Allison Glenn is the curator of the Counterpublic 2023 triennial currently on view in St. Louis. In her role, she considers the importance of collectivity and collaboration. Below, Glenn discusses her related interests.
Until late last summer, I had never been to the roof of the Duomo in Florence. There was a long succession of architects and engineers who headed the construction project, driven by the collective use of Candoglia marble. Those who helped create the famous structure did so as an ensemble working in unison. This concept of collectivity really drove my curatorial approach for Counterpublic.
The artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons has this way of making seemingly impossible goals a reality through collaboration. Everything Is Separated by Water, the book that accompanied her 2007 solo exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, sets the stage for work that both she and curator Okwui Enwezor were going to do. Now, 17 years later, I’m still following these threads through an Enwezor-conceived edition of the Sharjah Biennial and Campos-Pons’s work showing in the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art, in Knoxville.
I grew up listening to Detroit-based producer J Dilla’s music. I’m fascinated by the connections that Dan Charnas’s book and website, Dilla Time, make to syncopation—not only the history of syncopated beats, but also how J Dilla used that as a framework to create a new kind of sonic vocabulary as a producer. The website is free and provides accompaniment to the biography. The book’s second chapter, “Straight Time/Swing Time,” traces Dilla’s connection to rags by St. Louis native Scott Joplin. One part asks the reader to consider how syncopation feels in one’s body. I’m interested in the embodied experience of viewing as well as understanding what syncopation means in the body. There’s a larger arc to the history of syncopation and musical innovation in the United States, particularly in the Midwest.
I’ve worked with a few members of the Seattle-based collective Black Constellation individually, but I’m enamored with their collective approach. A great point of entry into the collective is its podcast Fresh Off the Spaceship, that recently hosted Shabazz Palaces, a hip-hop duo and cocreators of the group. In a video for the Shabazz Palaces song “Fast Learner,” lead rapper Ishmael Butler is wearing clothes designed by fellow Black Constellation artist Nep Sidhu. There’s so much to learn from their level of collaboration.
Pruitt-Igoe was a Minoru Yamasaki–designed series of buildings in St. Louis that was part of a mid-20th-century drive toward modernism and cooperative living for all. However, the housing development for low-income residents eventually fell into disrepair and was demolished. The 2011 documentary Pruitt-Igoe Myth unpacks the buildings’ history through the lens of former residents. While many believe it to be a failed project, those who lived there recounted fond memories. As I worked on the triennial, I’ve been considering this past as it relates to the land and its usage.