Talking to other Americans about the U.S. can be disorienting, as if we’re describing different countries. 

Several of those countries were explored at the March 2026 Tilt West roundtable, “CHANGE: Deconstructing American Values.”

Participants discussed America’s optimists, who emphasize the nation’s progress. In their version of history, the optimists see successive generations of Americans invoking the “unalienable rights” proclaimed in the Declaration to bring an ever-larger number of people under the protections of the Constitution. 

This is the America that President Obama has described in his speeches, that civil rights leaders from Frederick Douglass to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have deployed on behalf of their respective movements, and that historian Jill Lepore characterizes in her scholarship [1] (some of which was included in the roundtable’s prompt). 

For the optimists, the idea that we’re all created equal and that we all deserve equal protection under the law is leverage that Americans use to make the country uphold its promises and over time become a more perfect union. 

But there’s another story of America that for many feels much more real, and that was also discussed. This story, told by those we might call our rememberers, is of a country founded on originating sins that have never been reckoned with, their perpetrators never brought to justice, their victims never given restitution or even acknowledgment. In fact, much of the country likes to pretend it never committed any sins at all.   

But the sins were so ghastly, their scale so vast, their human impact so catastrophic, for the rememberers there is no honest way of understanding America without understanding not just the role these sins played in the country’s founding, but also the role that forgetting them has played in the country’s story since. 

In this view, America can feel like a huge multi-story house where beneficiaries of the original sins live on the upper floors, and the inheritors of the sinned-against reside below. The house has no stairs, only ladders lowered down sporadically before being yanked back up at random.

For most of our history, the upper inhabitants have gotten to tell the story of the house. When asked about the house’s history they talk about all the progress that’s been made on it – but they mostly like to talk about the house’s future. On the rare occasion they acknowledge those living below, they’re quick to point out those who have climbed up. (“Getting up only takes a willingness to climb,” those born on the upper floors like to say.) When it’s brought to their attention that there are no stairs, only occasional ladders that many are not even able to reach, the upper inhabitants calmly explain that progress takes time. Years ago the upper-floor inhabitants put up a giant sign above the front door that reads: “Indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

For two and a half centuries, these upper inhabitants have been the country’s primary storytellers – its mythmakers. 

Whether it was our extermination of the continent’s first inhabitants, our kidnapping, torture, and enslavement of millions from across the Atlantic, our century of Jim Crow apartheid and racial terror, or our half century of gutting America’s public services as soon as they became desegregated, our country’s sins have been reflected in our national architecture but not our national story.

Until we atone for those sins and make repair, our rememberers insist, we will continue pretending to be a country we are not, and we’ll be stuck having the same circular conversations, while upstairs Americans wonder why we can’t just move on. 

For those who are not treated as fully American, the original sins are plainly visible and experienced viscerally every day. But it’s other Americans’ denial that the architecture is even there – their insistence that the design is not even real – that can make living in the U.S. so bewildering, infuriating, and exhausting, and that makes talking about it across differences often seem impossible. 

"To forget a holocaust,” Elie Wiesel said, “is to kill twice.” [2] 

Americans visiting Germany today are often struck by how openly the country memorializes its sins. They encounter plaques in the sidewalks in front of buildings, engraved with the names of citizens who lived there and who were murdered by their government.

Famously, not long ago, Germany was a very different place – one unencumbered by honest memory. 

After the First World War, Germans embraced the "stab-in-the-back" myth (Dolchstoßlegende), falsely alleging that Germany only lost because it was betrayed by treacherous insiders – namely Jews. This myth encouraged Germans to ignore their own failings while also propelling anti-semitism and the public’s willingness to turn against, and eventually exterminate, their fellow citizens.

After the cataclysm of the Second World War and the slaughter of millions, the West German government wanted to make sure the past was remembered honestly, the country’s sins fully acknowledged, and its surviving victims given restitution. They wanted to avoid a repeat of the catastrophe that comes from denying past wrongs. They began building the Germany we see today.

In the U.S., those who committed treason against our government in order to protect slavery were not punished. To excuse their failure and to avoid the shame of their war’s stated purpose, after losing the war they started Confederates quickly embraced the myth that they had fought the war not on behalf of slavery, but for states’ rights. This “Lost Cause” myth replaced historical fact and encouraged the aggressors to see themselves as the victims. 

Not one Confederate who waged war against the United States was ever even tried for treason. [3]. Lincoln’s murder and the resulting abandonment of Reconstruction meant that racial segregation and subjugation continued for another 100 years and the “Lost Cause” and its related lies (e.g., “northern oppressors,” “heritage not hate,” etc.) were allowed to fester and grow in the public imagination and popular culture, where they remain to this day. 

The passage of civil and voting rights legislation in the 1960s increased the number of ladders in the house and how long they had to stay down, but it also provided an opportunity to turn white Americans against their own country. 

Since Reagan, few things are seen as more patriotic in the U.S. than hating the United States government and wanting to defund all but its military. Desegregation allowed business interests to drive a wedge between Americans, encouraging white voters to see public services not as the basic building block of any civil society, but as part of an oppressive federal government. Programs like Social Security and Medicare were merely examples of “your hard-earned tax dollars” going to an undeserving “other.” (After the 1960s, race had to be invoked implicitly instead of stated plainly, so they invented dog-whistle terms like “welfare queens” that achieve exactly what explicit racist slander does, but without the fingerprints. A coward’s bigotry.) 

Today we can see the cost of these harmful myths, of forgetting our past and denying the architecture it produces. The last half century of American life – the skyrocketing inequality, the calcification of economic mobility, the dismantling of civil and political rights – are all the product of the same toxic lies. And these myths are being propagated from those living on the highest floors of the house. 

In the current Gilded Age, the wealthy and the powerful are once again pulling up the ladders of economic and social mobility from the reach of the American public. And to get away with it, they’re stoking culture wars by putting new spins on old myths. 

Freeloading “welfare queens” have been replaced by enemies within our borders, outsiders who have infiltrated the country, aided and abetted by the traitorous “woke.” We have a critical shortage of public services such as health care and education spending but no shortage of racist hysteria, moral panics, and targeted campaigns aimed at scapegoating marginalized groups. 

