On the Cancellation of Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine

Kingston, Jamaica, March 21, 2025 — Today should have marked the opening of Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, an exhibition over three years in the making, at the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) in Washington, D.C. But on Feb. 14, just weeks before installation was set to begin, AMA officially cancelled the show, as directed by the Secretariat of the Organization of American States (OAS), which administers the museum. PREE would like to take the opportunity to publish an article by one of the participating artists examining the current zeitgeist in which artists find themselves operating and strategies to continue making and exhibiting work. 

 

Deborah Root

I was intrigued when Andil Gosine extended an invitation to participate in his exhibition, Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, scheduled to open at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2025. Conceived of as “a solo show with many artists” this exhibition would have included a range of work, all imagined as a collaboration and engagement with Andil’s book Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean.

At every level, the Nature’s Wild exhibition impressively challenged expectations and received ideas about what an art project should be. It was collaborative and interdisciplinary, bringing together different people from different places with different practices, a living example of the fluidity inherent in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a molecular process, which by its very nature challenges fixed ideas. For me, it was an opportunity to engage with other artists, and with ideas that have preoccupied me for a long time. I also welcomed the opportunity to show my work in a major museum.

In keeping with the mandate of the show, I created a portrait of two friends, Trinidad-Canadian filmmaker Richard Fung and writer Tim McCaskell, long time activists and partners, who good-naturedly allowed me to photograph them for the painting and provided me with images from their queer activist days, some of which I used in my montage-style work.

The Rise of Cancel Culture

After Trump was re-elected and continued his rants about “wokeness” and similar issues, I began to wonder if the exhibition would see the light of day. The show had a Caribbean focus and included a diverse group of artists. Although it was not a queer show per se (as Andil points out in several interviews), it was nevertheless queer positive, and Andil’s book, Nature’s Wild, published by Duke University Press, is generally seen as a queer theory text.

Should I have expected the cancellation of the Nature’s Wild show? Looking back, I can see that well before Trump’s last election, art exhibitions and individual works were being cancelled (including here in Canada, supposedly a bastion of liberal thought), particularly in public galleries because the works were seen as too controversial or because donors didn’t like the artists’ politics. In the last few years — and even beyond Trump’s agenda — what people working in the arts could and could not say about current events began to be adjudicated and censored, with curators and others being fired because of their views. This has been an ongoing issue, both here and overseas, with the default institutional position being censorship.

Incidents like the post-election firing of the Kennedy Center board were not entirely unexpected therefore, given that their funding structure is dependent on US government money, still it was alarming how quickly this new iteration of censorship was happening. Nature’s Wild however was in place and all set to open. The various monies — for materials, transportation of the work, artists’ fees, a catalogue — were in place and had not come from US government agencies. On my end, I’d completed my oil painting in good time, the paint was dry, it had been varnished and signed, packed up and ready to be shipped. The courier had been notified, and arrangements were in place to have it picked up the following day.

And then

Pow! It was over!

So fast…

Even if partially imagined, the cancellation of the exhibition was still shocking, a kind of summary execution with no warning, and no recourse. My disappointment was overlaid by anger and disbelief — and yes, fear. What was happening in the US had come into my house, into my home here in Canada, in a deeply personal way.

Free market Authoritarianism

Current US policies reflect a deep-seated racism and homophobia, with an unabashed longing for pre-civil rights days, when white men were in charge, without question, a harkening back that has come up periodically in US politics and populist culture. Even if such longing is ultimately about money and power and the persistence of bad histories, this nostalgia also reflects a deep anxiety about racial and gender categories being seen as too untidy today, all jumbled up, and hence unreliable, in need of strict corralling by a supposedly capable leader who has a like-minded army of followers behind him. Hannah Arendt and others spoke of the authoritarian personality, and the way in which such people are both obedient and rigid. They like their hierarchies and want everyone to stay in their lane — too many differing voices, too many possibilities, means that the world is out of control. Recent research suggests a link between authoritarian personalities and homophobia and other prejudices.

