Aria Dean
The collision of ready-made poetics and cold bureaucracy raises provocative questions in the artist’s new exhibition at Dia Beacon.
Cameron Rowland: Properties, installation view. Courtesy Dia Beacon. Pictured, far left: Commissary, 2024. Center, back wall: Plot, 2024 (detail). Far right: Increase, 2024.
Cameron Rowland: Properties, curated by Jordan Carter and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Dia Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY,
through October 20, 2025
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First, an empty vestibule with a bench, no art in it. Then, the exhibition: the centerpiece of Properties, Cameron Rowland’s new presentation at Dia Beacon, is Plot (2024), a one-acre parcel of land on the institution’s property not readily visible from its galleries. Instead, we initially encounter the work indoors, along with found objects, in the form of a framed easement—“a grant,” according to the legal dictionary, “of non-possessory property interest that provides the easement holder permission to use another person’s land.” This particular easement signs over the Dia parcel to Plot Inc. “for the purpose,” as we learn from the exhibition materials, “of protecting the graves of enslaved people who may have been buried there.”
Plot Inc.’s rights to the land and the prohibition of its development continue even if Dia transfers ownership of its grounds to someone else. The exhibition materials also tell us that the plot will “degrade the value of the institution’s property.” You can see in the paperwork that the notary’s location had to be amended—“The Bronx,” not “Ulster County,” which gives the austere array of documents some humor, calling up the legal process and all its annoyances. It also makes the work feel rather human, vaguely reminding us that the law is in fact little more than a collaboratively upheld set of rituals or social fictions.
If this is so—as any good lawyer will tell you—then the terms of Rowland’s contract with Dia raise some questions. Will this plot indeed devalue Dia’s property? The work seems to take “value” as a very general concept and disregard the particularities of the possibly conflicting systems of value that surround it. On the simplest level, does the land’s assured “devaluation” result from the basic math of the situation (dollar value per square foot)—by subtracting the one acre that could have been transferred to the next owner of Dia from the lot? Or is it devalued ideologically, thanks to a learned paranoia about burial grounds in the US after centuries of desecrating the graves of Native peoples? Does the land become undesirable in this regard? Or should we look toward another value schema, more intimate to the project, that of the speculative contemporary art market? Here, what matters is that, in name, there is a conceptual work by the artist Cameron Rowland on the grounds. Is the land’s value not more likely to appreciate in the same way that a house previously owned by a celebrity would?
Messy economics aside, the work still works. In my view, the actuality of the devaluation is secondary; what is primary is the may and the might of it all. We are asked to assume that if there may be slaves buried there, then there are. Perhaps this logic can be extended to Rowland’s assumptions about value—that if the plot may devalue the land, then it will. These shifts in perspective allegorize a larger proposition: if American capitalism and its regimes of property may be rooted in slavery at their very core, then they are. If slavery may be the bedrock of everything we know, then it is. If this is a fact, then what do we do? Or the question art can try to answer: If this fact is metabolized, then what does it mean?
Increase, 2024. Bed frame, 46 × 42 × 78 inches.
Under slave law, partus sequitur ventrem stipulated that the “child follows the belly.” When slave owners bought black women, they also purchased the rights to what owners termed “all her future increase.”
Saidiya Hartman describes the centrality of this principle to the system of racial slavery: “The work of sex and procreation was the chief motor for reproducing the material, social, and symbolic relations of slavery. The value accrued through reproductive labor was brutally apparent to the enslaved who protested bitterly against being bred like cattle and oxen.” 1
This status was constructed to last forever. What Jennifer Morgan names as “the value of a reproducing labor force” has ordered the continuity of this sexual violence. 2 Domestic work has been a principal vector for its preservation. Live-in workers have been made perpetually available to their employers.
Refusals of this availability are criminalized. Christina Sharpe makes clear that “living in/the wake of slavery is living ‘the afterlife of property’ and living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother. That inheritance of a non/status is everywhere apparent now in the ongoing criminalization of Black women and children.” 3
Non/being constitutes a position whose modalities of life and death are simultaneously structured by and unrecognizable to the capture of ownership. As Hartman writes, “The forms of care, intimacy, and sustenance exploited by racial capitalism, most importantly, are not reducible to or exhausted by it. These labors cannot be assimilated to the template or grid of the black worker, but instead nourish the latent text of the fugitive. They enable those ‘who were never meant to survive’ to sometimes do just that.” 4
This fugitivity is an inherent threat to the value of increase.
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1 Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” Souls 18, no. 1 (Jan.– Mar. 2016): 169.