It’s just the “Lost Cause” in new clothes: “out-of-touch” city dwellers trying to ruin the “true” heritage of our country by elevating un-American “others.”

The mega-rich have long understood that as long as the country stays focused on cultural provocation, the inequitable architecture of our house will not be renovated. 

And so we bleed. 

Lacking a shared origin story – a shared myth that’s both aspirational and honest – we stay trapped in a spiral of mutual hatred and misunderstanding as we backslide further from America’s promise, while failing to see any way out.

In our last Gilded Age of spiraling inequality, Jay Gatsby emerged as an embodiment of the American Dream’s double meaning, both its ambition and its illusion. Seen as having climbed America’s economic and social ladders (dream as ambition), in reality he had covered up his true history with a fictional one (dream as illusion). 

If Fitzgerald’s Gatsby embodied the American Dream, maybe it’s fitting to see Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone [4] as the American Nightmare. Instead of a fraud we foolishly admire, Walker’s is a monster we buried and have tried desperately to forget. Now the monster is rearing its head(s) and asking us to remember.

Unmanned Drone is further evidence that Walker may be this country’s most significant living artist. Each of her pieces arrives fully formed, simultaneously unlike anything before it while also feeling strangely obvious, like being shown a color we somehow never noticed. 

Maybe the reason her works feel this way – both completely novel and plainly true – is because she’s drawing from the raw material of our buried memory. She’s showing us something that came from inside us that we’ve tried to forget. 

In this way, Walker forges new myth from honest material. And honest myths are rare in our country. 

With honest myths – ones that embody both our atrocities and our achievements, our oppressions and our liberations, our condemnation and our salvation – the past and the future don’t need to live in tension with each other. They can be bridged by stories instead of buried beneath them.

With good and honest myth, the optimists and the rememberers can tell our story together, offering both the vision and the conscience of a nation.  

When, in 1858, Lincoln said “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” it caused controversy. Many Americans at the time didn’t want to imagine that the country could rip itself apart. But he was quoting Christ’s words in the gospels because he knew his 19th century American audience would recognize the Biblical reference and as a result perhaps be more willing to consider the message.

We have no comparable shared reference today. We also don’t want to imagine our country ripping itself apart. But we have so little in the way of healthy and healing myth to compete with the poisonous lies of the “Lost Cause” and its offspring. 

This is what makes Walker’s work so immeasurably valuable. 

We’re scared and we’re angry. We feel something essential has been lost. And it seems impossible to talk to each other. 

But we have artists like Walker whose work can retrieve what’s been lost, express what words can’t, and give us a way of bearing witness to ourselves and one another. 

Whether we retain this republic or have to rebuild it, our coming work will require the vision of our optimists and the conscience of our rememberers. 

And it will take rare souls like Walker who can combine those stories into better myths so we can finally begin discussing – and building – the same country together. 

I recently attended my first Tilt West dialogue and now have the honor to share my experience. To preface, I attended over a month ago, and the experience still unfolds within me. Yet I feel this moment seeping into my bones like marrow nourishing new growth, stretching and expanding them. Before I share a poem from what resonated most that evening, I provide context to help illuminate the sensorial experience in the hope that your curiosity about the body, your body, and the humanness of existing continues to leave you in wonder and deep curiosity.

I walked into a spotlighted gallery at the Denver Botanic Garden filled with sculptures, prints, and paintings portraying bodies as universality and oneness. To my right, on the south wall, prints of elongated bodies hung from hooks, enclosed within towering box frames. Later, a participant shared the irony of boxing in the bodies. As I continued walking through the gallery before dialoguing, I remembered the evening prompt was the body as a battleground. As I approached the circle of chairs where I would soon sit and become confused in conversation yet stimulated by curiosity and deep listening, several large busts stood nearby. The heads resembled being squeezed and thinned by a pasta maker, creating a similarity among them.

A writing on a nearby wall stating, What is beautiful is to be as one while keeping our differences. Yet, I’m not sure what looked different in the space when I was there alone. The various media used differed. The artistic approaches differed, but the differences were vague. The idea that the body is a battleground was not quite felt, or maybe it was that feeling of unsteadiness, the whitewashed sameness. What was different in the space, where was the beauty of difference?

Then, after sitting down in the circle with a small group, Sam, our prompter for the evening, began to retell her observations of a 1970s documentary about dead bodies chilled in a morgue. They mentioned personal interpretations and questions about what bodies are. They asked questions similar to “What is our engagement in these bodies; in our own bodies engaging another body figuratively through realism and abstraction, and at the end of the day, are our bodies just goo, organs, flesh, and hair?”

As I listened to them, I thought about the literal body: skin tones, hair texture, nailbeds,  and the ideas that shaped current U.S. reality: racism, sexism, toxic masculinity, and the behavior of emotional paralysis. I was in my head, slightly detached from my fellow attendees and definitely from my own body.

As the conversation continued, a fellow artist shared how she honors rocks and stones as beings. The beingness of something so still and yet so strong and influential–specifically, disregard of their beauty and their abilities. “Are we rocks?” I wondered.

Sam posed a half-thought question, “To get at the core of us…”

To get at the core of us is a wonder

Unsure:

I move in curiosity.

What does that mean?

Maybe Process, not Stagnation?

What does curiosity mean for connection?

Growth? Composting? Nourishing New?

Sam says, “Bodies - bags of goo and hair…”

An artist with a mustache ponders facial recognition to gain access.

I visualize curtains of zeros and ones flooding a screen. A flash on the screen: ACCESS GRANTED.

Vulnerability and Relationships dance in the dialogue.

Oh! Vulnerability and Relationships, how I love you!

Open to listen. Hearing stories of another while drawing them. 

Zest fills the heart of the artist as she reflects.

Tears well up in my eyes as I feel the moment of two strangers connecting.

Self-looking glass aligning with what is true and tangible - a breath and acceptance of self, what does that really mean when I’m the one creating the art yet inspired by another?

Maybe mutuality? The energetic moment of newness?

Is this what connection feels like?

Artists sharing their deep care for another and their resistance to misrepresent. 

