 is A Blade of Grass’s outlet to collaborate with practitioners and learn through their perspectives. While we understand that our communities have long been in a state of crisis, the inauguration of the current political administration accelerated these crises with a strategy to overwhelm constituents. With the ground shifting rapidly throughout the first half of 2025, our conversation with artist and writer Dan S. Wang reminded us that moments like this are not new to communities and elders who have long engaged political struggle.

As guest editor of this year’s issue of 

, Dan brings a rich history of organizing with artist collaborators and collectives and contributing to social movements throughout the Midwest and beyond. Dan has produced work with artist groups Compass, Madison Mutual Drift, and Red76, and he was a founding member of Chicago experimental space Mess Hall. Dan’s recent residency and exhibition 

 at Dartmouth College explored political memory, revolutionary strategy, and leftist failure. In 2022, Dan co-edited with Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker the book 

Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic

, a collection of interviews, critical essays, and artist portfolios that—in their words—“offers a framework to help us make sense of the interlocked crises of the unfolding present and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this time of transition.”

 contributions that will continue to unfold throughout the rest of the year.

At the quarter mark of the 21st century, more than two decades after the Patriot Act and now at the dawn of ubiquitous AI, privacy is nothing but a bad joke and our encrypted browsers won’t save us.

Which is not to say that the public sphere is healthy. In the United States, between Clintonian neoliberalism and Trump’s crony capitalism, everything “public” has been heavily degraded, disfigured, shut down, or shut out. Most public services are on life support. Public sector workers are the go-to punching bag for conservatives. Public education has one defender for every hundred critics. Public lands will be sold to real estate vultures for a song if the Republicans get their way. And public expression? Forget it. Circulation is so uneven and attention so fleeting that any given public gesture, message, or display might as well be private—in which case, refer to the bad joke above.

Over a three-part rolling release, this year’s edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. By addressing this condition directly and obliquely, the hope is that the conversations, essays, process notes, and other contributions amount to a genealogy of “private” and “public” while grappling with a world in which it is no longer possible to hide, and yet in which the spaces of mutual visibility and common communication continue to fracture and shrink.

The wish is to create forms of social engagement untethered to the outdated dichotomy, but that can realistically contend with inherited systems and distributions of power that were built on those presumptions of public versus private. If this edition of 

makes strides toward that end it will have been a success, all the more so as a project completed under a totalitarian regime on the ascent. It must be said, the events of 2025 and beyond—today, yesterday, any day you are reading this—temper our plans and expectations. Whatever adjustments we make as the year unfolds will stand as a record of this time. Progress is the hope, survival the goal.

This editorial platform was created in collaboration with curator and writer Risa Puleo, who served as an advisor and thought partner to A Blade of Grass in 2024. 

 is guest edited by Dan S. Wang with support from ABoG Program Directors Allie Linn and Lee Heinemann with Executive Director Lu Zhang. ABoG’s board is ashley sparks, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Diya Vij, Gregory Sale, Michael Premo, and Michael Quattrone. Rebekah Kirkman copyedited these contributions and Team designed the identity and interface for 

Dan S. Wang was born in Midland, Michigan in 1968. Growing up inside the contradictions of a deindustrializing Midwest supplied formative aesthetic attachments and lasting impressions of a society unraveling.

Dan landed in Chicago in 1998 with a studio practice centered around letterpress printing. He co-founded the cultural space Mess Hall and worked in various collaborative groups. In this time Dan produced many texts and lectured internationally. Relocating to Los Angeles in 2017 by way of Madison, Wisconsin, Dan turned toward drawing, sculpture, and video.

He was supported as a Local Artist-in-Residence at 18th Street Arts Center of Santa Monica from 2019 to 2024. In recent years he’s presented new and commissioned work at Station Museum (Houston), Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia), and solo projects at Compound Yellow (Oak Park), Fonderie Darling (Montreal), Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles, and the Jaffe-Friede Gallery at Dartmouth College.

Dan now splits time between Los Angeles and Chicago.

Website

Instagram

Dan S. Wang

Over a three-part rolling release, this edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. 

