For as long as Lu Zhang could remember, she wanted to be an artist. “I don’t know if that was me being rebellious because I came from a family that wanted doctors and lawyers, but I was always making drawings at a young age,” she told me. Zhang went on to become an acclaimed a multi-disciplinary artist, but she said it wasn’t until she attended the Maryland Institute College of Art that she realized “there were roles related to the arts outside of being an artist or a teacher.”
Zhang eventually landed a job at The Contemporary in Baltimore before becoming the initiatives director of the national grantmaker United States Artists (USA), where she oversaw Disability Futures, a program that funds disabled creatives, and Artist Relief, a $23.4 million COVID-19 emergency initiative. On June 20, Zhang, who is an a multidisciplinary artist, assumed her new role as executive director at A Blade of Grass (ABOG), which was founded in 2011 by philanthropist Shelley Frost Rubin and works from its home base in Long Island City, New York, to support artists whose work is a conduit for social change.
It’s been an eventful three years for A Blade of Grass. In the fall of 2020, then-Executive Director Deborah Fisher overhauled its operations and laid off full-time staff. In March of 2022, Fischer announced ABOG was shifting its governance structure to a “paid, professional board of artists and arts professionals with deep experience in socially engaged art.” Rubin was one of four board members who stepped down in support of the transition and committed $450,000 to pay the honorariums of new members over the next three years.
Zhang begins the next phase of her career at a time when ABOG’s board has been convening artists around the country to assess the state of its socially engaged practice. “My first task is leaning into that research to see what artists have been naming as their needs,” said. Our conversation, which took place during Zhang’s last week at United States Artists, hit on a host of other topics, including the working artists that inspire her and the classic “What if you had a magic wand” thought experiment. Below is a summary of our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and length.
What were your earliest formative experiences involving the arts?
I was born in China. My mother and I came to the U.S. when I was four to be with my dad, who was living in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he was a student at Oklahoma State University. I didn’t have much exposure to art growing up, except one summer when I went to visit my relatives in China and took a traditional Chinese brush painting class. Outside of that, I just had basic art classes in school. My first time visiting a contemporary art museum was in middle school, where we went to the Dallas Contemporary. But I’d say my interest in art was very self-initiated.
Did you always envision yourself working in the arts field?
I had hoped to be a working artist, and the field of arts administration was very abstract to me until I started working at The Contemporary. I came back to Baltimore after grad school and the arts landscape had really changed while I was gone, and so I was just hoping to reconnect. I had heard great things about Deana Haggag, who had just started as The Contemporary’s executive director, and she hired Ginevra Shay as the artistic director. So when I became an arts worker, it was more about wanting to build relationships rather than being interested in a specific role.
What’s your biggest takeaway from your time at United States Artists?
I learned so much by being in conversation with disabled artists and cultural workers in designing Disability Futures. That experience led me to reflect on how I had gauged my own value in terms of what I was contributing in terms of time or labor, and those conversations helped me to reframe what it means to be a human.
This was right before the pandemic hit, and having that realization informed how I worked with my team by asking, “How can this experience be sustainable for you? How can we not burn out in this work?” That experience then led to how we designed Artists Relief. We asked, “How can we minimize the labor we ask of the artists? How can we limit the time and emotional labor of applying for a relief effort?” All of those things came from what we learned working on Disability Futures.
Who are some working artists that you admire?
There are so many, so it’s difficult to highlight just a few. But I’d say Carolyn Lazard, who is the author of “Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice,” which is an incredibly helpful resource. The People’s Kitchen Collective is based out of Oakland and they work at the intersection of art and activism as a food-centered political education project.
Stephanie Dinkins, who’s a Knight Arts and Tech Fellow and ABOG fellow, has done really interesting work around thinking about AI as social collaboration and ecosystems based on care and social equity. This may be biased, but I’ll mention a longtime collaborator, Kimi Hanauer, who is the founder of collaborative publishing initiative Press Press. I run an institute called the Institute for Expanded Research and we co-published “Toolkit for Cooperative, Collective, & Collaborative Cultural Work” with them.
The last group was put on my radar by Diya Vij, who is ABOG board member and also the curator at Creative Time, and that’s a group called New Red Order. It’s a public secret society of rotating members, and they collaborate with “informants” to create exhibitions, videos and performances that question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. They have an exhibition up at Counterpublic in St. Louis.
The following question is a bit cliché, especially when the obvious answer is, “Give them more money,” but if you could wave a magic wand so philanthropy properly centered artists, what would that look like?
To be honest with you, Mike, if I had a magic wand, there would be bigger changes. There’d be less of a wealth gap so that philanthropy didn’t have to play such a crucial role in supporting the basic needs of artists; there would be universal basic income, real social safety nets around healthcare, education, housing, food and security.
If I could wave a more philanthropy-focused wand, I think there should be more support for artist-led activity and organizations and collectives of all sizes. I think funders can provide more unrestricted support that artists can use for their basic needs. It’s also important to remember that when artists receive this kind of support, it feeds the community and larger ecosystem, whether it’s being able to back pay a designer who was volunteering their services or money going to their families.
There also needs to be a broader question around how we think about merit. As I approach my new position at ABOG, I’m thinking about ways to engage a broader group of artists who may not be considered through existing processes that are focused on application and jury review.
You’ll also be taking a deep dive into the board’s assessment of ABOG’s social engaged practice.
That’s right. In my work, I’ve seen how socially engaged practices can slip through the cracks of funding structures, especially because many of these artists work across disciplines. So I would be surprised if there wasn’t a need for direct funding, as well as things like financial planning, legal services, mentorship and coaching, PR and communications support for artists. And if we’re talking about truly holistic support, that also means thinking about healthcare, child care and elder care services.
What will be some of your other priorities in this new role?
I’m really excited to work with the board to think about what it means to have an entirely artist- and arts-worker-led organization. How do we think about fundraising? Of course, I’ll reach out to more traditional models for support, but what are the opportunities for partnerships?
And then finally, I want to think about everything that came out of the Disabilities Futures work. I’m rereading a collection of essays called “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who is a Disability Futures fellow and another artist I admire. It’s an incredibly informative book that I keep returning to, especially now, because I want disability and access to be core to all of ABOG’s work moving forward.
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