New York, NY, October 1, 2024 – Dia Art Foundation is pleased to present Cameron Rowland: Properties, an exhibition of new work by Cameron Rowland, opening at Dia Beacon on October 4, 2024.

Cameron Rowland: Properties is curated by Jordan Carter and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curators and co–department heads at Dia Art Foundation.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.

Cameron Rowland: Properties is made possible by significant support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support provided by Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and Terra Foundation for American Art.

 

Properties
Cameron Rowland

No matter how degraded the factory hand, he is not real estate. . . . “It is safe to say that the law regards a Negro slave, so far as his civil status is concerned, purely and absolutely property, to be bought and sold and pass and descend as a tract of land, a horse, or an ox.”¹

—W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

 

     Property in the United States is predicated on slavery.² In tracing the emergence of U.S. property law, K-Sue Park writes that “laws evolved to render land and people the two most significant market commodities during this period.”³ “Real estate” described the combination of stolen indigenous land and slaves.⁴ Enslaved people were components of the land. The land was a prison. The carceral twinning of enslaved people and property produced value. Slaves were simultaneously commodities and assets who were the producers of commodities and assets. Partus sequitur ventrem stipulated that all children of enslaved women would be the property of their owners. Judge James Gholson argued before the Virginia Legislature, “The legal maxim of ‘Partus sequitur ventrem’ is coeval with the existence of the right of property itself.”⁵

     This right to property was not extinguished by the end of slavery but was sustained through each phase of abolition. The value of enslaved people was tied to the value of their production. Northern merchants set the export prices of slave-produced commodities, which determined the market value of the crop, the land, and the slaves. Northern politicians constructed federal tariff laws to benefit Northern merchants, who were also bankers and plantation lenders. In this way the North controlled much of the economy of U.S. slavery. Northern abolition of slavery was strategically linked to the disenfranchisement of black people in an effort to enhance this control. Northern states increased their representation in the House of Representatives by counting newly free black people as one person rather than as three-fifths of a person, while simultaneously prohibiting black people from voting. The political and economic benefits of Northern abolition relied on the maintenance of slavery in the South and the maintenance of black subhumanity in the North. Southern secession disrupted the supply chains of Northern merchants who bought and sold the goods produced by slaves, Northern mills that processed those goods, and Northern manufacturers that produced tools and supplies for plantations. Northern efforts to preserve the Union stemmed from the need to maintain the interstate dependencies of an economy and a government that hinged on black exploitation. As Lincoln stated at the outset of the Civil War, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”⁶
     The Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery. It applied only to the Confederate states, which did not recognize any laws of the Union. It was intended to incentivize enslaved black people to cross into the Union, despite the fact that slavery was still legal in every Union state that bordered the Confederacy—Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.⁷ But as W. E. B. Du Bois writes in Black Reconstruction in America, “Slavery was not abolished even after the Thirteenth Amendment. There were four million freedmen and most of them on the same plantation, doing the same work that they did before emancipation, except as their work had been interrupted and changed by the upheaval of war. Moreover, they were getting about the same wages and apparently were going to be subject to slave codes modified only in name.”⁸ Black codes forced the formerly enslaved to sign labor contracts for wages that would not cover the basic costs of life. If they refused, they could be arrested for being jobless or homeless, crimes under the black codes. Under the exception clause of the Thirteenth Amendment, prisoners were made to work as convict lease laborers, who were leased to plantation owners and the growing number of Southern industrialists. Many convict lease laborers were forced to become sharecroppers by being leased to farms, charged for necessities, and trapped in a cycle of perpetual debt.⁹
     Sharecropping was debt peonage. Sharecroppers named it as such.¹⁰ Sharecropping contracts were designed to keep black people bound to the land, which their labor made valuable. Plantation owners became landlords who paid sharecroppers a minority portion of the crop’s market value. Landlords were under no obligation to accurately report the market value. Sharecroppers were forced to buy clothes, food, tools, and other necessities on credit at the landlord’s company store, otherwise known as the commissary. These lines of credit carried extortionate interest rates of up to 70 percent. The combination of coercive contracts and predatory lending made black debt bondage a new standard that would supply the unfree black labor that both the South and the North required. Binding black debtors to the land reconstituted white owners’ plantation property. Sharecroppers inherited debts, and landlords inherited sharecroppers. Du Bois succinctly describes how “property control especially of land and labor had always dominated politics in the South, and after the war, it set itself to put labor to work at a wage approximating as nearly as possible slavery conditions, in order to restore capital lost in the war.”¹¹
     This goal was served by the numerous methods of unfreedom developed throughout the South and the North to reconstitute enslaved property. An essay titled “More Slavery at the South,” published in 1912 by an anonymous author under the pseudonym “Negro Nurse,” detailed the proximity of black women’s labor in Georgia to slavery:

More than two-thirds of the negroes of the town where I live are menial servants of one kind or another, and besides that more than two-thirds of the negro women here, whether married or single, are compelled to work for a living—as nurses, cooks, washerwomen, chambermaids, seamstresses, hucksters, janitresses, and the like. I will say, also, that the condition of this vast host of poor colored people is just as bad as, if not worse than, it was during the days of slavery. . . . I see my own children only when they happen to see me on the streets when I am out with the [white] children. . . . You might as well say that I’m on duty all the time—from sunrise to sunrise, every day in the week. I am the slave, body and soul, of this family.¹²

The author specifies that the labor expected of black domestic workers was not limited to cooking, cleaning, and childcare. White homeowners consistently entitled themselves to inflict sexual and reproductive violence on the black women they employed. This entitlement to white enjoyment was a form of racial terror.¹³ Tera Hunter describes the continued treatment of black women’s bodies as the property of the employer: “A Black woman’s body, in slavery and freedom, was treated as though it were not her own.”¹⁴

     As they had under slavery, black people put the terms of their exploitation in a state of constant contention. They took food from the homeowner, stole corn from the crop, were idle, abandoned the field and the contract. They organized as workers who did not meet the Marxist criteria of the proletariat. Many organized in secret. Others announced themselves as black unions. In 1838 the Caulkers Association was formed to protect black workers in the Baltimore shipyards. In 1886 black farmers in Texas created the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union, which grew to include over a million members with chapters in Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas. Sharecroppers created the Croppers’ and Farm Workers’ Union in Alabama and the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America in Arkansas. Laundry workers organized strikes in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1866; Galveston, Texas, in 1877; and Atlanta, Georgia, in 1881.¹⁵ Undermining and organizing were the ground of dissenting property and “unwilling possessions.”¹⁶ They were extensions of the black sociality built through the non/being of slavery.¹⁷ Black sociality was the arena in which the mass of black property recognized its deindividuated capacity. It was, and remains, a living contradiction to the individualism of capital and contract. It threatens the stability and value of property.
     The implications of this instability fueled Northern and Southern support for Confederate “redemption,” Jim Crow, and the Klan. Du Bois describes these rearticulations of slavery as functions of the white fear of the property:

The masters feared their former slaves’ success far more than their anticipated failure. They lied about the Negroes. They accused them of theft, crime, moral enormities and laughable grotesqueries. They forestalled the danger of a united Southern labor movement by appealing to the fear and hate of white labor and offering them alliance and leisure. They encouraged them to ridicule Negroes and beat them, kill and burn their bodies. . . . And thus was built a Solid South impervious to reason, justice or fact. With this arose a Solid North—a North born of that North which never meant to abolish Negro slavery, because its profits were built on it.¹⁸