The paradox of connection: uncomfortable but in love with another and the craft.

Willing to try to honor and explore.

 

Disconnection:

Meditation apps and Looksmaxxing

Cultural coding and code switching

Is this universality?

We’re all just organs - that comment doesn’t feel good

We’re all one, but there are differences - does that feel better? I don’t think so.

What is the universal body, and what is that right now?

Anxious about how you portray the body of another? Yes and No.

Surrounded by prints of bodies, appearing to be people of the Global Majority, tall prints. 10 feet high, enclosed, boxed in.

Is there truly universality?

Am I boxed in?

I feel so at times, and yet tonight, I’m in deep wonder. 

 

Connection:

Stepping in “Dog shit” while trying to connect. A misstep towards widening curiosity and the Love of bodies.

Forgetting myself as body and more as energy, a sponge, a radio wave, and a sticky web trying To catch what others cast into the circle of unknown - of wonder.

An artist shares creating interactive work - Touching and interacting with the object ignites the Senses - now that feels like connection!

The body as a battleground. Yes. Maybe. 

Still asking, What does connection feel like? 

I leave feeling eager to do this again. 

I leave in wonder.

I watched NASA’s livestream of Artemis II from an uncomfortable plastic recliner at my father’s bedside. He is a 26 year Air Force veteran who brought me to countless air shows and Air & Space museums, and now suffers from Parkinson’s as a result of exposure to chemicals during his time in the Vietnam War. He witnessed the Apollo missions as a young man from Alabama, in the midst of racial violence, unjust wars, and social restructuring. Then, as now, the “space race” was framed by movements pushing for change, meeting oppressive violence with imaginative collective work toward improving life on this planet. It was also fueled by fears escalated by nuclear power, the Red Scare, and threats to US political dominance. The specifics may be different, but the tensions are not new.

In the moments before launch, I was caught off guard by the excitement and trepidation tumbling in my gut (like many genXers, I witnessed the Challenger tragedy), and just how much I wanted this mission to achieve its goals even though I know the enterprise is tainted. I needed to witness a collective effort to do something improbable, to confirm that group efforts to support a few tenacious humans can be celebrated, not feared, and we can do so in inhospitable environments. 

As I sat next to my father in his assisted living facility, it struck me that my family, with healthcare workers, government funding, and numerous medical devices were doing something similar. Faced with his vulnerability, his proximity to death, caused in part by participation (willing or no) in war, all amidst cuts to funding, low wages for care workers, and skyrocketing medical costs, we work together to support and care for his dignity and humanity. This time with him, alongside my own harrowing experiences in hospital beds, has gifted me deep tenderness, patience, and love amidst exhaustion and grief. His, my, our thriving depends upon the support and coordination of so many people; we cannot exist alone. Our grief and exhaustion, both acute and pervasive, is a valid response to living within structural systems that willfully direct unfathomable amounts of resources toward achievements like space travel (and, well, “winning” wars), yet deny the interdependence, vulnerability, and mortality that life requires of us at all times and in all places.

In her memoir, Year of the Tiger, our fierce disabled oracle Alice Wong states, “vulnerable ‘high-risk’ people are some of the strongest, most interdependent, and most resilient people around.” [1] She was describing persons living with disabilities, though we tend to refer to astronauts in similar ways. Astronauts, however, get to choose to adapt to high-risk, inhospitable environments, and receive vast amounts of support to make it happen. Living in space requires comprehensive assistive systems: a high-tech vehicle, complex life support devices [2], and near constant surveillance to prevent failure (re: zero privacy). Without any of these, they, well, die. The astronauts must be highly sensitive to changing circumstances (presence), utterly dependent on machines and people who are literally sustaining their lives (trust), and undergo years of physical, mental, and psychological training (experiential knowledge). We consider these sacrifices “worth it” for space exploration. What about folks living with disabilities? We have made space more accessible to humans than our native planet.

Most disabled persons’ experiential knowledge of living with disability on earth requires trust in caregivers for daily needs, reliance upon (barely functional) healthcare systems and expensive medical devices or prescriptions, and acute presence to a constantly changing body, environment, and community in order to not merely survive, but thrive. Wong was a fierce fighter for her right to participate in and shape the world, and fought for and alongside people experiencing all kinds of oppression, marginalization, and exploitation. She knew that “we have the creativity, moral courage, and collective power to shape a world that has space for all” [1],  and worked hard to make it happen.

The Artemis II mission was a much needed sharp counterpoint to the near constant alarm bells shrieking for our attention in this media saturated time. This moon journey is one of many that will entail the cooperation of many nations, not just the efforts of the US. We have learned some things these past 50 years, though we have a ways to go. The example of camaraderie and care set by these four astronauts, their tenderness publicly displayed, the images of never seen faces of the moon [3] are an awe-full reminder of our place in the wider context of the universe. We are fragile yet resilient, an ecosystem of interdependent beings with agency and capability to enact wonderful and frightful events. We inhabit the only speck in space that we know sustains lives (that we recognize as such), a sobering reality check that ought shock us awake: it is OUR job to care for each other, and this place. We need to allow wonder to exist amidst the fear—it is necessary not merely for survival, but for us to thrive.

So, as we celebrate the astronauts’ safe return to earth, let us also be reminded that humans are working against the odds right here on the earth, and that earth itself is vulnerable, too. We must adapt, and do so in ways that expand the man-made boundaries of who we think the world is for. “Adaptation is care work. Adaptation is survival. Adaptation is a negotiation between the past and the present. Adaptation is a science and art. Adaptation pushes boundaries and creates new futures.” [1] We must choose to make accessibility a priority here on earth as it is in the heavens. Just as space exploration brings knowledge, international cooperation, and wonder to us all, the wisdom, interdependence, and attentiveness of the disability community are gifts that benefit us all. If change is the only constant in life, adaptation is essential.

Nostalgia, fluidity, and stagnation. These are difficult topics to discuss without also bringing to light your perception of time. When asked to define the past, what comes to your mind? Many people would describe it as a linear timeline of events that is supported and upheld through evidence and remembrance. As I sat through this roundtable, I felt the idea of the past as a concept and how it is individually interpreted being questioned. My own memories were laid before me, the very things that helped shape who I am. I began to feel that even my own liberal ideas of how to perceive time were being challenged.