No Privacy, No Public

The artist Justine Di Fiore was doing care work when we first met. She was working with a nonspeaking autistic youth—I believe that might have been the first time I’d heard the term “autistic,” that’s how long ago this was. I recall her describing communication with the child that was more sensory than linguistic. This seemed to chime somewhat with her painting practice at the time, which was basically solitary, often self-portraiture, light on surrounding conversation, and hardly was seen outside a basement workspace. But then a little later, Justine got involved in radical organizing, doing grassroots work that was intensely social, and heavy on verbal debate, persuasion, study, and reflection. I was always intrigued by these multiple, uncompromising paths—caregiver, artist, organizer. Finally, after more than thirty years, we had a chance to talk about these modes and how they became a single path.


This is a conversation featuring the painter Justine Di Fiore. Are you a New Yorker, born and raised?

I lived all over, but my adolescent years were in the Bronx. Probably the most important years.

Let me say a few words recapping how I know this artist. That begins a lifetime ago, back in about 1991, when Justine was new to Minneapolis and I was there as well. This was fresh post-college for both of us. Justine was the first person I met of my own age with a demonstrably committed practice as a visual artist. I split town not long thereafter, but Justine stuck around for years and became a true Minneapolitan.

Over the decades we had intermittent contact, less through art and more through grassroots organizing networks. Of course we’re talking about Minneapolis, which was then and remains a city full of radical streaks. Even though I assumed all along that she was painting, I knew more about her involvement in workplace democracy and other projects of a political nature.

Take an opening prompt here: In your estimation, how does the relationship between art and politics around 1991 compare to now, a quarter century into the 21st century?

At that time I was painting in the basement, and I was focused on building my practice right out the gate of undergrad. I was super excited about that. Then the first Gulf War started. I had a buddy, my first friend in Minneapolis. She invited me to go to an anti-war protest. And I'm like, yeah, sure. I liked hanging out with her and I already had a developing consciousness as a young person about world events, cumulative histories, and forces that oppressed people. But I’d never gone to a formal protest.

It was my first anti-war protest, the first time I saw resistance on the street instead of reading about it as history or seeing pictures of it in the news. I felt that the war needed to be addressed in some way, and that painting in the basement wasn’t necessarily going to help that cause. I ended up involved in various organizations, and in grassroots organizing in general. As I met more people, I got more connected, and in particular, to anti-racist youth movements.

So I was continuing with painting, but the paintings that I made weren’t necessarily highly political in nature. But I think it’s a question also as to what is political. At that time, I let painting take a back seat and became active in organized resistance to the war and police brutality.

Did you have a community where you connected to other painters, people who were doing the creative visual art that you were doing?

I did. I was developing that at the same time. They were different ways of being a part of community. I took some extension classes at the University of Minnesota, and I had a show with a couple other artists. There was some momentum there. But over time it became hard to sustain a rigor in both community organizing and painting. So there was a period where painting took a back seat to illustration and drawing for zines or newspapers that I produced in collectives. I continued to paint portraits of people alongside this other work. Compared to my engagement with painting now, it was very different.

It sounds to me like the painting was never entirely solitary. You would do it on your own time, in your own space, but also would do it in a classroom setting or in a group setting, or a workshop setting, or you would engage people one-on-one by doing portraiture. What about your own goals as a painter back then? Was that something of a private sphere, where you’d have, say, five things to master in terms of technique and craft, or mark-making vocabularies?

There was an interest in developing technique, but the main motivation for the work was to allow myself a voice. It’s interesting to think about now, as I was coming into my own as a young feminist, an anti-racist, I was also coming into the idea that my voice as an artist was important to develop. So the work was a lot about personal experience and felt very diaristic. I had a visual journal that I worked in obsessively, the most blatantly political visual work that I produced. Some of it would include text, like a response to something I saw in the media. I was becoming really disgusted with television, which had shaped my identity and the role of young women in society. I was encountering bell hooks’s writing and Andrea Dworkin’s. Everything was turning upside down for me. When I think back, that probably allowed me the ability to have a voice in the public sphere.

One of the projects that was woven into larger radical networks was Emma Center, which you helped to organize. It was an infoshop, a thing back then. Lots of cities had infoshops, usually conveying a low-rent punk rock aesthetic, like the A-Zone in Chicago or 404 in Detroit. These were folks making autonomous spaces informed by anti-authoritarian ways of thinking, experimenting with horizontal structures, consensus, and so forth.

It seems like such a bygone time. It was valuable, being involved in those intense, pre-social media ways of organizing, struggling in person with like-minded values but against differing personalities while actualizing projects. How did that filter into your art making? Did it make your painting more of a refuge?

