“Well, the Guggenheim exhibition happened purely by accident…they said they couldn’t do without an African — that’s how I got involved.” — Okwui Enwezor, May 2017

Helen Lewis incorrectly wrote that I was not the first Black curator in the Guggenheim’s 80-year-history, she and The Atlantic positioned the fact that I would not lie as entitlement and an erasure of another Black person for reasons of vanity. It was another instance, along with this one, and this one, and this one of this flagship publication disregarding facts and law to print information about me that is not only untrue, racist, fantastical and damaging, it serves to reinforce as status-quo, by any means. Including misinformation.

Nothing could have been further from the truth, but I do not think that The Atlantic was interested in publishing the truth. There are two reasons why the Guggenheim brought up Enwezor: one, I began asking about their historical record in December 2018 after looking through the libraries and exhibition catalogues which I saw in the hallways, none of which were authored by Black people. I began putting these inquiries in writing, a sample of which is below. Two, people began whispering if I was the first Black curator in the Guggenheim’s history, which came back to them. They became immediately nervous when I brought this up, because they knew that it was true. There is lots of evidence in writing, notes from meetings and diary entries to confirm this, but there was absolutely no way in Elon Musk’s Twitter hell that Helen Lewis was ever going to get her hands on these materials. She is simply not good enough of a journalist to get them.

So, to back up a bit: A curator and co-curator of an exhibition are not the same thing. A curator of an exhibition is responsible for the creation of an exhibition, they lead the scholarship, they are often the author of the exhibition catalogue, and/or their scholarship is the theory and research that other essay contributions follow or are guided by. In cinematic terms, a curator is a director. A curator may have a team of people to help — fact checkers, editors, a curatorial assistant, the Education department, etc — but they are working alone in terms of where the vision and idea for the show are coming from, the visuals that the exhibition will use and are the creator of the intellectual property, if not by copyright, certainly by process, authority and sovereignty. It’s why curators are atop the hierarchical rank in museums; they are considered to be the generators of the most important — and valuable — IP in a museum, which is the origin point of a museum’s money, prestige, clout and ability to fundraise and recruit donors. This hierarchy comes at the expense of other departments, especially Education, which is often treated like downstairs staff, though they and Visitor Services, Security have the most contact with the public. The truth is, curatorial ranks across nearly every museum, especially the top-tier ones, believe that despite the low wages and terrible benefits, they are a sort of landed gentry in the feudal system that is a museum. But the culture of how museums resemble and for the people working inside of them, are compared to feudal systems, plantations and monarchies is a conversation for another time.

In 2018, I came to the Guggenheim with an already formed vision of what I wanted the show to look like, the theories that had been worked through and I had done this work alone, therefore claiming an intellectual sovereignty of the work that was so complete the Guggenheim broke an industry norm and agreed to do the show with the copyright of ideas, research, interviews and other ideas under both my control. They would later break the contract and their own rules, many, many, many times over. In fact, one of the first questions that Spector asked me in January 2017 when we met to discuss my work was if I had collaborators, which would’ve made it more difficult to bring the exhibition in, because it would’ve added another budget line, credit line and another personality with which to negotiate with. It’s different if a museum is adding their curators to the project, but they do not want to deal with more outside opinion than what they have to, some concerns legitimate, some rapacious. To designate someone as the curator of the show is to imply that they brought the vision of the project to an institution alone, and as such, there is no need to add the addendum of “solo curator” because it is implied in the name, which is why there is the designation of “co-curator” to indicate when a team of people bring the vision to an institution, or are brought in by an institution to execute an already formed vision.

A co-curator does the same thing — brings an exhibition to life — but they have a team of people doing it who are of equal rank and credit. Giving a curator a '“co-curator” credit is necessary to avoid erasure, and to draw divisions around credit, depending how the contracts and the teams are constructed. In the cinematic sense, a “co-curator” is more like co-director teams in filmmaking: The Cohen Brothers (The Big Lebowski, 1998), The Allen Brothers (The Book of Eli, 2010) or The Wachowskis (The Matrix, 1999) are three examples to parallel. Co-curators, like co-directors, tend to divvy up credit and creative responsibilities amongst themselves, without museum (or studio) input, unless the contract or lawyers stipulate otherwise. A co-curator sometimes is a team of two people, sometimes it can be as many as four people, which was the case with Okwui Enwezor’s credit line for the 1996 exhibition In/Sight: TK TK. Enwezor, a hugely respected curator who died in March 2019, was part of a team of people who brought the show to life. He was brought in, after the show had already been formed, which was something that Joan Young, Director of Curatorial Affairs, actually told me first in a December 2018 conversation, of which I have notes and the exact date. Curators who are attached to travelling shows are never credited as curators — sometimes they do not get a curating credit at all — because they are receiving an already formed and ideated exhibition. This is why it was strange — though I know the reasons why — that the New York Times and other outlets credited Ashley James as a curator of “Soul of a Nation” when it travelled to the Brooklyn Museum; Zoe Whitley and Mark Godfrey were the curators (and individually, co-curators) of that show, which was ideated at the Tate Modern in London. The exhibition that was received by the Guggenheim was originally titled “Africa: The Art of a Continent”, originating also in London, at the Royal Academy of Arts and it was curated by Tom Phillips, who also edited the original catalogue by the same title. Per the contract agreement and industry standards, it would’ve been impossible for the team that took the exhibition to the Guggenheim to have been credited as the original curators of the exhibition, and it would’ve defied logic as four people were assembled for that team: Okwui Enwezor, Danielle Tilkin, Octavio Zaya and Clare Bell, who was the Guggenheim curator assigned to the show.