Memory, identity, and the body actively shape how time is perceived. Through these mediums, time is often warped, looped, or even lingers. When we reflect on a memory, our feelings about that particular moment will change depending on our current sense of identity and understanding. What happened, happened, yes - but the meaning is never fixed. When we remember the past, we filter it through the current lens of the present. It is then changed and reshaped by who we have become, what we have survived, and what we are still imagining for the future. Memory is not a still, perfect moment. It is a living, breathing entity.

However, we cannot discuss time without thinking about the way that we capture it: media. Throughout history, the way media is viewed and perceived has constantly changed. When you think about it, media tries to imitate non-linear time without inhabiting it in a physical way. Unlike memory, identity, and the body - which are personal, somatic, and fluid - media instead will fixate itself into moments that can easily be replayed, recirculated, and detached from the original meaning. It externalizes time while pretending to stabilize it, and because media is tangible, it is the primary way we try to understand time.

These ideas come to a focal point when you consider the degradation of media. Photographs and video capture a moment, but their significance will vary depending on the viewer’s interpretation. Archival practices and media platforms (whether digital or physical) draw attention to this as well. When files degrade, formats then become obsolete. We all know content circulates and changes endlessly, creating never-ending loops that, when you think about it, defy our linear conceptions of past, present, and future.

My favorite question brought up at the roundtable was “How has media evolved to be nostalgic toward cultural “slop,” a meme of a meme, rather than toward the texture of lived, human experience?” While I’m sure there are many other ways to describe this experience, my mind immediately went to the “memeification” of the 9/11 attacks. For those who are reading that are not as chronically online as some of us may be, “the “memeification” of the 9/11 attacks” refers to the widespread internet phenomenon where the historical significance of 9/11 has become totally removed from the initial tragedy, and has instead turned into an endlessly reproducible symbol detached from the original context. There are many ways I could break down why this happened in the particular instance of the 9/11 attacks, and many other examples I could give (think of any popular meme image that has been removed from its context), but I think the point remains. Media is marked by repetition, and the quick-paced atmosphere of social media only hastens the process.

As I stated before, time often warps, loops, and lingers in ways that do not follow a straight line, and it is often turned into content for consumption. Our lived experience keeps time layered and complex and ever-changing. It is not something that is for sale. Media shapes how we document time, and therefore how we perceive it, but it cannot contain or limit it. I believe that the richest understanding of time exists outside of media. Non-linear, embodied experiences exist outside of circulation and offer the world a more human view of temporal understanding.

The September 2025 roundtable, “Culture Under Pressure: Censorship, Pivots, and Alternative Practices”, was my first time joining a Tilt West roundtable. Upon invitation, I thought I was attending as an audience not a participant. Surprise! After getting over the notion of “preparedness” I quite enjoyed the thoughtful discussion that included questioning and allowed criticism to be kindly exchanged, IRL. It stretches your mind more.

I walked into the discussion convinced that money controls everything. And my varied work as a fundraising professional had everything to do with it. Money feels like the invisible, or not so invisible, hand that determines what can and cannot happen. What gets shown, who gets invited, what risk is worth taking. But was I skeptical of the idea that a museum could be a true space for freedom or dissent when so much of its function depends on financial access? I can’t really say. Maybe a little, yeah. What I can say is I strongly believe museums and larger institutions are meant to be agents for social change.

As the conversation unfolded, and I listened to others challenge and expand on the relationship between cultural institutions, DIY/alternative art spaces and artist autonomy, I found myself doubling down on museums. I left with the conviction that museums are indeed places for dissent. Not despite their money, access or constraints, but because of them.

The dialogue reminded me that dissent can exist in less obvious ways. Often, it’s subtle quiet disruption from within, other times more visible. But both types are necessary and always happening. Just not always at the pace we want. Like any other activism we see in a public space, museums are meant to hold multiple and opposing truths. This friction is the capacity for dissent. Exhibitions, each acquisition, down to the language on a label, can serve as acts of resistance. Just as in an alt/ DIY space, there are people in these places challenging dominant narratives, confronting inequities, and questioning the very structures they work in. I know people want to see it in order to know it’s happening, but it’s not that simple.

Museums carry a visibility and legitimacy that few other cultural platforms can. Their reach and permanence can amplify or neutralize dissent. (We want to see the former.) That visibility should bring a sense of duty more than risk-aversion. It offers the possibility for discourse at scale. It’s easy to frame institutions as monoliths, but the reality is more complex, and I think in a human-centered way. Museums are made up of people — curators, educators, artists, fundraisers — navigating expression and responsibility. The roundtable sparked inspiration that the existing tension offers hope and motivation to continue working towards change. If the possibility for dissent to be amplified is there, the work these people are doing is worth it. (I’m conflating dissent with change here, but that’s what we’re talking about!).

This fixation on dissent brought me to another point: the distinction between artist and place. We often assume that institutional constraint diminishes the autonomy of an artist and what they present within it. Sometimes it does. BUT, artist and place occupy different roles, and each serves a purpose. As such, artists question, push boundaries, and sometimes articulate something we may not yet have language for, despite the limitations of place or resources. The magic is sort of in the challenge, right? In turn, it’s the museum’s role to hold that expression in a broader and very public framework, and to preserve the meaning of it while contextualizing it for a wider community. This is dialogue —a chance for pressure, and for change.

On community, I cannot discount what alt and DIY spaces do – they embody, react, and respond with immediacy, explicit directness, and urgency. They really know how to meet the moment in a way we dream bigger institutions would. Everyone could recognize this in the roundtable and acknowledged their ability to exist and adapt as economic disparities rage on. Alt spaces incubate and amplify art and artists often before broad recognition or support. These spaces are part of creating cultural memory and signal what’s to come, serving a crucial function. It was said by someone at the roundtable in reference to museums and alt art spaces, “it is all a continuum.” Obviously, I could not agree more. The roles are not opposing. As someone moving through all these environments, DIY/ alt spaces are personally affirming and give me confidence, while there is a knowing of what’s culturally relevant when entering an institutional space, like a museum.

