Historical, documentary, state, and other records became the collectively accepted communicators of “truth” through their perceived objectivity and comprehensiveness. They presumably tell a story from a place of remove, with all relevant details included. Off the Record challenges this pretense, bringing together the work of contemporary artists from the Guggenheim’s collection who interrogate, revise, or otherwise query dominant narratives and the transmission of culture through official “records.”

Drawn from the context of journalist reportage, the phrase “off the record” here refers to accounts that have been left out of mainstream narratives. The exhibition’s title can also be understood in its verb form: to undermine or “kill” the record as a gesture of redress. Across various manipulations of “records,” artists in this exhibition seek to call out the power dynamics obscured by official documentation, complicate the idea of objectivity and truth, and surface new narrative possibilities.

In these tracks, hear exhibition artists, scholars, Guggenheim staff, and other thinkers share their perspectives on the featured works and records.

Visit Exhibition Site

Off the Record

Hear artist Tomashi Jackson discuss how her work incorporates ephemera related to the democratic process, contrasting the marginalization of Black voters in the United States to the ancient Greek democratic ideal.

TRANSCRIPT:
Tomashi Jackson: Hi, my name is Tomashi Jackson. I am a painter. I work with other media, but I believe my primary communication is through painting.

Today I’m talking about "Ecology of Fear (Gillum for Governor of Florida)(Freedom Writers bus bombed by the KKK)."

I see histories in collision, and I think that that’s actually always been the case. The meat of the work was research driven, and that allows me to look and then ask a series of questions that opens the door to creative methods of response. So I had spent some time in Greece, and it was there that I was taken into the heart of the Athenian democratic experiment.

What I learned about democracy when I was in Greece was that everyone was supposed to do it. And so I was like, “Oh wow, that’s amazing. So in the United States, we actually haven’t had a democracy.” That’s what I heard. 

It’s just kind of dawning on me that in the United States, when Black Americans have attempted to participate, the response is terrorism. 

Lyndon B. Johnson (archival audio): Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. 

Jackson: I was picturing this image taken by a Theadore Gaffney, the Jet magazine photographer, of the bombing of the Freedom Riders bus in Alabama in 1961. I was also picturing the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Johnson (archival audio): Today is a time for freedom.

Jackson: So I came back to the States with Greek voting papers and Pentelic-marble dust. It felt like another eureka moment, you know? So I have site specificity with the soil, and I have site specificity with the voting ephemera from different places than the United States, mostly Florida and Georgia.

That huge Andrew Gillum sign—Andrew Gillum was running for governor in Florida, . . . 

Newscaster #1 (archival audio): If Gillum wins, . . . 

Jackson: . . . the first Black man to do so

Newscaster #1 (archival audio): . . . he’d be Florida’s first Black governor.
 
Jackson: All sorts of extraordinarily racist language in this effort to derail Andrew Gillum’s campaign. 
Newscaster #2 (archival audio): Ron DeSantis told voters not to “monkey up” the state by electing his Democratic opponent. 

Newscaster #1 (archival audio): Republican Congressman Ron DeSantis said voters shouldn’t “monkey this up.” 

Jackson: I started making work colliding colors of halftone lines. This was a really exciting piece to make actually: the, the painting into the surface of LBJ signing the Voting Rights Act, surrounded by all of these politicians and activists. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King can be seen just behind LBJ looking on as he is signing the act.

All of this is just lines, ultimately. All of it is just lines. Once I could see him and I could see LBJ, the painting was done. This piece is so much about the interaction of subtly different blues. It’s a limited-value exercise. It visualizes the reality that in the United States these two blue images, they collide and create a crosshatching, like an intertwining of these two real experiences of the democratic process.

Tomashi Jackson, "Ecology of Fear (Gillum for Governor of Florida)(Freedom Riders bus bombed by KKK)", 2020. Archival prints on PVC marine vinyl, acrylic paint, American campaign materials, Greek ballot papers, Andrew Gillum campaign sign, paper bags, Greek canvas, and Pentelic marble dust. 231.1 × 254 × 30.5 cm. © Tomashi Jackson

Exhibition Website

Ecology of Fear (Gillum for Governor of Florida)(Freedom Riders bus bombed by KKK), 2020

Hear artist Sadie Barnette and her father, Rodney, a former Black Panther, talk about how they uncovered Mr. Barnette’s FBI record, his experience of surveillance, and how Sadie’s work shines a light on the subjectivity of government documentation. 

