On one of the first days of spring warm enough to sit outside without a coat, vanessa german (previously) and I met at her studio just outside of Chicago. I had planned to discuss her work and the Gray Center fellowship that brought her to the city to teach students at the University of Chicago and later this summer, open a large-scale solo exhibition on its campus. But as we sat in folding chairs in the morning sun, the conversation veered from my list of questions to topics vital and vulnerable, what might be referred to as the heart of the matter.

This feels fitting considering german frequently returns to love and honesty as the core of her work and therefore, her life. She believes love is an “infinite human technology” with the immense potential to catalyze change and mobilize people, and it emerges in her work not as a theme or metaphor but as a material, named alongside others like rose quartz, Astroturf, and the artist’s own hair.

As she explains in our conversation, german is allergic to pretense and compartmentalizing. Instead, she makes work in the manner she lives her life, with an immense passion for curiosity and care and a deep understanding of what it means to be whole.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. All images © vanessa german, courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York, shared with permission. 

Shown above is “Master Blaster Or, boombox from the 5th dimension,” lapis, pyrite, the sound of love as found in the frequencies of the mineral world, time before time was even time, sapphire, sodalite, sea jasper, the blues, 800 million tears and counting, a miracle, sun-Ră’s golden hand rising up the back to carry the night of sounds on his infinite and eternal shoulders, love and grief with no space between them, something awestruck and hopeful then, wood, blue pigment, gold glass beads, the earth, the stars, the sun and the moon, water, the outrageous mouth of the human heart, the beginning and the end switching places all the time, the glory of music, being awake and alive. 

Grace Ebert: I’d like to start with being a citizen artist. What did that mean to you when you first started referring to yourself as a citizen artist, and what does it mean today?

vanessa german: I chose citizen artist because I recognize that I experienced this great disparity throughout my entire life. There’s a way that people talk about being human and what’s valuable about being human and then there’s this lived reality. As a kid, it was very confusing that adults always seemed tense, stressed,  bitter, and angry. There was this acceptance that this is what life is. This is what it is to work and to make a life. I was confused by that. I wanted to find a way to be whole in my life and not have these compartmentalized realities, where I would have to cut off part of my life just to make it.

I call myself a citizen artist because that was my decision to center my citizenship and humanity. It’s not necessarily an affiliation to a nation or a constitution. To be a citizen is to be an inhabitant of a place. The center of my inhabitation on this planet as a human is art. And since that’s the center of my existence, then I can channel everything through creativity, imagination, and curiosity. That means that human relationships are really valuable to me. Consciousness is really valuable to me, how you have chemistry with people and can feel someone else’s feelings. It’s mesmerizing to think about care, like when you care for someone and what that is. I can explore all those things through my citizenship, the citizenship of my own humanity.

I also got a really quick and intense education on what it is to be in the nonprofit industrial complex as an artist and this idea that I would be working as a teaching artist or doing poetry for nonprofit organizations with strategic missions about justice. But for them to exist, there had to be injustice. There was never a real impetus in organizations to make themselves obsolete. There were a lot of miserable people experiencing the thresholds of poverty working for organizations that were about art, justice, and community. If people aren’t well, how do they grow a well garden? I dipped out of that way of making income and decided that if I just share wherever I am, then that would meet the needs of my soul.

I understand it a different way, like how chefs feel when they think about the ingredients for food. They’re very thoughtful, and they don’t just put anything into the food. There’s this way that chefs look when they watch people eat their food. I get that. I think it’s a sharing that is not ever wrong to call love because it’s from all the dimensions of you. It’s part of your intellectual process.

But there’s also something that’s just part of your intuitive magic as a human being that you’re like, these flavors would be good together. I work in assemblage, and I’m like, this radio from 1917 is exactly the technology I need to communicate this idea with rose quartz or something. So it is this way of being as a citizen. My commitment is to love. My commitment is to the force that keeps me alive.

Grace: You mention chefs and how they’re considering each ingredient. They’re also helping to nourish someone, helping to fill their stomachs, and satisfy a very human need, which is a type of care. And in thinking about care, I’m also curious how you think about responsibility. Do you feel like you have a responsibility to yourself with the work? Do you feel like you have a responsibility to other people? Do you feel like there’s a responsibility for something?

vanessa: My first responsibility is to not do things that feel wrong. It’s not even about rightness but about recognizing dimensionally in the body and the mind that there’s a line. The first responsibility is to not cross that line, to not lie. There’s a responsibility to truth, and I think there’s intuitive truth.

The human world is really complicated. There are layers of the ways humans make up places of responsibility, right? But we share those and grow new ones. If you think about how people thought about responsibility in the Antebellum South, we’re not there anymore. There’s this article out today about how Thomas Jefferson used the flesh of Indigenous people as the reins of his horse. And so my question about responsibility is, did he cross a line himself? Did he feel like human beings shouldn’t be saddles and bridles and reins, but this is what we do? Was there no line because they didn’t recognize Indigenous people as humans? They were like cats and dogs and creatures, you know?

We know from Thomas Jefferson’s writings that he was deeply conflicted, but he used human flesh as the reins of his horses, and he had a lot of horses. So there’s a way that I experience a responsibility to a place of consciousness and awareness and not crossing that. The most pain I’ve been in is to cross that. Sometimes, I crossed it because people around me said, this is what you do. This is what Black girls do, or this is what this thing is. I feel like having a sense of responsibility to your connection to your actual consciousness and to your heart transcends the kinds of responsibility we say humans have.

I believe what Malcolm X said is true: it’s your responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Do not give yourself over to this injustice because they say it’s right. If you know it’s wrong to turn human beings into horse saddles, maybe you go the other way. That’s a kind of transcendent responsibility. I try to pay attention to that.

I think that when people in this form of civilization, ask Black people and people of color and people whose bodies, hearts, and souls have been used, abused, and taken away from themselves—when you asked me about responsibility—it’s really coded and it’s really weighted, right? I’m present on land that was stolen. I’m a direct descendant of enslaved Africans. I was never imagined until the mid-70s to be able to have freedom and resources. My first responsibility given that story would be to my own freedom and sense of liberty. When one stands in the responsibility of their own liberty, which is the soul’s right to breathe in their own freedom, then they make more freedom and liberty for other human beings.

It’s a problem when you’re in a society where true freedom and liberty are considered dangerous to the structure serving you a very particular platter of freedom and liberty. I have a responsibility to be deeply irresponsible. I’m watching police officers wake up in the morning and bop the fuck out of kids. Drag them, beat them with batons. Do you know how hard it is to actually hit another human being when you’re an adult? When you’re a kid, you hit. But have you had to hit anybody as an adult? No. It’s different. I’m watching it happen all the time. My responsibility is to be irresponsible.

Grace: Thank you. Like a lot of people, I’ve been thinking about campus protests in relation to this idea of responsibility and the conversations about the right to protest.

vanessa: When you look at the charter of those schools, it’s indefensible. This is not going to end well. I don’t know when kids are gonna start dying. I don’t know if it’s gonna be tomorrow. They’re gonna start killing these people. Why is it so easy for them to call the riot squads? How’s it so easy for these people to hit other people? I know they’re trained to actually see the citizenry as enemies. I couldn’t do that.

Grace: My first job out of college was working for the Wisconsin branch of the USA TODAY Network, which really hardened me. I’m still learning to let my wall come down and to open up to let myself feel the weight of what’s happening in the world. But you seem to be fully feeling everything. What keeps you going and allows you to not be paralyzed so you’re able to make your work?

vanessa: Well, people can only take so much. It’s new in human history that we have this much information and images of so many different things. But it struck me when you said now I can open up and feel things. I find it hard to digest. You’re not meant to hold that alone. You’re meant to sit in a circle with others, right? One of the things about feeling things is the isolation that can come to you when you don’t have a place to express the feeling.

We could say, Grace, 1,000 other young people in a 12-mile radius around you are feeling isolated and close to despair. You should start a coffee talk circle, name it, and say it’s about sorrow, grief, processing, stories, and creativity. Make a space for whatever comes from it. We’re not meant to be alone.

The people who studied capitalism said this will drive your people to isolation. They said that in this stage, people will become isolated and despondent. They will lean toward vice and violence. This is not a surprise. The way to be irresponsible and deeply loving is to say, I reject this isolation, and I will reach out to other people. Isolation frenzy gets you to turn down your feelings. You stop feeling as much. You can be irresponsible to that process of deadening within yourself by being a little bit courageous.

I think about the physicist who won the Nobel Prize in science last year for the discovery that there is no local reality, which means that unless your attention and perspective are on it, the particle actually doesn’t exist. It’s freaky. One scientist said, given this, what we can say is real is feeling. People need to trust their instincts.

When it comes to your creativity, the inclination to repeat yourself where you’ve had success before can be strong. When I did this series with rose quartz, my gallery was like, how are we going to talk to people about this new material?  And I was like, is it a new material? There’s an awareness for us creative people when the material calls us. I think about Mary Oliver who said when she would be out in the field, a poem would come to her, and she would have to write. That’s the thing, being connected to magic.

I’ve been in extreme situations where it has been very difficult to feel, but because I am focusing on people’s hearts, feelings, eye contact, resonance, and this place of not trying to tell myself lies, then I’m not hiding from how I feel. When I’m very confused, I will say help me. I have to tell my assistant sometimes, oh, I just got really, really scared. I’m about to cry. And he’ll be like, is there anything I can do? I say no. I just want you to know that nothing feels okay right now. I’ll be able to say that, so I’m not performing my existence. That makes processing less difficult because I’m not resisting. I am not accumulating suffering in trying to resist suffering. But I wish I had community.

Grace: You don’t feel like you have a community?

vanessa: I feel pretty isolated. I am. It’s not a lie. I really don’t have a community around me.

Grace: Is that partially because you’re in Chicago right now, where you don’t live, and are traveling for projects?

vanessa: Partially it is that. I have projects in different places around the country. I’m in a different city sometimes every week. When I was doing the course [at the University of Chicago], I would spend the week in Chicago, and then the next week would be in Topeka. I don’t feel like I have a local community, but I do feel like I’m part of a global community of awareness. Sometimes, I just wish there were people, somebody I could talk to. I work really hard, and sometimes after working hard, it’s 11 at night, and I want somebody to talk to.

Grace: It’s interesting to me that you feel that way because your work is so much about community and holding space for others’ feelings. For your Power Figures, you often reach out to people on social media who share their grief and heartbreak but don’t seem to have any other outlet.

vanessa: I’ve done that at different times. I invite people to bring whatever their need or heart is. I did this piece at the National Mall, and I got 1,000 wishes. Some people wrote me a chapter, and I was like, they needed to do that, you know? I’ve done that a lot of different times.

It’s very special. I take it very seriously. I thought, how do I share with people the care I give this? I took all those wishes, and I read everybody’s story. What I transcribed onto the cloth was the wish answered. One woman wrote that her child was autistic, and he was going to college, and she was worried that nobody would like him. I thought it was an honest wish. She was like, I just want Dylan to have friends. She probably can’t say that to him. What I wrote for her was, when your son walks into the room, people smile. They wave to him, and they call him over to their table. They have jokes in common. He finds his people.