It was an interesting time to be in Minneapolis because there’s a strong history of collective organizing there. You know, the food co-op movement and all, some of it still going. And a strong history of collectivized workplace structures.

It was in that context that Emma Center came about. I developed relationships with people that I organized with. And there came a time when I felt the need to document these relationships. So I started a series of portraits of young activists who I knew from the scene.

I was painting people from life. It was about the connection, the dynamic between myself and the sitting subject. It was a way for me to connect that felt meaningful. It was quiet, a connection between two humans that was very felt. I enjoyed that and continued it for a while.

I would allow the subject, the person I was painting, to help me decide what the environment of their portrait would be, what the setting would be. I remember one young activist who wanted a halo of paper dolls on fire hovering above her head. There was a collaborative process of creating these images. It was really fun.

Alice Neel comes to mind. A socialist partisan, she had that commitment to finding and even freeing her subjects in portraiture through brushstroke and decisions about color, shape, line, and surface, in a time when portraiture wasn’t in vogue.

Fast forward a couple of decades. At some point you started thinking about, let’s say, professionalizing, going to graduate school and foregrounding your painting practice as your primary activity, and even your livelihood. How did that come to the fore in tandem with the workplace organizing you’d been doing for a while?

I worked for 27 years in Minneapolis as a CNA. In the hospital structure there was a union that organized the nursing assistants, custodians, nutrition workers, and laboratory technicians. That became my primary community.

I phased out of youth-based movements that were predominantly white, to being engaged with communities composed of a diverse array of people living in the Twin Cities. I found myself involved in organizations to address incidents of police brutality, and then gradually became involved in workplace democracy and unions. That was an important transition for me. At the same time I started to feel that the artistic voice that I had been cultivating when I first moved to Minneapolis was a bit muffled and diluted. I had lost touch with that aspect of my creative practice.

I started to crave it. I took accordion lessons. Somehow that opened up my mind to getting back into painting and drawing. I needed that bridge of studying a musical instrument to get me back to thinking visually.

Probably around 2006, 2007. Then in 2013 I attended the Women’s Art Institute, a studio intensive program. I spent a month off of work, which I hadn’t done in about twenty years, and devoted it to painting.

I continued with portraiture, painting from a live model, mostly friends, people who I was interested in spending time with. That catapulted my practice and it continued to ramp up. Certain concerns became an obsession, dealing with light and form and color on a two-dimensional plane. I was thinking about how the figure/the body occupies space. I found these things liberating in terms of processing information.

I think that working in the institutional setting of the hospital and being very regimented put me in a grid-like way of thinking, as Deleuze and Guattari talk about in 

, versus a nomadic, open way of thinking. Understanding this difference really opened things up.

I couldn’t leave alone this desire to think visually any longer. An important connection between my career as a nursing assistant and my current work happened when I received a Minnesota State Arts Board grant to do a series of portraits of hospital workers in 2013–14. I made twelve diptychs, twenty-four different portraits. I showed the work at the Mall of America through the initiative called Made Here, which brought artists to vacant storefronts and other nontraditional spaces that reached a wide public.

It was a great experience for me. I was hooked and invested in continuing along this trajectory. That project was a way for me to out myself at the hospital as an artist, and it was a way for me to out myself as an artist who was a hospital worker.

From Emma Center to the Mall of America, that’s quite a range of public exposure.

It’s interesting, you might think a radical infoshop would be the more public venue, the place where you’d be reaching people. But that community, which was beautiful and had a lot to offer, and impacted people’s lives in important ways, was insular, protected, and isolated from other people’s experiences. Of course, thinking about the mall as this completely opposite site, and an expression of corporate capitalism that promotes homogeneity, all these things that punk rock butted up against—yet in some ways the Mall of America is a more public space, a context in which to connect with people of all different experiences.

So let’s take that to your painting from recent years, having relocated to Los Angeles after graduate school. Now, most days you’re painting, maybe for many hours a day. Can we see any of these long-brewing histories in the work?

One thing I started to think about in grad school was, what is the function of my work? It was a big change of identity. Until then I identified as a worker. Not that grad students aren’t workers. What I mean is, I identified with that class of people that worked in a hospital; that was my comfort zone.

