Cameron Rowland was born on 1988 and is an American conceptual artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and acclaimed for its structural analytic approach to addressing issues of American slavery, mass incarceration, and reparations.
17 Facts About Cameron Rowland
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Cameron Rowland is noted for their distinct method of loaning some works to collectors and institutions rather than selling them outright, an approach meant to mirror the experience of low-income people shopping at rent-to-own stores like Rent-A-Center and disrupt the traditional value structure in the contemporary art market.
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Cameron Rowland's artwork focuses on critiquing systems and institutions that perpetuate or benefit from racial injustices.
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Many of the objects Cameron Rowland uses for their artwork derive from online government auctions and scrap yards, from decommissioned municipal buildings and manufacturers of commercial security apparatuses.
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Cameron Rowland encourages museums not just to show work about marginalized communities but actually do something about how they live.
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Cameron Rowland is an example of an artist who is able to place conditions the terms of collection for their work.
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The lending model for Cameron Rowland represents a restructuring of value in the art market and an examination of the exchange of capital between artists and collectors.
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Since 2015, Cameron Rowland has made about half of their works available in this manner.
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Cameron Rowland's 2019 show at Art Basel in Miami Beach was their first show that solely presented works circulated under this model.
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Cameron Rowland uses artwork budgets and research to reveal Los Angeles' role in the violent displacement of the poor and people of color.
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Cameron Rowland focuses on these instances of legally sanctioned racism through D37, unveiling the very mechanisms of a government that makes its own rules to justify its own injustices.
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Cameron Rowland exhibited the show 91020000 at the Artists Space in New York in 2016.
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Cameron Rowland purchased four courtroom benches made of oak, a particle board office desk, and seven cast aluminum manhole rings through a partnership with Artists Space.
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Cameron Rowland interprets the prison labor force to be a practiced form of neo-slavery that continues to thrive in our present economy.
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In Cameron Rowland's essay explaining the work, they explicate how the 13th Amendment made it possible to incarcerate ex-slaves for vagrancy, allowing private companies and later state governments to exploit prisoners' free labor.
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Similar to how Cameron Rowland used some of D37's budget, they used some of the budget from the show to purchase $10,000 worth of the insurance company Aetna's shares, which held slave insurance policies for slave owners prior to the abolition of slavery, planning to hold onto the shares until the US government makes financial reparations for slavery, at which time the shares will be liquidated toward the payment of reparations.
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Cameron Rowland has participated in a large number of group exhibitions, including La Biennale de Montreal, the Whitney Biennial, and Afro-Atlantic Histories.