Museum Of Contemporary Art Denver Showcases Artists As Citizens

America has problems.

Problems the scale and scope of which can overwhelm those determined to correct them.

When that happens, the advice of author Max Lucado becomes important to remember: “no one can do everything, but everyone can do something.”

Artists are doing something and what they’re doing is the focus of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, “Citizenship: A Practice of Society,” on view through February 14, 2021. The exhibition surveys politically engaged art made since 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected president.

The work of more than 30 artists features in the show including contemporary art luminaries Nan Goldin, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Dread Scott, Marilyn Minter, Titus Kaphar and Nari Ward, offering a timely look at the impact artists continue to have on the shape of our world and how they utilize their voices to further ideological causes.

Those causes range from the nation’s opioid epidemic to Flint, Michigan’s fight for a clean water supply.

“Citizenship: A Practice of Society,” posits art making as a critical civic act. The works in the exhibition exemplify how artists act as citizens.

“It is the idea that citizenship is an ongoing exercise, much like an artistic practice, that defines these works and the ‘citizen-artists’ who made them,” exhibition curator and MCA Denver Assistant Curator Zoe Larkins said when announcing the show.

The exhibit also features five new commissions approaching issues that have become more pressing this year: voter registration, native lands, access to information, legislation on citizenship and human connection.

One of these, “Property Rights” by Yumi Janairo Roth, is the artist’s exploration of how our image of public land and the American West is built, maintained, accessed, controlled and delineated.

Public lands were a flashpoint in the 2020 election. They always have been. Thomas Jefferson’s acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 generated heated arguments about the constitutionality of the purchase and the appropriate management of this massive new federal territory. Territory taken from Indigenous people without their consent.

In 2020, Trump’s border wall tearing through a national monument and over sacred Native American sites, climate change-fueled wildfires raging through national forests across the West and the Administration opening oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the first time incited an American citizenry deeply divided along strictly political lines about how best to use the roughly 640 million acres of land possessed by the federal government.

On one side, those who believe, generally, federal land should be aggressively managed, existing primarily for the extraction of resources–oil, natural gas, timber, minerals–to fuel economic interests. On the other side, those who believe, generally, the land should be gently managed, protected largely for conservation interests.

“How we use and preserve public land is perpetually negotiated,” Roth told Forbes.com. “I think that’s an important feature that people should know.”

To reinforce that point, Roth created a series of screen-printed aluminum signs that she then installed in the Roosevelt National Forest outside of Boulder, Colorado near where the artist lives. The signs spell out five types of property rights: access rights, alienation rights, management rights, extraction rights, and exclusion rights.

These rights are referred to as the “bundle of rights” that, when combined, establish the integrity of federally managed land.

“The current administration isn’t managing public lands according to that ‘bundle of rights,’” Roth said. “Rather, it seems focused on only specific parts of that bundle, mainly around extraction and alienation.”

Alienation rights being the ability of a property owner, in this case the federal government, to dispose of  the land it owns. That seems to be the particular specialty of one of the Trump Administration’s most egregious offenses perpetrated against federal land: William Pendley. Pendley, who illegally served for more than 400 days as the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, and the 240-plus million acres of federal land it controls, has advocated for the sale of all federal land.

National parks.

Yellowstone. The Everglades. Yosemite.

All of it.

National Wildlife Refuges. National forests.

Fortunately, things didn’t go that far. However, Trump’s reign as president has been unprecedented for its approach to federal land.

“This administration is responsible for one of the largest reductions of federal land to date,” Roth said. “The creation of expansive federally-owned land was a monumental achievement, something unique to the United States, however, the way in which that land was acquired disregarded the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, and the consequences of those acquisitions continue to reverberate.”

Unless the William Pendleys of the world have their way and the United States liquidates its federal lands, this extraordinary treasure will continue being wrestled over.

Roth encourages people to think about the nation’s federal lands, the property rights inherit on them and each individuals’ claim to them as a citizen.

“They might ask themselves, ‘does that right apply to me, if not, who has that right, how is that right granted,’” she said.

The volume of these arguments is always louder in the West where nearly 50% of the land area is federally owned. In Roth’s home state, it’s 36%. Compare that with typical eastern states like Virginia, 9%, Wisconsin, 5%, and Maine, 1%.

But every acre of federal land belongs equally to every American. A Floridian has every bit as much ownership and right to determine the fate of land in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a born-and-bred Alaskan, and an Alaskan the same interest in the Apalachicola National Forest as a Floridian.

The incoming Biden Administration has vowed to overturn many of its predecessor’s policies toward federal land as the nation’s tug of war over how to handle this resource continues.