Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
A Gathering of the Tribes / Steve Cannon
24
Floor 6
Founded 1991
Steve Cannon: Born 1935 in New Orleans, LA
Died 2019 in New York, NY
Founded in 1991 by poet, playwright, novelist, and former Medgar Evers College professor Steve Cannon (1935–2019), A Gathering of the Tribes began as a literary magazine that incorporated as a nonprofit arts organization in 1993. Tribes programs grew to include a reading venue, artist salon, online literary magazine and art gallery in Cannon’s home on East Third Street in Manhattan. The organization continues to provide a platform for diverse, traditionally underrepresented artists and writers, amplifying the emerging and established revolutionary voices of our time. Today, Tribes continues to host literary readings, and publishes a robust online literary magazine as well as a biennial art and literary print journal.
This installation is drawn from Cannon’s personal effects and the Tribes archive held in special collections at New York University, and was organized in close collaboration with Tracie Dawn Williams and Chavisa Woods, Tribes’s archivist and executive director, respectively. The floating red wall and hair sculpture—two works by David Hammons, Cannon’s friend and collaborator—were a fixture in the gallery-apartment. Cannon, who was blind, held court from a couch in front of the crimson wall, and with the assistance of a dedicated group of friends he provided a space that empowered artists and writers of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ individuals, and people from diverse class backgrounds, who regularly came together bonded by a singular passion: love of the arts. Cannon’s gatherings fostered an open space for experimentation and rigorous intellectual debate.
Installation of materials from A Gathering of the Tribes, 2022
David Hammons, A Gathering of the Tribes series, n.d. (installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Photograph by Ron Amstutz
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A Gathering of the Tribes, selection of archival material
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Chavisa Woods: My name is Chavisa Woods, and I am currently the Executive Director of A Gathering of the Tribes.
Narrator: The poet and thinker Steve Cannon founded A Gathering of the Tribes in 1991.
Chavisa Woods: The mission of A Gathering of the Tribes, Steve always said, Tribes meant to him people from different groups coming together for a greater purpose. So it was a place where all different types of marginalized artists and authors came together in order to strengthen our standing, and to make sure that we did get represented. I think it’s a place for LGBTQ artists, artists of color, immigrant artists, Native American artists, Indigenous artists, and artists from poor and working class backgrounds.
Narrator: Tribes was housed in Cannon’s apartment in the East Village. It operated as a magazine, a salon, and a gallery—flyers hanging around this space show the vast range of artists whose work appeared there. One of its most striking features was a wall painted by the artist David Hammons, which framed the couch where Cannon could usually be found directing the action in the space.
Chavisa Woods: The wall to me looks like David Hammons has created wallpaper, but it’s painted on. So it’s these beautiful sort of golden waves that go vertically up and down the full length of the wall. And they look like they’re made with gold leaf.
And at the top it looks like chicken wire, and the part that would be spikes is made of human hair. So then the wall becomes something else. It becomes a security fence, but of course it’s not, because it’s also . . . there’s a conflict there because it’s so beautiful. Because it’s red and gold, and then the human hair gives it this sort of really gritty feel because the hair, of course, has been cut off and is old and dry.
Narrator: A Gathering of the Tribes has operated out of two different apartments in New York. In 2013, Cannon was evicted from the organization’s first home.
Chavisa Woods: Steve, when he was evicted, decided to take the wall with him, which is a pretty brassy move, to tell the landlord, okay, I’ll move out but I’m taking a wall with me. [laughs]