I began to think more about how I represent figures, the motivation and the intention. Where do the marks that construct the figures come from? This activity of touching the canvas—what was it related to for me? I began to integrate my experiences as a worker and painter. I thought about the differences between my perspective as a caregiver versus as a student of the figure, a cool and distant perspective versus the up-close perspective that you experience when washing, supporting, holding bodies, physically turning bodies. All of that informed how I understand the figure in space. So I experimented while at UC Davis, triggering my muscle memory, in particular, of washing bodies, beginning with a process of wiping paint on a surface using the gestures of caregiving. It started with painting on bed sheets, and then evolved into using plastic because I could paint on plastic and transfer it onto my canvas.

This horizontal nature of painting on the floor simulated the patient in bed. I found the figures in the paintings and the contours of the body through the gesture of washing the body. All of that brought me to an interest in depicting the figure in states of being held by another. Now all of this is part of my vocabulary of painting. I’m remaking the figural form in painting through the labor of caregiving.

Let me go back to that first question of 1990 versus 2025. What is your view on how, both as an artist but also as a citizen of this country, of this world, what are we left with? How do we act in this world given that corporate contexts like the Mall of America are the biggest physical stages, while the radical work we do tends to be at a micro level that doesn’t reach many outside of our own lives? Now living and working in LA under an awful regime we’re trying to survive, how are you thinking now?

I think that all these modes of expression and action in the world are necessary. We need a community that engages on lots of different levels with ideas, with free thought. I don’t know what the right formula is.

I teach painting and drawing, and when thinking about private and public activities, even teaching is, in my opinion, a very public activity. One of the things I notice in studio classes is that technology, while it is really important for us all, also limits our ability to think. It’s another example of a constrained grid structure.

Students are preoccupied by what is on their phone. It’s a puzzle, figuring out how to teach interpretation of the visual world. That is what I can do, engage with students to open up their perception. Art education is a space for students to develop a voice through mark-making, and an understanding of shape and form. It’s a very human need that goes back to Paleolithic times.

A follow-up then on your reentry into intensive painting through bridging your history of hands-on care work and the painter’s canvas. Maybe the word political is too superficial. This seems like a deeper values kind of project, almost spiritual in what it’s after. You may be onto something that all of us need to grapple with in order to preserve our humanity in the age of catastrophe. Can you say something about this, considering that we sit here talking in Los Angeles, a city associated with the fetishization of bodies, of appearances, of individual wellness?

Well, that the personal is political, taught to us through the work of different movements, especially the feminist art movement, holds true. It’s a legacy that I feel is important to hold onto. Maybe a better way to think about it in the current context is that survival is political. Speaking to what is personal can be an act of survival. When artists use their experience to generate content their work has the potential to speak to people more broadly. If there is one thing that stands out in the last decade it is that identity and personal experience drive a lot of creative work. It seems to be one of the unifying features of this period of post-post- modern art. It is more than a trend, it is a manifestation of our time and born out of necessity.

For me it has become a question of how caregiving and the labor of caregiving can enter my work. I’m continuing to explore how touching and marking the canvas can contain experience, like some kind of experience of caring for the body. Can that energy be transferable? Compassion as medium, words borrowed from the title of an essay written by Clarisse Abelarde about my work, is a brilliant way to summarize not only what I think is important in my practice, but what is important in our lives as communities here in LA and around the world.

How can I put that into my work, and can I construct a figure bearing that weight and light of compassion? John Berger and Leon Kossoff wrote about these questions in their letters to each other, and in an essay in Berger’s book 

. In their discussion it came up that there was a visually impaired person whose understanding of light came through touch. This is very interesting to me, how light manifests in a painting through how one touches the painting as it is being created. I work to bring that energy and muscle memory from caregiving into my practice in the hopes that the compassion will rub off onto the surface of the painting, if that sounds possible. That’s what I'm striving for. And maybe this is what I mean when thinking about the personal as political—caregiving as resistance.

Justine Di Fiore

I work to bring that energy and muscle memory from caregiving into my practice in the hopes that the compassion will rub off onto the surface of the painting, if that sounds possible. That’s what I'm striving for. And maybe this is what I mean when thinking about the personal as political—caregiving as resistance.