I would read everything in such a way that I would make a vision in my mind’s eye until it felt like joy. I transcribed in Washington D.C. at a hotel off of K Street, right around the corner from the White House. I did 1,000 of these, and time went by. It felt like the moment where the trampoline pushes you back up, and you’re almost weightless but for hours because I committed to seeing the vision through to a place of joy. I took it really seriously. Some of these prayers are intimate, and I would answer for the person being able to have strength of heart.

After a couple of months, people would write me and say, my wish came true. It was incredibly, incredibly sweet. It was so amazing. I’ll tell you one story specifically. This Indigenous council member in Canada was part of that coalition of people who wanted the government to go through the dump to look through bodies, and that’s what they wished for. A month later, they sent me the headline in the newspaper. They were like, my wish came true. And I was like, you worked really hard for that! But it was cool to see that spooling out over a couple of months. It must feel good to be able to go to somebody and say, my wish came true. You know what I mean? To be 50 or 60 years old and have this moment that like, I wished for daffodils, and look there are daffodils!

Grace: That’s really special. You’re giving people hope that there’s a possibility for change.

vanessa: Yeah, I was strategic. In the prompt, I said send me a wish or a prayer to the highest and best good for yourself or your community. It makes people imagine what is for the highest and best good. I think about the human technology of imagination, of that being activated in mass.

Grace: Can you tell me about what you’re working on here in Chicago?

vanessa: I’m building work now. I’m making sculptures. I don’t want you to see what I’m making. It’s epic. You’ll know what I mean when you see it. I found it joyful to take this risk. I’m doing something I never did before.

Grace: How have you been sourcing your materials here? Are you still going out and finding things?

vanessa: I’m doing some very specific works. I had to specialty source some stuff because of the scale that I’m working at.

Grace: Because scale is the last forefront, right?

vanessa: Yeah, it is. Well, I mean, no actually. Consciousness is. I feel like that’s the wilderness. Love is the wilderness.

What’s that law where they say your perspective is in relationship to your consciousness? As your consciousness expands, your awareness will expand, and you will see things you didn’t see before. When I’m thinking about healing differently, what it is to have human trauma and for billions of people to share the same heartbreak, which means billions of people can share the same thread of healing. What is it to heal generational human trauma? What we’re understanding is the speed of human perception.

Grace: So if we expand our perception…

vanessa: That’s actually the question. You asked the question of the future. You said, what if we expand our perception? And then you would have to say how do we do that?

german’s exhibition, CRAVING LIGHT: The Museum of Love and Reckoning, at Mulvane Art Museum in Topeka, is on view through the end of 2024. vanessa german: at the end of this reality there is a bridge—the bridge is inside of you but not inside of your body. Take this bridge to get to the next, all of your friends are there; death is not real and we are all dj’s opens on July 19 and runs through December 15 at the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago. 

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article vanessa german On Being Whole and Having a Responsibility to Be Irresponsible appeared first on Colossal.

When I first walked into 21c Museum Hotel in downtown Chicago last spring, there was a medicine cabinet filled with felted products by Lucy Sparrow, a photo from Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table series, and Angela Ellsworth’s unsettling bonnets made of pearls and pins, all within the lobby alone. The works were part of OFF-SPRING: New Generation, a traveling exhibition curated by Alice Gray Stites that considers how rituals influence identity. They were also unusual sights for a venue welcoming guests toting unwieldy luggage and grabbing a drink at the bar.

Stites is chief curator for 21c Museum Hotels, a boutique hospitality chain across the Midwest and South that has carved a singular niche as both a space for world-renowned artworks and everyday tourism. I spoke with Stites in February 2024 via Zoom about curating for a multi-venue museum of this kind, why she values being articulate over being accessible, and the incredible trust and respect she has for the public.

This conversation has been edited and condensed. Shown above is an installation view of ‘Refuge: Needing, Seeking, Creating Shelter.’ All images courtesy of 21c Museum Hotels, shared with permission.

Grace Ebert: I don’t know that all of our readers are familiar with 21c, so I’m wondering if you can do an introduction. How did this concept of a museum and hotel come to be? How did you get involved?

Alice Gray Stites: 21c was started in 2006 in Louisville, Kentucky, by Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, visionary art collectors and preservationists. They had been traveling around the world and seeing how contemporary art museums were driving a lot of revitalization in cities, the biggest and best-known example being Bilbao, where the Guggenheim transformed a small city into an international venue for tourism.

They were looking at the downtown of their hometown, Louisville, Kentucky. It’s a beautiful downtown with many 19th-century historic cast-iron facade buildings, and a lot of them were not in use, which is no longer the case. At the same time, they were getting requests from different groups visiting Louisville and other people who were interested in seeing their private collection at their farm. They thought, we need to find a way to share more of our art with the public. They did not want to build a private museum that would charge admission—being free and open to the public is still very much part of 21c’s DNA—or rely on donations, tax dollars, etc. They wanted the art to drive civic engagement as well as economic revitalization. After doing a lot of research, they were told that Louisville needed more hotel rooms. They’ve also been very passionate about land preservation and food, so it was important to have a special chef-driven restaurant as part of this contemporary art museum and boutique hotel.

There was a lot of skepticism surrounding this new hybrid concept. It’s both public and private, commercial and cultural. Where are the lines? What lines are being crossed? Certainly, in the art world, I think there was some skepticism because people were going to be able to walk around and look at the art and have a drink at the same time.

The first hotel opened in 2006, and at that time Steve and Laura Lee were thinking it would only be in Louisville. Very quickly, investors and developers from other locations started calling. Number two opened in November 2012 in Cincinnati, and then in the summer of 2023, we opened number eight in St. Louis, Missouri.

I came on in January of 2012, as 21c was beginning to expand. The company leadership recognized that they needed a whole museum department, and I was brought on to develop that department and oversee the site-specific commissions—each location has a handful of permanent site-specific art—as well as curate the exhibitions and oversee programming.

We think of 21c as one multi-venue museum because while the hotels and the restaurants are very much defined by their locations and the architecture of the buildings—seven out of eight are historic renovations—the museum component is more holistic, which allows 21c have a broader presence and create more opportunities, especially for all the emerging artists that we’ve been working with. 21c exhibits, commissions, and collects internationally known artists as well as emerging artists. It’s a real mix.

When I started, I was working on the opening of Cincinnati, and then Bentonville, and then Durham. It’s gone on and on. Here we are in eight locations with a multi-venue museum. As I said, we have permanent site-specific commissions in each building that are identified and commissioned as part of the design process. We look for spaces within the building that don’t lend themselves to being a museum gallery space, restaurant space, or a hotel room. These are spaces that move people through the building, in which an art installation serves to heighten their experience and spark their curiosity. They’re interstitial spaces, like hallways, stairwells, and elevator lobbies.

We do both solo and group exhibitions of 21st-century art, largely drawn from the permanent collection, which Steve and Laura Lee continue to support. It’s now over 5,000 artworks in every media from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, performance, VR, and AR. The group exhibitions are thematic exhibitions that reflect issues on people’s minds. What are people talking about today? What is of concern? Things like immigration, gender, race, sexuality, the environment, technology, and political divisiveness. We believe that contemporary art is a great platform for bringing people together to have these conversations and start new ones. The group exhibitions are also global, reflecting a lot of different perspectives. We want everyone who walks through the door to see themselves and their culture represented and discover new faces and places.

We also have done solo exhibitions often in collaboration with other museums. A few years ago, I co-curated an exhibition for an artist named Albano Afonso, who’s from Brazil, with the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The exhibition was in both locations at once. We did the same thing with the North Carolina Museum of Art in 2019 when an exhibition of the South African artist Wim Botha was on view at both 21c Durham and at the museum in Raleigh. We also collaborated with the Speed Museum to do a solo show for Yinka Shonibare CBE RA that was centered around “The American Library,” which had been in the Cleveland triennial. We actively borrow and loan from the collection, and sometimes augment the thematic exhibitions with loaned works from other collections and artists.

The third type of exhibition program that we have is something called Elevate at 21c, and this is curated by the local museum manager. One museum manager is in each location, and they curate the Elevate program, which is dedicated to showcasing the work of artists in those communities, typically on view for three to six months. In the beginning, the reason we called it Elevate was not only because it was intended to hopefully broaden the audience for these artists’ work but also because we were dedicating space in the elevator lobbies for this purpose, thinking that people who are coming to stay in Lexington or Cincinnati or Durham would not be aware of what kind of art was being made in that community. We thought this would be a great way to share with guests. It’s been so successful that we’ve expanded it, and now the museum managers are identifying other gallery spaces in the building to offer more opportunities and invigorate that connection to the local scene.

For me and many people, our experience of intense isolation during COVID and thereafter really sharpened our focus on the need to engage deeply with the local community. We want artists in all these cities to feel like 21c is a hub for them. At the same time, we’re continuing to nurture those broader national and international connections because it’s very important that 21c be part of those global conversations.

Grace: One thing that I was struck by going into the 21c in Chicago is the weight of the issues you’re addressing. As you say, there are a lot of conversations about race, gender, class, and climate, crucial but politically touchy issues. I can see where a museum so linked to commerce and hospitality would find it easier to curate exhibitions that are potentially easier for people from various political backgrounds to digest. But you don’t do that. And I love that. What drives those decisions? How do you think about doing these shows and offering them to such broad audiences?

Alice: It goes back to the mission, which is to expand access to thought-provoking contemporary art. It’s very much rooted in the vision of the founders. That’s the kind of art they’re interested in. That’s what the collection looks like. So that’s the first answer.

To expand a bit, at 21c, we believe that thought-provoking art sparks curiosity and creates connections. We don’t expect that everyone is going to like everything. We value the subjectivity that art provides. People can have a variety of reactions, and I think if the art and the exhibitions are done well enough, you create different entry points for different people’s points of view. You may not be able to understand, relate to, or engage with this work, but there’s a good chance that there’s something else in the exhibition that will allow a viewer, no matter what their background, to pull a thread. I’m much more focused curatorially on being articulate in terms of putting the exhibition together than I am on making it conceptually accessible.

What we find is that people will surprise you. I often get this question in relation to some of our locations that are in the South or locations that may not have a contemporary art center. People may assume that those communities have not had a chance to be exposed to this kind of work. But what I will tell you is that people will surprise you. Outside of major metropolitan centers, there’s a great deal of interest and eagerness to engage and absorb.

Some people are very focused on the art, and sometimes people are business travelers who may not even know they’ve been booked into a 21c. It’s just kind of in the background. But I think you can be affected by art whether you’re directly looking at it and talking about it or by osmosis.

We have an exhibition currently on view at 21c Louisville, which debuted in Chicago, called This We Believe, which is directly about the costs and consequences of unquestioned allegiance to creed, country, or code. You see a lot of work that calls into question ideas around patriotism and nationalism. How did we end up with a global culture of divisiveness? It’s not just American. The response was very positive in Chicago, and it’s just as positive in Louisville.

My last answer to your question is I don’t think any of us at 21c would have as much fun if we were putting together shows that didn’t take risks. As a museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting 21st-century art, we have a responsibility to share those voices and visions that need to be seen and heard.

Grace: The points you made about being in the Midwest and the South are so important politically but also in terms of the art world. Even Chicago, which is a major city and has great museums and galleries, isn’t a focal point for the art world. We’re in “flyover country.”

