This NOV 2024 The Vanguard Issue story is available in print.

Joseph Orzal is the executive and creative director at NoMüNoMü, the D.C.-born, all-things-go gallery, and revolutionary artistic space located on Howard Street in Baltimore.

Growing up in D.C. as a first-generation Filipino-Mexican child of immigrants, Orzal observed the U.S. art world—museums and galleries alike—as widely catered to Anglo cultures, often making them unwelcoming to marginalized patrons and artists of color. Time and time again, radical artists have experienced the suppression and alienation of their work in the name of political sterilization and neoliberal palatability. The ‘art world’ as it stands, has remained in the pockets of those who only seek to maintain their bourgeoisie authority over culture and wealth distribution.

The artist, curator, and seasoned organizer co-founded NoMüNomü in 2014 with Nora Mueller, opening it as an intersectional artist collective and community activation space working to decolonize and open up this gated arena. The space is a radical departure from the ‘neutral’ nomenclature of Western art institutions, which makes funding difficult to come by. Not only does NoMüNomü successfully elevate artists, it also successfully establishes a clear agenda to serve the masses.

“You can only have a few [business] models, right? The nonprofit model… there's no other kind of model [for us]. So you can only do what you can do, and get what you can get. So I think it does require us to have someone who can dedicate all their time to figuring out the monetary streams for that model. So we don't have to rely on funders who are aligned with genocide,”

Orzal continues on the difficulty of balancing principled anti-capitalism with funding a gallery in a capitalist system. “Like, it's not how my brain works. And that's been part of the problem, my whole brain has been built around anti-capitalism, and now I'm being forced to be like, ‘How do we, how can we, make more and more and more money?’ That has been a huge adjustment that I'm learning for sure,” he says. “The hardest part is the system. You learn, as a nonprofit, an incorporated, whatever within the Baltimore community, when you have these principles that people don't like, they're not going to fund you. And that’s it.”

Orzal has had a hand in some of the DMV’s best-known activist moments. He was one of the organizers of #DontMuteDC, activating NoMüNoMü to screen print posters supporting the movement to protect go-go artists from gentrifiers. He later co-edited Long Live GoGo: The Movement, a 2021 photo book that features more than 90 images from the 2019 Moechella protests. NoMüNoMü regularly platforms local actions and mutual aid efforts.

Now living in Baltimore, Joseph Orzal continues to provide space for creatives looking for accessible workspace, exhibitions of local art, and all-ages events. He often reserves the gallery for political activations and organizations like the Baltimore chapter of Black Alliance for Peace. Shaped by a collectivist ethos in both its structure and programming, it often encounters the same challenges that befall many DIY, grassroots collectives.

“How do we create these systems where care is more built-in? It doesn't seem like that. It always seems like it falls on a person in organizing, you know, the workforce. And they just get burnt out,” Orzal says. “I feel like that was me in the space. It's just like all this work kept falling on me, you know, and you try and you try but… I'm becoming more cognizant of [asking myself] ‘Where am I?’ Do I have people who are around me who are like, ‘Hey, please go to Spa World today and chill, and then come back to work.’ I don't know. People don't have money. Spa World is expensive as shit. You can't just go every other day. And it's far. And, like, all of that stuff, if there's no class analysis on self care, it's just like… but for who? Like, who can afford that shit? Poor people can't. So, I don't know, but I mean….we have to figure that out.”

Navigating the redlines of the non-profit-industrial complex, various social solidarities, and keeping a midtown space activated can be a difficult, mind-consuming calculus for an executive director. To sustain himself, Orzal refers back to nature, grounded in a philosophical perspective that recognizes the limitations of human power and control. 

“I do want to get back into producing beautiful things and shows, and pushing up on ideas, and making and creating exhibitions that can reflect a type of criticality of the times. Even like what we were talking about with self-care. It's like, what does a show that kind of pokes at that notion look like? So, [imagining] the space as something that pushes our imaginations more.”

I’m learning more and more to meditate, and I kind of go internally and watch my thoughts and what those do. Calm them down and kind of just go, If I can, to places that remind me that we're not as powerful as we think we are, you know what I mean? Like the ocean, or amongst lots and lots of trees, you know? Just to remind myself that the ocean, a tidal wave, can just take out an entire coast of yachts in a second and we have this illusion that all these things and people have all this power, but it's…we're not, we're just not.”

His call for artworld overseers is ‘Don’t be scared, fund radical spaces.’