Care on Canvas: A Conversation with Justine Di Fiore

We of the grassroots American left are heirs to the global anti-systemic movements of the 1960s and ’70s. The twin hallmarks of New Left politics, a critique of institutions and the valorization of horizontal structures, are in our political DNA. Sadly, that’s left us unable to advance an affirmative theory of the state for a half century and counting. Outside of the most banal ideas, the left has largely abandoned claims to government. The right, by contrast, for all its demonization of the public sector, has had no such problem. If the left is to successfully retool its relationship to government—an urgent task under the auspices of Trump 2.0—we need to reinvigorate our imaginations regarding government and what it can do. Robby Herbst takes us back to the late years of idealistic Big Government, when imaginative, publicly supported initiatives were possible, despite their imperfection. Shall cultural workers embrace the messy reality of public services and make those demands of government in 2025? Do we have any other choice?

– Dan S. Wang

What did American liberalism look like? I mean classic, big government, “we can change the world” kind of liberalism? What did it look like, not where we recognize it most, i.e. in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s time, but at its zenith under Lyndon Baines Johnson, when the administration tackled the dual issues of poverty and racialized inequality?

Do you know? Is there a picture in your brain?

If not, you are excused. Between neoliberalism, massively regressive tax cuts, old and new illiberalism, and over a century of virulent anti-communism, liberalism doesn’t hold much of a footprint in people’s minds. And then there’s the 1960s New Left, which didn’t comfort LBJ, our ultimate big lib, at all.

Does the word liberal read as a smear to you? It’s been that way for a long time, and is anybody coming to defend it? As Trump moves to mop up the remnants of what was known as a Great Society,

 now is a good time to take a look at liberalism and ask, what was it?

A decade ago I started looking at Lyndon Johnson’s legislative achievements during his presidency from 1963 to 1969. For me, at that time, “participation” had meant being a member of a theater troupe, an art collective, or a scrappy anarchist media project. At best these relationships could get me a free slice of pizza, and they were often ephemeral; here today, gone tomorrow. I’d been drawn to LBJ because of a reference to his liberal Model Cities program in a book on participatory strategies in the arts, Claire Bishop’s 

, which included a diagram labeled “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” The diagram was conceived by an aggrieved government employee named Sherry Arnstein in 1969.


Arnstein had been an employee of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as an administrator of its Model Cities program. She believed the quality of a given Model Cities program could be judged on a spectrum ranging from manipulation and abuse of citizens by the government, at the bottom rung, to total citizen control, at the ladder’s peak. For Arnstein, citizen and community control was an end point for a federal program whose concept was to enfranchise the disenfranchised. Citizen control meant tangible power for democratic subjects managing their destinies, together. Art and grassroots politics was one thing, but up until reading about this I had never heard of a government program that sought to fund grassroots participation, much less experimental models for community engagement.

The spark for Johnson’s Model Cities started from a philanthropic initiative called Gray Areas, supported by the liberal Ford Foundation, that ran from 1959 to 1965. Gray Areas sought to develop social equity in America by financing what today we might call “change makers.” The privately funded Gray Areas program developed into the federal programs of Job Corps, Head Start, and Volunteers in Service to America. Other less durable projects Gray Areas sponsored look like social practice artworks today—such as a geodesic dome in Manhattan’s Lower East Side organized by a gang that would become New York City’s CHARAS organization, and a people’s architectural bureau of Harlem.

Johnson, in his first State of the Union address given in January 1964, declared a War on Poverty. That year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the lesser-known Economic Opportunity Act to “eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this nation by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.”

In 1965 the Watts Rebellion happened and, partially in response, Johnson created the Department of Housing and Urban Development as a Cabinet-level agency. HUD oversaw Model Cities.

In 1966 Congress passed the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act, formalizing and directing the transformative power of the nation’s riches toward pockets of urban poverty. The act created the Model Cities program and mandated “maximum feasible citizen participation” in the development and conceptualization of each city’s model program. The meaning of this so-called feasible participation would become a political football as the nature of actual community involvement came into focus.

The Model Cities Program encouraged community stakeholders to co-organize, articulate problems, and generate solutions to address the crisis of poverty in a wealthy society. The thought was that the urban riots of that era could be curtailed by giving alienated communities tax dollars to innovate in spending. Poor folks would be granted a buy-in to the liberal order, rather than held at its margins, and empowered to come up with innovative methods to solve urban problems. From 1967 to 1968, organized, and organizing, communities collaborated in writing a city’s Community Action Plan for HUD. These plans looked like a constellation of what we now understand as urban nonprofits and community organizations working in the fields of housing, social services, education, transportation, health, and the arts.

