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This chapter explores the exhibition, Contemporary Black Artists in America (CBAA), held at the Whitney Museum. The CBAA was the work of a white man, Whitney's curator, Robert M. “Mac” Doty. It presented dissident artists as, in every sense, a creation of the society they occupied. It offered a lens through which to discern the contested and dynamic nature of the terrain on which stoic formations of blackness were then being established. The CBAA has virtually no art history because it went against pretty much everything about the art's interactions with color and race that gets to be historical. This is why it is so hard to accommodate to social histories of the period that would content themselves to rehash the old antagonisms. However, within the special confines of CBAA, the modernist project and that of interracialization regained a vitality whose loss had seemed assured for some time.

Jayne Wark draws on the ideas of Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva as a means to examine the political potency of a number of works by the Canadian artists Allyson Mitchell, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, and Rosalie Favell whose practices are informed by feminist and lesbian politics. The artists work to problematize fixed identity categories. Wark seeks to move beyond what she perceives to be the limiting outlook of the conceptualisation of abject art offered by the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition on the theme. The exhibition lacked nuance and was too wedded to the political climate of the United States of the early 1990s. The Whitney curators had a national agenda and were responding to efforts to censor art and censure certain artists. Their political motivations do not seamlessly transfer to a consideration of contemporary Canadian art. For Wark, each of the artists she considers strives, in different ways, to resignify the abject. They therefore employ it as a critical resource in the way Judith Butler envisages. As the Whitney exhibition and the essay by Wark demonstrates, thinking about modernist and contemporary works through the prism of abjection allows us to recognize their political radicalism and to understand how they confront the repressive tendencies of dominant culture at specific historical moments.

This chapter addresses Jeff Koons’s work, which was on displayed at the old Whitney Museum of American Art in 2015. The Koons show puts lots of sex and celebrity on display. Against the background of the sad details of Koons’s failed marriage to the ready-made love of his life, the porn icon La Cicciolina, the exhibition even puts the tragic on display. Each of his pieces comes packaged, as it were, with important questions for the audience to ask about their feelings about toys, or cheap consumer goods, or luxury and celebrity. Indeed, Koons attends not only to the material detail but to the intellectual detail as well. Ultimately, however, what makes Koons’s work so accessible and so likable is not its engagement with interesting questions but its pornographic pandering. It provides cheap thrills.

In 1956, Nell joined the new Poindexter Gallery. Reviewers praised her first show. The following year, she was awarded a residency at Yaddo (the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York), meeting poets Jane Mayhall and May Swenson. Afterward, she traveled to Mexico City and Oaxaca, where she worked at night by the light of an oil lamp. On her return, she spent several weeks at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, followed by another stay at Yaddo in December, when her fellow residents were poets Barbara Guest and Jean Garrigue. Nell spent the summer of 1958 in a rented studio in Gloucester. It was there that ARTnews writer Lawrence Campbell visited her to write a major piece about her work on Harbor and Green Cloth, illustrated with photographs by her friend Rudy Burckhardt. A second version of this painting was purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art.