This essay examines Cameron Rowland's use of a rental contract to govern the transfer of his artistic work. In asserting that possession of his work will be temporally finite, Rowland draws upon legal scholarship into slavery and colonization as legacies of “propertized” human life and dispossession to recognize how, through the social and legal order, individuals today expect, rely on, and protect historical forms of domination within normalized relations and conditions of exchange of property. Rowland's contract presents new challenges to predominant relations of exchange, capital accumulation, ownership, and racialized dispossession that rely on property law, as well as to prescribed notions of cultural competency and artistic experimentation. This essay tracks Rowland's critical project from the political imperatives and early research questions that motivated his conceptualization of the rental contract, through its use in different exhibition contexts, culminating in the story of how the evolving terms of Rowland's contract steered the Museum of Modern Art in New York's rental of his artistic work. Through an analysis of how the contract was negotiated between the artist, MoMA staff, the museum's acquisitions committee, and legal counsel, this essay reflects on why the agreement represents a significant precedent that complicates established parameters for the ownership of art as legal property.

Two texts by Andrea Fraser are reprinted as part of October's ongoing effort to publish contemporary documents of cultural activism that aims to create spaces of progressive resistance to threats of authoritarianism. Written as a speech delivered at the Museum Ludwig Cologne in 2017, Fraser's “Trusteeship in the Age of Trump,” demonstrates how the privatization of social services and the arts through philanthropy is part of a larger withdrawal of government responsibility for the welfare of its citizens. Accompanying the lecture is an open letter, drafted Andreas Fraser and Eric Golo Stone in late 2016 and signed by dozens of art world figures, demanding the resignation of now Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin from the Board of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.