Execution was a regular form of punishment under slave law. Slaves could be killed, without a trial, by any authorized white person, for any minor infraction. As with livestock, the owner was permitted to determine the life, reproduction, and death of their enslaved property. Mass killings, often as retribution for slave rebellions, were also regular. Many are well documented: the executions following the Stono rebellion in Virginia, the executions following La Escalera in Cuba, the executions following the Christmas rebellion in Jamaica, the executions following the 1741 slave conspiracy in New York. Many are unrecorded. The normalized killing of black people as a form of punishment, fearmongering, and control was uninterrupted by the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
     In December of 1865, one month after the conclusion of the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, by former Confederate soldiers. It was one of many white-supremacist hate groups founded during this time period. These included the White League, the Knights of the White Camelia, the White Line, and the Red Shirts. They quickly established systems of enforcement that continued the murderous management strategies of slavery. While these methods were no longer legal, the Klan consistently comprised police officers, judges, and government officials. The Klan drew its power from its members’ positions of authority, which sustained white impunity for any violence against black people. As the Klan grew in popularity, the number of its members in positions of power also grew across the country. By the 1920s the Klan claimed that 62 percent of Congress and twenty-six governors were affiliated with the organization.¹⁹ The 1920s-era Klan “was stronger in the North than in the South.”²⁰ The prevalence of the Klan demonstrated that amendments to the Constitution would not protect against the systemic murder of black people. This apparent contradiction is the paradigm of lynch law.
     Efforts to exterminate black insubordination were frequently described as race riots. In 1871, a group of black farm workers from Sumter County, Alabama, migrated to Meridian, Mississippi. The Sumter County Klan then travelled to Meridian to recover the farmers, who they believed belonged to them. The “turbulent negroes” refused to leave and attacked the Klan members who sought to take them. This led to a two-day struggle, during which the Klan killed thirty black farmers.²¹

     In 1887, one thousand black sugarcane workers went on strike in Thibodaux, Louisiana, to protest the fact that their wages were paid only in credit at the commissary. The striking workers were ordered to leave their homes on the plantation. They refused and were described in the New Orleans Daily Picayune as “the most vicious and unruly set of negroes” who “no power on earth could remove . . . unless they were removed as corpses.”²² In response to this unruly disorder, the landowners and the state militia went door to door to find suspected strike leaders. They killed sixty black people and left their bodies in an unmarked mass grave that was turned into a landfill.²³
     In 1919, black sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Black people outnumbered white people in Elaine ten to one. In an effort to retain control over the terms of black labor, the landlords decided to kill every member of the organization. The landlords shot up a union meeting, killing over one hundred black people. Nearly one hundred more were arrested for the deaths of the five white people who were shot by union members. Ida B. Wells wrote and published a dedicated pamphlet describing what took place, in an effort to build public support for the farmers then on death row. As one of the farmers she interviewed stated, “They did this to take our crops from us and run us away.”²⁴ In the chapter titled “what white folks got from the riot,” Wells describes that the landlords had timed this mass killing to occur after the crops had been laid by and made ready for harvest.²⁵ She calculates that “the white lynchers of Phillips County made a cool million dollars last year off the cotton crop of the twelve men who are sentenced to death, the seventy-five who are in the Arkansas penitentiary, and the one hundred whom they lynched outright on that awful October 1, 1919!”²⁶
     By 1931 the Alabama Croppers’ and Farm Workers’ Union (CFWU) had eight hundred members. The union was founded by black communists whose work was an extension of the political domain of the enslaved.²⁷ Like the cane workers in Thibodaux, members of the CFWU in Tallapoosa County were organizing for cash wages rather than commissary credit as well as for scheduled breaks, a minimum wage, and small plots for subsistence gardens.²⁸ Robin Kelley describes the first attempt to destroy the group: “Although police chief Wilson could not legally act out his wish to ‘kill every member of the “Reds” there and throw them into the creek,’ the Camp Hill police department stood idle as enraged white citizens waged genocidal attacks on the black community that left dozens wounded or dead and forced entire families to seek refuge in the woods.”²⁹ Approximately fifty-five union members were arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, conspiracy to murder, or assault with intent to murder.³⁰ As black labor organizing proliferated throughout Alabama in the 1930s, so too did Klan chapters with a stated mandate to quash black communists. 

     The pursuit of a social order “approximating as nearly as possible slavery conditions” governed the actions of white employers, workers, police officers, politicians, and landowners. These actions frequently came in response to black unionization, black strikes, black reclamation, and other modes of black survival. Black people remained the terrain on which white political-economic power struggles were fought. Du Bois writes of this position that “above all, we must remember the black worker was the ultimate exploited; that he formed that mass of labor which had neither wish nor power to escape from the labor status, in order to directly exploit other laborers, or indirectly, by alliance with capital, to share in their exploitation.”³¹ The indissoluble capacity of this black mass is precisely what white supremacists sought to exterminate. Black rioters refused to live or die as assets. Black people’s use of violence was categorically distinct from that of white supremacists who sought to retain them as property. The race riot is the site of continued domination, and of its disavowal. It contains the mass killings of black people, and the very reason that white people felt these mass killings were necessary: the irreconcilability of unwilling possessions within the frame of capital and the wage.
     Black rioting intervened on mass killings. It violated the category of property. Its radicality has been occluded within the neutralizing framework of the “race riot.” Black rioting does not rely on legal rights or admission to the category of human. It emerges from the black mass that does not conform to the logic of individual freedom requisite for capital accumulation.³² It runs below the index of history. It is property in rebellion.

 

¹ W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935; repr., New York: Free Press, 1998), 10. Du Bois quotes A Picture of Slaver­y, Drawn from the Decisions of Southern Courts (Philadelphia: Crissy & Markley, 1863), 5.
² Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 10, 1993): 1716, 1718, 1721.
³ K-Sue Park, “The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Field,” Yale Law Journal 131, no. 4 (Feb. 2022): 1120.
⁴ Park, “The History Wars and Property Law,” 1117.
⁵ James H. Gholson, “Second Day of Debate: January 12, 1832,” in Sons of the Fathers: The Virginia Slavery Debates of 1831–1832, ed. Erik S. Root (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 45.
⁶ Abraham Lincoln, letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862, Daily National Intelligencer, August 23, 1862.
⁷ Kentucky did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1976.
⁸ Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 188.
⁹ A Georgia Negro Peon, “The New Slavery in the South—An Autobiography,” Independent, February 25, 1904, 413.
¹⁰ A Georgia Negro Peon, “The New Slavery in the South,” 409–14.
¹¹ Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 586.
¹² A Negro Nurse, “More Slavery at the South,” Independent, January 25, 1912, 196–200.
¹³ Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 2022), 21–78.
¹⁴ Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom : Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 74.
¹⁵ Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 106.
¹⁶ William Beckford Jr., Remarks Upon the Situation of the Negroes in Jamaica (London: 1788), 52–53, quoted in Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: Black Society in Jamaica, 1655–1838 (1967; repr., Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022), 81.
¹⁷ Christina Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 15.
¹⁸ Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 633.
¹⁹ Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK : The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017), 164.
²⁰ Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK , 2.
²¹ Michael Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 32–33.
²² John DeSantis, The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2016), 103.
²³ DeSantis, The Thibodaux Massacre, 140.
²⁴ Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Arkansas Race Riot (Chicago: printed by the author, 1920), 18.
²⁵ Wells-Barnett, The Arkansas Race Riot , 19.
²⁶ Wells-Barnett, The Arkansas Race Riot, 24.
²⁷ Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (1990; repr., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 101.
²⁸ Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 40.
²⁹ Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 41.
³⁰ Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 41.
³¹ Du Bois, Black Reconsturction in America, 15.
³² Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 201–21.

 

About Cameron Rowland

Cameron Rowland was born in Philadelphia in 1988. They live in New York.

About Dia Art Foundation

Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s. 

In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally. These include: 

• Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all located in New York
• De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in western New Mexico
• Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
• Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
• De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany 
• Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)

For additional information or materials, contact: 

(U.S. press inquiries)
Hannah Gompertz, Dia Art Foundation, hgompertz@diaart.org, +1 212 293 5598
Melissa Parsoff, Parsoff Communications, mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com, +1 516 445 5899

(International press inquiries)
Sam Talbot, sam@sam-talbot.com, +44 (0) 772 5184 630