Profile: Adia Sykes
By Marielle Mervau
What do arts workers need in order to thrive in Chicagoland’s vast creative sector? Probably more people like curator and art administrator Adia Sykes. A constant thread linking the research, curatorial projects, and public programs that make up Sykes’s multidisciplinary practice is a deep-seated dedication to creating palpable solutions to the problems that impact the lives of thousands of workers in Chicago’s arts ecosystem. As a co-founder of the data collection effort, the Chicago Arts Census, Sykes is advocating for better working, living, and making conditions across Chicagoland. In May, Adia agreed to sit down with me and discuss everything from improvisation, to advocacy tools, to following her intuition.
Photo credit: Leslie Frempong
Marielle Mervau: Can you tell me about the relationship between your curatorial practice and art administration practice?
Adia Sykes: At the center of all of it, there’s an advocacy lens for racial equity, and equity on all fronts. My background comes from predominantly white spaces, and I recognize the immense amount of privilege that a certain pedigree can grant one person. The best way that I can frame it is “the smash and grab,” which I heard Kamilah Rashied use to first describe how she operates her arts career as well. It’s about leveraging privilege in order to push resources out— to have a role in mining certain histories that would otherwise fly under the radar. And of course, there’s a certain politics that comes with things being excluded, or things being forgotten, and moving them to the floor. It’san immense honor to be able to work with artists on projects and programs that do some of that work, because it is in alignment with my own values. I think that is the through-line between a lot of things that I do: they are based in both the values that I have cultivated and how I want to move through the world both as an “arts person” wearing those multi-hyphenated hats, but also as a human being navigating the world as well.
MM: It is easy to see how your work embodies this “smash and grab;” like using your institution’s platform to hold space for a conversation about funding barriers for arts administrators of color. Clearly, change is needed. And appropriately, the theme of this year’s emerge journal is “change.” I’m wondering if you can talk about how you approach the arts as a vehicle for change?
AS: One of the things that’s become abundantly clear, particularly working on the Chicago Arts Census project, is that there’s an inextricable link between the microcosm that is the art sector, and the rest of the things in the world. We are subject to the same kind of meta structures of white supremacy, of exclusion, of anti-Blackness and racism, and all of those kinds of things that we can put under that umbrella. And, the arts have a really interesting, phenomenal kind of proximity to power and wealth. So marrying those two things through the Census is hopefully going to lead to an advocacy tool.
It’s interesting to think outside of the art sector, but also to not lose sight of the fact that we’re also moving through the same things, because the needs of art workers are arguably the needs of any worker in any sphere as well. So it’s recognizing the “why” behind the thing you are working to change in the arts, while alluding to some of those connections outside of it. We can’t lose sight of the fact that the nonprofit industrial complex exists as it does for a reason. There’s a reason we still have art service organizations advocating for the well-being of certain demographics. The goal could be to write all of those [non-profits] out of existence. You’re working to fill a gap or need in the social/political/economic fabric. What if we collectively arrived to a place where resources are distributed in ways that help the most vulnerable and everything is so equitable, that everyone will be so well taken care of, that that ecosystem will be so care-filled that we won’t have a need for a lot of those things.? It’s probably not going to happen in our lifetime, but abolitionist thinkers call this into existence with their work. The hope is that by doing things like the Chicago Art Census— by talking about and telling stories of folks who have seen the changes that the ecosystem has gone through— we can look at the good and bad, because there has been a lot of beautiful growth and change in this ecosystem. It’s continuing to apply pressure and question, which is really exciting about this work.
MM: You just mentioned “care,” and I want to bring this up because there seems to be a new attitude about care that’s emerging in the arts. I’m wondering if you can speak to the introduction of “care” in conversations right now.
AS: Yes! This could be an entire TED Talk. Care is moving to the forefront. I think it’s because what was going on before was not working for a lot of folks. But really, it started to not work, particularly in the past three years, for folks who get to tell the stories or who have been allowed to tell the stories in the past.
We know that in communities of color, Black communities, and disabled communities, there’s been care work, both as a practice but also as a necessity. And now those efforts are getting highlighted. It’s becoming this great thing. I think having the rhetoric of care re-enter mainstream discourses will do a lot of good.
I also think there’s a lot of folks saying that they’re doing care work but they are not doing it in a way that is sustainable because they aren’t doing it in a way that actually takes into account the most marginalized people; those communities relegated to the margins. Doing care work for folks is actually hard. Wanting to build systems that have care built into their very fabric takes a lot of unlearning, undoing, and visioning as well. I don’t think many places exist that stand out as role models for this care ethic. So it does take some visioning work, and it makes sense that it’s happening in the art field because this is where folks are really allowed to sometimes do the most radical of dreaming.
I think about the rhetoric of care in terms of radical self care and community care; a lot of that having started in the sixties and seventies with Black Power movements like the Panthers and Black feminist writers like Audre Lorde. So it’s not actually new work. It looks different, in some ways, but it is similar in that people are going to refuse to operate or navigate through systems that don’t see them as full human beings. And so we will see change happening when we see people using that rhetoric of care and hopefully putting it into practice.