Alice: That’s why I love working with different organizations. We can all join hands and say flyover country is where you need to be if you’re interested in seeing who’s pushing the envelope, taking risks, saying important things, and envisioning important ideas.

Grace: And it’s more respectful to the local artists. You’re saying their work is worth seeing. This is worth looking at. This is worth talking about. That feels important.

Alice: It does. It’s not about checking the box when you read the label to say, “Oh, yes, I know who that artist is, or I’ve seen their work before.” It’s really about showcasing their visions. We do prioritize the artist’s vision in terms of the way we put the shows together, talk about the work, write about the work. And it’s exciting. There’s one particular instance of a young Louisville artist who was very excited when he found out his work was going to be in a show with Kehinde Wiley. We think that there are talented, amazing artists everywhere. And why not?

It’s also really inspiring to be part of an organization that strives for best museum practices but doesn’t have to play by all the rules. This goes back to your earlier question about how you curate in a commercial space. I would say there are fewer constraints. On a practical level, I have to think about things like circulation. For example, we don’t put large sculptures in the middle of the main event space because we don’t want to have to move them every time there’s a wedding. We think about guests checking in and moving through the space in a way that you don’t have to when you’re curating for a museum, but in a bigger, more conceptual way, I think we can take more risks.

Grace: What is your exhibition cycle?

Alice: Originally, when there were only three, we would change the main exhibition every six months. Now, it’s close to once a year. We have a very lean, fantastic team. As I said, there are eight exhibition museum managers, one in each location. The other eight of us are based here in Louisville. The collections team is here, the art handlers are here, the curatorial team is here. There are eight changeouts a year for the main exhibition, which varies between a minimum of 60 to over 100 works of art in each show.

The Elevate exhibitions will change more frequently as determined by the museum managers. They also are the people in charge of developing a lot of local programming, so performances, lectures, and music, each very tailored to what that community is interested in. Some places like to do a lot of film screenings, others do a ton of performance. All of our programs and exhibitions are always free and open to the public. That’s very important. That’s a great way for people, artists, and lots of others to understand that 21c is a community cultural hub where something is always going on.

There are free public tours once a week in every location. We do tours for school groups from the elementary through the graduate level. It’s fantastic to feel how integral and integrated the art is with every department. From housekeeping to the restaurant, to the front desk, they’re very much part of the museum team, too.

Grace: You said you also borrow works from other institutions for your shows. What are the logistics of that in terms of making these works so accessible to the public?

Alice: Well, that’s a great segue from my last comments because, as I said, we consider everyone to be part of the museum team, especially those in positions that are public-facing. There’s a lot of staff training that goes on. Now, this is not simply because I want them to know about the exhibitions. I do. I want everyone to feel confident and competent, that they can share something about the work, but we also train the staff to be stewards of the artwork that is part of their current exhibitions. I think the right formula for keeping your artwork safe is to have people on staff who care about it. They’re watching over it, and we have a whole system: like the TSA, if you see something, say something. That’s been the key to being able to confidently borrow work.

We develop relationships with artists and other institutions by loaning from the 21c collection when it’s a great opportunity for an artist. We have lent to small colleges and universities that maybe don’t have access to their own permanent collection as well as to well-known museums and institutions. Two years ago, 21c lent an artwork to the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

We care, and we instill that spirit of caring in our colleagues. We all work together to make 21c a wonderful space for art and people.

Grace: Do you think that’s why the concept works? Honestly, if you told me that there’s a museum hotel, I would be skeptical and assume there might be some sort of gimmick. But 21c isn’t that.

Alice: That has come up more in the last few years as other hotels have been showing art and calling themselves art hotels, which I think is great. Any support for the arts and opportunity for artists is fantastic. But the difference is that this is a museum hotel because we have a team of art professionals, people who are professionally trained to curate, install, care for, and maintain artwork. We do very robust cultural programming. Any day of the week, there’s probably an event happening in multiple locations that brings in the public. Just like a traditional museum, part of our job is to serve the community. That’s not necessarily the case for a hotel that is maybe showcasing art in a more decorative sense. As you touched on, our exhibitions are not decorative. Many of the artworks are aesthetically appealing but are also conceptually compelling. It’s not about decorating. It’s about engaging.

Grace: That feels like 21c’s focus is really on the art rather than a heads-in-beds kind of situation. Or at least it’s more balanced, rather than having commerce dominate your goals.

Alice: I think that’s a really good point and very relevant. You can’t predict how people are going to respond, and 21c appeals to so many different kinds of travelers. You have business travelers, families, leisure travelers, artists, and art collectors. It’s very hard to identify a demographic, which of course most commercial endeavors seek to do because they want to appeal to whoever is going to buy their product or stay at their hotel. We’re so lucky to have so many different kinds of guests. I have too much respect for the public to predict how they’re going to respond. So we need to honor and prioritize the artists’ vision, the art, and the artists and allow people to respond in whatever way feels natural and interesting to them.

There are a lot of assumptions about how much people in flyover country understand, and I can tell you from 12 years of doing this that people are plenty smart. I have learned so much more about the artwork and the exhibitions from people’s responses. I don’t think it’s curating to cater to your audience or trying to imagine what the response is going to be. If this is an idea, an issue, an image that needs to be seen and heard, that’s the litmus test.

Grace: What’s next for 21c? What’s next for you?

Alice: We’re giving a prize at EXPO CHICAGO this year, the 21c acquisition prize for art that drives civic engagement, which is the theme of the fair this year. And then later in April, we’ll be opening The Future Is Female in Kansas City, where Zoë Buckman will come and be our featured speaker on April 25th. 21c started collecting her work in 2016, and it’s been so exciting to watch her star rise.

There’s also a new soccer stadium opening and a women’s professional soccer team. They’re very excited about our upcoming exhibitions, and we’re starting to see all these different ways in which sports entities get excited and see the exhibitions. I mentioned some collaborations with museums, but I’m also a big believer in collaborating with other kinds of organizations. You’d be very surprised how those connections get made.

And then in the summer, we’ll be changing out the exhibitions in Durham and St. Louis. Refuge: Needing, Seeking, Creating Shelter opens June 13th in Durham, and artist Arleene Correa Valencia will be the featured speaker. Pop Stars! Popular Culture and Contemporary Art, which was in Chicago last year, will open in St Louis in early July. Then in the fall, we’ll be opening Revival: Digging into Yesterday, Planting Tomorrow in Cincinnati around the same time as the big FotoFocus Biennial.

21c has a partnership with Artadia, the New York-based grants organization. The 21c/Artadia grant moves from city to city. We started it in 2021 in Louisville. In 2022, we gave it to an artist in Kansas City, and just this past fall, we gave it to an artist in Durham, North Carolina, Andre Leon Gray. This fall, it’ll be awarded in Cincinnati, which I’m very excited about because Cincinnati has a lot of really strong artists working there.

On the hotel side, we’ve just announced a new artist’s suite in Kansas City. Patty Carroll has created the Panther Suite based on one of her photographs of anonymous women overwhelmed by their domestic interiors.

Patty’s photo, “Panther,” is of a woman is lying on a green couch and surrounded by her black ceramic panther collection. The image has now come to life as a room that you can stay in at 21c Kansas City. We are also working on a plan for an immersive artist’s suite that will include a projection. People love interactive art, and it’s taken me a couple of years to figure out how that could work in a room that also still has to function as a hotel room. We haven’t announced that one yet, but I’m pretty excited about what that’s going to look like. Because we’re a 21st-century museum, I feel we have a responsibility to support artists who are exploring new technologies and new platforms, working in video productions, augmented reality, and virtual reality.

21c Museum Hotels has locations in Louisville, Cincinnati, Bentonville, Durham, Lexington, Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis. You can find more about the exhibitions and programming on the museum website.

Stites also contributed to Hit Me With Your Best Shot, a group exhibition engaging with what’s at stake for women working in the art world today, which is on view through April 20 at Pen and Brush in New York.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Alice Gray Stites On Taking Risks, Respecting the Public, and Curating for 21c Museum Hotels appeared first on Colossal.

Nadya Tolokonnikova created Pussy Riot in 2011 partly in response to Vladimir Putin’s declaration that he would continue his reign over Russia. In 2012, when she and her collaborators undertook their now-famous performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, she was infamously sentenced to two years in prison, vaulting the art collective to international fame.

I spoke with Nadya over Zoom one Saturday in February 2024, more than a decade since Pussy Riot’s founding, her imprisonment, and her release. The artist must live geo-anonymously, a more pressing concern now that she’s not only on Russia’s most-wanted list but was also arrested in absentia in November. The threat she faces from her home country became even more precarious given that, less than two weeks after we talked, Russian opposition leader, activist, and friend of the artist Alexei Navalny died in a remote Russian prison.

There’s a notable point in our conversation when Nadya describes her desire to see the Russian Orthodox Church, the same one at the heart of that 2012 performance, become something like a women’s healthcare center offering free birth control and abortions. When I say I want her version to become a reality—meaning, I’d like someone to take action and create such a space—Nadya responds that she wants to build it. This is what makes her so impactful as an artist and a human: she’s fiercely determined and committed to showing up in the streets, online, and in the studio, wielding the twin tools of art and activism to very literally create the world she wants to live in.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Grace Ebert: How are you today?

Nadya Tolokonnikova: Doing good. I’m working on some things. I’ve been studying calligraphy, and I’ve been just drawing a bunch.

Grace: Have you always drawn?

Nadya: It’s more like calligraphy, so it’s not really drawing. It’s a different skill set. I always had good handwriting. It’s time for me to explore my roots because it’s something that was born in my part of the world in the 14th century. I’m interested in medieval times because I feel like we’re going back, and I need to reflect that.

Grace: To also go back a bit, you created Pussy Riot in 2011. Since then, the collective has made countless works that you’ve been involved in and that you haven’t been involved in. I’ve heard you say that anyone can join Pussy Riot and act under its name. I understand that from an activist perspective and that a lot of collectives historically have allowed anyone to join as long as they have similar values. But as an artist, what does it mean to structure the collective in that way?

Nadya: You mean, is it more difficult in terms of aesthetic values?

Grace: Yeah, like what does it mean to have people putting on performances or creating work under the Pussy Riot name when you’re not directly involved?

Nadya: We created a pretty good visual bible from the start, and it’s very easy to reproduce and follow. We did it knowingly because before Pussy Riot, I was also a co-founder of another art collective called Voina, which translates to war and was a war against artist institutions and Putin’s government. In that collective, every action of ours was completely different. It could be anything from a staged performance in a shopping mall to projecting a skull and bones as a canvas on the White House of Russia. That kind of thing is very difficult to reproduce because it can only be born from the very specific core peoples’ minds.

We were partly influenced by Femen. They started a few years earlier than Pussy Riot, and what attracted me to their actions is that they do have a very strong visual bible. It allowed them to have chapters all around the world and truly become a movement. I loved that. I think we consciously, or sometimes subconsciously, reproduced that model in Pussy Riot. It proved to be a working model once we ended up in jail. I couldn’t come up with ideas for actions anymore, but other people did, and it truly grew into an international movement. So it’s easy from that perspective.

