Cameron Rowland

This group exhibition ran from March 19 to July 30, 2017, and included artists such as John Akomfrah, Jonathas de Andrade, Anna Boghiguian, Andrea Bowers, Paul Chan, Simon Denny, Samuel Fosso, Iman Issa, Kim Beom, Erik van Lieshout, Wolfgang Tillmans, Adrián Villar Rojas, Kara Walker, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye as well as Rowland. It considers the connected themes of social protest, the effect of history on the formation of identity, and how art juxtaposes fact and fiction.[14]

The group exhibition was shown from October 11, 2015 to March 7, 2016. It is the fourth coming of an exhibition series started in 2000, and included over 400 works from 157 artists. According to MoMA, “Greater New York departs from the show’s traditional focus on youth, instead examining points of connection and tension between our desire for the new and nostalgia for that which it displaces.” The works that it includes employ a heterogeneous range of aesthetic strategies, representing the cities inhabitants through bold figuration.[15]

Running from October 14, 2018 to June 24, 2019, D37 is one of Rowlands biggest solo exhibitions. Rowland uses artwork budgets and research to reveal Los Angeles’ role in the violent displacement of the poor and people of color.

MoCA, the place of the exhibition, is located in Bunker Hill, a historically Mexican and Chinese neighborhood marked area “D37”, hence the name of the exhibition. It was assigned the lowest Security Grade by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1939, and HOLC’s Residential Security Map calls Bunker Hill “a slum area and one of the city’s melting pots”. HOLC changed into the Federal Housing Administration and guided the Los Angeles CRA to attempt to cover up its violence through artificial acts of community service. Rowland focuses on these instances of legally sanctioned racism through D37, unveiling the very mechanisms of a government that makes its own rules to justify its own injustices.

The gallery consists of carefully selected objects seized by police under civil asset forfeiture that resonate of past ownership. These include used bikes, two leaf blowers, and a one green stroller. Another work, Assessment (2018), which is a late eighteenth-century grandfather clock from Paul Dalton Plantation in South Carolina, stands at the end of the gallery. Also included are property tax receipts on slaves and other owned goods from Mississippi and Virginia that show how these slave states profited and relied on black bodies to build their infrastructure and governments.

The gallery closes with Depreciation (2018), which consists of a series of legal documents and contracts that show Rowland’s usage of D37’s budget. He used part of the money to acquire one acre of land on Edisto Island, South Carolina to restrict the land and devalue it, and indicates that the current value is $0. He does this because of an empty promise placed on the area in 1865, which stated that slaves would receive forty acres and a mule, which included Edisto Island. The initiative was rescinded in 1866 by President Andrew Johnson.[8]

Another large solo show for Rowland ran from January 17 to March 13, 2016.

The title is derived from Artists Space’s customer account number with Corcraft, a company that manufactures affordable commodities to sell to government agencies, schools, and non-profit organizations, like Artists Space. Rowland purchased four courtroom benches made of oak, a particle board office desk, and seven cast aluminum manhole rings through his partnership with Artists Space. These objects are laid across his presentation space, leaving the viewer to observe without knowing their significance until they pick up the paper accompanying the work which tells them the objects were made by the cheap labor of New York State’s prison inmates. Rowland interprets the prison labor force to be a practiced form of neo-slavery that continues to thrive in our present economy.

In Rowland’s essay explaining the work, he carefully explicates how the 13th Amendment made it possible to incarcerate ex-slaves for vagrancy, allowing private companies and later state governments to exploit prisoners’ free labor. He also explains how a similar tactic was used during the War on Drugs in the 1970’s, and since then the country has seen a massive rise in incarceration, especially among African Americans.

Rowland approaches his role as an artist to be like an investigative reporter,  seeking out intellectual, factual, and material evidence to support his written claims. He also assumes the role of active consumer by taking ownership of the objects as a form of antagonism. He reclaims these objects that are markers of corrupt history, stripping the objects of their use-value, and positioning them as relics of structural racism.

One of the more hopeful works in the show is Disgorgement (2016), which is a contractual agreement. Similar to how Rowland used some of D37’s budget, he uses some of the budget from the show to purchase $10,000 worth of the insurance company Aetna’s shares, which held slave insurance policies for slave owners prior to the abolition of slavery, planning to hold onto the shares until the US government makes financial reparations for slavery, at which time the shares will be liquidated toward the payment of reparations.[4]