Play Time with
MoMA Curator Thomas Lax

The Ongoing Work of Reimagining Narratives Within and Beyond Institutions

Interview: Collier Meyerson
Photography: Heather Sten

Nearly one year ago, at the start of lockdown in New York, streets were emptied of cars and people. The only city noise you were sure to hear was the blare of ambulances. Occasionally I would meet with Thomas Lax when I took my 2-year-old son Ozzy to play on an asphalt field in our neighborhood. I was often gloomy, expressing to Thomas my anxiety about an impending economic crisis and its accompanying, inevitable civil unrest. But Thomas, with their innate and boundless optimism, flashing a perennial smile that, even with a mask, shines through, seemed to buoy us. Our time spent early in the pandemic on that asphalt field, while Ozzy would kick his ball, remains vivid, a rare moment of pleasure.

Thomas has been a curator of MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance for 6 years. In that time, they were a recipient of the Cisneros Research Grant, traveling to Brazil in 2020 to research contemporary Black art. Most recently, they worked alongside colleagues on a major rehang of MoMA’s permanent collection and co-organized the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done. Thomas’ work often brings to the fore artists and histories that haven’t yet received wide institutional support and recognition. Driven by Black feminist theory and Black feminist teachers they have, like Thelma Golden, Saidiya Hartman and Linda Goode Bryant, Lax reimagines the myriad possibilities of how power, privilege, gender and race can function in art.

Just as they are in friendship, Thomas approaches curating as both an act of play and of listening. From a study into lemanjá (Yoruba ocean goddess) that took Lax all around Brazil in search of her, to the curation of an incredibly expansive evening honoring writer and academic Saidiya Hartman’s latest book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lax always finds unique ways of navigating institution by pushing the limits of imagination.

The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Collier Meyerson

Thomas Lax

We’re both from the Upper West Side of Manhattan but never crossed paths growing up. What was it like for you?

Like all places where we're from, we have this sense of being imprinted by [the place] but also a deep desire to escape and separate oneself out from it. Being from New York people imagine that you must not have that [desire] because you're from the place everybody wanted to move to. But, it still feels like "No!" I have that desire to leave and continue finding myself.

Yes, that’s why I went to Minnesota for college!

Whether it's being a weirdo, queer, gender nonconforming kid, who never really fit in—that's a reason to not want to be from [your place of origin]. Or just like the intensity of white liberalism [on the Upper West Side] which is promising you something that's never going to happen. It's like...wait for it, wait for it! It’s a perpetual deferral of any form of real justice; and it was so in the cultural soup we were sipping on that our critique of it is fine-tuned, but we’re also a product of it.

Yes, like multiculturalism, the flavor of the 90s.

Multiculturalism is such a deep factor in all this.

It defined our childhoods!

My mom wasn’t from the U.S. but her father was African American. So, she was both Black American—like the descendants of enslaved people in this part of the world—and also all of that history was in some ways new to her as a lived experience. She was reading James Baldwin and Gayl Jones and coming to a history that was hers as an outsider. She wanted to throw herself into it. Basically, she doubled down on multiculturalism.

It’s making me think of how we navigate the white liberal institutions we’re thrust into today. Like, you are a curator at MoMA.

MoMA, like every institution, is in the middle of so many existential changes. Not only because of the moment we’re in because of race in this country, one that many of us have known we've been in. But for the rest, it’s this great reveal.

The big reveal is so amusing to me.

There’s also COVID. I had 150 colleagues retire or transition from MoMA in the last four months. It’s definitely a moment of loss and transition and sadness. But there’s some sense of, "OK, maybe there is another kind of possibility."

MoMA, like every institution,
is in the middle of so many existential changes.

You have been so instrumental in bringing programming to the museum that feels as you say “another kind of possibility.” I went to a celebration of Saidiya Hartman’s newest book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments at PS1 back in January.

