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In Conversation with Joe Paul Jr. Part One

by Joe Paul Jr.

June 6, 2018

This interview with Joe Paul Jr., the Vocational Services Administrator at SHIELDS for Families, was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place May 23, 2018. This is part one of an ongoing conversation between frank and Joe Paul Jr.

How did you find yourself here, working at SHIELDS for Families?

Alright. I’m a formerly incarcerated person, E-22-8-4-2. I went to California State Prison. Sentenced June 22, 1989 for voluntary manslaughter; it was a drug related murder. I came home December 2, 1992 and that whole experience was the transforming moment of my life. Prison literally saved my life with no cliché. I found myself, I found the initial portion of my identity in that place. I recognized how disenfranchised my people, black men, were at that moment in time, and Latino men too. How blind we were to this deterioration we were in the middle of. I had the moral guilt that somebody died as a result of actions I was involved with. The converging of all these circumstances put me in this place where I said, "every day in my life moving forward I will do something to make a difference in improving the quality of life not only for myself and my family, but for the people around me –my community" – I was 24 years old when I came home. I'm 49 years old now and I've lived up to every single promise in terms of making sure that every day I'm doing something to improve the state and quality of our community.

I've always been involved from the time I came home with some sort of volunteerism. Typically this has been around church, supporting ministries in the African-American communities in South LA; I still do that to this very day. Not only do I work here at SHIELDS For Families as the Vocational Service Administrator for all of our adult programs, in the sidebar we have about 38 programs; we're a 25-million-dollar non-profit operation.

County Board of Supervisors said that SHILEDS For Families is a safety net in South Los Angeles. We serve a very important function with mental health, substance abuse, child welfare, re-entry, family preservation, prenatal, neonatal, children's health, just all of the safeguards our community needs to at least have stability. I wouldn't even say progress. I would say stability.

I've been here for the last six years. This is a twenty-seven-year-old organization that evolved out of the crack epidemic and everything subsequent to that.

In that last 10 years, I've been challenged in the field of nonprofit work to take on this issue of mass incarceration. When I first got into this field from a workforce development professionals point of view, I came into it at the precipice of the mortgage meltdown and then the Great Recession. At the same exact time California was in the throes of this three judge panel that told Schwarzenegger, and ultimately Jerry Brown, that you got too many people in prison. This is a constitutional violation, it’s cruel and unusual punishment: You're not providing adequate healthcare, you're not providing adequate mental health, you're not providing adequate housing. You've got to drop the population in prison. The advent of Assembly Bill 109, a reform bill around changing the status of felons from the traditional prison felony to now this county jail felony thing. We went through all of this transition and watched the subsequent reform bills along with it.

We were working in that climate, and now I feel like a veteran because we're in one of the most robust economies we've been in in a long time. There's construction across the whole state. There’s opportunities for people to relatively make living wage jobs with very little skills or education, and we still are at a crisis level when it comes to social dynamic. That's what keeps me moving and thinking about policy and legislation, and really closing the gaps where they've been created. Even with the best intentions we couldn't foresee the collateral consequences as a result of the effort that we saw the need for at that time. That's the front we're working on now.

What were the collateral consequences of that work?

I'll give you an example around a very salient point, and that's "Ban the Box". Ban the Box is the policy and intention to remove the question of: "Have you been convicted of a felony?", from employment applications. It was a foreign notion in L.A. and in California ten years ago; we were fighting for it. Now, we have statewide laws, we have one of the most robust Ban the Box laws in the whole country right here in L.A.

A collateral consequence of that is now you're on an equal playing field. Now the felony is not the issue, now it's your skill set. How do you compete with somebody who's had all of this history and work experience? You're being judged on the merit of your qualification for the job and you can't even utilize your experience from prison where you just spent the last 20 years to compete for this opportunity that we created by removing the box.

We didn't close the gap on how do you sell yourself and verify your work experience the way everyone else is going to? A very well intended, hard fought victory, to get the boxes removed, but now that the box is removed, these other complications are exposing themselves that we don't have a remedy for. On the CDCR, the Department of Corrections and Parole side, unless you have a very motivated parole agent, they're not going to focus on the employment verification for this dude who just spent 20 years in prison. All of his work experience, although credible, although valuable, although more qualified than someone else, won’t be provable. We’re working on that now.

