Exposure: Covid 19. Artists. Rent.

(A Foreword)

It was right at the cusp of COVID that I moved into an apartment in Manhattan's East Village — the same neighborhood Jonathan Larson wrote about in RENT. That show tells a story of bohemians clinging to their apartments through the AIDS plague. I arrived thirty years apart, same zip code, different virus.

My first job in that neighborhood, before I'd even finished unpacking, was associate producing choreographer Yoshiko Chuma's Love Story at La MaMa ETC, the same theater where RENT itself was first workshopped. Artists, housing instability, plague, value measured in love, and the general absurdity of being a person that creates culture. When SARS-CoV-2 hit, the themes of that exact story were playing out again, on stage and off.

Immediately before arriving in the EV, I'd lost my day job and got evicted from my Chinatown apartment within weeks of the pandemic's global disruption. That lease, for what it's worth, had been written on the back of a receipt — which should have told me everything about how stable any of this was ever going to be. More on that later. Not long after the pandemic hit the streets and shuttered the New York cultural milieu, I was the first in my family to be accepted to an Ivy League: Columbia University.

Go Lions, baby!

It was a hard time for many. It was an oddly opportunistic time for many. Mostly, it was overwhelming. Debt piled up along with assignments, bodies piled up in morgues, and my patience waxed and waned as I endeavored to finish my university program. I entered it with a decade of professional practice already behind me, not as someone learning the field for the first time, but as someone trying to finally get the language for what I'd already lived. Upon arrival, I had already been pushing the proverbial boulder up the mountain. Naively, I thought Columbia would ease the weight.

We Spray Painted and Spoke Poetry at the Master's House was my thesis submission for the Masters capstone at Teachers College. In it, I proposed an experimental documentary short about racial capitalism, bosses, bullshit, aesthetics and poetics — an imaginative examination of the neoliberal policies that arose in the arts and culture market at the onset of the once-in-a-generation pandemic. I proposed the usage of re-enactment, animation, narration, rap and dance in a film that would put such expressive art at the center of an analytic overview of the era, shot across NYC's galleries, theaters, symphonies, courthouses, and streets, scripted from interviews with artists, curators, educators, and journalists working across the field.

The film itself was never made, and I never published the thesis publicly, for several reasons.

First, life got in the way: paid arts projects, an imploding romantic relationship, the endless errand of finding work.

Second, the thesis had been written in the hyper formal style expected in Ivy League academia, which was a requirement. My voice got lost in the process, and I never made peace with that. Also, I'd wanted to center the work on class first, and other intersections second. My thesis advisor encouraged me to look at race as a primary lens instead. I learned a great deal from that process, but the project that resulted had drifted from my own core concern.

Lastly, it took me several years to overcome my anger with my graduate program, anger which was blocking me from releasing this work at all.

In the second year of my masters, the administration pulled the scholarship funding from my cohort without explanation or cause. That resulted in heavy pushback from the class, a movement which I led, in turn souring some of my relationships with the Columbia network. I didn't know how to talk about this publicly afterward, and wasn't sure if I ever should, until recently. I've come to the conclusion that including it here only adds to what the thesis itself is trying to say.

A few months ago, I revisited the storyboard collages I'd made for the thesis project and redeveloped them into a zine, titled Emergency Imaginations. (Culture Writing link.)

When revisiting the thesis visuals to make the zine, I recollected on my time at Columbia. I noticed a pattern I hadn't fully named while I was living it. The story about the art world in New York during Covid is a story about rent — literal rent, and every other kind of rent this system charges you for existing inside it: the emotional rent of performed gratitude toward the institutions funding you while they fuck you over, the relational rent of staying somewhere wrong because leaving costs more, the reputational rent of not saying the true thing because it'll piss off Very Important People. "Your network is your net worth," is what people who already own property, stocks, and bonds say.

Nonprofits, universities, cultural institutions — structurally, they're all landlords. They rent you a version of belonging, and the lease is never in your favor. You find out what's in the fine print exactly once: when they enforce it. Money is the native language of every institution I've ever loved. Universities simply pretend to speak it with a better vocabulary . . . right up until they don't need to bother anymore.

The frame holding this up is class and precarity: who writes the lease versus who signs it.

On My Experience at Columbia (Why it Took Me Three Years to Publish The Thesis.)

Edward Said taught at Columbia for nearly four decades. He also spent his career arguing that the people living through displacement and precarity are the ones entitled to narrate it — what he called, in his own writing, "permission to narrate." It's a strange, specific kind of institutional irony that the university teaching generations of students to read Said seriously is the same university that, the year after I graduated, called the NYPD onto its own campus to clear a student encampment, arrested dozens of its own students at Hamilton Hall, and has since suspended, expelled, or revoked the degrees of more than a hundred of them for pro-Palestinian activism — while its president at the time resigned under the pressure of it all, and the school negotiated with a federal administration threatening to pull hundreds of millions in funding unless it disciplined its own students harder.