As [Saidiya Hartman] finished her book we kept running into each other at these really salient moments. And we thought: how can we take the kind of happenstance of us running into each other and elaborate that further for more folks to come into. She was really into this idea of “assembly.” So many of the ideas behind the book were about the stakes and what it is to be together, which I think is interesting even before COVID. So we were like, let's do that. Let's actually come together. And we just kind of moved intuitively about who we wanted to be part of that day. It felt important to have a few different generations of artists be present because I think Saidiya’s influence both personally and in her work has been her peers, like Arthur Jafa, but also to other generations of subsequent artists [like Cameron Rowland and Garrett Bradley]. And we wanted the event to mirror the non-genre-ness of her book. It feels like a film treatment. It feels like a mixtape. And it became a love letter.

You recently were part of a team who installed Garrett Bradley’s piece at MoMA which deals with her imagining Black figures at the turn of the 20th century. And you were doing it in the middle of this mishigas surrounding who would be our next president. That must have been an interesting backdrop.

I was so grateful to Garrett Bradley for giving the crew of people [led by Thelma Golden with Legacy Russell] who came together to help make her vision possible; that space, because it literally is like a physical space that she's constructed inside of the Museum of Modern Art as part of this collaboration between MoMA and the Studio Museum. And what I mean by physical space is that she's a filmmaker. So she’s somebody who's used to working with time as a third dimension. But here she's taking that and using it as a fourth axis through which to invite people to be with one another. And that's really how I understand the thing that she's made and how she's articulated it—you know, she has tried to reimagine these like early 20th century films of Black folks living their lives and historically important events and everything in between. But as an opening, an invitation to participate, an ongoing reimagination, You move through the space—our body becomes a surface onto which the image is taking form. The materialization is metaphorical.
There's this deep sense of collectivity and collaboration that is at every step this vision of the past and also this hope for what might happen. And it brings it to the present moment that you're talking about too. The work is called America, which is an algorithmic umbrella under which she's holding these things and she knows she can name it all different kinds of things. By calling it America, she's pointing specifically to the way that, in this past presidency, the past has been summoned as a way of securing a certain kind of future for white people and whiteness in this country. And by unhinging or decoupling “America” from being the provenance of whiteness, I think she's proposing this other kind of space that we might be able to inhabit together.

How do you reckon working inside of an institution like MoMA with an eye toward revolutionary Black works?

You know, I think what Thelma Golden, my former boss and forever mentor, has demonstrated, and what I am so lucky to be in the kind of tributary of, is how one can work at once inside of an institution and also kind of turn it inside out simultaneously.
I do have enough of a belief in the possibilities of us coming together inside of, or under the auspices of, institutions as a place to invite strangers into or run away from it, but to nevertheless not spend our efforts trying to destroy it, because then we sometimes waste our energy or we destroy ourselves.

So it doesn’t have to be an either/or, is what you’re saying.

There is a third space that my collaborator Linda Goode Bryant has talked about: where you find cover underneath [the institution] to do the things you need to do. You use it to deploy the kinds of resources towards other spaces so that you can make sure that you're not just centering yourself inside of there. And in this juggling act you’re able to refuse to give into the terms of either.

You’re working on a show with Linda Goode Bryant who founded the gallery called Just Above Midtown in the mid-70s, which focused on harnessing the work of Black artists and artists of color.

The importance of context and community for the emergence of all of these individual geniuses is so important. And putting Just Above Midtown and Linda Bryant in the conversation is central to that. There are a whole number of artists like David Hammons and Senga Nengudi who have been featured in museums but not necessarily within the broader circle or context that allowed them to flourish, that created the conditions for them to be able to make the work that they make.
What this show is attempting to do is to really make the context clear so that we recognize [the works] museums want to acquire don’t just grow out of nowhere, you have to nourish and sustain and feed an entire infrastructure.

Collier Meyerson is a contributor at WIRED Magazine and New York Magazine and a Knobler Fellow at Type Media Center.