What about extended and collateral consequences in the community?

2018 is midterms for the feds, it's statewide election, we're electing a governor in California, in L.A. we're electing the sheriff. You have 30 percent of the incarcerated population returning to L.A. County, and a huge percentage of that group coming to the city of L.A. Those who've been formerly incarcerated, and are felons and think that they're disenfranchised still, think they can't go to the polls and vote. If you're already a minority group, where it takes everybody's voice to stand up and say we agree with this piece of legislation, or we want this elected candidate in office, and everybody showed up without any restrictions, we still would have a challenge electing somebody.

Cut off 30 percent of that group because either they're apathetic about believing in the policies or the people, or they think they can't vote because they were formerly incarcerated, and now what kind of voice does the community have?

You don't even scratch the surface of what change looks like. Those are blind consequences to the effect of mass incarceration on communities of color, and these disenfranchised communities like South Los Angeles.

For the last 20 years let's say, the police department, the DA, all of these different government bureaucratic systems, are more willing to work with you as the voice of the community, but the communities themselves are not so open to them.

What does that relationship look like right now?

It's almost like the community is saying, ‘too little too late’. It's like, ‘we were ready to work with you after the riots. We were ready to engage healthy dialogue after Rodney King’. We go through all of that, and not only do we have to suffer through the consequences of that experience, but then you put gang injunctions on our communities and the police come in and terrorize community members and criminalize innocent people inadvertently, and call them gang members. And then the criminal system puts enhancements on charges because now we label innocent people who weren't gang members as gang members and, yeah they sold drugs, or maybe they got caught with a gun, whatever the case may have been, but now I'm labeled a gang member because I grew up in this community and I get an extra five or six years on top of a sentence? These mothers are saying he's not a gang member, and he’s saying I'm not in it — you create this distrust. To the point where we don't want to deal with you.

Now it almost seems like we're being placated by the system because the system comes and says we want to play fair now, we want to cooperate now, and we want you to excuse all of the urban terrorism that we blighted you with for the last 30 years under the disguise of tough on crime and the war on drugs. "Forgive us, we just want to play fair now".

The community is not in a place where they have been as forgiving as others. My position is, I wish that we – I hear Rodney King in the back of my head: "Can we all just get along?"

Right now the community is playing the biggest part of the problem in my opinion. A murder may happen in the community and the community itself knows exactly who did it, the detectives are doing this full blown investigation with no leads and nobody is saying anything. If you have individuals who consistently find themselves in a place where there's no consequence to their behavior because of the street code, or the community is intimidated by the perpetrator, whatever the case may be, we only end up hurting ourselves. We have to find a balance between those two extremes right now.

What allows you to trust government institutions after your own experience in the system?

Understanding the power of democracy, understanding that yeah, there's a lot of politics in politics. But still majority rules. I found that to be true.

And it doesn't take a whole lot. A few years ago, 2012, we worked closely with the sheriff's department and the county Registrar's office with our inmate voter registration. There were approximately 20,000 folks incarcerated in the county jail system at that time. We registered approximately 1,200, 1,250 folks. We didn't hit 10 percent of the total population for a lot of reasons. I felt we didn't do the best job we could. County Board of Supervisors, City Council people elected from the state touted the effort. "Oh my God, look what you guys did!" About 900 of those folks cast their ballot in custody. I've come to realize 900 additional votes could swing an election. I didn’t know it at the time. What I've learned is that we can mobilize and demonstrate that we can do this with intention, and purpose, and have a lot of weight in the power we bring to the table.

That's the issue I'm trying to convey to gang members in any community. You may not believe in the power of our democracy, you may not believe in the police chief, you may not believe in the sheriff, you may not believe judges and courts, but all those folks –minus the police chief– are elected to office.

You got the power to say “nah not to you, you, but not you". If we all come together, they have to come to us to have a conversation, to get our opinion on what best practice looks like if they're elected. It's been like herding cats to get people into a place to see this potential power. It's apathy. It's almost too little too late. If you had asked it of us ten years ago, maybe, but we don't hear it now. You hear I don't care. Even if it hurts me to avoid this opportunity

Are you optimistic?