I wasn't there for any of that. I graduated the year before, and I was never expelled or arrested or investigated. I want to be precise about the difference in scale, because collapsing my story into theirs would be its own kind of dishonesty. But I did live an earlier, quieter version of the same aggressive institutional instinct: when my cohort's funding got pulled with no explanation, the administration's move wasn't violence, it was silence. Scholarships cut with letters that were sent without apology, just an update.

Members of my cohort tried to figure out how we were going to pay for the semester, students siloed in shame. The thing about a place like Columbia is that it has a quiet culture of expected wealth. To admit you need any kind of help is to admit you aren't part of The Club. But I was already a relatively seasoned community organizer at this point in my journey, and could not afford to pretend to be rich. So I organized my peers, created a formal letter requesting a Town Hall, and penned a set of demands. Mainly, that funding be reinstated. We students were met in The Town Hall by our professors and two Columbia lawyers. In the end we won back some of the money, something like two credits worth. Looking back I honestly don't know if the fight was worth it. But isn't that the whole point of advocacy? That it isn't easy? That you don't always "win?"

A year later, facing a much larger threat to its funding from a much larger source, the same institution's instinct scaled up dramatically: not just silence or legal language anymore, but active force, deployed against its own students as they spoke up about university funds being implicated in a war abroad.

So, the university's defunding of my cohort had not been an anomaly. It had been a rehearsal.

I'm not going to litigate the international conflict those students were protesting; that's a different essay, written by someone with more standing than me to write it. What I will say is this: an institution can teach you Said, and Freire, and hooks, in exquisite detail, and still fail every single one of them the moment its own students try to practice what was assigned. That's not a contradiction unique to Columbia. It's the same pattern the thesis that follows keeps tracking in museums and philharmonics — just wearing a cap and gown this time. Institutions reveal themselves most clearly when the people inside them refuse the terms, or lease, under which participation has been offered.

Here's the part that's genuinely hard to hold at once: Columbia is also, unambiguously, a dream factory. It handed me a degree, a network, and credibility that I didn't have walking in. Doors are still opening because of it years later. Both things are true. The institution that arbitrarily pulled my cohort's funding and the institution that made me legible to rooms I'd likely never have entered otherwise are a product of the same building, the same letterhead, the same acceptance email I screamed about during lockdown. It still hurts, holding both truths. I don't think it's supposed to stop hurting.

I think the hurt is the accurate response to something that looks like a diploma but feels like heartbreak.

I'm asking you to trust my story as key evidence here and not just anecdote — this isn't a story about someone unqualified falling through the cracks. It's about someone extremely qualified falling through them anyway, and climbing back out. Picking the boulder back up. Walking up the mountain. Over and over. It's also not just my story. It's hundreds of arts workers tackling the same crisis of gentrification and precarity, with COVID and New York as the backdrop. The research that follows reinforces what I lived through, and vice versa. I'm carrying the theory of my thesis on my back.

I'm a working interdisciplinary artist — writing, performance, community-facing work and feminist transgression both — trained by theater artists, choreographers, ethnographers, playwrights, and activists, with over ten years in the field and roots going back to childhood training in Houston. Houston is its own contradiction: progressive without being precious about it. It didn't fully prepare me for New York. Nothing does. The East Village, where I live now, is a constant source of material (and, apparently, a neighborhood that keeps handing artists the same story on a different decade's letterhead.)

There's an ancient story about a king condemned to push a boulder up a mountain forever, watching it roll back down every time he nears the top. Sisyphus gets treated like a tragedy, the human condition made absurd. I'd argue he's just an artist with a day job. The boulder is the vocation, the dream. The mountain is debt, and rent, and grants that get pulled the moment you're standing on solid ground.

As for me, I keep pushing anyway. Not because I think the boulder's going to stay at the top this time, or that an institution is coming to save me. Because putting your shoulder into something you love, over and over, with no illusions left about how the story ends — that's not defeat. That's devotion. And it's the only tool I've ever actually owned outright.

To quote Camus, "one must imagine Sisyphus happy."

What follows is the thesis itself: the research, the case studies, the theory I was carrying and didn't yet have the distance to carry lightly. I've left it as I wrote it. Read it as the evidence, all 67 pages.

Read We Spray Painted & Spoke Poetry at the Masters House

WE SPRAY PAINTED AND SPOKE POETRY AT THE MASTER. final.cb.pdf

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