Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). This was a highlight for me as museum visits are part of my self-care and also a source of motivation to keep creating. During this particular visit, I was pleasantly surprised to see LACMA was, at that time, hosting the Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald. My time in the museum stirred up thoughts about the complications of art that also extend to the research enterprise. As such, I am moved to explicate my parallel concerns with the realms of art and research.
There are challenges in who gets to define them and assign their value:
What struck me immediately during my time at LACMA was the range of art and how some of what I saw might go unnoticed if anywhere else. This ultimately led me and company to ponder, “who gets to decide what counts as art?” This question echoes sentiments I remembered while listening to remarks from the late Virgil Abloh. In the lecture, one statement stood out most. Abloh discussed how depending on where something is placed, it becomes art. He referenced something like a dingy can in a cluttered room might not seem like art and then juxtaposed this with how this same can in an art museum somehow now means something. 
Dr. Constance Iloh
Similarly, research is taking place all around us. As I stated in a previous post, research has always been part of my life, just not in the ways I see given recognition. I have leveraged research to make sense of how to navigate a world that has continually proven itself unsafe and unrelentingly punitive. I have come to realize that what I consider research is far more expansive than the often gatekept research domains I now navigate.
The contributions of minoritized people are often relegated to special exhibits and issues:
