HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican? is [1] a collective founded in 2013. The group, also called the YAMS Collective, was formed to bring a digital media piece titled Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera to the 2014 Whitney Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The Whitney Biennial of contemporary art is an invitation-only exhibition which generally favors young artists and in the past helped bring greater recognition to artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Jeff Koons. [2] The Whitney Museum bills the event as: "...the longest-running survey of American art, and ...a hallmark of the Museum since 1932." [3] The Biennial has often faced criticism over issues of privilege, access and inclusivity. [4] The 2014 edition was especially controversial for many issues, including the Yams Collective. [5]
The group started after one of the initial curation visits for the 2014 edition of the Biennial. One of the Biennial's co-curators, Michelle Grabner, had visited Sienna Shields in her studio and seen a short video loop the artist had made with friends dancing in front of glaciers in Alaska. [6] Shields organized the Yams Collective (short for HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican?) of 38 international mostly black and queer musicians, poets, actors, writers and visual artists to create a digital film about racial identity for the 2014 edition. [6] Shields in part organized the collective to address representation in the New York art scene: "I’d go to art events, and I’d be the only black person in the room — here in New York. It was ridiculous." [6] This became the instigation for the collective's submission, a 53-minute digital piece in 35 parts titled Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera. [6] This participation was seen by the collective as an "infiltration" of the institutional art world and the very size of the collective was meant partly as a protest against tokenism. [7]
Despite the collective's diverse membership, one of only two individual black female artists invited that year was "Donelle Woolford", a creation of Joe Scanlan. [8] Scanlan, a white, male, Princeton University professor hired a succession of actresses to play "Woolford" at events. The inclusion of this "fake" artist led the Yams Collective to withdraw their submission, objecting to "Woolford's" inclusion in a show alongside their work. [9] Shields explained the withdrawal was due to not only Scanlan but also: "...the history of the Whitney and its lack of any kind of initiative in changing its white supremacist attitudes." [10] The collective also considered the inclusion of Scanlan to be a reflection of larger issues of racism in the elite art world. [7] The film instead premiered at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. [11]