the hierarchy is not neutral
john ros
may 2026
In the 90s and oughts I was doing what young artists do: applying. Juried shows, academic exhibitions, open calls — anything that might add a line to the CV, anything that might signal to the gatekeepers that I was worth paying attention to. The rejections came fast and kept coming. A fellow BFA grad was in the same position. The same closed doors. The same stack of form letters.
So we stopped applying and started building. pocket was an artist-run exhibition space in downtown Binghamton, NY — it started as a shared studio space and quickly became a place where we wanted to show our work and the work of others in the community. Artist spaces have a long legacy in the art world, and though it was scrappy, people came. The community came. Conversation followed. What we made there was a critical mass, a gathering, something alive that no juried show could have offered us.
pocket was not an anomaly. The history of art is full of artists who built their own infrastructure when the existing structures wouldn’t have them. The Salon des Refusés in 1863 — Courbet, Manet and others rejected by the official Paris Salon — mounted their own exhibition and changed the terms of the conversation entirely. Harlem in the 1920s and 30s was a self-generated cultural ecosystem: artists, writers, musicians building institutions, publications and audiences from within a community that the mainstream art world was actively ignoring. The artists of the East Village in the early 80s — Jean-Michel Basquiat showing in storefronts and parking lots before gallery recognition, graffiti writers claiming public space as their exhibition venue. Faith Ringgold, refused by galleries that wouldn’t show her work, organizing her own shows and later co-founding Where We At — a collective formed in the early 1970s by artists who found themselves excluded from both the white-dominated mainstream and a male-dominated Black arts movement, and who decided, collectively, that the answer was to build something in refusal. Senga Nengudi and David Hammons performing under the freeways of Los Angeles, making work in and for the streets because the streets were more honest than the institutions — and because the institutions hadn’t offered an invitation. The move was the same across all of them: when the door is shut, build your own room.
What these artists understood — what pocket taught me — is that the gatekeepers are not the ceiling. They are a wall you can go around.
We built our own infrastructure. I sold work out of the studio — but more importantly we maintained a steady conversation around art in the community. Once I let go of seeking approval from external forces, I learned to build differently — and stronger. That period was an expansion too: graphic design skills developed out of necessity, institutional knowledge accumulated through doing, critical frameworks sharpened through the daily work of running a space with no roadmap. No degree program. No credential other than commitment, time and an education that comes from being fully responsible for something. It was unofficial business school, a grounding in activist organizing and community building, and a deepening of what I had been forming — a critique not just of specific institutions but of the field itself: its economies, its standards, its inherited assumptions about what counts and who gets to say so.
The work continued with galleryELL, and in the solidarity I found with other artist-run spaces in New York City, what was being built was real conversation — more rigorous, more urgent, more sustaining than most of what was happening in the spaces the art world considered legitimate — because we were on the ground making. We were contending with the daily struggle of life in our city. We were asking the difficult questions we all too often faced — financial sustainability, the conditions that make making possible, the day job, gentrification, visibility, the boundaries the gatekeepers kept drawing and redrawing — and we were doing it together.
Still, I kept applying — because that is what we are told we are supposed to do. And I had heard it long enough to still believe the gate was worth aiming for. More than a decade into my practice, I was going after more prestigious grants and residencies, and the gatekeepers held their position. What shifted was my orientation: I had come to understand that I wanted to push the academic dimension of the practice rather than the commercial gallery track. I applied more specifically toward that end. A few opportunities arose, but for the most part the rejections kept coming, and with them a particular feeling — that without the right credential, the door to that world would stay shut regardless of the work. So I decided to pursue the MFA. In many ways the decision was transactional. I needed the credential to move through certain doors. Again, the gatekeepers were unsure — and waitlisted me. After a phone call I was in. The lesson was not that the system rewards persistence. Sometimes the door just opens. And sometimes it doesn’t.
What I found inside those doors was anything but transactional — the people, the care, the sustained attention of artists working toward something together. And time. Surviving in New York City as an art handler had real advantages — proximity to work, to curators, to institutions, to conversations — but it was exhausting, and the label followed you everywhere — once the art handler, never the artist. The studio calls for sustained presence. The degree, whatever its transactional dimensions, answered that call. I am still in close contact with some of those artists. The degree ended. The community didn’t.
What the path outside the system built in me was not what any institution had planned. It started with unlearning. Every artist who moves through institutions — art school, the gallery system, the grant economy — absorbs its logic whether they intend to or not. We learn to describe our work in language that travels, that sounds legible to the people who hold resources. We learn to frame ambition in terms of career trajectory. We learn to read a room and calibrate accordingly. Unlearning this is slow and ongoing work. It means refusing the internalized hierarchy — the voice that asks whether the work is prestigious enough, well-reviewed enough, shown in the right places by the right people. It means learning to trust the work itself as the primary intelligence, not the market’s response to it. For me, unlearning accelerated in the years I spent building rather than applying — because building forced a different set of questions. Not: will this be accepted? But: what does this need to be? Not: who will show this? But: who is this for and what does it do in the world?