There were meant to be 46 model cities splitting among them $2 billion when Johnson’s bill was first proposed. But by the time the bill became law, there were 150 cities splitting only $900 million, a massive funding shortfall to go with a greatly enlarged map. The deficit is pinned on Johnson’s unwillingness to raise taxes on a nation he was trying to hold, despite his desire to richly fund the increasingly unpopular War in Vietnam. So when the Community Action Plans went live in 1969, the projects the citizenry had dreamt up were deeply underfinanced. And this would be the case until 1974 when the law’s vestment ended and President Richard Nixon let Model Cities die. 

That most of the underfunded Model Cities lifespan occurred under the rule of a hostile administration points to the doomed nature of the initiative. Yet there is something immanent to a program called Model Cities regardless, and the word “model” has two meanings to consider: The first is an ideal prototype to be appreciated, like the clothes on a runway model. The second is a model run in a laboratory, an experiment to learn from, successful or otherwise. So when I ask what American liberalism looked like, those two meanings hold the answer.

Model Cities built stuff, delivered services, and activated urban populations. But unlike the monumental public works of FDR, the top models of the program are less known and were more customized and local. For example, the program supported the construction of community centers. There were several architecturally significant public housing projects in the Bronx. A community called Soul City got off the ground in North Carolina. It was spearheaded by the Nixon-friendly figure Floyd McKissick as a multiracial community branded with an “uplift” concept of Black self-determination. In Los Angeles, in the Greater Watts Model Neighborhood, a full ten percent of all Model Cities monies went to community arts organizations.

  These organizations are central to what we now think of as the LA expression of the Black Arts Movement. Those funds also seeded a public housing project known as the Guy Miller Homes. Developed by grantee Studio Watts Workshop, it housed the elderly and sponsored an art gallery and residency center for memorable community arts experiments.

Detroit’s Model Neighborhoods supported the city’s Mobile Swimming Pool program. At its peak, a fleet of five trucks comprised the pool initiative, which continued beyond the Model Cities era. These trucks carted around specially designed decked trailer tanks. When filled with 25,000 gallons of fire hydrant water, they made an up-to-five-foot-deep tub. These pools were staffed by lifeguards, some trained and paid from the Model Cities budget. During the swim seasons people could find a truck by tuning into Channel 2, WJBK at 12:30 p.m. The mobile pools were a part of an armada of mobile amenities cruising the Motor City, including a skate-mobile, a movie-mobile, and a puppet-mobile (though it’s unclear whether these amenities were supported by Model Cities or not).

These emblematic models are the eye-catching exceptions to a frequently pragmatic legislation meant to seed money to poor and often racialized communities. For example, in Detroit, the Citizen’s Urban Opportunity Fund (CUOF) was set up by request of Detroit’s primary Model Cities manager for two reasons. The first reason was to receive and distribute cash to organizational grantees of the Model Cities program. These programs included institutions supporting job training, health care, tenants’ rights, and primary school education.

And second, the CUOF was set up as a fund to be tapped by Detroit’s citizens to access cash grants or loans to address immediate needs. Its head, Ralph H. Richardson, interpreted this mandate and structured the organization to work as a “G.I. Bill” for the ghetto. For its single year in operation, the $250,000 fund distributed American tax dollars to, among other things, pay for an asthmatic’s air filter, provide rental assistance for a single mother, cover tuition and fees for college students, spot union dues, pay for home repairs, provide down payments on homes, and even grant cash so a guy could buy a suit for a job or a mom could hire a babysitter for when she was out on a job interview. Someone was able to buy a car to drive to work. A year into the program Richardson was taken to task by the new Nixon-appointed Model Cities manager and asked to defend himself as a Black “Santa Claus.” The implications made in the city’s newspapers are clear, that a Black man handing out cash to other Black folks shouldn’t be trusted. Richardson opined defensively, “The plan was to stress new, imaginative approaches to old problems. The prospect that some money might be wasted was not to be an obstacle.”