Of course, it’s tough for me to see a good action without good documentation because people often don’t think about how important a person who has a photo and video camera is. The action could be gorgeous, but if you don’t have a good photographer to capture it, then it’s just not gonna work. For me, it’s painful to see, but I still think it works all together. It’s complimentary. You have different styles, different actions, different attitudes. People have different means, different connections, and there is beauty in it.

Grace: Is that why initially you gravitated toward performance art, in comparison to another medium that could also be created as an act of protest?

Nadya: With the views that I have, it’s impossible to get into art institutions in Russia. Not just exhibiting but even participating in a panel talk. No interaction with official art institutions is possible. It narrows down your options, even if you think about photography. When we started, the internet was around definitely, but it wasn’t as developed as a medium as it is today. I think today it’s totally possible. Back in the day, everything was more physical still, and you had to have a real presence in order to make a real difference. I think today, not really. I mean, you can live on the North Pole and still have a real influence with a blog or TikTok. But our options were super narrow.

I also was personally drawn to performance art because I was exposed to it pretty early. When I was 14 or 15 years old, my home city of Norilsk in Siberia was visited by Prigov, who besides being a poet, sculptor, musician, at his core is a performance artist. He described his life as a project, like, “This life is a project of Dimitri Aleksandrovich Prigov.” This is his full name. So all other mediums fall into his life as a project.

I was so drawn to this idea. I realized that it gave me so much more freedom than my parents or teachers, whoever was around me when I was a little girl told me. They would say, “Well, we have to pick an avenue,” and then just live your life constraining yourself. I realized that you can describe your art life as art and an art performance. Then you can really go any direction, and there’s going to be a valid move, at least for yourself. And that’s what matters, right? If you personally think that what you do is important or valid? So performance art chose me, I guess.

Grace: Would you consider your life your art project then? In that same way?

Nadya: I’m not there yet to describe it like this. I feel like he was a little bit older when he came up with this concept, maybe? I describe some parts of my life as an art project, like to reclaim my identity. When I was thrown in jail, my agency was taken away from me. And I’m trying to reclaim it by describing those two years in jail as a performance art project. It’s a little bit of a joke, but also not really because every single day I was trying to fight for some sort of meaning to what’s going on. And to my life.

Viktor Frankl described it in his book where he talks about his experience in a concentration camp, which was obviously not comparable to what I’ve been through, but it was an important book for me. He talks about man’s search for meaning, and it was totally applicable to my experience, which was lighter, but still, it was very tough. So in that sense, it was an art project every single day.

Grace: I know that in such difficult circumstances, the pressure is to survive and to, I don’t know, try to find yourself amid horrible times. But to make your life an art project every day feels like it would require a lot of emotional energy.

Nadya: At some point, all my emotions died. That was something that launched a lot of psychological problems that I still deal with. All my emotions just went to sleep. As I learned later in an academic description of trauma, you have to somehow open yourself up again because you don’t want to walk around life like a mummy. It was a fight for feeling something.

But people helped a lot. And even though I was forbidden from having friends, my friends would go through lots of problems in order to stay my friends. Some of them lost the possibility to have parole because they wanted to stay my friend. Another human really helps a lot in any circumstance.

Grace: The connection. Absolutely.

Nayda: I have Johann Hari’s Lost Connections. Have you ever come across that book?

Grace: I haven’t read that, but I did just read his later book, Stolen Focus.

Nadya: I just read it, too. So good. My focus is so stolen. It’s insane.

Grace: What’s your relationship to social media and the internet these days?

Nadya: As you see, I went a little bit offline lately. I’m coming back to physical stuff like paper and pen and wooden panel. It’s rewarding. During the pandemic, I started to do more stuff with my hands. I’m by no means the only one. I’ve heard that a lot from my friends because all of us were online 24/7. Everything was online, doctor’s appointments, everything. We all started to look back at the physical world. I started to do some clothing projects and projects to help me survive because all of my sources of income died down. As a performing artist, we had no place to perform. So I started to create clothes, and I did this DIY collection.

Now I discovered the joy of doing something with my hands, which before I’d never really done. I mean, I dug trenches when it was needed for an action, like once we decided to bury a police car so we dug a giant hole. It was with my own hands, but it wasn’t pleasure. It was just something that we needed to do.

I loved what Johann said in Stolen Focus. It is annoying that social media did not incentivize us to make us more connected to each other. Recently, I’ve been complaining quite a lot about just one simple thing. I cannot find new music anymore because Spotify just keeps me in my own bubble. Unless someone in person gives me a hint about what to listen to, it just keeps me in the loop of something that I’ve been listening to over and over again for the last bloody five years! So not a big fan.

But that being said, Pussy Riot was as much an online phenomenon as offline. Our end product for all our performances was always something that we jokingly called a music video, which was not really music. It was more a documentation of the performance. We were playing with the entertainment culture of music videos. If somebody sees a Pussy Riot action just on the street, that’s going to be a miserable thing. We’re just screaming something or getting dragged by cops. The music most likely is not playing because our PA system has been taken away by cops. It’s just chaotic. You don’t hear what’s going on. You cannot hear a word. Like, are we pro-Putin or against Putin or singing something about our vaginas or what? So when it’s nice and focused and in a package then it could be part of a campaign for spreading good ideas.

Grace: Yeah, social media is certainly useful in protest.

Nadya: It is. It’s very useful for organizing, but you also can spend too much time on the internet and never show up in the street. And that’s not what we want to do right?

I went to Planned Parenthood a few months ago, and there were pro-life protesters. They just spent time there. They were standing out there for eight hours a day with their banners. And it’s very admirable because they just show up. I think it’s really cool. And they could have done a post on the internet, but they showed up.

Grace: That’s one thing that conservatives do. They do show up.

Nadya: They do. We’re too cool for school.

Grace: You’ve talked a little bit about how you don’t want to let the fear of craft or how good something is, technically speaking, hold you back from being out in the streets and doing the actions and performances. And still, your recent works, like “Putin’s Ashes,” are so impeccably produced. How are you thinking about craft these days?

Nadya: There are times to throw stones and times to collect stones. So there are times when you can afford to spend a little bit more time on perfecting your craft, and I think it’s so important. Otherwise, it’s just sloppy. It’s good to learn craft.

But it doesn’t have to be something that stops you from doing an action when it’s time to do an action. How do you know when the work is done? I don’t know. I think it’s intuition. We talk about art and activism. Both things require a good amount of intuition. Being able to listen to your intuition requires good mental health. So please take care of your mental health. If you’re just in a bad place and you want to hide, your intuition is dead. I’m spending a lot of time and energy and all sorts of different things I do to just keep my mental state in good shape, focused and clean, to be able to listen to the world.

I think about an artist almost like an antenna that has to hear things. We’re privileged in a way that we can take our time to just sit down, listen, and be this antenna. Not everyone is privileged to do that. Some people have to work three jobs, and that’s just unfortunate. I hope we’re gonna have UBI [universal basic income], and everyone is going to be able to have much more free time on their hands.

Grace: The dream.

Nadya: Yeah! I’m a big proponent. It’s just a basic level of dignity that every human being deserves. We don’t have to constantly prove that we’re worthy.

When you try to put together an activist project, there are a lot of people who will tell you that this is not professional, that is not professional. Maybe it’s the late capitalism thing. It’s not just about activism. It’s about art as well. A lot of art is overproduced.

But if you think about the early punk movement, it was pretty raw. A lot of them started their bands as jokes and then later grew into something very important and significant. Now you can start something as a joke and then learn your craft like I did. I learned songwriting.

Grace: It’s amazing how you’ve harnessed this DIY approach for teaching yourself. I know that you studied philosophy and have some formal education, of course, but the number of references in your book, in your interviews, even in this conversation, you must have this encyclopedic memory.

Nadya: Thank you. That’s so kind. I’m not really fond of my memory, but maybe I should be.

Grace: Or maybe it’s not memory? You draw connections between things. You have such a strong foundation of philosophy and art and history, which clearly seeps into your work.

Nadya: Yeah, a mental map, I guess. It gives me a sense of identity. I think I struggle a bit sometimes. You would never think so looking at me, but I struggle with the sense of identity, of self. What am I doing in the world? We talked with my daughter who’s 15 now, and she said, “I’m a little bit worried that I am so old, and I still don’t know 100 percent what I’m going to do in my life.” And I was like I’m 34, and I still don’t know what I’m doing in my life. It’s good news but also bad news that it’s not going to stop anytime soon.

So creating this mental map helps me to maintain this sense of self that has some longevity and roots through philosophy, history, science.

Grace: I would imagine that living this geo-anonymous life impacts that. You’re globally ambiguous necessarily. I understand why that’s the case. But what is it like to have this fluid identity, particularly in terms of geography, which tends to be something that really grounds us, and also live so publicly? What is that contrast like?

Nadya: You hit it right in the heart of things. There’s this little slipping identity thing that is attached to me being a nomadic figure. It started ever since I left my hometown when I was 16, and then I never came back. Never, not even once. I moved to Moscow, and then Moscow became the center, this rooting factor of my identity and also my performance practice. Voina first and then Pussy Riot.

Moscow State University wasn’t heaven on Earth, but also your alma mater gives you a sense of identity. And then I was thrown out of it and found myself in jail. That’s where most of my psychological problems started to arise. If you throw a plant out of the soil, they die. That’s how I felt.

Then I came back from jail, but the problem was the world was never the same for me. I wasn’t able to do performance art in the streets anymore because I was followed by police. We tried to do one action at the Sochi Olympics, and we got terribly beaten by Cossacks, pepper sprayed in our faces. It became all of a sudden really serious. Government people were attacking us, and it started to be life-threatening.

So I lost my performance art practice, and my community because a lot of people didn’t want to go to jail. A lot of people stopped participating in protest actions. Some people stopped communicating with me because they perceived me as too famous. That was not something I necessarily chose for myself because we were anonymous. Two years in jail, something that you cannot control at all, and the next day you get out, and yes, you take photos with Madonna, which is undeniably cool, but then your whole community and world are not the same anymore. I had to restructure everything in terms of my practice, like learning how to do stuff in the studio, writing songs, creating actual music videos because I couldn’t do guerilla-style actions. You’re 25, and you have to re-invent everything again.

And then I couldn’t live in Moscow anymore even. That became too dangerous. Now there are a couple of criminal cases on me, including one for terrorism, which is up to 25 years in jail. I cannot travel to a lot of places in the world. Just Europe and North America are safe for me. For example, I don’t know if you’ve followed it, but it was a big huge deal in Russian media with one of the biggest Russian bands Bi-2. They’re very big. I’ve been listening to them since I was a kid. They got detained in Thailand and almost deported to Russia, but they were able to go to Israel instead. That was really scary. They spent a week in jail in Thailand, and they were about to get sentenced. In Russia, they would be sentenced for 15 years or something for supporting Ukraine. Then on top of that, you have to think about getting poisoned by the FSB when you travel places, when you see people.

It does add up a lot to to a feeling of slipping identity and just an endangered identity I guess. But on the flip side, I always think about artists like Banksy or to a lesser extent Daft Punk. Artists who played with anonymity as their tools, as their brushes and paint. It’s also my strength.