I am. You've got to be! I mean there's a verse of Bible that says a living dog is better than a dead lion. As long as we're alive there's hope.

I'm tired of going to funerals; I'm tired of burying kids. I'm tired of visiting domestic violence programs where women are abused simply because of the residual trauma and anger that community members have that are displaced.

We're hurting each other because we're being hurt.

I made a commitment as I said in the beginning, that I'm going to do my best to serve my community as long as I'm alive. I see no victory to believe. I'm a firm believer in the word of God that says a little leaven leavens the whole lump. So we can have a little bit, and sustain that little bit, it has the potential to grow into something bigger. I feel I've got other partners across the state who have a similar idea that we're not done yet. I do have optimism towards it.

MoMA PS1 In Brief

by Angela Goding

October 20, 2018

Angela Goding is Director of Development at MoMA PS1. frank sat down with Angela to talk all things PS1, Long Island City and the legacy punk spirit of the museum.

This interview was conducted and condensed by frank news editors.

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frank: Let's dive in. How has PS1 changed as Long Island City has become more developed?

Angela: It's tough. It's tough work. In general, the community around Long Island City is not as hungry for hard-hitting material. Long Island City is a strange moment. It used to be this raw edgy neighborhood where nobody was really there, and now they're turning it into these skyscrapers with lots of young people moving in who work in the city. We're creating this cultural center in the middle of Queens, so we always need to think about who our community is.

Our community is artists. They don't live in Long Island City. They live in LA, they live in Bushwick. They don't live in Long Island City. We're testing it out, it's all new, it's all changed in the seven years since I've been at MoMA PS1.

We have all this space, and have you seen MOMA PS1? We have space. It's a very, it's fast moving, and we're constantly negotiating it. We have great relationship with the government, with our councilman, our borough president, and all of the government officials are definitely trying to figure out ways to work with us and the community.

Tell us more about PS1’s community and its legacy.

There were very few people living in Long Island City before. It was just empty warehouses. At the end of the day, we really look at our community now as artists. Wherever they live, that's our community. Anyone who gets it and who wants to have conversations –They feel hungry for it.

They're grateful for a place that is very embracing and has an energy. Because we are so scrappy and it's an old school house, a lot of it has to do with the building that's decrepit, falling apart and floods whenever there's rain, and all these things keep it real. We aren’t alienating. It's a destination. You get on the subway and you come to MoMA PS1 and you spend all day there. You do it once a month. There are people that are coming very regularly. They see every single show, they go to every single opening, they know what's happening.

Who funds PS1?

We are a CIG, which is a Cultural Institute Group, so we get some money from the government –the DCA government affairs gives us some money, but it's almost 100 percent our patrons. We have a great board. We have an incredible board chaired by Agnes Gund, and we have a few board members from MoMA who sit on our board, and it's this very beautiful group that Klaus Biesenbach over the years brought together. It's largely our board, and we work with Volkswagen. They've been with us since I started, and they're a very generous, vocal partner.

What exhibitions are up next?

Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts is currently on view. It's our entire building. It's so crazy –he's in the building, in the studio. He’s an icon. We're in full throttle. February is the last day of the show, and I don't know what's happening in March. No idea. There are ideas. That why it's exciting, because you're just always responsive. It's scary, but it keeps it real, because then you really can just throw something daunting in there that's responsive to whatever's happening.

All of the artists – I feel like we have the most amazing program – you look at Sue Coe and the shows that Peter Eleey is doing and there are lots of women, and super diverse presentation in the artists that are in our galleries. That’s what's appealing to our community, which are the artists, because there's multiplicity of the artists.

There are very young curators. They all have the freedom to do little pop-up gem shows because the real estate is there. We have so much luxury of space that somebody can throw something together in a month and do something with one emerging artist and have it be on view. I think that's what's exciting to artists in our community is that there's this multiplicity, at least it's in the galleries.

It is great that artists of every age are being represented.

What’s the criteria for becoming a curator?