MM: I think this is a perfect segue to get into the Chicago Art Census because personally, I think of it as an advocacy tool for care. Can you talk about how the project emerged and how the notion of care plays a role in this?
AS: The Census is one of those projects that reminds me of that speech that you hear at graduation. You know the one, it’s the same speech every year, “these are your friends for life, you will link up later and do cool projects together.” Well, this is actually one of those projects. There are five of us in total working on it. Three out of the five of us met at SAIC [School of the Art Institute of Chicago], from just being in similar circles.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we were seeing the rug pulled out from under so many people around us and so many of our peers. Since we’re all in the art sector, we’re not above any of that. We were thinking, well, what the hell can we do? Because we have to do something. And just doing little art exhibitions at that moment didn’t feel like the right thing to do. Well maybe we can do a little exhibition, but let’s also collect some data about how folks are living because the needs are greater than just presentation opportunities right now. After a few weekly Zoom meetings, we thought, well maybe we should actually do this. It moved from that space of ideation to “this is actually a needed thing.” And that quickly spiraled into the behemoth of a project that it is now. The core group of organizers working on it are Kate Bowen, Stephanie Koch, Alden Burke, and Tiffany Johnson.
We wanted to create an advocacy tool that’s not only for people working in the arts, and co-authored by folks working in the arts, but, we also wanted to create a tool that took into account the full humanity of arts workers. This is because we were all getting a lot of surveys at that time that felt really gross, that asked tough questions about how shitty it is out there. We were like, we all know how shitty it is. We’re all living it. So we wondered, how do we create a survey that says, “Things will get better, so tell us about this situation that you’re in while bringing in this idea of visioning and hope.” Not just, “tell me how you can’t make rent,” But, what would it look like to have a job, or some type of financial security that lets you do x,y, and z, that lets you have health care?”
In the first couple of iterations of the survey, some of the feedback we received was that it was really sad to take. We’re not trying to re-traumatize folks, that’s not the business that we’re in. So how do you balance getting quantitative and qualitative data; in a way that cares for the individual taking it? What does it look like to build breaks [into the survey]? What does it look like to recognize the multiplicity of ways in which a home or family situation may exist for an individual?
One of our committee members, Tempestt Hazel, asked, how do art folks do this differently; how do creatives approach data and questions differently than a public policy person or the government? How do we do something different, but not just for the sake of doing something different, but wanting to do something that will be in service to more of us.
After the census, there will be free public programming to help folks understand both how to leverage the data for their own advocacy, and how folks lobbying at policy levels can use this data to advocate for the arts as well. It’s multi-layered, it’s multifaceted, and it’s multi-hyphenated. It’s “multi” a lot of things that I think the art world and those in it also naturally are. Therefore, the tools that respond to it or advocate for it should also follow suit.
MM: I like thinking about how the Census provides this co-authorship or co-narrative creation between the folks who are taking it, and you, the folks who created it. Can you speak to this idea of co-authorship more, and how you might see it in the greater cultural ecosystem?
AS: In the greater cultural landscape it’s become clear that a multiplicity of voices creates a more resounding chorus. What I mean by that, is the increased movement to models that collectively hold power or that think more deeply, more intentionally about “community”.
You’re seeing more co-directorships which, in some cases, is not just about sharing a workload but also having a thought partner, sharing power, collective decision-making. That’s one example.
I think, or hope, rather, that there’s also a continued deepening of how we think about community in the arts–some criticality even to how we engage with “community”. In 2020 at the start of multiple pandemics, we saw folk who were, supposedly, in community with organizations and institutions calling them out and speaking truth to power. They weren’t just calling out inequities but also pointing to the fact that they weren’t in “right relationship” with community and x,y,or z place. Sonya Renee Taylor and adrienne maree brown write about “right relationship” and I hope that we continue to see some genuine and sustained querying of how institutions, organizations, and even individual artists are working in and with community.
Adia Sykes is a Chicago-based independent curator and arts administrator. Her current research examines the potential of curating as an advocacy tool for racial equity in the arts. Through her practice, she seeks to center philosophies of improvisation and intuition, engaging them as tools by which meaningful relationships between artists and viewers can be cultivated, while leaving space for the vernacular to mingle with constructs of history and theory. Her curatorial projects include Locating Memory (Chicago Mayor’s Office, 2018), Project Radio London (Centro Arte Opificio Siri in Terni, Italy, 2018), and The Petty Biennial.2 (Chicago, 2019-2020). She has also completed projects with the Art Institute of Chicago, Sullivan Galleries, Woman Made Gallery, Material Exhibitions, Roman Susan Gallery, and Comfort Station.
Adia earned a Masters of Arts from the Department of Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018) and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2016) with a focus on material culture and museums.