The reason why I insist on being a geo-anonymous is not just because of the danger coming from the Russian government. Obviously, there is that part, but also, I want to give people exactly what I want to give them. In that sense, I treat myself as a performance artist. For example, when you have an appearance on MSNBC, the first thing that appears is, “This is Nadya, and she speaks from Moscow.” And I’m questioning that. How does that influence what we’re discussing right now if we’re talking about Trump? It’s irrelevant where I’m at right now.

Grace: That’s also a very art-world thing. So many people are described as where they were born and where they’re based. We do it on Colossal.

Nadya: My favorite art world phrase is “I live between London and New York.” And I’m like, where? The ocean?

For a long time, I was living in Moscow but traveling a lot. People started asking how much time do you actually spend in Moscow? Like, do you want to inspect my anus? What else do you want? It was just being comfortable with creating boundaries. It inspires other people to do it as well. I mean, I got inspired by people like Banksy, and hopefully, somebody will look at me and be just like, yeah, I don’t have to open up things that I don’t want to open up about myself.

Grace: Speaking of that public life, I saw your wedding in The New York Times. Congratulations.

Nadya: Thank you.

Grace: And I saw that you baked your own cake in the shape of a cross. I’m so curious about that symbol. Are you thinking of wearing and using the cross as a reclamation? What continues to draw you to that symbol?

Nadya: I’m stealing it back. I was accused of having a religious hatred. My official criminal article, when they sent me for two years in jail was hooliganism and inciting religious hatred, which I did not have. I was arguably very interested in religion and invested heavily into inspiring conversations among Russians about religion, not in the sense that you have to go and believe in God, but in the sense that it’s a part of our culture.

In the Soviet Union, the agenda was to just destroy religion, right? Everyone had to be an atheist. So my take was it’s an important part of culture. It’s an important language. We shouldn’t be fundamentalists from any side. We should not be atheist fundamentalists or religious fundamentalists. It’s a cool thing, in terms of language, font–I’m using a church font in my calligraphy right now–the imagery, and architecture are just stunning. The Bolsheviks were blowing up the churches, which was a crime against culture.

Then the church came back and reinstated its power in Russia. And knowing how difficult it is to be the oppressed, they decided to be the oppressors themselves. It just blows my mind. I’m like, can we have a little bit more nuanced conversation and just peacefully coexist, please? That was my whole vibe when we came to the church. We got accused of religious hatred, which was just pure bullshit. It was a smokescreen. The Russian government didn’t want to talk about our political agenda, about feminism, about LGBTQ+. They didn’t want to talk about our anti-Putin pro-democracy stance. They wanted to talk about God and that we went against God.

So I’m using it because they used it against me, and I guess it’s just another way of reclaiming and taking it from them. This is not their symbol anymore. Sometimes I turn it upside down, and I look at it as a symbol of feminism. Right side up, it’s a symbol of patriarchy. We literally call the head of the Russian Church the patriarch. How is that even okay in 2024?

When it’s turned upside down, it doesn’t mean satan for me. It’s just the opposite of it, which would be matriarchy. I sometimes call myself the matriarch of the new Russian Orthodox Church. I like imagining a world where a church exists, but it’s chill and nice and welcoming. You can go to church like you go to Planned Parenthood almost. You’re in trouble, you need to have an abortion, and you go to church. It’s like your nice and cool aunt. This is how I want the church to be.

I never went to Planned Parenthood, and now I go there with my teenage daughter. We’re blown away. They give you birth control pills, the full supply for free for the whole year. It’s communist in its best possible sense. It’s about sharing and caring. In my church, when I’m going to be the matriarch, people will also go there to get their birth control pills.

Grace: I want that church.

Nadya: I want to build it. It’s one of my dreams one day. I’m not wealthy enough, but I want to buy, or someone else can buy me, a church. I want to paint it pink and call it the Church of Feminism.

Grace: What else is in your utopian vision?

Nadya: The environment is a big thing. I’m from a very polluted industrial city, and my first-ever exposure to activism was through environmentalism and feminism. Later in life, I realized that they actually go hand in hand. Much later, I became vegan. I realized that veganism is also a part of this triangle of happiness. So there’s that. I mean, it’s the whole political program.

I hope for a world where it will be easier for people to travel. It’s really difficult these days with visas and all. And it’s not getting easier. It’s getting worse. I was a child of the ‘90s. I was born in ‘89, and if you look at the whole world, it felt like everyone was ecstatic. You can say different things about the concept of the end of history, and it’s proven not to be right. But it felt like the world was going to be better from now on, and it’s going to be easier to travel. We thought that visas were going to be a thing of the past for Russians because we thought we were going to be part of whatever Europe, like some future European Union or something. And it turned into something opposite.

Grace: What else are you working on these days?

Nadya: There is a show coming up. It’s my first big museum show at OK Linz, and it’s going to be called RAGE. I’m working on a bunch of works for it. A lot of them are going to be based on this Slavic calligraphy that’s been used in a lot of religious contexts. I always loved text-based works, but I wanted to do my own spin on them because there is way too much Arial font going on in art. I’ve done those too, but it gets tiring.

I’m working on some prototypes. It says, “Go fuck yourself,” but written in this font. It’s inspired a lot by Moscow conceptualists. Eric Bulatov and I have been working on a book that will be released later after the exhibit is opened. It will be a dive into Pussy Riot history and what came before Pussy Riot, which was Voina collective.

It’s possible but difficult to understand where Pussy Riot comes from without the history of Voina. At the end of Voina, we split into groups. One of them later became Pussy Riot. The reason for the split was, among everything else, sexism within the collective. We first started just another Voina group, and then were just like, you know what? Fuck it. We’re going to cover our faces and start something new, fresh. The book will be talking about Voina there, so basically, my practice from 2007 to now.

There will be some sculptures that have been very fun to make. They’re still in progress. The idea is to take used sex dolls and then turn them into Pussy Riot characters, warriors. It’s been a fun project but so complicated because first, we have to identify who is going to sell you sex dolls. So we found people and got them. Then we have to create an inner carcass structure because they’re not made for standing. They’re made for something else. Then you want to give them a very confident pose, like the poses we did for “God Save Abortion,” with fists in there. A confident, strong woman pose. Next, we’re going to add some dominatrix-type costumes and turn her basically into this dominatrix Pussy Riot character and give her some weapons. They have pink baseball bats and some different weapons that they hold in their hands.

They’re turned from just objects that are the quintessence of the patriarchal attitude towards women into the opposite. They turn into feminist superheroes. I want to place them in a little chapel that is in front of the museum. It’s tiny, but it’s beautiful. It has some legit Catholic icons painted on the walls. It’s a partisan museum. It’s not functional. And there is a mirror floor so it’s gonna be pretty.

I’m super excited. I’m working on one of the dolls with Niohuru X. She does the drag show, Dragula. We’ve been friends for a while. We collaborated before. She’s working on this Chinese goddess, turning these dolls into beautiful female warrior creatures.

Grace: I appreciate that you work on so many collaborations. That feels so special.

Nadya: Thank you. It’s important. I just got a call from a person new to me from the art world, and they were really, I guess surprised, that I instantly connected them with someone else who is a big supporter and friend in the art world. It’s just not what people do. But this is what people do in activism. We ask for help, and we make connections. I feel a little bit like a stranger in the art world often because there are a good number of people who do not do that.

I also want to mention “God Save Abortion.” An important part of our work is to continue guerilla actions and work with local communities. We’ve worked with students from Indiana University. I’m a big fan of combining theory and practice. I was invited for a lecture, and I said, well, maybe we’ll also do a little action because it’s not just about talking about activism. It’s also actually practicing it. And it turned out beautifully. It was just added to a show that is happening right now in Los Angeles. It’s called Interreality. 

There’s more stuff to come because reproductive rights, unfortunately, is still a very important topic.

Interreality is on view through March 18 in Los Angeles, and RAGE. runs from June 21 to October 20, 2024, in Linz. Find more from Tolokonnikova on her site and Instagram.

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In 1991, ceramic artist and professor Bobby Scroggins was frustrated by the lack of access and recognition for artists and craftspeople of color, particularly Black artists. At the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) conference, he sought out Black and Brown faces in the crowd and organized informal chats, inviting peers and colleagues to form a cohort. Conceived with a mission to promote the careers of ceramic artists of color, share information, and facilitate opportunities across the U.S., The Color Network was born.

In the early 2000s, Scroggins passed the baton to Chicago-based artist Paul Andrew Wandless, who transformed the project into an exhibition platform and website called Cultural Visions, which continued until 2014. Then, in 2018, a conversation at the same annual NCECA conference prompted Natalia Arbelaez and April D. Felipe to initiate a new organization named The Color Network in homage to Scroggins’s original idea.

Comprising a substantial database of artists, a mentorship program, micro-grants, community discussions, exhibitions, and residencies, The Color Network’s core aim is to advance people of color in the ceramic arts. Currently led by five co-organizers including Arbelaez, Felipe, Magdolene Dykstra, Corrin Grooms, and George Rodriguez, the group assists artists in developing their work, networking, and creating dialogue as a way to foster community and provide support for those working at all professional stages and skill levels.

Colossal editor Kate Mothes spoke with Arbelaez, Dykstra, and Rodriguez about the significance of access to the arts for people of color and education for their allies, the power of peer mentorship and sharing resources, and ideas for the future.

This conversation was conducted via Zoom in September 2023 and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Kate Mothes: How did the three of you get involved with The Color Network, and how long have you been a part of it?

Magdolene Dykstra: I first got involved with The Color Network as part of their mentorship program, as a mentee. Natalia was my mentor at that time, and that started in 2018. I had just finished grad school and was looking to find a new community after leaving that previous community. And then, in 2021, I was invited to jump on as a co-organizer and help organize different opportunities through The Color Network.

Natalia Arbelaez: I got involved in 2018 as part of this iteration of The Color Network. A few of us got together, and we got the namesake from Bobby Scroggins. I was part of the first group of organizers to start using more of the web-based organization and meeting and mentorship.

George Rodriguez: I did a little bit of jurying for The Color Network. Then I came on as a mentor in 2020 and officially joined the co-organizing team earlier in 2023.

Kate: I read that the initial history of the organization goes back to 1991 when artist Bobby Scroggins began a project by the same name. In its current guise, 2018 was a big year of redefining and reorganizing, and I’m curious how that came about. How did it change gears when a new group of people became involved?

Natalia: Yeah, it was a whole new group of people. I applied to run a topical network discussion with a few other individuals at NCECA, the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. I approached the community and asked, how can we organize? And what is important to you to see from the community, for artists of color?

Bobby Scroggins came to our talk but also pulled us to the side later and was like, well, we used to do this and this. So, after that, coming together and realizing that this work has been done for a long time—it’s nothing new—we asked Bobby if we could take on the namesake and continue the work, where a completely different group is honoring and continuing the work of elders in our community to help us be present, visible, and empowered.

Kate: Did you view the project initially as primarily a database, or were mentorship opportunities there to begin with? What were the anchors in the beginning?

Natalia: Yeah, I think the database was the first thing. Artaxis is a really great organization that was already kind of doing that. It was a great foundation to look at, and they were always willing to answer any questions and kind of be a mentor to this version of The Color Network. So we looked at their structure and made a database for other people who are looking for artists of color or other artists of color looking for each other.

