw, Meskwaki, Sac, and Kickapoo. Beyond the Chief also evoked the values of Heap of Birds’s own Cheyenne tribe. According to Heap of Birds, “In Cheyenne tradition a chief had no personal property. . . A chief is far beyond one person and should reflect an honor and allegiance—as well as truth, tradition, listening, openness, and good way—to a whole people. As we install these twelve sign panels, we walk forward on the University of Illinois campus to honor these ideals and intertribal brothers and sisters from a circular position of respect.”77 Through the duration of the Beyond the Chief exhibition, nine accounts of vandalism were documented.78 In his reflection on this vandalism Warrior observed that “these panels, in their memorialization of lives that were essentially ethnically cleansed from Illinois, present a modern Native voice critiquing the way the erasure and removal of those lives have been unmarked, a critique that some people would rather attack and steal than appreciate or even just ignore.”79 Beyond the Chief serves as an example of the mobilization of the notions of the Undercommons put forth by Moten and Harney. Sharon Irish has suggested that the visibility of a Native critique of the campus was a motivating factor of retaliation through vandalism.80 Indeed, Heap of Birds’s installation

76 Robert Warrior, “Vandalizing Life Writing at the University of Illinois: Heap of Birds’s Signs of Indigenous Life,” Profession (2011), 44. 77 Edgar Heap of Birds, “Artist Statement,” Beyond the Chief Exhibit, http://www.ais.illinois.edu/news/features/beyond/. 78 A complete list of the accounts of vandalism can be found at http://www.ais.illinois.edu/mascot/news/archive/2010/beyondhistory.aspx. 79 Warrior, “Vandalizing Life Writing,” 45. 80 Sharon Irish, quoted in Warrior, “Vandalizing Life Writing,” 47. 72 SHIFT

made visible the contemporary presence of Indigenous voices on campus, the way this presence is diminished, and the structural racism that exists under the surface of the neoliberal university’s call for a multicultural, diverse campus.81 Despite efforts by the Land Grant curators, the exhibition did not feature any documentation or work from Heap of Birds’s project. This important installation currently resides within the collections of American Indian Studies department and will be installed in an upcoming exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum. The situatedness of these artifacts highlights the centrality and importance of the work of the American Indian Studies department as well as the Native American cultural house on campus. The design of the exhibition began with a reproduction of Charles C. Royce’s map of Illinois

Figure 10. Charles C. Royce, “Illinois 1,” from Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1803-05. Courtesy of Newberry Library. in Indian Land Cessions in the United States, 1803-05, foregrounding the history of settler-colonial violence embedded in the campus (fig. 10). This curatorial move called attention to the themes of the real and the imaginary introduced in the conception of the university as both a physical place and an imagined space. This strategy is in line with Helen Molesworth’s vision for an institution that is a “fundamental reorganization of the institutions that govern us, as well as those that we, in turn, govern.”82 Molesworth goes

81 Chatterjee and Maira, “Introduction,” 7–8. 82 Molesworth, “How to Install Art Like a Feminist,” 499. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 73

on to say that it is not enough to simply reinsert works created by marginalized voices in a chronological order, but rather that a fundamental re-ordering of exhibitions is necessary to reveal an alternative history that doesn’t paper over violent absences.83 In this way, Land Grant sought to give these absences their own material referent. The only depiction of the retired University of Illinois mascot in Land Grant is contained within We the People and was placed on the final and least visible wall in the gallery, disempowering the image while harkening to its continued, sanctioned, presence on campus. In the painting, the former mascot is rendered wearing an orange and white feathered headdress and traditional buckskin garments, likely drawn from the 1982 regalia purchased by the University from Frank Fools Crow of the Oglala Sioux Tribal Nation of South Dakota.84 The former mascot stands with his open arms raised to the sky in a position like the other figureheads featured in the painting, the Alma Mater statue and the signatories of the Morrill Act. In contrast to these symbolic characters, the former mascot is depicted on a smaller scale, mirroring the laboring academic and agricultural workers in the piece. However, he is also removed from the progressive narrative of action and betterment they embody, and is instead is relegated to a frozen position, reflecting the University’s ascription of past-tense status to Indigeneity, a position the institution uses to “justify” the appropriation of traditional garments. Like the image of the retired mascot in We the People, the exhibition included a series of photographs in which primitivist performances meant to be understood by spectators as “Indian” exemplify North American legacies of ‘playing Indian.’ As Philip J. Deloria notes, white people undertake performances wherein they adopt Indigenous dress and culture for numerous, complicated, and paradoxical reasons.85 As Deloria explains, one of the primary functions of ‘Indian play’ is that it allows colonizers to temporarily inhabit an identity that is unquestionably American.86 Understood in this framework, the young people in the problematic photographs included in the exhibition Land Grant were enacting both their own yearning for American authenticity as well as the final paradox Deloria notes in his book: “The self-defining pairing of American truth with American freedom rests of the ability to wield power against Indians. . . while simultaneously drawing upon them.”87 While Land Grant disempowered the sanctioned image of the retired mascot, our curatorial collective placed the historic photographs of ‘playing Indian’ directly beside the Indian Land Cessions map on the gallery’s first wall, making an explicit connection between the initial physical and ongoing cultural theft perpetrated by settlers on Illinois’s Indigenous peoples.

