Cameron Rowland

D37, shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA) in 2018 and 2019, was one of Rowland's largest solo exhibitions. Rowland uses artwork budgets and research to reveal Los Angeles’ role in the violent displacement of the poor and people of color.

Bunker Hill, the site of MoCA, is a historically Mexican and Chinese neighborhood marked area “D37”, hence the name of the exhibition. It was assigned the lowest Security Grade by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1939, and HOLC’s Residential Security Map calls Bunker Hill “a slum area and one of the city’s melting pots”. HOLC changed into the Federal Housing Administration and guided the Los Angeles CRA to attempt to cover up its violence through artificial acts of community service. 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.

The gallery consisted of carefully selected objects seized by police under civil asset forfeiture that resonate of past ownership. These include used bikes, two leaf blowers, and a one green stroller. Another work, Assessment (2018), which is a late eighteenth-century grandfather clock from Paul Dalton Plantation in South Carolina, stood at the end of the gallery. Also included were property tax receipts on slaves and other owned goods from Mississippi and Virginia that show how these slave states profited and relied on black bodies to build their infrastructure and governments.

Depreciation (2018) at the National Gallery of Art's showing of Afro-Atlantic Histories in 2022

The gallery closed with Depreciation (2018), which consists of a series of legal documents and contracts that show Rowland’s usage of D37’s budget. They used part of the money to acquire one acre of land on Edisto Island, South Carolina to restrict the land and devalue it, and indicates that the current value is $0. They do this because of an empty promise placed on the area in 1865, which stated that slaves would receive forty acres and a mule, which included Edisto Island. The initiative was rescinded in 1866 by President Andrew Johnson.[8] In 2023, the Dia Art Foundation announced it had entered into a long-term loan agreement with Rowland and the nonprofit the artist had created to purchase the land on Edisto Island; Dia agreed to steward the land and showcase the exhibition documents as part of its permanent collection. Unlike the other traditional land art that is in Dia's collection or under Dia's stewardship, the land involved in Depreciation is not accessible to the public, a purposeful choice by the artist to restrict any usage of the land.[10][11]

Rowland also exhibited the show 91020000 at the Artists Space in New York in 2016. The title is derived from Artists Space’s customer account number with Corcraft, a company that manufactures affordable commodities to sell to government agencies, schools, and non-profit organizations, like Artists Space. 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. These objects were laid across the presentation space, leaving the viewer to observe without knowing their significance until they pick up the paper accompanying the work which tells them the objects were made by the cheap labor of New York State’s prison inmates. Rowland interprets the prison labor force to be a practiced form of neo-slavery that continues to thrive in our present economy.

In 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. They also explain how a similar tactic was used during the War on Drugs in the 1970’s, and since then the country has seen a massive rise in incarceration, especially among African Americans.

Rowland approaches their role as an artist to be like an investigative reporter,  seeking out intellectual, factual, and material evidence to support their written claims. They also assume the role of active consumer by taking ownership of the objects as a form of antagonism. They reclaim these objects that are markers of corrupt history, stripping the objects of their use-value, and positioning them as relics of structural racism.

A work included in the show is Disgorgement (2016), which is a contractual agreement. Similar to how 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.[4]