The mentorship program was always really important from the beginning. That developed from a few of us not having that in our own community, feeling isolated, or not having a natural mentor. So it was important pairing people with a mentor, with someone that you’re allowed to ask questions, and you’re allowed to initiate that conversation and not feel like you’re a burden on someone for just asking random questions.

Kate: Magdolene, you mentioned that you were initially a mentee and then a mentor and that there was a post-university aspect of community that you wanted to continue or find again in a different way. I’m curious what that transition was like, being first on one side of that relationship and then the other, and how that developed for you.

Magdolene: When we’re talking to mentees and mentors, and trying to recruit more mentors, this comes up a lot. Even if you’re serving as a mentor, you’re not necessarily an expert in all things. During my mentorship with Natalia, I started to realize that my feet were getting a little bit more firmly under me, and I started to understand that I have some things to offer. So, it’s a gradual transition; I’m still planting my feet. They could be firmer, but hopefully, that is always present. Hopefully, there’s always that sort of light-footedness in terms of looking for growth and understanding; there’s always room to grow.

I started to understand that I had my feet under me enough to be able to at least listen and be present with someone else. Not to have all the answers, but to at least be someone who could share space with a mentee and help them make connections to people who could answer questions I couldn’t. That’s how I decided that I was ready to give back in that way.

Kate: George, you mentioned that over the past few years, you’ve done mentorship and also been involved in a jurying capacity. Does The Color Network provide exhibitions, opportunities, or connections that you find particularly interesting or meaningful?

George: Yeah, so to speak on the process, I’ve applied to many, many things in my life as an artist. Sometimes it’s unknown how you get chosen to be in an exhibition or are selected for a grant. I think that to be on the other end, where I’m actually jurying a large assortment of applications, to narrow it down to just a couple of grantees… It was good to be in that perspective of having to sift through all of these different people. And I would say that all of them are qualified in some capacity, but we still have to narrow it down. It’s a really enlightening process to be able to witness.

In the mentorship capacity, to echo Magdolene a little bit, I’ve taught formally at different institutions, but to get a one-on-one conversation with a mentee is just more valuable. It’s more personal. You don’t just talk about academia or their work or their process. You get to know other artists as people, what their goals are, and have a conversation about how we become better stewards in the world through our artwork, which is really great.

Kate: There’s a certain language involved with academia and scholarship, whereas mentorship can be so much more about relationship-building over longer periods. In your involvement with The Color Network as a mentee or mentor, how has it impacted your own artistic practice?

George: There’s such a wide breadth of artists involved with The Color Network, and there’s a really lovely page on the website where all of these artists can showcase their work. Just looking through to see who’s on there, you begin building some relationships. Then, the first time that I had the opportunity to see a TCN grouping in person was really striking. You can feel the intention and power of the work, which just made me question like, okay, well, if I want to be in this grouping, how am I putting in my intention? So it didn’t change the concepts, but it increased the intention that I was putting into creating my own work.

Magdolene: That’s really well put, George. For me, too, my work continues to follow its own path. I don’t think it’s coincidental that, in my work, I’m thinking about relationships and finding ways to visualize that. A lot of the work we do with The Color Network is about building and fostering relationships. So it’s a sort of echoing or reverberation, between my work and the work we do through The Color Network.

Kate: Do you actively tie artists in the database and the mentorship program to exhibitions within the network?

Magdolene: We’ve been trying with exhibitions to turn those into opportunities and not limit it to just the folks who are in the network, to really expand and allow more opportunities for folks who might not be on the database yet. A really exciting component of the database is that educators and curators are looking at it. Educators and curators are well aware of needing to question the models they’ve been following and decenter previously prioritized groups. For me, as an educator, that’s the most exciting aspect of the database: there is no longer any excuse for any educator to say that they just don’t know any artists of color.

Natalia: I think that’s my favorite part when K-12 teachers send us their projects and share how excited the students are to be using the database. And how the database is really for everyone and anyone, not just for artists of color. I also think that, now that people are recognizing TCN, we can just put out open calls to anyone.

George: Yeah, and I just wanted to add that our connections as organizers, individually, reach beyond what the database has. There’s always a lot more interest. And the upkeep of the database is slower than we’d like it to be, so we do reach beyond that and try to always incorporate more.

Kate: That’s a great point to make, Natalia, about the K-12 education because the art world at large isn’t necessarily thinking about how they’re reaching, you know, 16-year-olds. It seems like you’re building elements that appeal to different groups of people depending on what their entry point is.

Magdolene: I think that accessibility to K-12 educators is actually incredibly important because the majority of those students aren’t going on to art school. So what does that mean? Only if you go to art school do you learn about artists of color? That’s not right. K-12 education is an important way to get more young people talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and what that can look like in visual arts and beyond.

Kate: There are so many variables, based on geography, economic background, what size school you went to, what your teachers even have been exposed to throughout their lives. Think about how much that early art education enriches how students view the entire world.

Magdolene: It’s massive. I mean, arts education, whether it’s K-12 or it’s post-secondary, like what are we really teaching? Yeah, we’re teaching art, but art is a vehicle for learning how to be a better human and a better co-traveler with all these other humans. Artists of color are doing incredible work that addresses these issues. There are beautiful prompts for student creativity, just by looking at the work being made today. You can start talking about incredibly crucial issues that are hard to get into otherwise. If you have an art object, whether it’s a piece of ceramic or painting or whatever, all of a sudden everyone can talk about this together.

Kate: Have you seen an increase in demand from artists or educators, seeking out this information as it has grown in the last few years?

Magdolene: From my experience, I would say yes. In the school board that I work with, there is still a really high need and a sense of not letting anyone off the hook in de-centering previously Eurocentric curricula but also acknowledging the capacity of each educator.

Every educator has a certain capacity that is stretched between a variety of responsibilities, and every educator also has a life where they’re navigating many factors. What I’m seeing in my role as a secondary educator is that my colleagues don’t always have the experience or even the capacity to do in-depth searches. The database offers educators a stepping stone to start this work, and I see that as really crucial. I’m seeing my colleagues hungry for it, and some are just a little bit lost until they can find a platform to start from.

Kate: TCN launched online in 2018, and then during the pandemic there was a wave where everyone went online out of necessity, to maintain connections and to keep working. Did that period change how the organization reaches people or what the response has been?

George: I think a big part of the 2018 formation—and even in 2017, right before that—it was about gathering in person, building community and camaraderie with one another, and exchanging ideas, like when you’ve had a similar lived experience or just have a perspective that you want to get some honest feedback on. It was all about gathering in 2018 and 2019. When we moved into an online platform, we tried to continue that through open studio sessions. We were able to figure out the technology and figure out, like, how can we still gather, but digitally?

We had these Open Studio Sessions where we could bring different ideas or just have conversations amongst each other. It’s imperfect, but it also opened up a lot of doors because we could do it more often, as opposed to those in-person gatherings, which tended to happen once a year.

Kate: The group offers something called affinity rooms. What are those?

Natalia: That is the Open Studio Session, and it’s still open. We provide a stipend for any artists of color who want to run a discussion. You can have up to three or four co-facilitators, and everyone receives a stipend just to guide a conversation.

The biggest feedback from the community is that they wanted more connection, more community events, and more ways to be able to connect with each other. A lot of us are spread throughout the United States and Canada, and a few of us are sometimes the only person of color in the surrounding area. A lot of spaces are predominantly white. So especially for a few artists that were living up in, for example, Alfred, New York, they were thirsty for conversations with the community. Doing these conversations or having community events online when we can’t get together in person, people can have a little bit of that. We’re always open to receiving applications to facilitate the Open Studio Conversations.

Kate: Can you tell me about TCN’s involvement with the Watershed Residency?

Magdolene: It’s a really good connection to make between the Open Studio Zoom gatherings and Watershed. I would say that both fall under a major pillar of our mission, which is to provide networking opportunities. Watershed goes a little further in terms of offering, rather than a quick network, a bit more of a sustained space and time for more in-depth dialogue and relationship-building. We’re still in relationship with Watershed, and we’ve been in talks around an upcoming project to try and keep that opportunity running.

Natalia: Yeah, it’s all grant-based. We will continue to try to make in-person residencies happen, and that’s just dependent on whether we receive funding. It’s a lot of work for some of these grants, but as long as we’re here, we’re going to continue to try to offer these in-person residencies for artists of color.

Kate: As you’ve been involved in various ways as part of the community, is there anything that you’ve been surprised by, something that happened that you didn’t anticipate, or anything that stuck with you over time?

Natalia: I would say the mentorship. I came into it as kind of the guinea pig with Magdolene, and I had graduated only a couple of years earlier than her from grad school, and I thought, what can I offer her? But having someone to talk to and becoming good friends through that program, it became peer mentorship. Even though I was the mentor, there were times she became the mentor. It’s a rich relationship, and we’ve worked on projects outside of The Color Network, which I think has been the most valuable experience for me.

George: I would also say the mentorship portion tied into the Watershed Residency because the residents at Watershed were mentees and mentors coming together. A lot of those relationships are digital; we’re online. My mentee was in Sacramento, and I’m in Philadelphia. Mostly we corresponded online, and that tends to happen a lot with our mentorship program, but we were able to gather a group of mentees and mentors at Watershed.

What was lovely is that, as soon as we all arrived, the hierarchy of the mentorship-mentee relationship kind of leveled out. Everybody was just there on even footing, and we were able to have really lovely conversations with each other. We came out of that and continued these really deep friendships with everybody. I think, because it was a residency and we were all in community, pretty constantly together, for two weeks, we were able to come out of that with a mentality of being able to rely on each other even more, which is lovely.

Magdolene: The surprise that came out of that, for me, was seeing a small group within the group of residents who were at Watershed carrying forward with friendship and professional relationships. They are taking control of the conversation. They gave an excellent panel presentation at NCECA this past year. It’s really exciting to see the power of mentorship, just having that connectedness and that network. Every person is a node connected to so many other nodes.

I think George absolutely hit it on the head: to just have this safe space where you can count on these people. And even if it’s as simple as, “Where are you going to stay for NCECA? How are you managing the logistics of this insane three-day sprint?” Even things like that are really beautiful to see.

Kate: That’s a great point, too, that no matter what region of the art world, so to speak, you might be in, it’s all about relationships. I love your idea of the nodes connecting to other nodes. Is there a goal or a mission that you’re working toward or projects that you’re in development for, like a focus on more in-person opportunities?

George: I think the focus right now is to apply for grants so that we can have that funding to create these larger opportunities. We do have a fiscal sponsorship with Watershed that allows us to continue some of the programs that we’ve been running. Micro-grants are ongoing for artists to get reimbursed for application fees. It’s a really small thing, but it’s something that we can provide pretty easily. But for larger-vision projects, we gather about once a month as co-organizers to discuss these ideas. Right now, we’re just trying to kind of steady the ship and figure out things like, how do we gain more funding to create these bigger opportunities?

Kate: Say there’s endless funding. Is there a dream opportunity? Is there a project that you would love to see within the next year or two, a dream goal? I know that’s a big question, like “endless funding,” what’s that?!

Magdolene: If there’s no limit to the account, I mean… Something that’s on my radar at the moment is the Gardiner Museum in Toronto recently hosting a major exhibition of Magdalene Odundo’s work. I was talking with a friend who was previously my mentee, and we were talking about how amazing it would be for The Color Network to arrange some sort of event that interacts with that show, to celebrate these stars in our network. That’s been on my mind.

