We were makers in what the art historian Rosalind Krauss called an expanded field. That included the way we talked about art and poetry. It was boring to just talk about craft. We discussed art and poetry in relation to race and gender and class. Our identities informed our aesthetic but our aesthetic wasn’t exactly about identity either. We were lucky to take classes with professors like the artists Johnny Coleman and Nanette Yannuzzi Macias, who told us to not oversimplify ourselves and to read race with nuance; that if we were going to make art about race, the work should be difficult because race was a difficult subject.

The nineties was the era of the culture wars, when Bush stripped the NEA of visual arts funding because of controversial artworks like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. After witnessing the deaths of so many friends because of government neglect and malfeasance during the AIDS crisis, artists were radicalized. One of the most controversial Whitney Biennials was the 1993 show because of its unapologetic politics. The admission buttons, designed by the artist Daniel J. Martinez, read, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.” The artist Pepón Osorio re-created a crime scene installation of a South Bronx Puerto Rican home. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Pe?a, dressed in tribal costumes, appeared in a gilded cage. Janine Antoni gnawed away at a six-hundred-pound cube of chocolate and lard as a feminist take on Donald Judd and Joseph Beuys.

    Most critics attacked the Biennial. Peter Plagens, for instance, dismissed the show as having “the aroma of cultural reparations.” Holland Cotter, one of the few critics sympathetic to the exhibit, wrote, “When the economy tanked at the end of the 1980s and the art market fell apart, some serious gate crashing happened. Artists long shut out from the mainstream, many of them African-American, Asian-American and Latino, gained entry and changed the picture.”

As I’m writing, this charged political energy is back in the arts. I hope this time the “gate-crashing” will have lasting effects. By the time I graduated from college, white male critics, publishers, and pundits had already rung the funeral bells on multiculturalism, calling it a failure, and cut the ribbon to a post-race America. I would even say that the cultural upheaval was already over by the time Erin, Helen, and I were in college. But because we were isolated in a small campus in Ohio, we benefited from its delayed effects. Helen, Erin, and I were not only confident, we were cocky. This was our time and we thought it would always be that way.

* * *

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    I didn’t show my poetry to Helen for a while. I was intensely private because I wanted to keep the poems inside my private temple of self-regard. I knew how fast I could plunge from confidence to self-doubt, how fast my poem could fade from a vibrating disc of light to shit spray on paper.

“I’d love to read your poems,” Helen said.

“They’re not any good.”

“They’re awesome,” Erin said. “Don’t listen to her.”

“You think I’m not smart enough to understand them,” Helen said threateningly.

“Hell no!”

“Then why can’t I read your poems?”

I wasn’t sure why I kept them from her. Certainly I dreaded her judgment. If she didn’t like my poems, I would die! But Helen was such a dominating presence in my life that I wanted my poems to be free of her imprint. Poetry was my territory, my thing. Instead, I told her I was insecure. She then forced me to sit at the kitchen table and we talked about my insecurity for several hours. The next day, when I finally handed her my chapbook, which I kept wrapped in tissue paper as if it were a specimen of a rare South American butterfly, Helen laughed in delight and said she’d read it immediately.

Then I didn’t see her for a week.

She’s disappeared again, I thought distantly.

How could she do this to me?

A week is a long time in a tiny college campus where there’s nowhere to hide, especially since that year, our senior year, Erin, Helen, and I were all living together. But Helen would do that—disappear for days, crashing with Heather or staying with her “safe” friends, Pam and Jessica—when, for whatever reason, she was feeling paranoid that Erin and I were out to get her.

    I was a knuckle of anxiety. It was all I thought about that week.

“Have you seen Helen?” I asked Erin.

“Mm-hmm,” Erin said. “At the studio.”

“Did she say anything about my poems?”

“No.”

Bitch! She read the poems and she decided that she didn’t like them. She now hates me or no, it’s worse, she has no respect for me. But why can’t she be honest about this? Doesn’t she know it’s more agonizing to not tell me? Why can’t she just be honest and tell me she hates me and doesn’t respect me because she hates my poems? Then I’ll know the truth! But doesn’t she know how sensitive I am? Didn’t we have a three-hour talk about how fragile I was about my poetry? How guarded I was? How private I was? Didn’t we have that talk about our mothers and how we didn’t know how to trust anyone because of our mothers? Didn’t we talk about how there is a vital organ missing inside us, this vital organ called the ego? Our egos are like gigantic empty pools that will never get full, Helen! Where are you, you crazy bitch? Talk to me about my poems!