In this way of thinking, an art show such as Nature’s Wild — a cultural event that has nothing to do with creating official policy — must be cancelled, because it embodies, suggests and sanctions the existence of other possibilities, other fluidities. A friend currently in Berlin visited a museum display on Nazism and was struck by how petty and mean-spirited the early Nazi statutes were. Just like it is now, she said — and indeed the German Nazis went after culture before anything else. Not only were art exhibitions cancelled, but 16,000 works of confiscated art were exhibited  around the Reich as examples of “degenerate” art before being burned. Anyone who was deemed different — gay people, neurodivergent people, disabled people, and of course non-Aryans — had to be erased. Which in the end meant killed.

Managing Difference

Gay people have always been the canary in the mine; I’ve been struck by how many historical examples there are of conservative and hierarchical regimes preoccupied with control of sexuality, often blaming the need to control what people do with their bodies, and in the privacy of their homes, on religion. Although religion isn’t necessarily part of a regime’s toolbox of control, a quick glance around the globe reveals how regularly it’s deployed to shore up state authority. By intervening in people’s most private desires and acts, governments assert their power and, accordingly, people deemed deviant must be erased, one way or another. And bringing peoples’ private lives under the purview of state control lets us know how the state is likely to regulate other issues it seeks to administer, including how it manages other minorities in its society. One way to establish this control is through statutes and regulations, and another way is through silencing and erasure.

When I watch and listen to the current dictates of the US government I am seeing and hearing a clear intent to erase all traces of difference. Not only do they dislike anything that can be considered too fluid, but also the complex and rich histories of people of color (witness the current right-wing fear of the 1619 project, which centers around the unpacking of the various, ongoing effects of the slavery-based economy in the US). Along with the Nature’s Wild show, the Art Museum of the Americas also cancelled the Before the Americas exhibition, which explored the African diaspora and the transatlantic slave trade. I am witnessing what seems to be an interest in silencing nearly everyone who doesn’t fit in with the establishment’s narrow view of the perfect world, not only because of the fear of difference, but also because of the fear of different communities talking to each other and making common cause. Silence and isolation equals death, yet again.

‘Bad Art’

Importantly, the Art Museum of the Americas was not forced to cancel Nature’s Wild by any government agency. They chose to do this, a case of obedience in advance, I imagine in the hope that as budget cuts rain down they would be rewarded for their loyalty.

I think it’s important to bear in mind that the art market itself operates through a process of cancellation, in a very real sense, despite the patina of supposedly neutral “culture” that surrounds notions of quality in the arts. Galleries and related businesses exist to sell our work, and to please the people who have the money to buy, and the decisions they make exclude those of us who don’t fit ‘the program’ — although they tend to call work in this category bad art. Very few art institutions are interested in breaking new ground, although there did seem to be more openness when there were better funding structures in place.

Here in Canada, there was a reasonably good granting system resulting in many artist-run centres that allowed for new and interesting work to be shown. Much of this was cut in Ontario by a Conservative government that came in in 1995, which claimed the arts were dominated by “interest groups,” which those of us working in the arts understood to mean people of colour and queer people. Bear in mind that this happened nearly 30 years ago! The writing we are seeing now has been on the wall for some time.

The kind of work Trump and his minions wish to promote, which is to say, happy, patriotic work by straight white males, is inherently limiting. It’s not that straight white males are always, in themselves, a problem, but they are only one voice among many. And single voices are boring. Before emigrating, I grew up in a predominantly white enclave in the US and remember well the claustrophobia of those days. It is days like those, times like those, that the right wants to resurrect. Back then, everyone on TV sitcoms looked like my family; they dressed like us, and their houses looked like our house. There was no difference, no air. The only cultural outside people like me came across was in the pages of National Geographic. Many of our fathers drank too much, and too many of our mothers relied on “mother’s little helpers” to manage their lives. My generation, the Vietnam generation, came to clamour for change on a range of levels. I have come to feel that we, my generation, supported social and cultural change not just because of abstract notions of social justice, but because we also understood that our own freedom was linked to the freedom of everyone else.