This revanchism regarding who could receive money from the federal government and how they might spend it is evident in another racialized scandal documented sensationally in Detroit’s newspapers at the time. In August of 1970, the Detroit Free Press reported that Detroit city and the State of Michigan would close a Black Muslim summer camp in Milford, in the countryside north of Detroit. The Brothers Unlimited sleepaway camp had received an operating grant of $12,000. Among charges of not providing adequate and appropriate care for the campers, reportedly the camp had children doing military exercises in the middle of the night, trained them in combat, and had instructed campers “not to associate with white people.”

The controversies surrounding the funding of a veritable Black Santa or a Black Muslim summer “training” camp in Detroit with our tax dollars are emblematic of the program’s model as a social laboratory. These are instances where localized solutions were sought for specific communities. Seen from different contexts, however, they might be perceived as threatening, ill-informed, or unworthy of sanction by the federal government. Philosopher Michel Foucault used the term governmentality to describe how a ruler structures policy to conform to what a society deems permissible according to its self-conception.

 In this way a leader’s law forms what they conceive of as allowable within their social contract. In Model Cities’ initial development during the Johnson administration, money was earmarked to CUOF and Brothers Unlimited because his administration was seeking to empower, and directly enrich, marginalized subjects through participation in democratic processes. Liberal democracy itself was the reason. When the Nixon administration came to power, their conception of how persons and groups marginalized by society should benefit from participating in society changed. Archived notes stored in the Detroit Public Library indicate that the highest offices in D.C. acted to end a citizen-administered cash granting program in Detroit’s inner city. Nixon had other ideas of how Model Cities dollars should be put to use. Those involved giving mayors cash to distribute and making grants contingent on partnerships with business and banks.

The Nixon administration’s approach to Detroit’s Model Cities echoes a pattern seen elsewhere. In the program’s initial liberal stage, cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco had been working through what could be characterized as 

 processes of how to administer Model Cities locally. In each city, locally influential grassroots organizations tried to gain representative status to essentially control Model Cities implementation in their neighborhoods. Organized poor people were hoping to super-charge the program’s effectiveness in this way. In Black North Philadelphia this was the Area Wide Council (AWC), and in San Francisco’s multiethnic working class Mission District it was the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO). These coalition organizations were developed as networks of lower-income neighborhood stakeholders, working to counteract the ravages of bureaucratic urban redevelopment. Though each organization had leftists to their flanks antagonizing them, the organizations themselves were challenges to the then-dominant white power structure of their cities. In both instances, agreements were in development as to how these coalitions could run their Model Neighborhood when Nixon’s approach trickled down to the cities. The power of AWC and MCO was compromised and the meaning of “citizen participation” was brought to heel by the propertied and powerful of Philly and San Francisco.

Even before its funding ran out in 1974, Model Cities was deemed a failure. It was dogged by charges of fraud. Whole programs were forced to close due to allegations of corruption and misallocation of funds. 

 was the title of a 1969 book written by liberal wonk Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a lightning rod in the discourse of welfare and safety nets, and later a U.S. senator from New York. In the book Moynihan reflects on Johnson’s War on Poverty, a war Moynihan helped to shape while working with LBJ as an appointee of his and Kennedy’s administrations. Moynihan’s later criticism of Model Cities circled around the program’s democratic nature (there was too much of it) and the supposed fuzziness of the social science applied to the problem. Moynihan found himself migrating to the Nixon administration and served as Nixon’s Counselor to the President, a step towards becoming a policy hero to neoliberals who sought to engineer (or manipulate) the urban poor, rather than empower them. Nixon’s anti-poverty programs initiated a federal turn towards the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and private-public partnerships benefiting capital first and the poor last. The aim of these programs would be to structure federal expenditures around capital’s goals rather than humanist values.

In Foucauldian terms, a gambit of Model Cities engages the question of who and how someone in our society is allowed to waste federal tax dollars. A letter to the editor of the 

 published in 1971 by John Blaine, then secretary of The Meeting at Watts Towers, a network of community arts organizations in South LA, discusses this tension while pointing to the 

  It also considers the texture of the revanchist state in action during the Nixon administration:

“The $500 million contract awarded to Canoga Park’s Rocketdyne by NASA rated only Page 24 in a recent edition. The contract, for '36 engines by 1978' will enable Rocketdyne to provide '2,000 more jobs in a gradual buildup of the program,' and 'additional jobs at plants of subcontractors.'