83 Molesworth, “How to Install Art Like a Feminist,” 504. 84 Julie Wurth, “Sioux Request Prompts Look at History of Garb,” The News Gazette, January 27, 2007, http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2007-01-27/sioux-request-prompts-look-history-chief- illiniwek-garb.html. 85 Deloria, Philip J., Playing Indian (Chelsea: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–9. 86 Deloria, Playing Indian, 183. 87 Deloria, Playing Indian, 191. 74 SHIFT

The exhibition also contained an archival photograph of a building, Davenport Hall (3) (fig. 11). Visible in the upper left-hand corner of the image is a landscape of fields that would, more than a century later, become the site of the Native American House on the University of Illinois campus, as we noted in our wall label for this image. The Native American House opened in 2002 after fifteen years of organizing and protests. As Moten and Harney suggest, cultural houses serve important roles on contemporary university campuses because they are one of the few spaces dedicated to fostering relational, “being with” study. The opening of the Native American House addressed a longstanding absence of Native American representation on campus; an absence that was exacerbated by the omnipresent images of the former mascot and, in 2014, when all but one faculty member vacated their positions in the American Indian Studies program in response to the blocked hire of Indigenous scholar and activist Dr. Steven Salaita.88

Figure 11. Photographer unknown, Davenport Hall (3), 1900. Photograph on board. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives, Image 0002887.

Through the process of curating the objects that spoke to Indigeneity at UIUC from the university’s own collections, it became apparent to the co-curators of Land Grant that

88 Julie Wurth, “Post-Salaita: UI Program’s Future Unclear,” The News Gazette, August 29, 2016, http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2016-08-29/post-salaita-ui-programs-future-unclear.html. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 75

the institution’s approach to Native American communities and histories has been reactionary in nature. As with the reactionary violence towards Heap of Birds’s Beyond the Chief, the original violence of Indigenous removal is reenacted through each conflict between the university and its Native American critics. This reactionary relationship between the university’s logics of administration and critiques raised by faculty and students through course-offerings, exhibitions, and campus protests underscores Moten and Harney’s recognition of the futility of being a critical academic. Of this position, they ask, “Does the questioning of the academic not become a pacification?”89 To critique is to participate in the university’s logics of administration, which, as Ahmed points out in her recent work on complaint, creates space for the institution to deny the legitimacy of the person leveraging the critique, thus rendering them silent.90 Critical representations of Illinois and the university by Indigenous authors are absent from the campus collections drawn upon for Land Grant. The absence of these materials from the exhibition is thus reflects the institutional erasure of criticism directed towards the university. We addressed this shortcoming, as well as the settler-colonial violence which underlines it, by including wall labels that made mention of holes in collections, as well as drawing viewers’ attention to the ways that colonialism has and continues to shape the institution. Though Land Grant made use of available archival materials, our position remained suspicious of the archive as a colonial mechanism. Following Molesworth, as well as Melamed and Azoulay, we posit that while archives serve to legitimize particular historical narratives, they do not exclude the reality that others exist. By drawing public attention to the current limitations of institutional archives, our curatorial collective hopes that Land Grant can serve as a starting point for dissatisfied students, silenced administrators, and marginalized faculty to take up fugitive forms of study that better reflect their values and their experiences of the university.

Conclusion

The same discourses of academic civility that Moten and Harney critique in The Undercommons to took a concrete form at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in August 2014, when the college’s Board of Trustees made the decision to fire Dr. Steven Salaita after he had signed his employment contract but before he was able to officially take up a tenure-track position in the American Indian Studies Department because of his ‘uncivil’ tweets against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.91 In the

