The New York–based Racial Imaginary Institute examines the idea that race is a construct for all of us. Spearheaded by the poet, essayist, playwright, and 2016 MacArthur fellow Claudia Rankine, the institute plans to host exhibitions, performances, lectures, and talks. It is an antidote but not a rejoinder to the new administration in Washington, DC, because, as Rankine notes below, “Trump is not the beginning of this; he’s just a blatant manifestation of it. It was in the air for a long time.”

Here, she discusses her plans with artforum.com managing editor Lauren O’Neill-Butler.

LAUREN O’NEILL-BUTLER:

FOR MANY PEOPLE, 2016 was the year that a fantasy of progress contorted into exasperation: “I can’t believe it’s 2016 and people are still racist!” This feeling of belatedness is always beginning to give way to the evident fact that the passage of time alone, in either personal or collective historical life, is not enough to fix catastrophes. For a wound to heal, its cause has to stop. Thus transatlantic slavery, to give an important example, keeps insisting on its unhealed historical reality. An optimistic astonishment that a Black president was just as capable of presiding over drone bombings

ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE MOMENT: Greece is at the center of a convulsion in global capitalism. Athens, the birthplace of democratic ideals, experienced one of the earliest documented economic crises in the Western world, in the fifth century BCE. Even now, as an early warning sign of things to come for the European Union—and the epicenter of the biggest refugee crisis in history—Greece is a natural case study. Adding to the fracas is the inauguration this April of one of the world’s largest art exhibitions, Documenta 14: “Learning from Athens (Working Title),” directed by Adam Szymczyk.

Szymczyk proposed

It’s NOT What You Think It is: Banksters, Pineal Glands and Microtubules, Examined in a Meandering, Friendly, Nonlinear, Nonclinical Way (From Pineal to Penile to Penal: Western Civilization at a Glans)

We’re all inspired by the future. Can we remember, human people, that everything is sentient? Monarch-butterfly people know it, bird people know it. And contemporary ding-dong science can’t take that away from us. Hello, PS and by the way, money doesn’t exist. Will the liberal order survive?

Who wants to know? And what are you talking about. And survive for what? We can’t even keep a bee alive

INITIALLY, I RESISTED THE PUSSY HAT, that simple, pink, knitted or crocheted rectangular stocking cap that forms “ears” with its top corners, which became, thanks to grassroots efforts gone viral, de rigueur for the Women’s March. I quietly recoiled from that playful symbol seemingly at odds with my grave and militant agenda, not to mention my personal style. (During winter, I wear a felt beret in black, burgundy, or camel.) And while I’m usually game to celebrate the beauty and valor of women’s traditional work in the home, the crafty hats rubbed salt in the wound: I’d hoped, of course, this

IN 1970, the Japanese photographer Takuma Nakahira was asked by a publication to respond to the topic of “urban rebellion.” He took the assignment literally, relaying the successive images that took shape in his mind:

Urban and rebellion, somehow these words stir up an image within me that must be at night, where a fire burns bright red, as if to make the night exist all the darker. In addition, it must be filled with terror and disquiet. Described in this manner, my image of urban rebellion is very commonplace, something that can all too easily be related to any of the spectacles like that of

WE ENTERED THIS PROJECT TOGETHER to explore the aesthetic and political implications of our personal relationship. The work frames the transfer of knowledge between women as an act of resistance. Two women, two generations: Our lives and work are shaped by an unwavering commitment to justice, which encompasses not only women, but all those oppressed by the powerful. The mythologies underlying misogyny were in full evidence in the months and days leading up to the historic election on November 8, 2016, and in the subsequent results. This project embodies some ideas of performance art as developed

Kay Rosen is an artist who lives in Gary, Indiana, and New York. A solo exhibition of her work, “Kay Rosen: H is for House,” will be on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, from March 5 to September 4, 2017.

Nona Faustine is an artist who lives and works in New York. Faustine’s two-woman exhibition with artist Joiri Minaya, “The Body as Battleground,” opens at the Ben Shahn Center for Visual Arts, William Paterson University on January 31 and runs through March 19, 2017.

REHEARSAL FOR A REVOLUTION

A MASS DEMONSTRATION on September 28, 2014 against India’s current prime minster, Narendra Modi. He represents a right-wing Hindu extremism that emboldens and perpetrates caste-based, xenophobic, sexual, and anti-Muslim violence. There are no shortages of parallels to be made between Trump, Modi, and a growing list of world leaders and policies that seem to be emanating from the same right-wing populist, reactionary sources.

“The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness.

The following is something I jotted out the day after the election. I happened to be making a zine for a show at the Drawing Center in NYC, and purely by coincidence the printing deadline for the zine was that week. I was shocked by the election results, and had no idea how to process the news or how to make art for a show that would open in January or how to return to a studio at all. But a zine is a fast and furious public/private form of address, so I just knew that I should write something, a kind of letter, about how to approach this new time.

A FEW YEARS AGO we were knocked out by the first

IN A SWIFT, BRUTAL DEVELOPMENT, America has suddenly become the greatest reality show on earth, its inhabitants in peril of being thumped as if they were nothing more than a prop conference table on the Apprentice set. There is something both comforting and invigorating about revisiting an earlier era when television was television and real life was real life, and when in the space between the two—at least in one singular case—art blossomed.

In 1995, the curators Julie Lazar and Tom Finkelpearl asked the artist Mel Chin to take part in “Uncommon Sense,” a group show at the Museum of