Natalia: We’d like to pay mentors because we know that that’s work. And to get more mentors—we’re always looking for more mentors. I think people don’t realize that somebody just out of grad school could be a mentor. Somebody in grad school could be a mentor. A lot of people have that imposter syndrome or feel that they don’t have anything to give. We’re doing this out of a labor of love, but if we had unlimited funds, yeah, we’d be paying people, recognizing that it is important work.

George: For me, I’m a lot about the party! I want people to come together and hang out with each other. And if we had unlimited funds, having an event somewhere central where people could gather. Maybe we could pay people’s way if they needed help and just financially be able to support folks to come together and be in community with each other for a week. It’s those in-person conversations that are really powerful.

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For Arghavan Khosravi, obscurity is the point. The Iranian artist (previously) translates the experience of living a dual life—that of immigrating, of presenting differently when at school and at home, and of wanting to deny clear interpretations—into disjointed works that are equally alluring and destabilizing. She’s never proscriptive and offers viewers several entrance points into her narratives, which center around agency, identity, and most recently, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in protest of Iran’s strict limitations on women and girls.

I visited Khosravi’s solo show, True to Self, at Rachel Uffner Gallery in mid-November, a week after our phone call transcribed below. In addition to her fragmented wall works bound by cord and layered in multiple dimensions, several figurative sculptures congregate at the back of the gallery as a sort of battalion. The women are armored with chainmail and Persian helmets but aren’t militant, instead forming a structural resistance that both demands their right to be seen and invites viewers to stand with them in defiance and solidarity.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Grace Ebert: You have a background in graphic design and illustration, two disciplines rooted in narrative and storytelling. And in the first article we wrote about your work, you say that before you start a new painting, you keep thinking about what you want to say in it. Of course, your background is influential, but why is this narrative component so crucial to your work?

Arghavan Khosravi: I have always been painting on the side in my spare time, but when I came to the U.S. in 2015 to go to grad school and study painting, I wanted a fresh start. I thought that I should forget about all the skills that I learned during those years as a graphic designer and illustrator, and I had to let go of the set of tools that those fields gave me. I started with abstract paintings that were all process-based and more like happenings, accidents, pouring paint, things like that because I thought I’d have to start from the opposite pole in this spectrum. I didn’t have any sort of narrative in my work. 

When I was working in this mode, the process was not satisfying. The result was not satisfying for the viewer. In school, my first grade was very horrible. I was depressed for a week after my first critique, and that was a very small example of what a career in art was going to be. It was a good practice to not get disappointed by negative feedback. After that, I realized that for what I want to express in my paintings, abstraction is not good. I shouldn’t try to abandon narrative or all those things that I learned while working as a graphic designer. I thought that having those perspectives in my work as a painter could help me to create my own visual language. 

So I landed on painting, maybe from a slightly different perspective than someone who has been trained more traditionally or conventionally as a painter. That’s how having a narrative in my work became more and more important. 

At some point—it was a couple of years that I was away from home in Iran—I started to think about my memories from Iran, and because of some visa complications, I wasn’t able to travel. Beyond the immediate feeling of nostalgia, I thought of my memory and more and more about the situation in Iran. That became the prominent subject matter in my work. My work became more narrative about the situation in Iran, how women are treated, and in a broader sense, people in general, in a semi-totalitarian theocracy. That was the point of departure in my studio practice.

Grace: Have you always known what you wanted to say, especially as it relates to those more political or humanitarian issues that you’re talking about?

Arghavan: Even when I started, it wasn’t like, okay, I want to address these issues. It was more organic. It started with my childhood memories, which had nothing to do with the current situation because it was through a lens of me as a child and on a more personal level. But then it started to be more about the human rights crisis in Iran. 

I never have a clear idea of what I want to paint. I leave my imagination free while I’m sketching, and I try out different things and look at a lot of source material because sometimes that helps me. My creativity is more activated like that. When I look at several images from all different kinds of sources, some ideas come to my mind. It’s more like a stream of thoughts. Ideas are floating in my mind, and different images come to the surface and go. 

But when I want to start a painting, at that point, I have a very clear idea of what I want to paint. Everything is pre-planned during that sketching phase. Sometimes when I start to paint and look at my sketches, some things are even clearer to me because, before that, it seems that they were on a subconscious level, and I wasn’t even aware of them. Then it’s like an object in front of me. I look at it, and I realize that there were these underlying meanings that even I was not, in an active sense, aware of. 

Grace: What are some examples of subconscious things?

Arghavan: There is one piece called “The Void.” At the bottom of the composition, a woman is trapped in a box, and on the middle level of the painting, there is a woman trapped in flames. The more you go up, some positive things emerge, like a window to a garden and a woman who is sitting and reading a book, looking out from the window to that garden. When I was thinking about this composition, I didn’t consciously think about the hierarchy of the positioning of these elements. From the bottom to the upper part of the composition, there is a sense of liberation or hope. When I was working, I never thought about this logic.

Grace: I know symbolism is something you’re always thinking about. You use recurring motifs—hair, strings, chords, and I noticed that more recently, you’re using bodily wounds, like gashes in people’s skin. I know that these symbols serve different purposes and that they’re not all speaking to the same thing, but why do you decide to return to these recurring motifs? What does that repetition offer you and offer the narrative?

Arghavan: At first glance, they are very simple symbols, and most of them are universal. I like to complicate them and have them in my work in a way that conveys more complex thoughts. It’s like having this set of simple alphabets and then creating words or sentences that are not as simple. Again, it was not intentional, but I realized that I’m drawn to these simple symbols and to have them juxtaposed with other symbols or other imagery that in the end, eventually, convey something more complex.

In general, I’m interested in symbols because they make the paintings accessible to a wide audience. People coming from different cultural backgrounds, different life experiences, can have their own take by looking at these symbolic elements in the paintings. 

Maybe it’s because of where I’m coming from. In authoritarian systems, if you want to say something and not be in trouble, you have to say it in a way that it’s open to interpretation to circumvent that censorship. I think it has become part of Iranians’ DNA. Now that I’m here, and I have the freedom of expression, and I can say almost anything I want, it’s still part of me. If I want to be genuine in my paintings and true to myself, I still have that approach. It makes the paintings not just limited to a specific audience but also hopefully not specific to a time or geography. And maybe more poetic, I guess.

Grace: Last time we spoke, you mentioned that your goal is to find something that’s universal in women’s experiences. It does make sense that obscuring the meaning, not being so direct with what you’re speaking about, lends itself to being more universal. 

Arghavan: Exactly. And hopefully more timeless so that in the future, still the pieces have something to say. At the end of the day, I think the Iranian audience, Iranian women to be more specific, are the ones who get the paintings the most because we are coming from the same circumstances. While the audience is not limited to them, I think they are the core audience.

Grace: That makes me wonder what your relationship with Iran is at the moment.

Arghavan: Since late 2016, I haven’t traveled to Iran, so my contact is limited to my family, friends, and social media and news outlets. But I follow everything closely because still, a part of me is living there. I care about what’s going on. Based on what happens in Iran, I get energized, or inspired, or sometimes depressed. I try to reflect that in my work. To very selfishly put it, the main reason I make my paintings is because they make me feel better and cope with these negative thoughts or feelings. 

Also, the other part of the creative process that gives you satisfaction is that you share it with others. They can comment on it, share their own experiences, and create a broader conversation. For me, painting is a healing or coping mechanism to deal with trauma on a both personal and collective level.

Grace: And you paint every day, is that right?

Arghavan: Yeah, except for the days that I’m on a trip. I paint every day. I don’t have any days off.

Grace: I want to return to the obscurity that we were talking about in terms of the beauty of your works. I find them so destabilizing because I look at them, and they’re beautiful. They have bright colors and very clean lines. And yet, as you just mentioned, they’re full of anger, full of grief, full of rebellion. Can you talk about that dichotomy between the two?

Arghavan: You’re right that there is this dichotomy in my work. At first glance, the bright colors look like they could communicate some positive feelings, but the closer you look, some disturbing imagery is lurking beneath that beautiful surface as you said.

I’m interested in this idea of contradiction in general, not just in how the paintings look. When I have imagery coming from different contexts—like historic, contemporary, Western, Eastern—this creates tension, which is like a visual translation of the tension Iranian people feel living in Iran. Most Iranians don’t believe how the governing system is thinking and believing, so there is always this clash between tradition, religion, and then modernity and secular ideas. 

Like what I said about symbolism, it becomes like part of your DNA, this dual life you have to lead in Iran. In public, you appear to be following the rules that are based on religion, and then in private, you have your secular way of life and your freedom of thought. This is the core reason behind this idea of contradiction. When it comes to the paintings’ color palette or composition or even the way I paint, which is very precise— the painting has a sense of delicacy—then there is this contrast between these bright color palettes and the darker subject matter or situation depicted. I hope that it creates this tension that was something on an everyday basis when I was living in Iran I experienced.

Grace: Would you like to talk a little bit about what it was like growing up in Iran?

Arghavan: I’m happy to. I think this is the case of most Iranians, they say that there is a dual life that they have to live. I was born and grew up in a family of which religion wasn’t a part. My parents and extended family weren’t religious. So the first time that I encountered religion, when I had to face it and be forced to practice it, was in school. At seven years old, you start to realize that there is this separation between your private space and the public space. There are things you do at home that you shouldn’t mention in school, like if you listen to a kind of music, things like that.

The other thing is that the compulsory hijab starts at that age—not in the streets, but when you’re in school, we have to cover our hair. You realize that there is this distinct separation, and at an early age, you learn how to navigate this double life. First, it’s at school, then at your college and your workplace. You always know that once you step outside the haven of your home onto the streets, you have to adhere to these Islamic laws and like the case of Mahsa Jina Amini, risk your life if you don’t. 

Although I should mention that since last year’s uprisings in Iran, which started in reaction to the compulsory hijab, women are defying that. They’re defying to wear their compulsory hijab in public and risk their freedom or even their life. It seems that these newer generations are trying to rebel against these laws that are imposed in public and on a daily basis, and courage is contagious. They are not wearing their scarves as an act of civil disobedience. So, women’s hair has become a political object in Iran.

Grace: It feels like this disjointed reality, of living several different lives, comes through in the fragmented nature of your work where you have all of the different panels and different dimensions. 

Arghavan: Yeah, and on top of that, now I’m also living the life of an immigrant. Even now I feel that I’m living in between places, like a part of me is still living in Iran. I’m living here, but I don’t feel that I 100% belong to here, at least at the moment. Maybe in the future, things will change. That’s another reason that I feel like these multi-panel pieces are really speaking to that experience. 

Grace: Absolutely. I’m also curious about the use of hands in your pieces because hands to me seem to be representative of agency. 

Arghavan: Or lack of agency. 

Grace: Right! And sometimes in your works, the hands are glowing. Sometimes they’re bound by strings or cords. What does the hand mean to you? What do the gestures mean to you?