That's almost an impossible question. It always comes down to the individual. For PS1, there’s not this level of academic achievement that you have to have at all. One of our young curators started out as an assistant, and got the job by being really smart. This woman is brilliant, and she really is looking at artists who are on the margins and has a very incredible, important voice that is very unique. At the end of the day, she’s an incredible curator, and is constantly putting out really interesting work, has her finger on the pulse. Another young curator came from Stanford, and just got his Master's. He's very smart, very academic. We put out a call and we interviewed people all over the country and he moved from California to be here. It's like anything, it's a little right time, right place, access, and fitting into what we were looking for. We’re also constantly shifting the body of what our curatorial team looks like. A mix, again, a voice, if somebody slots into that, they're going to have more of an opportunity.

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Can you tell us a bit more about Warm-Up?

It's a dance themed, dance music series that we've gone on now 20 years. We were the first institution, first museum that we know of that incorporated DJ culture and DJs as artists. It's curated like any other exhibition, there's a curatorial committee that worked on it all year long, and they program during the course of every Saturday during the summer. It ends up being 10 Saturdays from three in the afternoon until nine o'clock at nine, live acts and DJs, but 4,000 people come to these – it's usually a sellout. It will run the gamut from some very obscure sound artist that you never heard of to playing Cardi B three years ago. It was her breakout moment. She always references the MoMA show as her moment when she came out.

I love it because there are so many different types of people there. That's why it's so beautiful, very much New York. It's the whole – from the 50-year-olds to the 18-year-olds – and everyone's just there dancing, and there's no bullshit, there's no attitude, they're just loving their lives. They go into the galleries, they see the shows, it brings in a whole audience that would normally never come to a museum, and now it's an institution.

Artists inherently are living outside of structure in a lot of ways. The idea that you would have a museum that celebrated that and threw parties or night events makes sense. I don't think we should put too many restrictions on these things. There's nothing like it in New York City for sure – you can roll around on the floor. It's an old school house party, familiar. It's very quirky, it's not precious at all.

Does PS1 do dance exhibitions as well?

We do commissions. We work with some amazing choreographers. We have a geodesic dome that we can do a lot of interesting presentations in there. It's a super flexible space, so we do commissions. We had a french choreographer stage an exhibition in one of our galleries where he actually had dancers in the space as part of an exhibition. It was one of my favorites. He's genius. They would do these dances and come up to you. It's all about interaction and conversation and live dancers in the space.

I also think the Judson Dance Theater show is interesting. I didn't really know what to expect, I wasn't part of the planning – I walked in the next day after it opened and had no background. Yvonne Rainer was dancing in the galleries. It's really cool. They've done it so that it's very archival, it's basically 100 percent archival material, so how do you make that interesting and engaging. They did a really great job. It tells a story. They're so smart, and there's sculptural elements, and the dancers come in and active every 15 minutes. There are real formal performances that are happening in the atrium every week, focusing on a different choreographer. I feel like it feels very alive very relevant, and it feels familiar in a strange way. It’s topical where these artists we're working with are seeing themes that are emerging 100 percent. They're so influential on everybody who's working now, so it was very timely. I think it's brilliant because I would have tapped that for PS1.

It’s very of the moment to flip it and take it to MoMA, that's a different precedence. Yeah, you want to be able to play with that, I think.

This was so interesting. Thank you.

Forward Union Fair

by frank

October 16, 2018

This interview with Forward Union, a coalition-building initiaitive connecting social justice organizations with artists and creative communities, was conducted and condesned by frank news.

frank: Could you tell me more about how Forward Union Fair was founded?

Jennie Lamensdorf: Shortly after the election, we went through an exercise assessing what everyone was talking about in the news and online. I took stock of my privilege and one of the things that I took stock of was that I have access to space in New York City, and I wanted to do something with that. I work with a real estate developer who had empty retail space in Manhattan that felt too extraordinary not to take advantage of. I have access to this space. I want to do a thing, and I don't know what the thing should be.

I was honestly thinking something small like, "We could make protest banners", or "We could do guided meditation". What could we do? It was around the time of Art Basel and so we were in this mindset "art fair season", and Holly Shen proposed an anti-Art Basel fair.

We didn't want to generate something new because we knew there were all these people doing really good work, and we didn't need to step into the fray to produce something from scratch. We wanted to create a platform that could support the people who already do the things. Then we wanted to do something that created face to face conversation.