89 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 39. 90 Sara Ahmed, “Complaint as Diversity Work” in Feministkilljoys (November 10, 2017). Accessed June 26, 2018, https://feministkilljoys.com/2017/11/10/complaint-as-diversity-work. 91 As Chancellor Wise stated, “As chancellor, it is my responsibility to ensure that all perspectives are welcome and that our discourse, regardless of subject matter or viewpoint, allows new concepts and differing points of view to be discussed in and outside the classroom in a scholarly, civil and productive manner.” 76 SHIFT

aftermath of his firing there was considerable commentary and outrage about the impingement of Salaita’s right to academic freedom.92 Many asserted that since Twitter is a public forum not associated with, nor formally acknowledged as labor by, the university, Salaita’s dismissal was a policing of his “extramural utterances.”93 There was, however, surprisingly little attention paid to the clear anti-Indigenous position of the university. The firing of Salaita was not merely about the ‘uncivility’ of his words; it was a statement against the American Indian Studies Department’s decision to expand the frame of their scholarship to Indigenous peoples from around the world, including Palestinians. When considered in concert with the university’s appeal to the National Collegiate Athletic Association to disregard a 2006 organization-wide ban on Native American sports mascots, the vandalization of Heap of Birds’s Beyond the Chief, and the localization of objects and artworks to sit within the American Indian Studies department, rather than larger university collections, makes plainly visible a pattern of administrative anti-Indigenous racism whilst the American Indian Studies department itself is another site wherein the Undercommons can be located.94 When approaching the Land Grant exhibition our curatorial collective sought to take up Moten and Harney’s call to appropriate the resources of the university to complicate and undermine problematic aspects of the institution’s history. Working with the Krannert Art Museum, professor Terri Weissman, and curator Amy Powell allowed us to borrow objects that students would not normally be allowed to access, such as Jackson’s We the People, which was on loan from the President’s Office for the run of the show. By positioning this revered painting alongside underground student publications and photographs that highlight the anti-Indigenous racism on campus, Land Grant sought to fulfill Moten and Harney’s cry to “abuse [the university’s] hospitality, to

Christine Des Garennes, “Updated: Wise Explains Salaita Decision, Gets Support from Trustees,” The News Gazette (Champaign, IL), Aug. 23, 2014. 92 The focus on academic freedom in the wake of the Salaita affair is exemplified by the over 1900 signatories of a call to boycott requests to speak at UIUC initiated by Frederick Moten in solidarity with the Campus Faculty Association of UIUC. Fred Moten, “In Defense of Academic Freedom,” Accessed April 5, 2018, https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfEFSgE4UmpjpZJeIhRK0J3pkMmxT6dk0Znbr3QdxUvY31jl Q/viewform. Scholarly works on academic freedom and the Salaita firing include Matthew Abraham, “Conceptualizing Academic Freedom after the Salaita Affair” in First Amendment Studies 49, no. 1 (2015), 8–12; John K. Wilson, “Academic Freedom and a Tale of Two Dismissals” in First Amendment Studies 49, no. 1 (2015), 5–7; Steven Salaita, “Normalizing State Power: Uncritical Ethical Praxis and Zionism” in Piya Chatterjee and Sumaina Maira (eds.), The Imperial University (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 217–236. 93 John K. Wilson “Academic Freedom and Extramural Utterances: The Leo Koch and Steven Salaita Cases at the University of Illinois” in American Association of University Professors: Journal of Academic Freedom 6 (2015), 2. 94 Inside Illinois, “UI Appeals NCAA Policy Regarding Chief Illiniwek,” Illinois News Bureau: Campus News, February 2, 2006, https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/211456. Bralower and Rowe | Land Grant 77

spite its mission.”95 As a space dedicated to the celebration of creative expression, the university art museum is uniquely positioned to construct frameworks for the Undercommons to perform fugitive, prophetic organization in public.96

Alyssa Bralower is a PhD student in art history researching women photographers in the interwar period at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has previously worked as a gallery assistant at Figure One in Champaign, IL and has held curatorial internships at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Krannert Art Museum in Urbana, IL.

Allison Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher. She is a PhD candidate in Art Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she is researching gallery and museum supported socially engaged art, and is the recipient of a 2016-2019 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship and the 2017-2018 Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship.

95 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 26. 96 Borderland Collective's installation Northern Triangle hosted at the Krannert Art Museum from August to December 2016 was a foundational influence on the development of Land Grant. For additional information on Northern Triangle, see “Borderland Collective: Northern Triangle,” Krannert Art Museum, accessed February 20, 2019, https://kam.illinois.edu/exhibition/borderland-collective-northern-triangle. In addition, while working on this essay, we very much had the recent firing of Helen Molesworth from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Laura Raicovich from the Queens Museum on our minds. Their removal from high status positions at large, public art museums highlight the pervasiveness of status-quo, apolitical civility expectations in American art galleries as well as the unquestionable tentacular hold that neoliberal professionalism has on institutions across the country.