Trump Puts His Face on the Passport
Plus, John Yau on Édouard Glissant’s collection, Sotheby’s holds a benefit auction for the Yale MFA program, and more.
The late philosopher Édouard Glissant saw the world as an archipelago, a non-hierarchical cluster of distinct but connected islands. To him, art wasn’t about ownership, but a commons — a living archive attentive to difference, but defined by relation and provisional alliances. It’s a way of thinking that is “practically unheard of in America,” critic John Yau writes in a review of an exhibition of Glissant’s collection at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York. “We are the poorer for it.”
Yep. As if to prove that point, the Trump administration announced this week that it plans to issue passports prominently displaying the president’s portrait and signature. Rather than Glissant’s vision of freedom — of movement, of association, of kinship across difference — the so-called “Land of the Free” has chosen to brand its passport with the very symbol of violently enforced borders.
But it’s not all bad news out there — speaking of provisional alliances, Sotheby’s is holding an auction to raise funds for Yale MFA scholarships. As Yale Dean Kymberly Pinder put it, the school is “investing in a community that will continue to grow.” Amen.
—Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
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From the Archive
Édouard Glissant Sought to Undermine the European Ideological Underpinnings of Colonization
In conversations with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Glissant proposed an Art Museum of the Americas. | David Brazil
