Much of of Andil Gosine’s cancelled Art Museum of the America’s exhibition was intended to unpack this photo of him at age 3, titled ‘Magna Carta’.Andil Gosine/Supplied
The Washington-based Art Museum of the Americas has cancelled an upcoming exhibit by York University environmental-arts professor Andil Gosine, who believes the institution may have been responding to expected budget cuts to U.S.-backed international organizations.
The museum showcases modern and contemporary art from the Western Hemisphere, and is run by the Organization of American States, a forum bringing together governments across North and South America. Museum director Adriana Ospina formally notified Prof. Gosine of the exhibition’s cancellation on Feb. 14, writing that her team had “made the difficult decision to indefinitely suspend all temporary travelling on-site exhibitions,” including his exhibit Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine.
Prof. Gosine’s work regularly reflects on queer theory, and the exhibition, he said, was “about the unpacking of a single photo,” of him at three years old wearing sparkling shoes. The exhibition was meant to feature works by Prof. Gosine, a dozen additional artists and 13 writers, including Angie Quick and Shani Mootoo.
They spent nearly three years developing the exhibition, built on his 2021 book Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean, which he described as an “interdisciplinary look at connections between histories of ecology, looking at human animal relations and how anxieties about desire figure into the way we make rules and regulations.”
Excerpt from Andil Gosine’s triptych ‘Les Trois Hommes de Paris’ (2022).Andil Gosine/Supplied
The Washington Post first reported on the cancelled exhibition in connection with another cancellation, of an exhibit focused on Black artists, that the outlet found appeared to be connected with the Trump administration’s efforts to quash diversity, equity and inclusion programming.
But Prof. Gosine said that he first heard about the cancellation of Nature’s Wild by phone from the museum’s director on Feb. 5, less than a day after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for a “review of all international intergovernmental organizations of which the United States is a member and provides any type of funding or other support.”
The Organization of American States said in December that it received $55-million from the United States last year.
“Given these facts, my best guess is that this is an effort to pre-emptively bend to the new political order in D.C.,” Prof. Gosine said in an interview. The majority of his exhibition’s costs, he said, were covered by a Canada Council for the Arts grant, as well as from WorldPride, not the Art Museum of the Americas, but it was shut down regardless.
“It is a strange situation – of at once feeling very supported by all of the Canadian institutions involved,” including the Permanent Mission of Canada to the Organization of American States, he said. But he worried about the future of how LGBTQ people, even from abroad, are treated in the face of the Trump administration. “There’s a difficult question: whose rights do you surrender in an effort to appease a new regime?”
The museum did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Canada’s mission to the Organization of American States declined to comment, but in a letter to Prof. Gosine that he shared with The Globe and Mail, its chargée d’affaires, Gillian Gillen, wrote that it was informed by the museum that the exhibition was cancelled “due to the current context and unforeseen circumstances.” She added: “We can appreciate the frustration and share the disappointment this decision brings.”
Prof. Gosine said that he is in talks with galleries in Toronto and Montreal to “rescue” elements of the show, to be announced on March 21, the day it was supposed to open at the Art Museum of the Americas. He’s also planning on hosting an event at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York.
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