After taking over the 50-year-old arts space The Kitchen, writer and curator Legacy Russell is driving the conversation about the speed of technology, contemporary art spaces, and history.

Curator Legacy Russell grew up in the East Village, being dragged to the same institutions she now programs. So, if you&rsquo;ve been going to exhibitions in<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/art/best-events-during-frieze-new-york-city-2022" title="The Must-See Events During Frieze New York 2022"> New York </a>and are reading the introductory plaque text, you cannot have missed her&mdash; Russell is a force in the city, of the city.
Last June, experimental <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/art/new-young-artists-to-watch-2022-gallery" title="15 Artists to Watch in 2022">art </a>venue The Kitchen announced Russell would be their new Executive Director and Chief Curator. In September, she unveiled a sculpture with Thomas J. Price in Marcus Garvey park, and then followed that up in November with an exhibition at <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/moma-will-screen-twin-peaks-marathon" title="MoMA Will Screen Twin Peaks Marathon">MoMA </a>PS1 for this year&rsquo;s Studio Museum artist-in-residence cohort: Jacolby Satterwhite, Texas Isaiah, Widline Cadet, and Genesis Jerez. December was Russell&rsquo;s solo exhibition with Kahlil Robert Irving, curated in partnership with The Studio Museum Chief Curator Thelma Golden.&nbsp;

In January, Russell opened The Kitchen&rsquo;s first bar. By Valentine&rsquo;s Day, Hauser &amp; Wirth had opened The New Bend, a 12-person group show focused on artists interested in quilting traditions and their social associations &ndash; also by Russell. Her ambitious calendar may imply that Russell is racing around, but, in fact, this recent rush of shows is emblematic of a decade spent working alongside artists while developing a pace and dialogues of her own. &ldquo;[My shows] may appear as if they&rsquo;re occurring quickly, but they are years and years of work and all the blood, sweat, tears, and joy inside of making sure that they can be done correctly,&rdquo; Russell says. &ldquo;I believe deeply in having things kind of occur at a cadence that feels holistic to the artists and to institutional life, because it&rsquo;s better to have things done in a way that people feel empowered by, than to have things done quickly.&rdquo;
While she doesn&rsquo;t subscribe to it, speed is a topic Russell returns to in her research and curatorial practice. She looks at everything from how time works to how it is weaponized. For instance, her first book, Glitch <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/feminist-desi-pop-artist-maria-qamar-fashion-line-instagram" title="Feminist Desi Pop Artist Maria Qamar is Launching a New Fashion Line">Feminism</a>: A Manifesto, published by Verso in 2020, encouraged its readers to look to a computer virus as a role model for disrupting linear time&rsquo;s clutches: &ldquo;A machine virus triggers the machinitic responses of slowness in ways that are unpredictable to the user. This slowness shifts time and space, altering a person&rsquo;s relationship to the machine. As glitch feminists, when we embody the virus as a vehicle of resistance, we are putting a wrench into the machinic gears of gender, striking against its economy, immersing ourselves inside of the break. The break is an error, the error a passageway.&rdquo;