I jotted down the term “autonomous zones” from the prompt ahead of discussion. It’s a mindset, a practice, that could exist anywhere. It’s a decision and in relationship to self, to others, to place. Which brings me back to the question of funding and my initial thinking that it cannot be separated from control. That it dictates and shapes culture. (Hello, late-stage capitalism.) Not sure that this response clearly articulates how I managed to change my mind through this roundtable yet, nonetheless, it happened, and I did.

The dialogue helped me see that funding can serve as a positive force. It can raise awareness and enable public engagement. Yes, funding may introduce conditions. But perhaps those conditions are the very systems of accountability that artists and institutions must navigate, together. One needs freedom, one has responsibility. Maintaining the integrity to transcend the pressure is the goal. Money doesn’t automatically corrupt; it can also affirm the values of culture within a broader social framework. It can be a constraint or a catalyst, another form of pressure. It doesn’t always silence dissent; it makes it possible to stage it publicly.

Nothing exists in a binary! And no doubt, museums are challenged to maintain openness to dissent, to be fluid, stay flexy. But that reflects society right now too —the threat of loss, of change. At the roundtable, it was rewarding to be amongst people who agreed and disagreed with openness, without collapsing into hostility. How refreshing. I’m surprised by how much I’m going to bat for museums in this response. Ultimately, dissent in a museum isn’t always opposition, it's engagement, it's care, it's recognition that to represent many truths is no risk at all.

"Immersive" is a big buzzword these days. For the last decade and some change, immersive experiences have offered a counterbalance to the flatness of our digital lives, in which we stare into a two-dimensional portal for hours on end. (Is there anything more indicative of the modern condition than one’s weekly "Screen Time Report"?) In this two-dimensional world, one can zoom into a photo of a distant geographic point via Google maps, but can’t smell it, or feel its temperature on the skin, or hear the way the wind sounds whistling through a far-off tree. This access-to-everything, sensual-experience-of-nothing life has everyone from technologists to game designers to marketing agencies clamoring to deem their particular product "immersive." The "immersive" label promises to lure a target audience by offering something more volumetric than what they can glean from their ubiquitous six-inch screens.

But what distinguishes the marketing concept from an artform? I’m not one to get too hung up on policing what constitutes immersive art, but it’s probably also a cop out to apply Jesse Helms’ definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." I admire folks whose definition of the term "immersive" is not an attempt to claim or gate-keep it, but to assist those who desire to get after it, create it, and understand it.

At April’s Tilt West roundtable, PLAY: Imagination and Worldbuilding, prompter Courtney Osaki-Durgin, a gifted immersive maker, introduced the writings of Margaret Kerrison who authored three books on immersive work.[1] The goal of these books is to establish guideposts for creating immersive experiences, informed by her work as a former Disney Imagineer and on several prominent immersive experiences, such as Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, Avengers Campus and the NASA Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Kerrison identifies five core tenets of successful immersive works. They:

1. 1. Are emotional
   2. Engage all senses
   3. Create a believable sense of time and place
   4. Invite us to participate and play
   5. Promote social interaction

Courtney used Kerrison’s writings as a launchpad (pun intended) for a discussion about the fourth aspect–how we play in the immersive container. As a creator of immersive theatre, I was thrilled to be in the mix for this conversation.

A few concepts kept surfacing in the discussion. The most significant was that in order to play in an immersive experience, folks need a feeling of safety. But that safety, I think, wasn’t defined simply as physical safety . The phrase "in good hands" popped up more than once.

There is much talk of safety in the theatre industry these days, and I find myself a little conflicted about it. Of course I want folks to be physically safe–to believe otherwise is psychopathic. But I am a proud Gen Xer who grew up in Houston, riding my bike until sundown without my mother knowing where I was, catching frogs in the bayou water that contained god knows what, climbing magnolia trees and hanging out with neighborhood pals on precarious branches for hours at a time. These early doses of freedom and adventure, of being a part of the wilder, sensual world, are something I aim to capture in my own work, especially in the outdoor immersive pieces that my company, The Catamounts, creates. So that phrase "in good hands" feels crucial. How can immersive creators invite audiences into their spaces, and encourage them to make themselves vulnerable to play and participation and the unknown? We have to make them feel they are "in good hands," to create a container, but one not too restrictive that allows for growth and adventure to unfold.

A tangent with a point: I used to be terrified of flying until I directed a play about a plane crash. The piece, United Flight 232, was based on a detailed account of a tragedy. My research, a necessary part of directing such a play, revealed that pilots are incredibly well trained, and their responses reflect this training even in moments of rare catastrophe. Each time you board a plane, you are in extremely good hands. As someone who loves travel and adventure, I flew in spite of my terror. But now I fly reassured that each time I travel, there is someone at the helm who is as knowledgeable about that mode of transport as it gets. This allows me to relax and go on the ride, to feel thrilled at the prospect of a new destination and new experiences.

How can immersive creators assure their audiences that they are in good hands so that the audience can relax and go on the ride? We identified few key things during our robust conversation:

1. Hospitality: ensuring that audience members are greeted with warmth and welcome.
2. The offering of food and drink, a gesture of hospitality.
3. Ritual, structure, or a form to connect with, that is already known or quickly knowable.

Any good host knows you greet your guests with warmth, an offering of food and drink, and an idea of what to anticipate for the evening ("We’ll sit down to dinner at 7.") This allows a guest to relax, to be open to the spontaneity of the evening, and even to the surprise.

I want my audiences to feel safe physically, yes, and I want them to feel safe to play. I know that the latter will draw them into the same world my performers inhabit. As someone who has worked in theatre for over 30 years, I can tell you that there is nothing quite like being in a play, when a director sets up a room of experimentation, rigor, wonder, and joy. Some of my richest relationships have grown out of the rehearsal and performance process, as brief as they can be. A good rehearsal space is like those hours spent with childhood friends in the branches of a magnolia tree: ostensibly precarious but exhilarating and free. And what an aspiration, to create that same space for performers and audiences alike.

To experiment, to participate, to engage, to be in relationship with the narrative, you have to feel you are "in good hands." And so that is the task, for we immersive creators, both to be those good hands, and identify ourselves as such.