“But when the Los Angeles Model Cities Agency received $26 million to distribute in East Los Angeles and the Greater Watts Model Cities Neighborhoods, it was played up on Page 1, giving further coverage inside, and generally trumpeted, to what purpose? The Model Cities funds, here since late April, are supposed to have a positive effect on the lives of literally tens of thousands of low-income people in these communities. Yet almost none of the Model Cities funds have as of yet begun to filter through the red tape to the people who need those funds.

“My point is this: By playing up the relatively small amount of government funds being used in low-income communities; the 

 makes it seem that a whole lot is being done for poor people in Los Angeles when this is not actually true. By playing down the middle-class welfare schemes which the whole space racket represents, you help to keep the pressure on government to provide more meaningless jobs for aerospace engineers and technicians.“

, the book that introduced me to Model Cities, Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation is presented as a foil. For art historian Bishop, the ladder is a misleading evaluative tool for participatory art. She contends that analyzing art with a grade of better-or-worse misses the point. For Bishop, art’s goal isn’t to prefigure utopian paradigms, as a pragmatic politician or technocrat might see fit. Rather she asks artists to create situations that embody the complex realities of society itself, as problems to be encountered, and engaged. And while The Ladder of Citizen Participation serves as an antagonist for Bishop’s argument, she never explains what Model Cities was, or what it meant to do. Nor does she ask us to consider its affect, rather than its effect, as she asks us to do for art. But if a federal program’s values are organized around building subjectivities, rather than strictly solutions, isn’t that a kind of participatory art? So then, can we appreciate the conflict over a government-funded Black militant summer camp as a successful artwork? An artwork where the terrain of a citizen’s relationship to the constructs of both blackness and whiteness are worked out? In a post-Cagean world, and certainly in our Trumpian world, isn’t law really a kind of performance score we’re all obliged to play when liberals concede that even horseshit can be an arbiter of political or judicial reality?

This gets to a deeper point about what American liberalism looked like. Model Cities was an underfunded ambitious mess of initiatives that sought to intervene at the bio-social level rather than just through physical infrastructure. While its programs hoped to find methods of effective change, Model Cities was also generated to create an affective relationship with democracy, almost as a cultural policy. For the American right this was a bold-faced welfare giveaway of the sludgiest kind. For the American left it simply propped up a racist, militarist, capitalist social organism. As for the liberal middle, they were left holding a policy bag, with nothing to show for it other than their own moral clarity, budget items, and constitutional ambitions of a more equitable society.

Unfortunately American politics is not art, but apparently a war fought and intensified in four-year cycles. Taking power in January 2025, the Trump administration revoked LBJ’s Equal Employment Opportunity executive order, and it’s gunning for much of America’s social architecture. His administration stands at the far right and sees anybody to his close or distant left as the enemy. From his point of view on the see-saw, there is no middle, only leftists. For Trump, those who see the world as anything other than cold hard business are fools, crooks, or liars. In this worldview the winners are allowed to give out money as they want, fail as they want, commit crimes as they want, and structure government policy to conform to the society they want. We have seen and will see failures and waste with Trump, but it will be attributed to the kind of failures Silicon Valley likes: innovative and disruptive as entrepreneurs, not citizens, are encouraged to be. We are told that these are the right folks to waste our money.

Today Model Cities is uncelebrated as an experiment because the program failed the test of America’s perceived understanding of itself. Given the option to build a truly “Great Society,” the country continues to choose a punitive path towards an ever-shrinking concept of federalized public wealth. We’re a big nation with a small idea of what we can do together, other than arm ourselves and the world, build jails, and buy and sell stuff. Model Cities pointed towards a kind of liberalism that is unfamiliar to us because its terms of affective subjectivities lie in a terrain beyond the pale of the rigid and gray society that elections have sadly demonstrated many of us think is best. Art, in Bishop’s 

, is a terrain where gray-suited participants experience as-if situations aiming to put this reality into relief. In our current political equation, where the dominating ideology aims to eliminate its opposition rather than deal with them as humans, one wonders how old school centrist liberalism, much less meaningful encounters masquerading as politics (or vice versa), can even exist. Even more so today, the broad agonistic idea behind “participation” in the deeply liberal conceptions of art itself is called into question as leftists and liberals alike ask, “Is this the time for radicalism?”

Robby Herbst

The Model Cities Program encouraged community stakeholders to co-organize, articulate problems, and generate solutions to address the crisis of poverty in a wealthy society.