Russell&rsquo;s winter program for The Kitchen was a physical embodiment of her theories. The director partnered with artist Sadie Barnette and DJ, critic, and nightlife spirit guide Madison Moore to teleport an early 1990s LA bar to present day New York. The exhibition, The New Eagle Creek Saloon, gets its name and look from the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco, which was run by Barnette&rsquo;s father, Rodney Barnette, a founding member of the <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/black-panther-costume-designer-ruth-carter-afrofuturism-scad-museum" title="New 'Afrofuturism&rsquo; Exhibition Spotlights &lsquo;Black Panther&rsquo; Costume Designer Ruth E. Carter">Black Panther</a> Compton chapter. The idea, years in the making, not only revived a foundational spot and initiated the need for The Kitchen&rsquo;s first nightlife-and-club-culture resident Moore&rsquo;s tenure, but The New Eagle Creek Saloon marked a momentary glitch in the national shuttering of safe spaces.
Once a bastion of queer-friendly institutions, <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/art/janaina-tschape-nina-beier-mandy-el-sayegh-chelsea-galleries" title="At Chelsea Galleries, Three Artists Subvert Aesthetics">Chelsea </a>has in the past decade lost all but a handful of its bars and shops. By reviving a pioneering bar, whose culture has been often referenced but whose authors have yet to be centered in the tale of the avant-garde, Russell and Barnette created a break from which visitors could collectively see their roots more clearly, as well as the state they are in now. To that end, one takeaway Russell hopes made its way to visitors is about the misconception that nightlife is speedy&mdash;as in things happen quickly and then proceed to disappear. &ldquo;In reality, nightlife culture has a deeply rigorous, deeply studied, deeply researched, deeply archived history,&rdquo; Russell says, continuing: &ldquo;And so, these are wonderful opportunities to ask about pacing. What does it mean to have a project run across some months in the case of The New Eagle Creek Salon? [What does it mean to have] people embed themselves slowly inside of a performance that otherwise might feel quick to them?&rdquo; Slowing down the audience is something Russell sees as a critical part of not only her practice but her field. &ldquo;Projects like [The New Eagle Creek Saloon] are meaningful investments in this next chapter of what the institution can be and what we aspire to as curators. We are finding ways to ask people to slow down and to examine with care and get into the density of material history, ask questions, and discover through it.&rdquo;&nbsp;

&ldquo;Nightlife culture has a deeply rigorous, deeply studied, deeply researched, deeply archived history.&rdquo;

Sitting at the helm of The Kitchen, a hybrid space that has over its 50 years become a powerful pilgrimage site, Russell feels especially grateful and optimistic about creating programming that can challenge the way we think, and challenge the dichotomy of commercial gallery versus institutional collections. &ldquo;The Kitchen is a special place because it&rsquo;s not a museum, and it&rsquo;s a place that doesn&rsquo;t necessarily take an oppositional stand to museums, but creates a counter-dialogue recognizing that there needs to be variance inside of what the art world, as we now know it, looks like,&rdquo; Russell says. &ldquo;It is a place where artists can experiment and where a process can be prioritized and there can be kind of enriched histories of taking risks and having things be sticky and complex. How can we honor history as a site of experimentation, but also keep redefining, reexamining, restructuring, reimagining what <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/avant-garde-haute-couture-dior-chanel-fendi" title="The 13 Most Avant-Garde Moments in Haute Couture History">avant-garde</a> even means?&rdquo;
Part of this renovation process is about building up a vocabulary. In June, she&rsquo;ll unveil The Condition of Being Addressable, a group exhibition for the ICA LA that uses Claudia Rankine&rsquo;s book, Citizen, as a titular jumping-off point to reflect on what the structure of address looks like across generations, localities, and disciplines. &ldquo;How can language be a site of healing, but also maybe a site of injury? What are those different models of decolonized practice that can help us navigate and maybe reword what address can be and what that even should look like?&rdquo; Russell asks rhetorically, continuing: &ldquo;In a period of time where often so much of our communication is so sped up and rapidly transmitted, our language comes with its own amazing possibilities in that refraction, but also challenges that can be complex and tender.&rdquo;&nbsp;

&ldquo;It&rsquo;s important to have the time for history to unfold and to process information at a different pace.&rdquo;

”Ctrl+Alt+Del,” 2021, by Qualeasha Wood

“Jubilee,” 2021, by Anthony Akinbola.

In Glitch Feminism, Russell introduced her own terminology. She&rsquo;s at work on her second <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/art/albers-foundation-50th-anniversary-new-book-you-can-go-anywhere-nicholas-fox-weber">book</a>, which perhaps will bring those phrases further and apply them to some of the curatorial work she&rsquo;s doing now. No matter the subject matter, she&rsquo;s taking her time, thanks to a Creative Capital grant and her own fierce belief in deceleration. &ldquo;My work meets at the intersection of art and technology. We are talking about a medium that often moves so quickly it can be challenging to even write about it, but I am still doing slow work inside of that fast medium, and I feel very strongly committed to that. It&rsquo;s important to have the time for history to unfold and to process information at a different pace.&rdquo;

Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon, Installation view, The Kitchen, New York, 2022. Photographed by Adam Reich.

Curator Legacy Russell Unravels Feminism, Technology, and Art at The Kitchen

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