Legacy Russell on code switching and Black computing

Since Legacy Russell became Executive Director and Chief Curator at the storied arts institution The Kitchen in New York she has steadily built a program that is fluid, innovative and committed in its dedication to (re)defining the avant-garde for the 21st century. Russell crafted her reputation as an incisive arts writer and adventurous curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her books Glitch Feminism and Black Meme are already key reference points for critical engagements with the internet, race and politics.

Because of this affinity for thinking with and through technology that she has displayed in her writing, it seemed inevitable that Russell would eventually organize a major exhibition that interrogates these intersecting fields. That show is now in the world. Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art is currently on view at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. This pioneering exhibition explores and redefines the history of “Black data”, centering and celebrating contributions by artists of African descent to the rapidly advancing field of new media art and digital practice. Staged in two chapters, the second presentation will take place in Spring 2025 at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. We spoke with Russell about her process and the multiple historical and creative layers unfolding in this project. 

What inspired you to organize an exhibition on Blackness and technology?

This is an exhibition that I have been working on for about a decade. It’s a project that began with two questions: “What would the story of a networked Blackness, through and beyond the internet as we now know it, be if we told it as an avant-garde and experimental history?” and, “What would the art history of time-based media, new media, and digital technologies have looked like if it had included Black people into the canon from its inception?” There have been so many projects and publications that have taken on intersections of cybercultures, digitality, computing, and time-based medias and yet still, ten years on, a discussion inside of institutional space that really establishes the lineage of these histories and traditions intersectional with artists of African descent and how they have deep and resonant roots as trailblazers feels thinly theorized and underrepresented in a broader art historical narrative. 

As Black people (and Black machines, and Black data) have been key drivers of, contributors to, a networked culture that predates the internet, is bound up in the Fluxus Movement, and catapults forward into the era of the 1990s when the electronic superhighway began to take shape as its own medium of both communication and creative expression, Code Switch celebrates those who have been at the forefront of this work and also, by including artists working across disciplines and generations, puts forward the proposition that technology and the materiality of the internet are hyper-present and, as such, can no longer be set apart from the progression of contemporary art as it moves forward into future generations. 

The first chapter of the exhibition at Schomburg Center in Harlem mobilizes a broad swath of history and a multiplicity of artistic disciplines. What are some of the thoughts you want audiences to take away from this show and leading into the next chapter?

I remember starting at The Kitchen and having a surprising and difficult discussion with a community member here who suggested that Black people were new to the avant-garde, and that much of our consciousness-raising around this idea of inclusion was about how this was a new phenomenon, rather than a long-standing tradition with radical diasporic roots. It was an eye-opening moment and a ringing of a bell, calling me into the presence and reminder that the histories and traditions of “avant-garde” and “experimental”, central to The Kitchen’s mission, have always come with fractured lines of sight and segregated frameworks. The project of institution building as it stands — and the work of continuing to revisit a mission and a mandate of any organization — is really to always honor the past while at the same time acknowledge that no organization can be set apart from the cultural context within which it was founded. 

The Kitchen was founded inside of an exciting and complex moment in the history of the world, the history of America, the history of New York City — this was a moment where artists and cultural workers felt failed and ignored by institutional sites and, as such, did the brave work of initiating their own dream-space in founding their own organizations. Important spaces such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum, PS1, Artists Space, Just Above Midtown (J.A.M.) and of course The Kitchen rose up out of this moment with creative people taking charge of considering differently how to be empowered inside of institutions. Still, every founding moment is an articulation of a value-set; it becomes the responsibility of organizations to query how to continue to ground the foundations of institutions with its value-set as values change over time, informed by cultural and social context. This is the first time in The Kitchen’s 50+ year history that it has collaborated with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; what a special moment to defy what have at points been historic, social, and cultural constraints that have dictated how institutions have both come together and been set apart and bring two groundbreaking organizations into exchange to intervene within, be guided by, and agitate “the archive”. Our hope is that this can be a project that pushes people out of their comfort zones and core assumptions about these creative lineages and also extends a vibrating string across the city in a key period where cultural institutions continue to be at risk and collaboration between organizations sets forward a promise for the abundant, porous future invested in new forms of collaborative knowledge-building that creative people deserve.

About histories, is our understanding correct that the first show the Studio Museum in Harlem ever organized was on creative technology, through a focus on the work of Tom Lloyd? That seems a major intervention for 1968, and as an opening statement from a new institution. What does the legacy of that exhibition mean to you? 

In many ways Code Switch rotates around that founding moment of 1968 at Studio Museum, several years before The Kitchen’s founding. It continues to amaze me that Tom Lloyd never had an exhibition at The Kitchen given the focus of his work and research; here was a peer to the founding moment of The Kitchen — who went on to found his own institution the Store Front Museum the same year The Kitchen came into being — who was quite literally existing in a parallel universe of experimental art and thought. One of the questions that I’ve always mused on regarding Tom Lloyd and Studio Museum has been: “If we acknowledge the root of Studio Museum and Lloyd’s contributions, does this make Studio Museum a founding organization of Blackness and experimental technologies?” It’s critical to have The Kitchen’s mission answer to those who arrived at The Kitchen in addition to those whose work is the quintessential articulation of what The Kitchen’s mission should do, who belongs inside of it, how its ancestry can be expanded, and what (or whom) can be a force of reimagination as we champion the next generation of the avant-garde and experimental practices. Lloyd in his brilliance, politic, and pioneering vision gives us all of that.

Code Switch seems to be the show you were made to curate, given your influential books Glitch Feminism and Black Meme. Were there any concepts or approaches from your books that you particularly wanted to carry over or explore in this exhibition?

Code Switch as a project in its early research predates the two books of mine you mention. This exhibition is not “about” those writings necessarily. However there are always going to be thoughtlines that traverse work, life, and research.

We are very curious to learn just a bit of what you have planned for the next iteration of this exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in 2025. Can you give us a small preview? 

Code Switch was designed — to the very language of the early internet — in “domains”, intended to be modular, and to move across locations with flexibility and cross-pollination. Beginning at Schomburg with domains that move from pre-1960, then to 1960 to 1990, and then traveling in April 2025 to MOCAD for another unprecedented cross-institutional collaboration felt logical given Detroit’s rich and influential history of Black technologies. This third and final domain will initiate in 1990 and bring together over 40 artists in a group exhibition that pushes further this framework of “Black data” and a networked Blackness, one that is machinic and computational and in its stickiness, touches everything, goes everywhere, covers everything, has no horizon, reprograms the world.

Thank you!