Private Client: Manifesto for the Refusal of The Artworld

I make music now :)

This is both a manifesto and a recursive conversation with power.

A confrontation with how neoliberal institutions use the language of progress to obscure their violence. In today’s art world, the placement of black individuals in visible positions does not disrupt white supremacy.

It reinforces it, offering the appearance of transformation while protecting the structures that remain unchanged.

I speak from lived experience. After the closure of my gallery, I turned to survival sex work to stay afloat. I earned $2,000—money that was later withheld by The Armory Show. Suspiciously after, the same institution appoints a black woman as director. This gesture, framed as progress, was not an act of accountability. It was the performance of inclusion.

My marginalization funded their optics.

I do not resent the person hired. I understand how survival works. But the system that necessitates this trade-off should be called what it is.

A bait and switch.

This is not an attack on individuals, nor a critique of black advancement. It is a critique of how institutions instrumentalize black pain to maintain the status quo. To name this dynamic is not divisive—it is necessary. The unspoken rule is that to speak the truth is to be ungrateful. But gratitude should not be demanded in exchange for silence.

The art world operates today as a finishing school for elite performance. It is less a space of imagination and more a factory for curating the appearance of dissent. The radical gestures are rehearsed. The discourse is pre-approved. The system does not exist to challenge material conditions—it exists to shield itself from them. It will not advocate for the homeless, attempt to undo the afterlife of slavery, or prevent bombs from falling on Gaza via their silencing of Pro-Palestine voices.

It produces aesthetics that mimic resistance while neutralizing its impact.

Art was once sanctuary for me. Now it feels like theater for those who trade in identity while suppressing truth. The cost of entry is containment. Those of us deemed too loud, too angry, too difficult are pushed to the margins. I have been called dangerous, a liability, a threat—not solely for anything I’ve done, but for refusing to perform docility.

Every black artist who is thriving in the art world I know is on drugs or in a deep Fanonian crisis.

So I’ve turned to music.

I scream now because I was never allowed to. I was expected to care, to mother, to disappear quietly.

To hold the pain of others while swallowing my own. That expectation is rooted in a long tradition of systemic contempt for black women, who are mined for strength but denied complexity.

I do not want to celebrate an industry that rewards silence and proximity to power. I reject the art world’s tolerance for abusers, its worship of capital, and its curated complicity.

I reject the warnings I’ve been given: not to be too radical, not to name names, not to disrupt the order of things. We are already dying. I choose to speak, to resist, to refuse asphyxiation by bullshit.