Julia Clark: Get people offline.

Jennie Lamensdorf: Get people offline! The internet was already super toxic. It was frustrating all of us, and making all of us really angry. We wanted to create a space, supporting people doing good work, that made people interact differently.

In a tense political climate, do you think art helps us focus on culture? Focus on politics? Or is there even a discussion about people making art for arts sake at this point?

Jennie Lamensdorf:

At all times art can be made for all reasons.

Artists make their work for whatever it is that moves them. I think maybe it's possible that more artists are being explicit about their political values right now.

An artist we work with named, Emily Noelle Lambert, makes paintings and sculpture and she produced all the furniture for our lounge the first two years. Her work didn't change but her titles changed in a way that made the painting a lot more politically explicate after the election. Her values didn't change, she was just being motivated to be a more political.

I also don't think art has to be about anything ever. It's just I think what I'm interested in might be changing, and what the audience is interested in is be changing, but I don't think the artist has to do anything ever. It's for the greater audience to shift the attention not the artist. Otherwise it comes off fake.

How do you select artists for Forward Union?

Jennie Lamensdorf: We've been working with a core group all three years and it is personal because they came out and supported us no questions asked in the beginning, when we had no track record and we were doing this on a three week timeline, and it seemed a little bit bonkers. There are a lot of artists that have been working with us and continue to do so.

This year we have a big instillation by Jesus Benavente. We have one by Aram Han Sifuentes and Lizania Cruz. The selection process is organized by Holly and me, who we're interested in working with, and who has an exciting project going on right now.

For the first time this year all the artists are getting paid W.A.G.E guideline fees.

We're not W.A.G.E certified, because we haven't gone through the process, but each artist is getting a fee based on the guidelines that are on their website. In the past we haven't had the resources to be able to pay the artist to produce work for us so that's really exciting. But in order to do that we had to have fewer artists. The first year we had 35, and this year we have 13. We have fewer artists, making fewer things, with better resources.

I think it also comes from learning how the fair works. The first year we had normally sized work on the walls. We had a lot of paintings that we hung by number of artists. What we realized is through an event of this scale, these domestically scaled objects get lost in the fray.

The spirit of the fair is a civics fair more than an art fair. The aesthetic is all over the place. It's rather DIY. We want to encourage that and make everything feel accessible. We want to encourage that in this space, because Redbull Arts is way more like a gallery than where we've been before, it's way more polished and feels a lot more professional, but we also don't want our audience who isn't part of the art world to all of the sudden feel like this isn't a space for them. The big work is more successful. You can see it from all angles, it occupies more space, its responding to the energy.

Who is this fair for?

Julia Clark: It's for everybody. The idea was to bring it offline – this is tangible, this next step, this action. This call to action. Obviously the art world is our audience and our network, bringing the creative community to the organization is sort of this new resource and outlet for them.

Then there are also the advocates and grassroots communities who aren't as involved in the art world, and they're more interested in the participants and the programs than the other things. It's bringing everybody together. Organizations are coming together and realizing that they are all overlapping, and they are having a conversation, and finding out how an artist can come and tap into that, and have a different view or perspective.

In some way the art is a conversation facilitator.

Julia Clark: Yes. And it complements. The same conversations are happening, and you can see them. Art has the capacity to communicate complex situations in an immediate fashion.

You talked a little about bringing things offline. It's no secret we're inundated with visual imagery all the time. When it comes to imparting a political message do you think that's helpful?

Jennie Lamensdorf: I am over the internet in some ways. I get social media specific, where I want to comment, I want to talk to people, and have a conversation, and organizing Forward Union Fair has us tapping into a world that we wouldn't necessarily. Learning about different organizations and being hands on and having a conversation is important. I do think seeing things online is also important.

Do you think art and activism are headed offline in a bigger sense?

Jennie Lamensdorf: No, I think we need both still. For example, Swing Left is coming to the fair and their big initiative now is called hashtag the last weekend (#TheLastWeekend) and that's because it is known that the most important moment to get out the vote for an election is the Sunday before a Tuesday election. #TheLastWeekend is a project to promote phone banking and knocking on doors on the last Sunday in October. What they're doing to promote that is a really big digital online social media push. The name of the project has a hashtag in it, in order to engender things to happen offline. In that way, I don't think you can remove the digital from anything.