Notes on Failure (aka Notes on Performance and Activism)[1]

It’s the difference between giving up and not giving up.

– Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die, 2024

For Caliban could only fight his master by cursing him in the language he had learned from him, thus being dependent in his rebellion on his “master’s tools.”

– Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 2014

Dear reader,

It’s May.

This essay is a playful—albeit challenging—experiment. It is a process of complex embodied thoughts. It is a reflection on the intersections of performance, activism, and personal experience, and how failure operates within these spaces—not as an endpoint, but as a site of continuous transformation. It raises more questions than provides answers. And much like unifying the body and mind into one entity that operates interdependently, it merges the failure-success binary into a constant state of becoming within space-time.

There are too many complex themes tied together here, so I offer just a momentary peek into the entanglement of performance, activism, failure, and how they intersect within my life.

In January, I started writing unsent love letters to people, places, things, and concepts. The idea was prompted by a virtual writing course I was taking called Fuck Writing taught by Johanna (yo-haw-nuh) Hedva (head-vuh). If you know me, you already know how deeply rooted my obsession is with Johanna. A few mornings after the March 10th Tilt West Roundtable, I set my ten-minute timer and wrote them for a second time.

“My dearest Johanna—I dreamt about you last night and it was such a sweet dream. I rarely have sweet dreams; they are usually nightmares. I was visiting you in LA because you were going to help look over some papers I wanted to publish into a book. It was the first time (well, I suppose the second time) we’ve met in person. You picked me up from an unknown and unrecognizable coffeeshop. You were driving one of those vans that’s all decked out with accessibility tools. You had the driver seat pushed closer to the passenger seat so that you could only drive with your left arm (I thought it was so you could be closer to me).”[2]

They were constantly on mind in mid-March because I was taking another one of their online courses called Death Writing while reading their newest publication How to Tell When We Will Die. As I read their chapter titled “The Freak,” I thought of my younger-New Orleans-self and the romantic nature of finding freaks to fuck—fantasies that never came to fruition because I was too scared that sex would cause my immediate and spontaneous death.

For context, I was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at age five and have since been diagnosed with a slew of other diseases and disorders. I was taught to embody that the only intimacy that was “safe,” “secure,” or allowed could be enacted by medical professionals. But I never felt safe or comfortable when I was poked, prodded, probed, pricked, and squeezed—i.e., penetrated—in the hospital and clinic. So, I learned to disconnect, separate my mind from my body, disembody. I still have issues with intimacy, love, touch, sex, and most importantly, trust. My inner, irrational gummy bear is constantly afraid that everyone is out to get me, especially when someone I just met tells me “You’re so beautiful” or “I love your body.”

But more on this later.

Performance art was formally presented to me by my mentor eight years ago when I was completing my second master’s degree at the University of Denver. It is an artistic practice that raises questions, disturbs the public, and allows for few precise answers. It is intentionally difficult in that the underlying premise is to avoid the comfortability that other art forms, like painting, might induce within a viewership.[3] Like the protests and violent events taking place at home and across the world, performance art, and especially my performance art, is often characterized as painful, perverse, and provocative. It is activism. It is a tool to both “unseat a complacent public and its view of the value of art” and create embodied connections between myself and others.[4] For me, “the art” happens at the moment when I am interacting or engaging with an audience member—i.e., the brief relationship that forms between me and a viewer during a performance and then disappears (but still exists) when the interaction ends.

As a medium that encourages both personal and collective exploration, performance art allows for play, risk, and experimentation in real-time. I find it liberating because it creates space for failure not as a defeat but to generate new understanding. Performance art, therefore, is a realm where experimentation and failure are essential parts of the process.

The unknown—embracing the chaos and unpredictability of failure—becomes a vital site of transformation and growth. This realization, stemming from both my personal life and my artistic practice, challenges the conventional view of failure as something to be avoided. When we push beyond the boundaries of success and failure, embracing the risk of the unknown, we open the possibility of creating something entirely new.

In April, I presented a nine-hour performance at the Emmanuel Gallery on Denver’s Auraria Campus called Visiting hours under the covers. I wanted to experiment with my fear of bodily intimacy by inviting consenting participants to join me under the blood-stained blankets of a hospital bed. Going into the performance, the initial questions I asked myself included, “How have my early experiences of being ‘touched’ by medical professionals impacted the way I experience bodily intimacy today? Can my bodymind learn/relearn/unlearn how to distinguish between ‘clinical contact’ and physical intimacy that can be comfortable and pleasurable?”[5] My hope was to discover new and unfamiliar relationships, narratives, and movements with each one-on-one interaction.

In my performance work, I often create rules or instructions for the audience as guiding structures for participation. This is where failure plays an important role in my work, because participants almost never interact with me or perceive the performance work the way I intended. It’s as if I always set myself up for failure when I do my performances.

What happens when the rules are ignored or broken? How does experimentation thrive when we embrace the unknown, when we allow the process to be chaotic rather than controlled?

The instructions included on the wall near the hospital bed were direct.

To participate, you are required to follow these instructions:

1. Enter the installation at the foot of the hospital bed
2. Put on gloves and a mask
3. Slowly get into the hospital bed [or sit or stand near the bed][6]
4. Visit for about five minutes
5. Exit at the head of the hospital bed

“It’s interesting to think about consent here. Perverse performance frequently foists power relations upon the audience member that they may or may not have consented to. When one decides to attend a performance, this is generally understood. One accepts that one does not know what will happen exactly.”[7]

After the third day, I left the hospital bed feeling stiff and perplexed, but excited about the prospects of what I had experienced. with more questions than I had answers. Only one participant I didn’t know personally, out of six individuals, actually got under the covers with me. What was it about the performance that made people scared to get in the bed with me? What were the fears they had? Were they scared of me as a “sick” body? Were they scared that I might harm them since I was a stranger? What does it mean to connect with a stranger? Was it the fear of being in proximity to a “dying” body of someone you don’t know?

Even though not everyone got under the covers with me, critical engagements still occurred. From afar, I was an object. Many visitors mistook me for a mannequin or a “dummy.”

Many college student visitors understood the “care partner” role to mean “doctor or nurse.” Instead of following the instructions, they asked me “How are you feeling today?” or “How long have you been here?”—akin to the 7 a.m. nurse who’s starting their first shift of the week.

I often forget that care is an integral part of intimacy and vice versa. Johanna defines care as an action that combines intention and attention.[8] It’s the moment when you ask the hot femme you’re making out with “Is this okay?” or “Are you okay?” Care is about checking in. Care is not purely for an individual or those closest to that individual. Care is about caring for literally every human because we are human. What would this earth feel like if we were “naturally” inclined to love and care for every being rather than naturally inclined to be fearful of them?

The concept of success in patriarchal capitalism is often tied to completion or achievement. In the medical field, success is married to the linear progress from “sick” to “healthy.” But many of us will never be fully healthy. So why not shift the paradigm to one that accommodates experimentation (which medicine invariably entails, especially for disabled bodies) and ongoing engagement without focus on a particular outcome that may neither be attained nor attainable. As Johanna reflects in How to Tell When We Will Die, activism—much like performance—rarely succeeds in the traditional sense. It is in the repeated failures and the perseverance to continue despite them that new meanings are found. “I like thinking that activism will always fail, because it means that the decision to take action, to act as though what we do matters, even in the face of certain defeat, is its own purpose…It’s about what we can do, right here, right now, for each other.”[9]

This work is a reminder that nothing is wasted, or a failure. Experimentation is all data. It is a practice of emergence. Like adrienne maree brown explains, “Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the mind…It is a system that makes use of everything in the iterative process.”[10]

When Sylvia offers the allegory of Caliban’s inability to break free from Prospero in Shakespear’s The Tempest, she is suggesting that we must find unknown pathways that derive from outside the “master’s tools” embedded within us (i.e., patriarchy, capitalism, colonization, all systems of oppression).

So, the next time you see me under the blankets of a hospital bed, you better come get under the covers with me.

I love you.
Love, MG

The memory is this: playing on a beach called Bombinhas (meaning “little bombs,” named after the sounds of the crashing waves) in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. A child about my same age was nearby with her mom, and we start to play together. I could not understand a word she said, and she could not understand me - her Argentinian Spanish sounded like puffs of sounds to me, as my Brazilian Portuguese probably did to her. But we shared a common language: the language of play. We were fluent in beach toys, sand, and sea. Not understanding each other’s spoken language did not inconvenience our playtime. What lasted in my memory was the fun I had with my friend of one day.

Play is a universal language. Children can discover and invent play anywhere. Play can thrive even amidst hardship. Play can activate the imagination to transform pain into joy.

Two photographs document this transformation:

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of a group of children playing in the rubble of destroyed buildings, taken through a hole in the wall. The ruined environment suggests violence, and the nearest child in the foreground is holding himself up on crutches. But most of the children in the photograph are laughing. One boy is laughing so hard that his eyes are closed, and he is holding his belly. Maybe the boy is not injured at all, and the children are merely taking turns playing with the crutches? The children’s boisterous joy contrasts sharply with the destruction around them, and the hole in the wall through which we witness the scene.

James Nachtwey’s photograph captures a child swinging on the turret of a war tank, transforming a tool of destruction into playground equipment. A military tank, fighting in a civil conflict rooted and financed by faraway powers, loses its power through the simple play of a swinging child.

Play can be painful too. And playtime, at some point, ends.

I write this reflection in the days leading up to the presidential election in the United States of America. In less than one week, the future of the world will be shaped by a small percentage of the planet’s population (4.23% according to Worldometer). These are dramatic words, but in the spirit of play, let’s exaggerate. Or is it an exaggeration to say that the economic and military policies of the United States affect people worldwide?

Let’s play the game of 20 Questions. The goal is to ask yes-or-no questions to reveal the right answer:

• Who writes the rules?
• Who benefits most from the rules as they stand?
• Who is allowed to change the rules, and when?
• Who wins?
• Who trusts the election process?
• Who will believe the results?
• Who gets to vote?
• Who gets pushed to the sidelines, and why?
• Who does the pushing?
• Will the rules be followed?
• Who enforces the rules?
• Who doesn’t play by the rules?
• Who is punished when they break the rules?
• Who suffers the consequences?
• If your land is destroyed by weapons made and supplied by the United States, don’t you get a vote?
• Why are billionaires building underground bunkers and compounds?
• When will we stop shattering records of droughts, floods, hurricanes and heat waves?
• Can the natural world survive our inaction?
• Can humanity go on like this?
• Who will not participate in a game they always seem to lose?

I am terrible at this game. I never seem to ask the right questions, so I never find the answer.

Play can reveal power imbalance. One person’s play can be another person’s trauma. Anyone who has ever been a victim of a playground bully understands power imbalance, and the physical threat resulting from facing a bully and their friends. Bullying is a familiar trope in books and films, spanning genres from comedy to horror to feel-good stories. Unfortunately, some bullies never grow out of their tactics, and we too often see them in leadership positions, using the same methods to silence or punish anyone they don’t like or agree with.

Play teaches equity. We learned to protest “it’s not fair” when someone cheated during play or got an advantage that allowed them to more easily win. We learned about winning, losing, and being left out when no one picked us for a team.

Through play, we can transform reality and imagine new worlds. Art does this too. Artists use trial and error, experimentation, curiosity, and a deep understanding of the rules - and knowing when to break them. Artists nurture the work in progress, adapting, questioning, evolving, and playing. Through art, we invite others to join the game, and to invent new ways to play.

Lessons from the playground (adapted from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum):

• Share knowledge and resources: Let go of deficit mentality. Think creatively. Learn to use the resources available. Learn and educate.
• Clean up your mess: No one should have to clean up after everyone else. When possible, leave things better than you found them.
• Play fair: Acknowledge inequities and work to dismantle systems of oppression. In life, we don’t all start at the same start line. Don’t keep changing the rules to favor the same people.
• Don’t hit people: Not with words, fists, bombs, or bullets.
• Apologize: Say you’re sorry when you hurt someone. Act to stop cycles of harm.
• Play: Ask questions, make mistakes, be silly. Dance, think, draw, and wonder “what if.
• Take turns: No one likes having the same leader all the time. Give someone else a turn. Vote for it.