Okwui Enwezor was not the first Black curator at the Guggenheim; he was the first Black co-curator at the Guggenheim. He said so much himself. Take a look at this 2017 interview, published in Aperture. The late curator said in his words, “Well, the Guggenheim exhibition happened purely by accident…The museum asked Octavio Zaya and Danielle Tilkin to organize the show, and they said they couldn’t do it without an African — that’s how I got involved.”

Enwezor is saying himself that he was brought into a travelling exhibition. In saying that I am the first Black curator, I am making the distinction that I was the first Black curator brought into the Guggenheim to curate, not co-curate, as it is defined across industry and has been for decades. The Guggenheim made up the distinction of “solo-curator”, knowing that the public mostly would not know or understand the massive difference between a co-curator and a curator, and knowing that the press would help them spread this lie, despite the fact that a White curator has never been credited as a solo-curator of an exhibition and there is no prior history of the Guggenheim using this distinction for the (White) curators that they’ve worked with in their 80 year-history. The Guggenheim basically thought that they could use Enwezor and myself interchangeably, as though our shows, backgrounds and roles were the same. It is the job of the press to tease this out, explain it to the public and hold the Guggenheim accountable. Instead, they just printed what the museum told them to.

Helen Lewis, in not doing her research and not being knowledgeable enough to report on the incredibly layered and secretive world of the New York art world, played an old page from the Guggenheim’s playbook: in using a narrative and propaganda that I was entitled, selfish, vain and willing to throw another Black curator under the bus — made to look even more awful for the fact that Enwezor is not here to comment — they are distracting the audience from the lies that are being spun and sold. And they are attempting to make me look like an unreliable narrator of not only my own story, but the Guggenheim’s and the art world’s histories, and thus making the arguments and substance of what I’m saying, impotent. In doing this, a lie is left intact — that the Guggenheim had worked with Black curators before — and the instinct to protect a beloved figure does the job of defending the Guggenheim, and the press that lied for them. At this point, both parties are invested in the re-telling and protection of the lie, because to reveal this truth is to call into question what else has knowingly been printed about me, the Guggenheim and the whole story of what happened with the Defacement exhibition. The Atlantic printed a lie to protect a lie.

It’s the zero sum game that White people play when you are better than them, smarter than them and you intimdate them. The Guggenheim, Spector, the press, The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, Jeffrey Goldberg and others in the art world have made themselves invested in rationing out how much credit they believe that I am allowed to claim, when all of it is mine. The work, the scholarship, the legacy and the work. I am not claiming anything more or less than what is mine and what I am owed — the problem is, the debt is so enormous, and my influence and work are inescapable post -2019 and rather than properly credit me and my work, they are basically saying, “how dare this Black bitch claim her work? her place in history? How dare she not let us re-write history for her, to make ourselves look and feel better about our moral failures?”

I was never erasing Okwui Enwezor, and there’s a long trail of evidence that supports this. I asked the Guggenheim repeatedly why hadn’t they done more to bring his work to the forefront, why didn’t they bring him back to the Guggenheim, and why were they only bringing him now that he couldn’t speak for himself?

This email, along with other correspondence, contradicts Lewis’s claims, as well as others. I was privately asking — and agitating — the Guggenheim to give me records of Black curators and artists that they had worked with. These requests were mostly ignored or briefly acknowledged and then went into a corner somewhere and died. I was willing to be wrong, and asked them repeatedly to show me if there were other Black curators that they had worked with, since they privately acknowledged that since Enwezor was asked to come in with a team of three other people, it was not the same job as mine. It should be met with great suspicion that the Guggenheim is only willing to discuss Black hiring at the museum (which has an origin story in death, murder, fraud, cover-ups, public campaigns of gaslighting, harassment, union busting, audiotapes of conspiracy and a problematic open letter) now that Enwezor is dead, they have sustained a campaign of silence, harassment and misinformation, and Ashley James and Naomi Beckwith are willing to be the faces of a clean-up crew to a PR campaign of “Change” that few believe. It’s why the story hasn’t gone away. Everyone knows that there’s more to the story. This website isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.

Lewis was merely doing her part to help protect the Guggenheim, and protect the White woman who had a leading role in the campaign of mis-information and intentionally lying to the public. For the Guggenheim to acknowledge that I am the first Black curator, it would reveal a Pandora’s Box of more problems: