Building Without Permission Chapter 1
Positions of Resistance
“A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or a structure. It is a realized complex of experiences, relationships, and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits.”—Raymond Williams
1. Encountering Behind the Red Moon
[1] Walking into the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London was the first time I encountered El Anatsui’s work at a scale that made its logic fully legible. Commissioned as Tate’s annual Hyundai Commission, Behind the Red Moon (2023-24) transformed the vast industrial hall into a site for three monumental metal hangings—one cascading hundreds of feet from ceiling to floor—that reoriented how viewers moved through the space. The concrete walls, stark and directional, seemed suddenly permeable in the presence of the suspended sheets. From the center of the hall, the surface shifted with the air and the changing light. The installation seemed to pull the space inward and redirect the atmosphere around it.
[2] Standing in the midpoint of the hall, Act I: The Red Moon never settled into a single form. Light traveled across the surface in small, quick adjustments—gold flashed for a second, then copper, then areas of deep red that gathered toward the base of the form as it billowed outward like a sail. Very quickly, I learned that I could not stand still if I wanted to understand what the surface was doing. The work demanded movement, and each shift of position revealed a new form. The sheets curved inward, folded at their joins, and relaxed where the wire gave way. No edge felt settled. Watching the surface recalibrate made clear how deliberately Anatsui constructs work that will not hold a fixed form. Gravity acted on the piece continuously, producing subtle shifts that accumulated into a larger sense of instability—a form designed to remain open.
[3] Up close, the surface no longer looked fluid. It broke down into hundreds of individual elements: aluminum bottle caps, copper wire, metal strips, foil wrappings, cast-off industrial fragments, each carrying the record of previous circulations before arriving here. Scratches, dents, and oxidation, marks left by machines, hands, and varied environments, traced the material’s biography. It held multiple histories at once, none of them smoothed away.
[4] From a distance again, those small marks dissolved into a single field of reflected light. Color moved laterally across a broad plane, pooling and scattering in ways that recalled the chromatic sweep of large-scale painting. Karen Hindsbo’s foreword in the catalogue for the exhibition describes the hangings as conveying the “elemental power of the natural world.” In person, that felt exact—gravity shaped the folds, air shifted the surface, and luminance moved across the metal as though across water. But the illusion of a flat surface never held for long. The closer I moved, the more the surface refused the stability it suggested from afar. The construction broke open into folds and pleats that pushed outward, catching brightness on one edge and swallowing it on the next. What looked like a flat field kept slipping into depth; what appeared solid fell away into pockets of shadow. The work held both conditions at once: a broad expanse of color that read as a single surface, and a restless physical structure that kept interrupting it.
[5] The more time I spent with the installation, the more the internal structure revealed itself—not all at once, but in fragments. When I stepped into the narrow passage between the metal curtain and the hall wall, the sound dropped away, and the light dimmed. In that quieter space, I could see how tightly each wire had been twisted, how a single fold completely redirected sections, how the different metals negotiated each other, and how a dense section of black bottle caps opened into a kind of void that pulled the eye inward. The work’s surface shimmered from afar, but up close it was held together by labor, tension, and repetition.
[6] Returning to the open space of the hall, the installation again reshaped how bodies moved. Turbine Hall has a history of dictating circulation. From Doris Salcedo’s crack carved into the floor to the hall’s long industrial axis, the architecture typically directs how visitors move. Behind the Red Moon unsettled that architecture, drawing movement upward toward its suspended surfaces. Viewers ducked under low curves, stepped aside to follow a glint of metal, or slowed as the surface trembled. The hall, once governed by industrial certainty, became responsive to a soft, flexible skin of metal. Movement followed the sheet’s shifting weight, not the hall’s architecture.
[7] As I approached the exit, I kept turning back. From the mezzanine, the sheets looked like a continent. From the far end of the hall, they resembled a celestial system. From the balcony, they behaved like a single shifting facade. Each vantage point produced a different story, and each movement caused small tremors in the surface. The sheets felt aware of the space and of the people moving within it.
[8] That experience stayed with me long after I left the hall. Behind the Red Moon brings together what I would come to understand as the core principles of Anatsui’s practice: materials that carry history, gravity as a structural force, collective labor as an engine of meaning, and architecture as something open to reconfiguration. The installation showed how his work operates by reordering what already exists. His sheets do not attempt to dominate the hall. They reorganize it. They loosen its habits. They place its authority under pressure.
2. Power, Hegemony, and the Control of the Archive
[9] That encounter—the experience of standing inside a work that will not settle, that insists on remaining open, that turns the museum’s own architecture into something provisional—is where this thesis begins. The behavior of Anatsui’s sheets enacts in sculptural form a set of problems that are fundamentally problems of power. Every institution that displays art also produces what James C. Scott has called a public transcript—the official account of how things are, performed in the open, shaped to confirm the authority of those who control the stage. The museum’s lighting, wall text, conservation protocols, and spatial organization compose such a transcript: they determine not only what is seen but the terms on which it is understood. What Behind the Red Moon revealed is what happens when a work enters that institutional frame and refuses to conform to it—when the material itself carries knowledge that the public transcript cannot contain. Who determines what counts as history? Through what material and institutional means is that determination enforced? And what happens when the materials themselves—matter that dominant systems discarded as waste—begin to assert a different account?
[10] These are not abstract questions. They are, in fact, among the most urgent questions of the present moment. Across the United States and beyond, the relationship between political power and institutional narrative is being renegotiated in ways that would have seemed extraordinary even a decade ago. In March 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14253, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” accusing the Smithsonian Institution—a network of twenty-one museums, fourteen research centers, and a national zoo—of having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” The order directed Vice President Vance, in his capacity as a member of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, to work to “remove improper ideology” from the institution’s properties, and called for future appropriations to be withheld from any exhibitions or programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.” On August 12, the White House followed with a formal letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III announcing a comprehensive review of eight museums, including the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The letter demanded that the institution submit all public-facing content—exhibition text, wall didactics, educational materials, social media content, and plans for upcoming exhibitions—to be assessed for “tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals.” Museums were given 120 days to begin making what the letter called “content corrections.” The Smithsonian, which derives approximately sixty-two percent of its annual budget from federal funding, was left with an implicit but unmistakable choice: adjust what you are willing to say, or risk losing the resources that allow you to say anything at all.
[11] What followed was a pattern of quiet capitulation—not the dramatic confrontation of censorship’s popular imagination, but the slow, anticipatory contraction of what an institution believes it is permitted to say. In July 2025, the National Museum of American History removed references to Trump’s two impeachments from its exhibition The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden, which had included information on impeachment proceedings since 2008. After public outcry, the text was restored—but in a less prominent position, with softened language. That same month, a student mural at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival—created by teenage artists invited to depict their lives under the festival’s theme, “Youth and the Future of Culture”—was covered with tarps after it included, among depictions of climate protests and immigration, the phrase “Free Palestine.” The director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage explained that the institution “doesn’t promote or endorse individual political statements.” The mural was quietly placed in storage.
[12] Later that month, the painter Amy Sherald—among the most significant contemporary American painters and well known for her official portrait of Michelle Obama—withdrew her mid-career retrospective, American Sublime, from the National Portrait Gallery after learning that the institution had raised concerns about her painting Trans Forming Liberty (2024), a portrait of a Black trans woman posed in the fashion of the Statue of Liberty. The museum proposed “contextualizing” the work with an accompanying video rather than displaying it on its own terms; Sherald understood this as an act of institutional fear. In a letter to the Smithsonian, she wrote: “I entered into this collaboration in good faith, believing that the institution shared a commitment to presenting work that reflects the full, complex truth of American life. Unfortunately, it has become clear that the conditions no longer support the integrity of the work as conceived.” The exhibition ultimately moved to the Baltimore Museum of Art.
[13] By January 2026, the National Portrait Gallery had replaced a photojournalist’s portrait of President Trump with an official White House photograph and stripped the accompanying wall text of all references to his impeachments and the events of January 6th—making Trump the only president in the gallery whose display lacked extended biographical text. The previous label, still available on the Smithsonian’s website, had noted that he was “impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection.”
[14] These were not dramatic confrontations. They were the small, quiet adjustments that censorship is designed to produce—the narrowing of institutional speech not through the spectacular act of removal but through the slow calculus of what an institution believes it can afford to say. The art historian Richard Meyer of Stanford University, responding to the White House’s published list of objectionable Smithsonian content, observed: “I’ve never seen a list like this. I mean, it does remind me a bit of McCarthyism.” But the comparison, while apt in spirit, does not fully capture the mechanism at work. McCarthyism mainly targeted individuals. What is happening at the Smithsonian and at cultural institutions across the country is something more systematic: an attempt to reorganize the terms on which public institutions are allowed to construct historical narrative—to determine, at the level of policy, which pasts are permissible and which are not. Sherald withdrew because the institution could no longer hold what her work demanded of it. The conditions under which a painting of a Black trans woman could hang on its own terms in a national museum had already been foreclosed. She refused to lend her presence to an institution performing the openness it had just surrendered.
[15] The Smithsonian is the most visible target, but the logic it reveals is neither new nor confined to museums. Across the country, legislatures have moved to restrict what can be taught in public schools, banning books, limiting curricula, and passing laws that govern the language in which history is allowed to be discussed. Executive orders have targeted universities, research bodies, and cultural organizations, each intervention proceeding from the same underlying premise: that the narratives produced by public institutions must be brought into alignment with a particular vision of national identity, and that those which fail to conform must be defunded, restructured, or silenced. What these interventions enforce is what Raymond Williams called a selective tradition—“an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is then powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification.” The directness of the present interventions may feel unprecedented. The logic that drives them is not. Power sustains itself by determining which histories enter the record and which are kept out, and that this determination must be actively maintained, defended, and reimposed when it is threatened.
[16] The consolidation of power through the control of what is permitted to be remembered is one of the oldest and most enduring operations of political authority, and its logic is not confined to the American present. As Ann Laura Stoler writes, “If it is obvious that colonial archives are products of state machines, it is only now that we are seeing them, in their own right, as technologies that reproduced those states themselves.” Colonial administrations classified populations, recorded extraction, and mapped territories—producing the official account of empire in documents that simultaneously recorded what had happened and determined what would happen next. But the logic of selection extends far beyond the formal archive: through families, schools, churches, and every site where what counts as significant is sorted from what is allowed to lapse into silence. It is, as Williams writes, “a deliberately selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order.” What counted as worthy of preservation, whose experience merited a place in the institutional record, and whose was consigned to silence were never neutral determinations. The Smithsonian crisis makes this operation newly visible, but the question it raises is older than any executive order: whether institutional narratives can be challenged from within the material conditions that produce them.
[17] Writing from a fascist prison in the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci developed a theory of power that centered not on the state’s capacity for violence but on the capacity of dominant groups to make their worldview feel like the natural order of things—to embed their values so thoroughly in cultural institutions, educational systems, and the textures of everyday life that their particular vision of the world comes to feel not like a vision at all, but like common sense. He called this process hegemony. Williams, extending Gramsci’s analysis, insisted on the full radicalism of the concept. Hegemony, Williams argued, “is not only the articulate upper level of ‘ideology’, nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as ‘manipulation’ or ‘indoctrination.’” It is instead “a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world.” If hegemony were merely a system of ideas—a set of false beliefs imposed from above—then a counter-argument would be sufficient to dislodge it. But because hegemony saturates the whole process of living, reaching into the material organization of space and the determination of what is preserved and what is discarded, it can only be effectively challenged on the same terrain: through practices that reorganize material life itself. Hegemony, as Williams insisted, must be “continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own.”
[18] The form of that challenge was what Gramsci called the war of position—not the frontal attack of revolutionary seizure, but the slow, patient, constructive work of building alternative structures of meaning from within and alongside the institutions that sustain the dominant order. Where “In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous,” Gramsci observed, “in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed.” In advanced capitalist societies, where the institutions of civil society are dense and deeply rooted, power cannot be seized in a single stroke. It must be contested position by position, institution by institution, through the sustained construction of alternatives. This requires a new kind of intellectual. “The mode of being of the new intellectual,” Gramsci wrote, “can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator.” The intellectual does not stand outside the world and describe it. The intellectual builds within it.
[19] What Gramsci could not have anticipated, writing from Mussolini’s prison, is the particular form that counter-hegemonic practice would take in the hands of contemporary artists working with the material residue of the systems his theory describes. But this is precisely what has happened. Over the past several decades, a body of artistic practice has emerged that challenges dominant institutional narratives by directly transforming materials that carry within them the histories of extraction and structural abandonment that those systems produced. Gramsci distinguished between what he called “historically organic ideologies, those, that is, which are necessary to a given structure, and ideologies that are arbitrary, rationalistic, ‘willed.’” Organic ideologies, he argued, “have a validity which is ‘psychological’; they ‘organize’ human masses, they form the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle.”
[20] The practices this thesis examines are organic in precisely Gramsci’s sense: they emerge from the material conditions of the systems they challenge, not as willed gestures of dissent but as sustained engagements with the physical residue—bottle caps, merchant posters, abandoned buildings—that those systems produced and discarded. These are practices that operate on the material infrastructure through which hegemony is produced and sustained, practices that take the debris of dominant systems and refashion it into forms that assert historical presence where power had assumed silence. The counter-hegemony these works construct is not an argument against existing power. It is the assembling, from the ground up, of an alternative material basis for historical understanding—one that does not depend on the permission of the institutions it seeks to challenge.
3. The Four Dimensions of Counter-Hegemonic Practice
[21] If hegemony operates through institutions—through the museum, the archive, the school, the systems that determine what is preserved and what is discarded—then counter-hegemonic practice must engage those institutions on their own material ground. Critique alone, however precise, leaves the structures it describes intact. A counter-narrative about colonial extraction does not change the fact that the museum still holds the extracted object. Counter-hegemonic practice, as this thesis understands it, is distinguished from critique by its commitment to building an alternative. It begins from the recognition that Williams placed at the center of his cultural analysis: that “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention.” There is always a surplus—experiences, materials, forms of knowledge—that the dominant order neglects, discards, or actively suppresses. Counter-hegemonic practice works in that surplus. It builds from what dominant systems refused to value.
[22] This thesis identifies four interconnected dimensions that must be simultaneously operative for a practice to construct genuine challenge. They emerged from sustained engagement with the practices themselves—from the recognition that the work most capable of challenging institutional power shares a structural logic even when its materials, geographies, and specific histories differ profoundly.
[23] The first dimension is the target of resistance. A practice that challenges institutional power does not operate against power in general. It responds to specific, historically situated systems of exclusion and violence—particular mechanisms through which institutions have organized the world, determined whose lives are worth recording, and decided which materials merit preservation and which are waste. The target is traceable: in the trade routes through which European liquor circulated across West Africa, in the redlining policies through which American neighborhoods were stripped of investment, in the institutional decisions through which cultural archives were abandoned and communities left without the infrastructure to preserve their own history. Without this specificity, the practice collapses into a generalized gesture of dissent—a posture rather than an intervention. The target grounds the practice in the actual history it seeks to challenge, and it determines the materials through which that challenge will be constructed.
[24] The second dimension is material regeneration. If the target identifies the system of power the practice responds to, material regeneration describes how the practice transforms the physical residue of that system into something new without erasing what the material has already endured. This is the dimension that distinguishes the art this thesis examines from both political art and formal experimentation. A protest banner uses its materials to deliver a message—the poster and ink are incidental to what they say. A formalist painter uses materials for their visual properties—the texture of oil paint matters, but not where the linseed oil was pressed or who harvested it. Counter-hegemonic practice works with materials precisely because of what they carry—because they are themselves archives of the systems they passed through, bearing in their surfaces the physical record of extraction, circulation, use, damage, and discard. The transformation these materials undergo does not redeem them or convert them from waste into beauty, as though the history of violence could be aesthetically resolved. It holds that history open, making visible what the material has been through while asserting that it can become the substance of something the original system never intended. Regeneration is not restoration. It is the refusal to let the material’s history be either erased or settled.
[25] The third dimension is the museum encounter. Hegemony does not simply produce narratives; it produces the institutional conditions under which narratives are received, interpreted, and legitimized. The museum is one of the most powerful of these conditions. It determines how objects are seen—through lighting, placement, framing, wall text, conservation protocols, and the spatial organization of display. It determines what objects mean—translating them from the contexts in which they were made into the context of the institution’s own authority. And it determines how long objects last—stabilizing them, preserving them, fixing them in forms the institution can manage across time. The work must engage this apparatus directly, because ignoring it means ceding the terms on which the work will be understood. The museum encounter, as this thesis defines it, is the friction that arises when a counter-hegemonic work enters institutional space and resists the institution’s attempts to contain it—when the work’s ongoing material behavior pushes against the systems of interpretation the museum relies on to exercise its authority. This is a material confrontation, one that happens not when the artist makes an argument about the museum but when the work itself won’t stay where the museum puts it.
[26] The fourth dimension is the creation of civic space, and it is the one that takes the practice furthest from the territory of conventional art-making. If the museum encounter describes what happens when the work enters existing institutions, civic space creation describes what happens when the practice exceeds those institutions altogether—when the logic of material transformation and communal labor that animates the studio extends outward into the construction of new sites for collective life. This is the dimension that most fully realizes Gramsci’s vision of counter-hegemony as construction rather than opposition. It is one thing to produce a work that resists the museum’s authority from within the museum’s walls. It is another to build an archive, a library, a gathering space, a community institution in a neighborhood where the dominant order has withdrawn its resources—to create, from the same materials and through the same labor, the infrastructure for a form of public life that does not depend on institutional permission. Civic space creation demonstrates that the work’s ultimate horizon extends past the museum into the neighborhoods, communities, and forms of collective memory that hegemonic power has systematically defunded and abandoned.
[27] These four dimensions do not operate independently. They are aspects of a single logic, and the force of that logic depends on their interaction. Each dimension, taken alone, is insufficient: without material transformation, target identification remains documentary; without institutional engagement, even the most charged materials can be absorbed and made safe; without civic extension, the challenge remains confined to the space of display; and without historical grounding, new institutions lack the material density to sustain their force over time. It is the interaction of all four—target, material, museum, civic space—that constitutes counter-hegemonic practice as this thesis defines it. It is a form of making that assembles from the material evidence of power’s own operations the foundation for a different way of understanding and inhabiting the world.
4. From Intervention to Construction
[28] The three artists this thesis examines—El Anatsui, Mark Bradford, and Theaster Gates—are selected because each has developed, over decades of sustained practice, a way of working with materials that activates all four dimensions simultaneously, while doing so through fundamentally different operations. Any adequate account of their differences requires what Williams called attention to the residual and the emergent—the cultural elements that exist alongside and in tension with the dominant order. The residual, “by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present.” The emergent, by contrast, names “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship” that are “continually being created.”
[29] These categories are not labels to be affixed to artists. They describe the different modes through which each practice engages the dominant institutional order. Anatsui’s materials carry residual histories—colonial trade routes, patterns of extraction—and activate them within the dominant institution, pressing the museum’s own architecture into new configurations. Bradford works at the boundary where residual social knowledge, embedded in the paper infrastructure of American cities, confronts the museum’s interpretive authority with material density it cannot translate. Gates carries the practice furthest: building emergent cultural formations—archives, libraries, gathering spaces—in neighborhoods where the dominant order withdrew, constructing the institutional infrastructure for forms of public life that do not depend on the existing system’s permission. What connects these practices is structural kinship; what distinguishes them is where the center of gravity falls and how far beyond the institution’s walls each one reaches.
[30] Anatsui’s practice begins with the cast-off packaging of a liquor industry whose trade routes between Europe and West Africa trace back to the colonial period—aluminum bottle caps whose scratched, dented surfaces carry the physical record of the systems through which they circulated. From thousands of these fragments, he and his studio assistants construct monumental metal sheets that shimmer, cascade, and shift with gravity and air. The transformation is extraordinary, but it does not aestheticize away the history embedded in the material. It holds that history open. When these sheets enter the museum—and they have entered the most powerful museums in the world, selling for millions and hanging in permanent collections around the world—they refuse to behave as the institution expects. They move. They reconfigure with each installation. They hold no fixed form. The conservation team cannot stabilize them; the same work, rehung, produces a different object, and the institution must accommodate a piece that refuses the stability its storage and display systems depend on. Anatsui’s force operates primarily from within the institution, entering the museum on its own terms and then, once inside, unsettling the physical conditions of display from the inside out.
[31] Bradford works with different materials and presses against a different limit. Where Anatsui disrupts the museum’s physical space, Bradford confronts its interpretive authority—the systems of wall text, catalogue description, and curatorial framing through which the institution translates objects into meaning. He builds with merchant posters advertising tax preparation, hair braiding, and immigration law, stapled to telephone poles in South Los Angeles; end papers from beauty salons; billboard fragments; advertisements for bail bonds and home loans—as well as historical maps and cartographic documents that record the longer arc of racial violence and disinvestment in American life. He builds these materials into enormous layered constructions that he sands, tears, and excavates, producing surfaces that are simultaneously abstract painting and social archive. Bradford represented the United States at the 2017 Venice Biennale; his work commands institutional attention at the highest level. But the institution that acquires a Bradford painting finds that its wall label can name his materials without being able to translate them. A visitor who reads “merchant posters” learns the name of the material; she does not learn that these posters circulated outside the formal economy the museum itself inhabits, in neighborhoods whose specific economies of predatory lending and informal commerce the institutional frame cannot reconstruct. The museum owns the object. It does not own what the object knows.
[32] Gates extends the practice beyond the museum entirely. Where Anatsui enters the museum and reorganizes it from within, and where Bradford confronts the museum with materials it cannot fully translate, Gates constructs parallel cultural infrastructure that challenges the museum’s claim to be the necessary site for the encounter between art and public life. His materials are drawn from buildings on Chicago’s South Side—roof tar, salvaged wood, fire hoses, institutional furniture—neighborhoods that were not simply abandoned but systematically disinvested through the specific mechanisms of redlining, contract buying, and the withdrawal of municipal services that followed the Great Migration. He works with cultural archives that lost their institutional support when the city stopped sustaining the communities they once served: the vinyl collection of Frankie Knuckles, the glass lantern slides of the University of Chicago’s art history department, and the library of the Johnson Publishing Company. Gates is represented by major international galleries and has exhibited at institutions on four continents. Yet the civic institutions he builds—the Stony Island Arts Bank, the Listening House, the Archive House—operate in neighborhoods where the gallery system cannot reach them in the same way. They assert that cultural value resides not in the objects the market prices highest but in the infrastructure that sustains collective memory and public life.
[33] The institutional embrace these artists have received is not incidental to the argument—it is central to it. If hegemony operates through institutions, and these artists have been thoroughly absorbed into the most powerful institutions in the art world, then in what sense is their practice counter-hegemonic? Is the museum’s celebration of their work not precisely the mechanism through which the institution incorporates the appearance of dissent while leaving its fundamental operations intact? This thesis does not pretend that the objection can be resolved by appeal to the artists’ intentions or the critical content of their work. Intentions can be sincere, and content can be radical, and the institution can still neutralize both. The argument, developed across the three chapters that follow, is that what resists absorption is not the meaning of these works but their material behavior—that the forms these practices take produce conditions the institution cannot manage, and that this unmanageability is where counter-hegemonic force resides. The war of position, as Gramsci understood it, does not require standing outside the system. It requires building within it in ways that alter the terms on which the system operates.
5. The Chapters Ahead
[34] This thesis proceeds in five chapters. This introduction has established the theoretical and political stakes. What follows are three chapters, each devoted to a single artist, each building on the argument of the one before it. The sequence moves from material transformation inside the museum to the construction of civic infrastructure beyond it—from the bottle cap to the built institution, and it is meant to be read in order, because the argument is cumulative.
[35] Chapter Two begins with Anatsui because his practice establishes the foundational claim on which everything else depends: that discarded materials can carry historical knowledge no archive chose to preserve, and that this knowledge, once inside the museum, produces physical conditions the institution cannot fully control. Chapter Three turns to Bradford and deepens the argument by moving from physical resistance to interpretive confrontation—showing how his layered surfaces carry civic knowledge that the museum’s systems of meaning-making cannot absorb. Chapter Four examines Gates and carries the argument to its furthest point: the construction of actual civic infrastructure in the neighborhoods where dominant power has withdrawn. The chapter also confronts the tensions in Gates’s practice directly, including his dependence on the market, arguing that these tensions illuminate rather than undermine the conditions under which the war of position must actually be waged.
[36] A concluding chapter returns to the questions with which this introduction began. The artists examined here have not been waiting for the present political crisis. They have been doing this work for decades—building from materials that power discarded and refused to build. What the Smithsonian crisis, the executive orders, the quiet capitulations of 2025 and 2026 make newly legible is what their practices have always known: that the archive has never been neutral, that the museum has never been a transparent window onto history, and that the most durable challenge to hegemonic power is not the critique leveled against it but the world constructed in its place. When Amy Sherald wrote that governments policing museums are “policing imagination itself,” she identified the stakes. The artists this thesis examines offer a response by demonstrating that the materials the institution discarded, the histories it refused to hold, and the communities it abandoned can become the foundation for forms of cultural life that do not depend on the institution’s permission.