IN SEPTEMBER 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation that would establish the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest arts funder in the United States. In March of this year, President Trump proposed its elimination. While any immediate action has been forestalled, the threat to thousands of community organizations, museums, artists, and projects that benefit from NEA grants still looms. In light of this, Artforum asked five distinguished artists and critics to reflect on the NEA’s vital impact.

JOHNIE SCOTT

IN THE MONTHS immediately following the Watts riots in Los Angeles in

In the prelude to the opening of the 57th Venice Biennale, we asked artists exhibiting and being celebrated around the city to choose something to highlight on artforum.com. Here are some of their selections. The biennial is open to the public from May 13 through November 26, 2017.

DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE

JEREMY SHAW

KATJA NOVITSKOVA

IVÁN ARGOTE

JASMINA CIBIC

VAJIKO CHACHKHIANI

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN

Today, the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale opened for early viewings. On the ground, we asked artists showing in “Viva Arte Viva,” curated by Christine Macel, to choose another artist who, in the early moments of the exhibitions, immediately stood out in their minds. The biennial is open to the public from May 13 through November 26, 2017.

McARTHUR BINION

RACHEL ROSE

DAWN KASPER

TAUS MAKHACHEVA

SENGA NENGUDI

LEE MINGWEI

MICHELLE STAURT

IT IS INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT, in a political landscape where deliberate confusion—alternative facts and fake news—holds sway, to determine precisely where the boundary between the artificial and the actual is to be drawn. Yet this seemingly contemporary condition was foreseen almost half a century ago by Marcel Broodthaers, who made this dialectic into the very substance of his practice: “When a work of art finds its condition in lies or deception, is it then still a work of art? I do not have the answer.” In a sense, this fundamental uncertainty is intrinsic to the endless staging

IT IS ONE OF THE GREAT PARADOXES of our current era of mediated interconnectivity: We adopt the very same technologies used by intelligence agencies and corporations to covertly track our behavior as our primary means to communicate, to consume, and even to preserve our most intimate memories. This uneasy affinity between surveillant and surveilled provided the central theme of Frank Heath’s recent show at the Swiss Institute in New York. The duality was in fact already signaled in the show’s title, “Blue Room,” which refers to two quite different spaces: areas in prisons reserved for projecting

ONE SMALL ASPECT of daily life that Donald Trump’s election has altered, perhaps irrevocably, is e-mail etiquette. Professional contacts sign off on all manner of correspondence with “In solidarity.” Announcements and invitations include the poignant yet perfunctory phrase “now more than ever.” Friends forward (and reforward) online petitions, solicitations for donations, and pleas to call Congress. Among all these missives, the most memorable I have received was a post to Change.org by the artist Luis Camnitzer: “Dear President Donald Trump: Please use this golden opportunity to commission US

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