The game is called How Do We Save the World. Who is ready to play?

Let us listen to the elders
Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Lakota, Kiowa, Pawnee, Ute
And the other 42 tribes that live in Colorado
Who remind us the planet is as much a relative as a resource
If you are in this room recognize this
Heal Colorado to win, win to heal Colorado

Operating as an ecology over an economy
Find out why abuelo embellishes about his ranchos
Where he found tia frijol y calabaza
Biodiversification means humanization
Don’t you know being in rooms with folks only like you
Is a metric of monocultures

Where are the songs for the seasons
I cannot hear any drums anymore
I dream of deafening songs from cranes
Sanctioned marched of tarantulas
Wandering wolves and stable farming
We can’t keep favoring two leggeds

Haven’t you been on tik tok
Kids got podcasts wandering swamps and plant foraging
Pronouns intros, Southern, East coast
And an un-inimitable Albuquerque accent
America panned the camera
Showing folks of all kind benefit outside
Generations of hunters, canoers and birders

Any good field ecologists observes
These youngins are acting different
They’ve been listening despite our bias
Purifying water, legislating and direct actioning
A spunk just like my Mexican grandparents

The elders remind us
Mitakoye oyasin
All my relations
The siblings that flow, layer and precipitate
Climbers, guides and conservationists
Educators with headwater knowledge
A biodiverse ecosystem of mind, bodies and souls
Stewarding generations of two legged and four
Brother pike, sister corn, cousin pika
First nations practices cause we going back to them anyway apparently

There’s a lot of spiritual fine tuning left
Get into that mechanic shop heart you got
When you can’t recognize the tools anymore
Remember homo habilis hacked tools up too
Mycological hominids
Epigenetic spiritual advice
Keep the young ones close to Tonanztin
Mother of all sand dunes, rockies and prairies
Conserve the love soil cantos
Any native person knows mother’s worth everything

Why else do run backpacking trips
Prefer herds in green pastures over factories
Fish where the surfactants don’t touch
Camp beyond light and sound pollution
Litigate for legends our grandparents dreamed about
Ascending the prayers for acequias
Facing doubts of democracy and profit
Heal generations of broken promises
Listening to pebble, plant, pond, people stories
Nature doesn’t show everything to everyone
Scar stories cause is wise to learn
Discerning the times we cut in, extract or exploit
Our consumption, bills and responsibilities are man-made and ours

Give native and frontline people your money
Risking reputations and cold shoulders for justice
Redirecting boards, trusts and friends
Freeing waters who miss families in the south
A parade of ribbon skirts and drums return to the forests
Remember its for the sake of us all
Colorado the beautiful is our initiative

Listen to the elders
Nature is home
Colorado means colorful
I wonder what name it had before
I wonder if we heal if we can remember
I wonder how many names it has had
The elders remind us we’re an ecosystem
I bet you they have the names
I wonder if we’ll heal enough
Just to remember
What the elders said

Pay artists

Period?

Yea, period. Pay artists.
But, I am an artist before you cut the check.
Remember that.
Just like a tulip is a flower before their beauty makes you break your neck and cut the stem and take them home where you share their essence with your friends.

In fact…

I am an artist because I chose to open up and stop caring about your love and started choosing
myself while I send most opinions to hell.
I mean, I have my collective,
I have my people I manifest with,
We should probably be more protective,
But many of us are givers, you see.

Folks witness us pour out and they want to take our seeds.
Some to sow them
And others to deny posterity.

Yet, I’ve learned the sky provides and my roots will have plenty.
So even in a drought, I will always have what I need.
But you should still pay artists,
Yes, pay me…and pay me well.

How is this still a topic?
Why do we not yet believe?
I take the shit from life, feed the earth and produce giving-trees.
Hungry souls pick the fruit, turn into gods and oft forget
The beat, the word, the brush stroke that awakened their deity
Hmm…
Maybe I should stop taking shit.
Hey artists, maybe we should stop taking shit.
That’s why we write and why we sing and why we paint hoping they’ll get it.
We speak louder, we reach farther, wear our dreams in public.
Folks think it’s crazy until we’re like Basquiat…
Started off as vandalism while gentrification creates mural fests.

So I repeat, cut the check.

Artists are the teachers so pay us…
Wait, y’all don’t even pay them.

Okay,
Artists are the healers, the doctors, the therapists.
Artists break the molds, we pay attention to the “accidents,”
We let failure transform us and transform our world: butterfly effect.

And, real quick, let’s address this:
Art transforms even if aesthetes aren’t around to witness it.
Because if the artist is changed, so is the world they live in.
Let that sink in.
That’s my contribution: a better me.
Artists discover life’s derivatives, call us mathematicians.
We step inside rips in the continuum and come back more than human.
Writing, painting, sculpting…hopefully en-light.
Folks think we’re crazy until death proves us right.
It is too often that creatives are overlooked on park benches; we need post-mortem advances.
Pay us while we are alive.

Pay us in the present.
Pay us in the moment.
Pay us until we kill the blasted term “starving artist.”
Pay us, at least, until we completely transform the system,
Until we reach higher grounds by sharing our inner visions,
Even Stevie Wonder saw it and named it…expanding senses, breaking limits.
Pay us for breaking limits.
Pay us for doing it different.
For those of us that survived hell-like conditions,
Pay us for living.
Pay us for telling these tales so that you could feel something.
Pay us for feeling it first.

And although many of us think to change the world, creating worlds that we deserve, creating
worlds that hold up mirrors…this is our world.
A beautiful tragedy:
Wars and the artists that cry out against them, freedom and the supremacies created to deny
them, slave trades and doors of no return, reclamation of roots while books and forests burn,
rhythm and poetry that fight the powers that be, greedy souls that rather move to Mars than pay
their employees or for peace.

We are…indeed…a beautiful tragedy…
And will likely remain to be.
But I thank the gods that I am an artist that will shine love from my chest.
My throat thick with hope because I will not be bested.
I will write and will write so that the children never forget,
And I will be paid for this sacred light.

That’s on periodt.