TRANSCRIPT: 
Sadie Barnette: My name is Sadie Barnette. I am a visual artist working in photography, drawing, installation. And today I’m going to be talking about a piece called "My Father’s FBI File: Government Employees Installation" from 2017.

When I was young, growing up, . . .
 
Rodney Barnette: My name’s Rodney Barnette, . . . 

Sadie: . . . my dad didn’t talk about the Panthers a lot. 

Rodney: . . . and I am, of course, her father. 

Sadie: You kind of had to coax out of him if you wanted to hear stories about that time. 

Rodney: You know, when I had been in the Panthers, I knew that there was some issues going on with informants, agent provocateurs.
 
Sadie: You know, in 2011 he decided he wanted to file this Freedom of Information Act.

Rodney: So finally one day, me, Sadie and her mother sat down and we drafted a letter to the FBI asking for files that concern me. 

Sadie: After about four and a half years, we received these files. People like to kind of imagine like a dusty banker’s box lands on your stoop, but this was 2015, so we actually received the CD-ROMs of these files, these chilling moments where he’s being observed. 

Often when we talk about surveillance, it can maybe sound passive, but what we knew to be true and what we had confirmation of when looking through my father’s 500-page FBI file was that it is so much more invasive.

It is intimidation. It’s harassment. In many cases and in my father’s case, his livelihood was targeted. He was fired from his job at the post office because of his involvement with the Panthers. 

Another moment that feels almost like a family album: And my dad was one of 11 siblings, and he always remembered, of course, the order in which the siblings were born. You know, who’s the oldest, who’s the youngest.

Rodney: But I could never remember the date of their birth. And so when we got the FBI file, they had everybody’s birth date, and everybody who had passed on and died, they had the dates that they died. So that was kind of a family tree that we called it that they provided for us.

Sadie: And so it’s this very conflicting, emotional moment. This FBI is looking at him and his family not as American citizens but as terrorists and threats to society simply for engaging in community organizing.
These state surveillance documents, it seems like it should be true or some type of empirical, you know, factual document, or documentation of a moment. But it’s so thinly veiled, completely unobjective, completely biased.

Rodney: I lived all these years wondering about what happened at certain times when I was in the Panther Parties, when I was at rallies and so forth, you know? Sometimes you might think you’re paranoid or something. This just documented all the things I thought that were going on, proved that I was right. 

Sadie: How powerful it does feel to know that just me and my small self with my spray paint in my studio can interject and . . .

Rodney: To see it all together. Just laid out.

Sadie: I think power can often be one little cut, one little mark that kind of punctures the surface of the facade of that perceived power.

It’s a father-daughter story, but it’s so connected to these kind of epically huge issues that we’re all kind of swirling around in as we try to figure out how to be people. 

Rodney: Yeah, we love each other.

Sadie Barnette, "My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation, 2017." Five archival pigment prints, 55.9 × 43.2 cm each, edition 3/5. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Young Collectors Council, with additional funds contributed by Peter Boyce II 2018.57. © Sadie Barnette

My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation, 2017

Hear curator Ashley James describe how Sadie Barnette’s engagement with government records in “My Father’s FBI File” inspired this exhibition.  

TRANSCRIPT:
Ashley James: Hi, I’m Ashley James. I’m the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art here at the Guggenheim. Today I’m going to be talking about "Off the Record", a collection show here. 

This exhibition began as I looked through recent acquisitions and I began noticing artists who were engaging with records or documents, and they were often doing things to documents.

They were coloring them, spray-painting them, tinting them, redacting them. I recognize that, for so many artists, the document is a kind of symbol of history. It becomes this space where so many kinds of critiques can happen, because you’re not only speaking to this individual material but you’re also speaking to the histories that they represent.

The show really began with Sadie Barnette’s "My Father’s FBI File: Government Employees Installation". She spray-painted these documents—in this case, the FBI files that were taken in surveillance of her father, who is a former Black Panther—and in so doing really reclaimed her father’s history, intervened upon the sterileness and the bureaucracy that these documents represent. And also the oppression that they represent. 

That work was really key to the development of the show, because it showed the ways that documents, even as they are kind of ubiquitous and things that we encounter in our everyday lives, hold so much power. And therefore, in an interaction with it, people can either call out that power or reclaim it for themselves.

So in the following audio guide, you’ll hear from a number of the artists in the show and from other thinkers who offer perspectives on the meaning of records and the many possibilities these document interventions can call forth.