The second thing was harder to name but easier to feel — what the academy would call epistemological, the knowledge that comes only from sustained practice in the studio and in community. This is not knowledge you can receive or be granted. It accumulates through doing, through return, through the particular intelligence that develops when you spend years with a set of problems and refuse to abandon them. It is knowing that is inseparable from making — the way a material teaches you its logic, the way a body of work generates questions that no amount of reading could have surfaced. The credential does not confer this knowledge. The work does. What I have come to understand about labor, time, value and the invisible economies of making did not come from a syllabus. It came from the studio, from years of making work about exactly these conditions while living them simultaneously.
The third was the most sustaining — what the academy would call phenomenological: the knowledge built in and through relationship, conversation and shared struggle. The communities I have been part of — from pocket to galleryELL to the MFA to the ongoing networks of artists, organizers and educators I move with now — have produced a form of knowing that is irreducible to individual achievement. This is care as infrastructure: what becomes possible when artists show up for each other consistently, when the space between people becomes a site of genuine exchange rather than competition. It includes alternative economies — trade, gift, mutual support, shared resources. Alternative value systems — where seriousness is measured by commitment and rigor rather than market position. Alternative standards for what constitutes meaningful work, significant contribution, a practice worth sustaining. This kind of knowing makes you a stronger artist, a more honest teacher, a more effective organizer. It roots you in the world you are actually trying to address.
I am entering what the field would call the established stage of my career — and my CV looks nothing like what the system says it should. There are self-built platforms where established and recognizable galleries are supposed to go. There is community-rooted work that doesn’t translate cleanly into the metrics the system uses to measure seriousness. A grant reviewer, hiring committee, or curator approaching my record through the standard lens would find it incomplete. What they would miss is that the incompleteness is the record — it documents a practice built from where I was, with what I had, refusing to wait for permission that was never coming.
Martin Puryear spent two years in Sierra Leone with the Peace Corps, making things, learning craft, operating entirely outside the art world’s line of sight. Henry Ossawa Tanner left the United States for Paris not as a retreat but as an assertion — refusing to be reduced by a culture that couldn’t see him whole, building a practice on his own terms across two continents. Howardena Pindell spent twelve years working inside MoMA — first as exhibition assistant, eventually as associate curator — making her own paintings after hours — and when the pull of her own practice became undeniable, she left. The through line is refusal — to internalize the institution’s assessment, and to stop.
Jo Baer left New York for Europe in the early 1970s — not because the art world had rejected her, but because she refused the terms of her own success. Recognized as a leading minimalist painter, she walked away from that recognition to pursue figuration — a decision the New York scene did not know how to rationalize. She was unwilling to be defined by what the market had already decided she was. I knew her, and wrote about her work — and her particular form of refusal, the willingness to abandon a hard-won position rather than be confined by it, has stayed with me.
The labels — emerging, mid-career, established — are the gate’s way of organizing what should not be organized. Contained. Managed. Made to feel less-than. These labels make hierarchy sound like neutral observation, like seasons, like natural growth. They borrow the language of development to naturalize what is actually a system of access control. They tell artists where they stand in relation to institutional approval — and train them to see that approval as the destination.
And now the system has migrated to our screens. The metrics of social media — follower counts, engagement rates, algorithmic visibility — have extended the logic of the gallery into every phone and every studio and every day. We cannot escape it — and it becomes harder by the day to separate that rubric from our own sense of where we stand. Artists track likes and followers the way they once tracked acceptances. The platform has become a new gatekeeper — an additional hurdle — and because it feels self-generated, because we built the profile ourselves and chose the images and wrote the captions, it can be harder to see that the rules of recognition have simply changed hands. The house always wins. And we keep volunteering — our time, our work, our attention.
But here is what the system cannot account for: creatives are the visionaries. We are the ones who make something from nothing, who build rather than audit, who ask what the world could be rather than administer what it already is. The artist-run space, the collective, the informal network, the chance gathering, the studio visit that turns into a decade-long conversation — these are the engine of culture and community. They have always been its engine. The institution follows. The institution names, collects and historicizes what the makers already made.
The work was never waiting for the label. It was happening in downtown Binghamton in a space we built because there was nowhere else. It was happening under the freeways of Los Angeles, in the streets and vacant lots of the East Village, in Harlem living rooms and Paris studios, in community centers and community colleges and community gardens, wherever artists decided that the work mattered more than the permission. It is happening right now in cities and towns the art world has never visited, in languages it doesn’t speak, in forms it hasn’t yet developed the vocabulary to recognize.
We build from where we are. We build with what we have. We create the critical mass and the conversation follows. Making is a practice. Building is a practice. Showing up for each other is a practice. This is how culture actually moves — not from the institution outward, but from the studio, the street, the collective, the room we made because no one offered us one. The hierarchy is not neutral. And you don’t need its permission to begin.