Cameron Rowland
Cameron Rowland is an American artist. Rowland graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in 2011, and after being awarded the MacArthur Fellowship returned there to address the student body. He spoke about his 2018 work Depreciation that critically examined the economics of slavery.
Early life
Cameron Rowland was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1988. He became known for his conceptual art addressing social injustice in contemporary society and displaying ready-made objects that are obtained through abstruse economic exchanges. After his exhibitions at Essex Street gallery in 2014 and MoMA PS1’s Greater New York show in 2015 his work gained a wider audience.He was chosen as a MacArthur Fellow in 2019 and is one of the six fellows from New York City. He currently works in Queens, New York.
Artistry
Rowland's artwork focuses on critiquing systems and institutions that perpetuate or benefit from racial injustices. Many of the objects Rowland uses for his artwork derive from online government auctions and scrap yards, from decommissioned municipal buildings and manufacturers of commercial security apparatuses. These objects are often overlooked by society, but serve a very important purpose in everyday life. For example, one of his works includes manhole leveler rings, which are used to adjust the height of manhole covers when roads are paved. These rings, which few would recognize, are one of the major products manufactured via inmate labor in the New York State prison industry, and are indispensable fixtures of urban infrastructure.Other works of his use such objects as wooden desks and wooden benches manufactured by prison laborers for far less than minimum wage. Rowland encourages museums not just to show work about marginalized communities but actually do something about how they live.
According to Artnet Rowland is an example of an artist who is able to place conditions on collectors of his work. They reported that, in some instances, collectors were only allowed to rent, not own, particular works. Since 2015, Rowland has made about half of his works available in this manner. Art Basel's upcoming 2019 Miami Beach show will be the first show to present solely works circulated under this model.
Exhibitions
Cameron Rowland's art has been featured in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. Notably, his work featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art, entitled 2015 MOCA REAL ESTATE ACQUISITION, revealing the Museum's history of benefiting from racist systems like redlining.| Year | Exhibition Title | Gallery/Museum | Solo/Group |
| 2018 | D37 | MoCA, Bunker Hill, LA | Solo |
| 2017 | Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW | MoMA, New York City, New York | Group |
| 2017 | Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection | MoMA, New York City, New York | Group |
| 2016 | Cameron Rowland | Kunsthalle Freiburg, Freiburg, Switzerland | Solo |
| 2016 | 91020000 | Artists Space, New York, New York | Solo |
| 2016 | When Did Intimacy Begin Width | New York, New York | Group |
| 2016 | Takashi Murakami’s Superflat Collection n―nFrom Shōhaku and Rosanjin to Anselm Kiefer | Yokohama Art Museum, Yokohama, Japan | Group |
| 2015 | A Constellation | The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York | Group |
| 2015 | 2015 MOCA REAL ESTATE ACQUISITION | Los Angeles, California | Solo |
| 2015 | Infamous Lives | Oracle, Berlin, Germany | Group |
| 2015 | Greater New York | MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York | Group |
| 2015 | The Wattis Institute | San Francisco, California | Group |
| 2015 | Raymond Roussel | Galerie Buchholz, New York, New York | Group |
| 2015 | The Chicken and The Egg and The Chicken | Rodeo, London, UK | Group |
| 2015 | The Fall | Rodeo, Istanbul, Turkey | Group |
| 2015 | Slip of the Tongue | Venice, Italy | Group |
| 2015 | International Currency | Lodos, Mexico City, Mexico | Group |
| 2015 | Overtime: The Art of Work | New York | Group |
| 2015 | ESSEX STREET @ ESSEX STREET | ESSEX STREET, New York, New York | Group |
| 2015 | AGGRO CULTURE | Holiday Cafe, Brooklyn, New York | Group |
| 2014 | Bait, Inc | ESSEX STREET, New York, New York | Solo |
| 2014 | THE CONTRACT | ESSEX STREET, New York, New York | Group |
| 2014 | Theater Objects: A Stage for Architecture and Art | LUMA Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland | Group |
| 2014 | U:L:O | Interstate, Brooklyn, New York | Group |
| 2014 | The Husk | Untitled, New York, New York | Group |
| 2014 | Samsonite | SWG3, Glasgow, Scotland | Group |
| 2013 | Conspicuous Unusable | Miguel Abreu, New York, New York | Group |
| 2013 | Collecting Matters | Galerie der HFBK, Hamburg, Germany | Group |
| 2013 | Turnkey of Forever After Bed | Stuy Love Affair, Brooklyn, New York | Group |
| 2013 | An Agreement | Wilfred Yang, Los Angeles, California | Solo |
| 2012 | Visibility and Aesthetic Control | Appendix Space, Portland, Oregon | Solo |
| 2012 | Those | Wave Hill Sunroom Project Space, Bronx, New York | Solo |
| 2012 | Concerns and Returns | Weingrüll, Karlsruhe, Germany | Group |
| 2011 | Both Together | Basel, Switzerland | Group |
''Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection''
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.''Greater New York''
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.''D37''
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 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, 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, 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.
91020000
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, 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.