Even here. We're basically only promoting the existence of the fair with online promotion. We did have print yesterday. We were in the Metro, New York.

Julia Clark: We did have a street team with post cards.

Jennie Lamensdorf: We did do some post cards. But mostly we are sending lots of emails we have a website, we are doing social media, and all of that work to get people to show up in real life.

Why is none of the art at the fair for sale?

Julia Clark: Selling art is a really hard job and we are not equipped to take on that role. We aren't sharing art that is very sellable and if someone was like "Oh my God, I am in love with Joiri Minaya instillation. I would like to acquire that" I would say "Amazing, here is Joiri's information." Selling art is really hard work and despite the fact all of us are from the art world, none of us are from the commercial art world.

Jennie Lamensdorf: When we organized the first fair, we without thinking used an art. A curatorial methodology, being that we though about the issues that were critical to our subject. Our subject being like "Oh My God that just happened, like Trump is now the president." So that is now the subject "What do we do next, what is going to happen? How do I survive? How do I get through the panic and the dark?" That was the subject matter and we used a curatorial methodology we looked at the subject matter we thought about all of the issues and we wanted each issue represented in some form. So that's how we targeted different organizations to participate.

Julia Clark: We felt like, we have to have representatives from immigrant communities, social justice communities, the health care community, gun control, LGBTQ etc. And that's how we reached out to all these organizations, and that's how we ended up with this, I think very diverse intersectional group of organizations because we have a lot of return. Every year there is some change but by and large we're getting lots of organizations over and over again. Turns out that is 100 percent the wrong way to organize an activist event. And environmentalism obviously. When activists do events is very subject oriented. So there is environmentalism and they have their events and there is women's reproductive health and they have their events and there is prison reform and they have their events and this is in part due to funding structures, they need to be tight to be on brand, on mission. Its tight because of the complexity of the issues.

Jennie Lamensdorf: In order to be an expert you have to be quite focused. I think its tight because of the way lobbying works and the way changing legislation works. So what we did was we did it wrong because none of us are traditional activists and we did it using the traditions and the structures of the world we come from and we ended up creating this amazing event that has all of these voices and one of the beautiful take aways from Forward Union is the incredible interdisciplinary networking that happens and opportunities for collaboration or thinking and idea sharing that come from it. So with the fair we actually open to the orgs two hours before we open to the public and we serve breakfast and we have this open mic where they can talk about what they do and do calls to action so they can all engage with each other.

I really think that the doing it wrong-ness and using the traditions of the art world to design a program that isn't exclusively for the art world is one of the things that makes Forward Union very different and very special and I think valuable, and adaptable, because it has morphed over the years and I think it has opportunity to continue to do so as like the world changes.

Julia Clark: That's interesting. That access in itself. Its taking a somewhat closed off seeming methodology, a curatorial methodology and overlaying it on an industry that doesn't look at things that way. Right?

Jennie Lamensdorf: Yeah, we disrupted them.

Julia Clark: Yeah, that's an element. I agree with that. That's exactly why I think its important and interesting.

Jennie Lamensdorf: We did by accident the first year, and we sort of leaned into it the second and third year. The first year we didn't have the open mic, we started the open mic last year. We did it one day last year and it was so successful we're going to do it two days this year.

Julia Clark: And it was literally like "Somebody canceled what do we do?" Thing. And it ended up being all of our end of the day roses and thorns. It was so great.

Activism is weird in the sense that I think people really do stay in their lane. That's a shame.

Jennie Lamensdorf: So much! It's super weird.

Julia Clark: Activism has its traditions. I'm sure they look at us in the art world and think we do things wrong and I think it's just our outsider perspective that accidentally allowed us to create something beautiful.

There is an irony that the art world has an exclusivity reputation but you guys were the outsiders in this case. You were not the insiders.

Julia Clark: I find the art world to be an incredibly welcoming and inviting place, but I think because so much or what people outside the art world know about us is from headlines like "$350 million paintings", it tends to be really grand market stuff, and not the lived DIY reality of most people.

I agree.

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