Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA)

Fund: $40,000

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) will present Cameron Rowland’s first solo museum exhibition. Comprised of a newly commissioned body of work, the exhibition opens in October 2018. The project considers “accumulation by dispossession” and the contingency of property as means of understanding the racial imperatives that continue to format accumulation in the afterlives of colonization and slavery. The project considers both the market and state development facilitated by these legal and economic operations. The project will consist of a group of tax receipts documenting the property taxes on slaves collected by state governments alongside a grandfather clock from a South Carolina plantation, which was also a taxable asset in the early 19th century South; a piece of real estate in the region allocated for ex-slave resettlement by General Sherman’s Field Order 15, which was revoked by Andrew Johnson in 1866; a modification of a public MOCA donor plaque to acknowledge the patronage of the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles, which forcibly removed the largely working-class community of color in Bunker Hill beginning in 1959, eventually allowing for the construction of MOCA; and objects seized by local and federal police through the process of civil asset forfeiture, which are sold at auction to fund the police departments that seize them. The project studies the racial genealogy of property in the United States.