Installation view, "Off the Record", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, April 2– September 27, 2021. Photo: David Heald

Origins of the Exhibition

Hear artist Leslie Hewitt and scholar Tina Campt talk about how we experience photographs, as well as the history, strategy, and dynamics behind techniques such as collage and perspective.

TRANSCRIPT:
Leslie Hewitt: My name is Leslie Hewitt. I am an artist, and I am discussing the work "Riffs on Real Time"—work made between 2006 and 2009. 

I think that oftentimes people assume that photography isn’t operating on our subconscious, that we have to understand. We really don’t often need to, because it’s hitting us just like sound on a subconscious level. And I think how I work with photography is acknowledging that first.

Tina Campt: I am Tina Campt. I’m a professor of modern culture and media, and I teach about Black contemporary art, vernacular photography, and Black feminist theory. 

The only way you register sound is when it physically penetrates you. And similarly photographs come into physical contact with us, even when we’re not holding them—if we allow ourselves to really respond to them, and to respond on all sorts of different levels that are not necessarily exactly about what you’re seeing. There are about a relationship that is being forged between you and the entire sort of ecosystem of a photograph

Hewitt: Early part of the 20th century gives us a lot of hints at different shifts in culture. There’s industrialization. There’s a lot of technology that we now really take for granted, right? Film photography really comes during this period where a different time-space is self-evident for everybody. We get different techniques that come out of that time period, too, right? One of which is collage.

Campt: Another way of thinking about collages are as palimpsests, right? And palimpsests are not simply layers, they’re sort of overwritings, right? In the sort of classical form of what a palimpsestic manuscript is that, you know, there’s different layers of writing that are on the same page. They impact each other, but it can also shift, right? And jostle, and it’s juxtaposed with one another. 

And in thinking about both that sense of layering as intensifying but also sort of shoving, moving, interacting with, you have to think about their dynamic interaction, that they’re actually talking to each other. 

To think about the collage as being really a dynamic relationship between all those different layers, activating a kind of really dynamic positioning of us in space and time.
 
Hewitt: The camera is monocular, right? It is a single lens that’s capturing. It is a compression because we are a monocular, right? The camera is like this proxy. We could think of one-point perspective, you know, it can move us back to the Renaissance. We could go back even further, you know, experiments in optics in the 10th century. So it’s actually a very rich and luscious history, though, I think, oftentimes we think of photography as a new modality in art.But what forms it is a lot older.

Campt: It’s not two-dimensional. It’s three-dimensional, even if it’s a photograph, right? She’s trying to actually give us the depth of the fact that these are objects that are taking up space, right? And coming from different times and interacting within that frame three-dimensionally.

Hewitt: Juxtaposition for me is one of those modalities that really speaks to the time-space that we’re in. And maybe we could say that that began in the early part of the 20th century with collage, or you know, maybe it began in the 17th century with, you know, the beginning of global capitalism, with mercantilism. And being able to have something that’s not local as a part of your reality, to me, is a form of juxtaposition.

Leslie Hewitt, "Riffs on Real Time (3 of 10)", 2006–09, Chromogenic print, 76.2 × 61 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee 2010.55 © Leslie Hewitt

Riffs on Real Time (3 of 10), 2006-09

Hear scholars Leigh Raiford and Tina Campt discuss the importance of interiority and the documentation of personal life through photography.   

TRANSCRIPT:
Leigh Raiford: My name is Leigh Raiford. I study race, gender, justice and visuality. 

Photography is a fundamental feature of everyday life. Traditionally photography and the genre of portraiture specifically were used to visualize the depth of an individual’s self. When we think about interiority, we are talking about one’s interior, one’s soul—things hidden from plain view. But for Black people and for many nonwhite people that notion of interiority was withheld.

Tina Campt: I am Tina Campt. I’m a professor of modern culture and media and humanities at Brown University. And I teach about Black contemporary art, vernacular photography and Black feminist theory. 

Historically the notion of portraits is that you’re actually rendering a subject respectable, reflective, thoughtful—that they are people of a certain standing that emphasize is not simply what you see on the surface but the fact that there is a depth and complexity beyond the surface.
And that’s what interiority is. 

Raiford: There’s sort of a conscious desire or need to assert the fullness of Black humanity. 

Campt: And so that’s one of the reasons why, when people talk about images or films that represent Black subjects as having interiority, it is a challenge to that particularly dominant form of attributing interiority only to white men in particular. 

