Nolan Hanson - An Effort To Defend

Art Space Is Your Space Residency, 2020/2021

Virtual Residency August - September 2020, in-person exhibition May 2021

An Effort To Defend brings together posters which feature people from three institutions: the New Bed Stuy Boxing Center– a boxing gym in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn founded by the late George Washington and currently run by Nate Boyd, Trans Boxing– an art project in the form of a boxing club that centers trans and gender variant people, founded by Nolan Hanson, and Queen City Boxing Club– a gym located in the West End neighborhood of Cincinnati, which was founded by the late Jackie Shropshire and is now run by Frank Rhodes.

While these affiliations may seem disparate– there are ways in which the three overlap and intersect. For example, Frank Rhodes was at the 1984 Olympic qualifiers with Mark Breland– a former professional and amateur champion who, alongside Nolan’s trainer, Carl Westbrooks, was trained by George Washington. Carl trains several fighters from Trans Boxing, including Maggie Walsh, Camden Zyler, and Kerry Thomas.

The work is situated within a complicated and brutal context. In America, diversity is at work nowhere more prominently than in the identities of the victims and the mechanisms through which they are targeted. Among other affronts, the status quo is a demoralizing culture of gun violence, anti-black policing, anti-immigration sentiment, an incomprehensible death toll from the covid-19 pandemic, a surge in hate crimes against Asian-Americans, and the unprecedented wave of legislation being introduced targets the basic rights of transgender and non-binary people. 2021 is on track to be the deadliest year in recorded history for transgender people.

Private and public spaces alike have been designated as potential crime scenes: a person’s bedroom, a grocery store, a spa, the front seat of somebody’s car, a dark hallway in an apartment building. It’s starting to feel like the most American thing one could feel is fear.

In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon writes, “All around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.” Of his banal and habitual movements, he writes, “ I make all these moves. Not out of habit, but by implicit knowledge. A slow construction of myself as a body in a spatial and temporal world…” The sport historically attracts people on the margins– for whom safety, representation, and agency has had to be fought for, and defended, over and over again. Boxing exerts control on fighters incrementally, and temporarily liberates the people who submit themselves to it from the realities outside the gym, in which the rules of engagement are often incoherent and contradictory.

Of the title, An Effort To Defend, Nolan states, “Over the course of this past year, the title has been repeating in my head like an echo, every time I hear about something that confronts me with an overwhelming sense of defenselessness. Recently, I’ve started to think of the title as an explanation of how I want my art practice to function in society; as a sort of defensive strategy.” 

The 2020 Art Space is Your Space Residency Program is supported by attendees of the High 5 Fiesta and members of Wave Pool.