2 Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 3.
3 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 15.
4 Hartman, “The Belly of the World,” 171.
It is a powerful wager, but one that is hampered by the exhibition’s object-based components, which counter the cold bureaucracy of Plot with Rowland’s signature minimal ready-made poetics. Commissary (2024) leans five scythes against a wall, upside down and at rest. Together, they’re beautiful, melancholy, and menacing, at once weapons and tools—the sharecropper’s rebellion being bound up in his labor. A bed frame (Increase, 2024) and a worn-out, inverted pot (Underproduction, 2024) are pushed against two other walls a little less elegantly, as though Rowland were aware that placing them too close to the center of the gallery would either make them overtly transmit “sculpture” or seem to imply their use too directly, as though the exhibition space would suddenly become a stage and the absence of the bodies that would use these objects all too noticeable.
Rowland’s work is at its best when it lodges itself in and manipulates systems, reconfiguring financial flows toward ends that show us something about the machinery of institutions and racial capitalism—even if the reconfiguration is symbolic and fleeting. These operations demystify the structural relations of the art world, heavy industry, insurance, and—like Plot—posit alternative narratives built on more accurate, more radical histories. However, something different happens when an object is asked to embody or participate in these operations. Maybe it brings a sort of melancholia, or just does what Marcel Broodthaers told us that all art ultimately does: reifies. Maybe art reifies in a specifically unsettling way when the art in question is already concerned with how capital turns people—especially Black people—into commodities and uses existing commodities to comment on that process and its attendant exploitations. Arranged as they are, the objects in Properties feel like props in relation to Plot, the absent presence that so intelligently anchors the show. For example, in the exhibition pamphlet, we are told that “the overturned pot protected meetings from the slave patrol.” The overturned pot—previously, to the eye, a useful object turned useless readymade sculpture—now waits for conspirators to gather or disperse. The connection is too firm between these objects, the bodies (people) that would have used them, and this Plot that models the places where they would have been buried and would have gathered.
Cameron Rowland, Estate, 2024. Dia Art Foundation Real Estate, 1974–2024. Books $10 each.
Schlumberger Limited, established in 1926, is the largest oilfield services company in the world. Descendants of founder Conrad Schlumberger used their shares in the company to create the Dia Art Foundation. Schlumberger Limited was the primary source of funds for the first decade of the institution. During this period, Dia purchased the majority of the fifty-nine real estate properties it has owned during the past fifty years.
The properties were purchased for artists, for artworks, for offices, for exhibition spaces, and as rentals. Many of these properties were given away. Many were sold at a high rate of return. A number continue to function as rental properties, which generate over $1 million of annual income for the institution.
Dia does not retain information on the history of these properties prior to the twentieth century.
Crucially, this plot is not specifically the place, these objects are not specifically those used. They are general, stand-ins, types of things that might be part of some such story, that illustrate that tale and draw us away from the knotty proposition at the exhibition’s core. Where Properties’ objects could rest on their own varied material lives, they are instead fixed in subservient connection to this story of enslavement, labor, and capital. These objects function differently from those in Rowland’s famed 2016 Artists Space exhibition (91020000), which landed there as the result and record of Rowland’s deft puppeteering of the prison industrial complex’s links to the nonprofit world. Those objects were allowed to populate the space because of the specific conditions of their production. The objects in Properties also differ from Rowland’s recent intervention in Glasgow (Obstruction, 2024), which used a seemingly nonspecific and relatively new metal padlock to block actual access to a cemetery that houses the graves of Scottish beneficiaries of the slave trade. As in these instances, Rowland’s objects are most successful when they investigate their own specific character as commodities, in use or out of it.
Alas, an artist must push forward, and with Properties, Rowland certainly does. However, the exhibition’s objects thematize rather than operate in a network with Black labor and its exploitation, aiding in what becomes a reductively narrative venture. They make a picture book out of Plot’s otherwise sprawling and intricate great American novel. We would be better-off left to peer beyond Dia’s landscaping job at the work’s non-presence and potential nonexistence and page through Rowland’s accompanying real-estate pamphlet (Estate, 2024), a pessimistic epilogue to this tale of racial capitalism or a preface to the next installment. Still, even with illustrations, Plot remains a rich read.
Aria Dean is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in New York City. She has exhibited widely in the US and internationally; recent exhibitions include Facts Worth Knowing at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles; Aria Dean: Abattoir at the ICA London; and Quiet as It’s Kept: Whitney Biennial 2022. From 2016 to 2021 she was a curator at Rhizome. Her first book of collected writing is out via Sternberg Press.