We are a people who have inhabited a history of systematic efforts to eradicate our relationship to our past in order to maintain white supremacy, right? So the ways in which Black people have, you know, trained themselves, insisted upon retaining residual artifacts that may be meaningless to many people. But they are our trace of connection to a past that for so very long so many institutions—and still—want to erase. That tangible connection to your past becomes that much more important when you have been the victims of systematic erasure, right? 

It really is about being visible in history. What does it mean to make yourself visible?

Raiford: I mean one of my all time favorite activities when I visited my great-grandmother was to look at the family photo album. These are photographs that were made not for a white gaze but were stories that my family told to each other. And subsequently, they told to me. Stories that I got to kind of make up as I reopened that family album every time. 

The opportunity to both document what is in the world as we see it while also opening up a space for the possibility of what could be. And I think part of what I loved about those family photographs, there was always a new story or an old story told slightly differently.

Leslie Hewitt, "Riffs on Real Time (6 of 10)", 2006–09, Chromogenic print, 76.2 × 61 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee 2010.54. © Leslie Hewitt

Riffs on Real Time (6 of 10), 2006-09

Artist Hank Willis Thomas talks about how he uses the visual language of advertising in his series Unbranded. Plus, Schomburg Center curator Tammi Lawson describes the explosion and impact of Black magazine publishing in the 1970s.

TRANSCRIPT:
Tammi Lawson: My name is Tammi Lawson. I am the Curator of the Art and Artifacts Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 

I’ve known Hank Willis Thomas through his mom, who worked with me at the Schomburg Center going back to 1989. He was probably 12 or 13 years old. 

There was an explosion of Black publishing in the seventies. You have Time magazine, but you have Ebony magazine. You have Vogue, and then we have Essence magazine, where you have Black models and the things that we particularly like. 

Black people really were depicting themselves in powerful ways. It’s speaking to our hopes, it’s speaking to our aspirations, it’s showing us a future that we can have.

Ashley James: I’m Ashley James, and I am the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art here at the Guggenheim. These three works come from Hank Willis Thomas’s Unbranded series, a series which speaks to the ways that capitalist impulses followed quickly on the heels of the liberatory possibility—that future that the Black Power movement and its aesthetic companion, Black Is Beautiful, seem to open up. Here advertisements present clear, sometimes discomforting ways that Black Is Beautiful and self-representation more broadly was ultimately instrumentalized and sold back to Black people in the post–Black Power movement.

Hank Willis Thomas: My name is Hank Willis. Thomas. I am a conceptual artist. And today I’m talking about work from my Unbranded series. 

Advertising is the most powerful and ubiquitous language in the world. And we have gotten so good at reading advertisements that we don't even know that we're consuming them half the time.

I think it’s really important to not only read the language but also to speak it and to utilize it, to share our own ideas, so it’s not just a one-way conversation from corporations to the public.

Advertising is not seen generally as a record. That’s part of the reason I wanted to make art with it, because I felt like ads typically have a very short life span, three to six months. And what I’ve done in this series is give them an infinite lifespan, because art lasts for centuries and generations.

Hank Willis Thomas, Farewell Uncle Tom, 1971/2007. Chromogenic print, 76 × 60.8 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee 2011.11. © Hank Willis Thomas

Unbranded Series

The audio tour for John Chamberlain: Choices shares perspectives on select key works from the exhibition.
www.guggenheim.org/chamberlain

John Chamberlain's Involvement with Abstract Expressionism

As part of the Guggenheim Museum’s Summer of Know series, artist Ad Minoliti and activist Adam Werner discussed social and artistic responsibility, and building community on digital platforms, with moderation by X Zhu-Nowell, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim Museum.

Photo: Ed Marshall

Archivo de la Memoria Trans
https://archivodelamemoriatrans.tumblr.com/

Queer Ancestors Project
https://www.queerancestorsproject.org/

The Feminist School of Painting
http://fschool.kadist.org/

Cromoactivismo
https://www.facebook.com/Cromoactivismo-1430319627007557/

Campaña Nacional por el Derecho al Aborto Legal Seguro y Gratuito
http://www.abortolegal.com.ar/

Summer of Know

Conversation: Ad Minoliti and Adam Werner (2019)

Listen to audio about exhibitions and artworks at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark building is home to a collection of modern and contemporary masterpieces.

My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation, 2017

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Related tracks