Margin Gathering

Since the cancellation, I find myself recalling bell hooks’ essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” which struck me profoundly when I first read it the late 1980s. “We greet you as liberators,” she writes, addressing white women and others, meaning, in part, that people who are historically oppressed have things to teach their oppressors, things about freedom and openness. There is little to be gained, she argues, by striving for insider status, seeking to please and be approved of by mainstream centers of power. The margin is where the energy is, she writes, a place of permission, possibility, the place where new and creative ideas come from. These ideas are not pre-determined by existing power structures, and they have yet to be co-opted. bell hooks is not saying that the margins are a safe space, exactly, but that it’s a place from which one can see more, and understand more — there, at the margins, we can imagine alternatives.

I believed that then and I believe it now and feel that the cancelling of Nature’s Wild again underlines the need for creative solutions and alternative structures. As the Art Museum of the Americas showed us by erasing exhibitions that centered queer people and people of colour, anything given by the state can be taken away by the state.

Before I made visual art I was a cultural theorist, working on the aftereffects of colonial histories, especially in the arts. Living in diverse and dynamic downtown Toronto, it seemed that most everyone I knew was an activist, dealing with cultural politics along with the politics of race and gender. Thinking back, I can see that some of us existed in a bubble, or perhaps an echo chamber. In those days, I never actually met anyone who was right wing or racist or homophobic that I was aware of. I told myself that we could relax as the battle had largely been won. We’d worked hard to ensure that there was more diversity in exhibitions as well as hiring, and art institutions were clean about their commitment to social change. I’m embarrassed to say that I believed them, and that when the world began to narrow, I was surprised — but friends whose lived experience was different, particularly those who’d come out of more oppressive histories, were not. Over the last several years I’ve been utterly shocked by the hostility coming from the right and have been trying to understand it — but increasingly I feel that my desire to grasp the prejudices in the world is a waste of energy.

Better to create alternative structures.

Soft Rebellion

And here I come back to bell hooks and the idea of the margin as a place of power and creativity. In many places artists do not rely on government funding, either because it does not exist or is too tied to the ideological interests of those in power. But work nevertheless gets created and shown because people in their communities are committed to making that happen. Shows take place in people’s homes, with invitations circulated among friends and to interested outsiders. Depending on government policies in their countries, much of what is made remains under the radar. Creativity is paramount — but so is safety.

I’ve been thinking about the ideas loosely referred to as “soft rebellion”, which call for alternative economies and structures, including those that are relevant to us, as artists. We must build community rather than privileging privatized models of success. This involves not only collective projects and collaborations, but mutual support around the practicalities of living as artists, which might mean sharing studio and living spaces. It might mean helping with other resources, if possible. Our approach to work and exhibition might become more local, while at the same time refusing insularity. Perhaps we rethink notions of success and refuse big names, big money, big institutions.

Then, once the world opens up as it inevitably will, we’ll be ready to show our newly energized works to a wider audience.

Deborah Root, PhD (Social and Political Thought) is a painter, cultural critic and writer whose  visual art has been exhibited at the Lacuna Festival: METAMORPHOSIS23 and CLASH22 (online and in Lanzarote, Spain, 2022 and 2023), Cista Arts (London, U.K, 2020, the Liebig12 Art Centre, Berlin, 2022),  the “Virtual Realism” exhibition (arthistorybabes.com online exhibition, digital catalogue PDF, podcast, 2021), and in Prince Edward County, Canada. Video work includes regret relief (4:21”), exhibited at the Fastnet Short Film Festival, 2012, and Friday (5″, in collaboration with Shani Mootoo), exhibited in Toronto and at Alice Yard Art Centre in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 2011. Her arts writing has focused on the relationship between visual art and cultural politics. Her catalog work includes substantive essays on Sarindar Dhaliwal, Laureana Toledo, Jorge Lozano, Ximena Cuevas and Annie Pootoogook, and her arts writing has appeared in Art Papers, Prefix Photo, Public, C magazine, the Contact Photography and Bienal de Sao Paulo catalogs, other Canadian and international journals, and most recently in IMPACT Printmaking Journal (Centre for Fine Print Research, Bristol). andRebecca Garret: Search. She is the author of the seminal text Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference, which was named Gustavus Gustavus Myers 1996 Outstanding Book in Human Rights, and listed in “These 16 Books Explain White Supremacy in the U.S.”, BuzzFeed News, 2017. Collaborating artist in Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, Washington, D. C. (Cancelled), 2025.