Arghavan: Hands can be charged with a lot of emotions, and how they’re positioned can convey a lot of emotions and feelings. This is something that you can see in miniature paintings, as well, not the hand, but the expressions of each person. Each figure’s feelings in those paintings are mostly conveyed through their body language, more than their facial expression. That has always been very interesting to me. And in my work, I found that hands are a good vehicle to express several feelings, without necessarily showing the face or the full body. 

And as you mentioned, they represent agency. If they are depicted in a situation where they’re bound to ropes, then they show a lack of agency. These glowing hands, in my mind, are predicting something about to happen. They are a source of power. This woman in this painting is depicted in this repressed situation, but the glowing hands suggest that she’s going to take things into her own hands. Because I have a lot of black ropes or the black ball and chain and shackles, these glowing, colorful hands are the opposite of that. Whatever the ball, chain, and shackles symbolize, these glowing hands are metaphors for the opposite concepts. 

Grace: You have hope then.

Arghavan: Yeah, maybe. We have to have hope. 

If the paintings are too dark, and everything is too disturbing, I, as the painter, cannot stand working on them, let alone with inviting other people to look at them. I need to have this balance of negative-positive in my work because, at the end of the day, it’s my coping mechanism. 

Grace: And, if we don’t have hope, then what is the point? Why make the work?

Arghavan: But a realistic hope, not something that is not achievable and makes you feel numb and not act. Something that feels real, not too idealistic.

Grace: I want to talk also about your recent show at the Rose Museum. Congratulations on that. How are you feeling about it now that is wrapped up? 

Arghavan: It was a great experience. Working with the curator, Dr. Gannit Ankori, was really a great experience. It was a survey, so there were works from the time that I was a student at Brandeis, works from my time at Rhode Island School of Design, and more recent works that I created over the past two years. Having all those pieces in one space, it was really interesting to look at them and look at how my journey as a painter started and evolved. 

For me, one of the highlights of that exhibition was five Persian miniature paintings that were on loan from the Harvard Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Because those are the sources of inspiration for most of my paintings, having those historic masterpieces exhibited beside my work was something that I have always dreamed of. I never thought that it could be possible. So, that was one of the most exciting parts. 

Also in this exhibition, I had eight works that were freestanding, fully three-dimensional pieces. That was also a first for me. They’re now on view for my solo show at Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York.

Grace: How do you feel about creating within this tradition of Persian miniature paintings and being in conversation with them? 

Arghavan: This is something that other people should judge. I have never been trained in that tradition of Persian miniature paintings. The way I paint is self-taught. The first time I studied painting was in grad school, and at that point, they assume you know how to paint. The conversation is more about what you paint. That’s why I don’t think that I can consider myself part of that tradition. 

But, it’s part of my visual language. These miniature paintings, or these patterns within the parts of the paintings, are part of my visual vocabulary, and it’s something that in my childhood I have grown up looking at.

From a cultural perspective, there are some overlaps between my lived experience, my experiences, and that tradition. It is important to note that these visual languages—patterns and arabesque designs—were also often used for governmental propaganda. So, it’s a visual vocabulary which has been developed over the years, and now I am interested in claiming it as my own and expressing my own contradictory narrative with it.

Grace: What made you decide to do fully three-dimensional sculptural works? 

Arghavan: I started to have some three-dimensional elements in my previous works, and I always want to push further and challenge myself in the studio. I have realized that I am more creative when I’m in problem-solving mode. 

I was interested in having pieces that the audience could move around and decide from which angle to look at. When they move around a piece, the work changes. That was also interesting. All of those three-dimensional works were created after the protests in Iran, so I was very inspired by those events. I wanted to give the women in my work a more powerful presence. These three-dimensional, larger-than-life, cropped portraits of women felt like a good choice to have that sense of power. They occupy space in a way that you cannot ignore them.

Grace: You can’t ignore the women no matter where they or you are. You can’t ignore them anywhere.

Arghavan: Exactly.

Khosravi’s works are on view through January 6 at Rachel Uffner Gallery and May 5 at Newport Art Museum. Keep up with her practice on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Arghavan Khosravi On Tension, Circumventing Censorship, and the Protest of Iranian Women appeared first on Colossal.

What responsibility does an artist have to care for her viewers? This is a question that Zoë Buckman (previously) thinks about deeply.

Portraying elements of her own experiences with abuse and sexual violence, Buckman is vulnerable, generous, and outspoken, sharing her stories in a manner that tethers her to countless others who have endured similar trauma. Her subject matter is difficult, but her works are warm and inviting as she stitches her grief and strength into handkerchiefs, tablecloths, and dish towels.

Much of her output during the past few years has championed the fight: that of resilient survivors, of rebelling against the patriarchy, and of Buckman’s own sparring with the art world as she sought to use mediums historically associated with “women’s work” to put issues of rape, assault, and bodily autonomy front and center. Her new series, though, titled Tended and on view at Lyes & King, takes a softer approach, which Buckman discusses in this conversation. In September 2023, we spoke via Zoom about making such large-scale portraits, her early indoctrination in feminism, and what it’s like to raise a child around such difficult, and undoubtedly necessary, work.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Grace Ebert: Can you tell me about Tended?

Zoë Buckman: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a first for me in that I’ve never done a solo show that just has one medium and one modality of expression. For the last several years, I’ve been working with textiles primarily, but I’ll usually have some sculptures, a sculpture hanging from the ceiling, and then some embroidered flat works. There might be a neon. At my last show in New York, I was actually incorporating handbuilt ceramics. So this, for me, is quite stripped back, and I gave myself firmer parameters. Within those boundaries, I’ve been able to really expand and explore and push my limits of what I can do with embroidery.

It’s also a first because I’ve never made works of this scale. I recognize that for a lot of artists, these are not large-scale works. But for me, who does this all by hand, myself, without assistance, this is a larger scale. From working on hankies and hand towels and tea towels to suddenly a tablecloth, that’s quite a big step up for me. It’s been challenging, but it’s also been fun and exciting.

Grace: That is a huge step. And the works are figurative, which is probably a different process than your other works?

Zoë: Totally. I’ve been edging towards figurative, more portraiture-style embroideries, and that’s been about me becoming more comfortable. Audiences have been seeing in real-time my growth and evolution. I started to actually put figures and forms in my work–which was something that I’d really strayed away from–and the first time I dipped my pinky in was during the pandemic. That was with a show called Nomi that had to go online at Pippy Houldsworth. At the time, like all of us, I was isolated, alone, and really just missing bodies and people, my family, my friends, my loved ones. Looking back now, I can see that a lot of that, that solitude and that fear of when am I going to get to see my people again, that’s why I started to depict forms. But they were really small, and these little figures dancing around a tea towel, coming undone and exalting and raving and whatnot.

Then my next series was called Bloodwork, and that was my first in-person solo show in London. In that series, I was like, these are portraits. It was more detailed and taking up more room within the textile. And now with Tended, I feel like I’ve been able to really expand that.

Grace: And these new works are based on photos, correct?

Zoë: They are. Ninety percent of them are abstractions from photos that are taken by me. Some of them are photos of me taken by other people. But they’re all my own personal moments that I’ve been reflecting back on from the early 2000s until now and ranging from moments captured with my mum, my daughter, niece, sister-in-law, best friends, a lover, etc. In some of the works, I also use text from writing I’ve done the last few years.

In the work “lies dressed honestly,” a friend and fellow survivor is lying on the floor of a boxing ring, exhausted and raw. I remember standing above them and taking that pic, and I’ve returned to it many times over the years because of their gaze that is both direct and non-confrontational. I painted flowers growing from those that were already printed onto the border of the tablecloth and then added text from writing I’d done about violence in gendered relationships.

Grace: Why did you choose to use photos from such a broad period of time?

Zoë: It’s about these significant relationships where there has been this tenderness and this closeness, this love and support, or a bearing witness to one of life’s big transitions. My mum passed away four years ago, so if I want to depict her, that’s already going to be a photo from the past.

My sister-in-law, Dionne, is such a rock and a force. There’s an embroidery of her daughter, my niece Sadie, and you can see my sister-in-law’s legs. Sadie is sat in between Dionne’s legs, having her hair done by her mum. I took that photo two summers ago before the Notting Hill Carnival in London. I love that there’s that moment in which the focus is really on the child. But I also wanted to depict something of me and her mother so I did that with the work, “songs leak from my bedroom walls,” which is the largest embroidery I’ve made to date and depicts a moment in my bedroom when I was 17. The figures, accompanied by their wilderness, take up most of the textile. There’s an explosion of growth coming from my pen in the piece. That, to me, really signifies my and Dionne’s evolution that was yet to come as we became women and mothers.

Grace: That makes me wonder if Tended is also having tenderness for yourself through these periods?

Zoë: Yeah, totally, 100 percent. Another thing that’s been going on with my art practice is that I’ve been making work exploring what I’m experiencing that year transposed onto the art. It’s obviously very cathartic. I hope I’m also finding ways to make it universal, and you’re not sitting here through my art therapy.

I am aware that Tended is also about my journey with healing and arriving at a place where I can talk now about grief, abandonment, violence, and abortion. But I can look at it now from a place where I’m really exploring our care and the tenderness towards ourselves and others as an antidote to these femme-bodied experiences. Whereas in the past, I was looking more at rage and strength, resilience and resistance. That was Bloodwork and that was Nomi. The mode of that work was more, look at these awful things that we experience, and look how fucking badass and strong we are. Now, I’m at a place where I’m able to be softer.

Grace: It feels that way. I think one of the reasons your work is so powerful is that it is universal, unfortunately, and many people have experienced similar things. I’ve heard you talk about your responsibility as an artist in making work about trauma, and I’m wondering how your thinking about that has evolved in the last couple of years. And also, how do you care for yourself as you bring up these moments from your past and are exposed to those of others sharing their stories in response to your work?

Zoë: Thank you. One thing that’s important to me has to do with beauty and softness. Those are definitely tools that I embrace and harness. I know that I’m exploring something that is very difficult and triggering. It’s always been important to me that I make work that draws people in and creates an environment for conversations about violence, rape, abortion, miscarriage, and all of these things. In the work itself, I am trying to care for viewers.

It’s an interesting question. I really appreciate you asking it. And I just realized something, which is that when I walked into the gallery to install, the first thing I did was make them turn the lights off. This is the standard and no shade to the gallery whatsoever, but they had those bright strip lights that honestly, remind me of the times when I’m being wheeled into surgery. It’s cold, and it’s sterile, and people are standing over you, and the lights are so bright. You’re about to get an injection that’s gonna put you out, but the last thing you see is this blinding white light. And you think, is this it? Is this the last thing I’m gonna see? Right? So when I walked in to install, and I saw all my pieces framed and finished, leaning up against the wall in this light, I was like, “We have to turn the lights off.” There was enough natural light to hang the work and get conversations right, and then we spot-lit each piece.

I personally have a bit of a stress response when I go into a packed gallery in Chelsea or the Lower East Side or wherever it is, and it’s blinding. You can see everything. I don’t like it. It makes me feel like I’m under a microscope as a viewer. I just want people to be looking at the work so the lighting was deliberate in that way.

Grace: It’s about creating a comfortable space for people to be in.

Zoë: Yeah, exactly, where it’s warm, and you can breathe. The works will then start to speak to you.

Grace: I’m curious if you are willing to talk a little bit about your child and them being around your work. You recently moved your studio, right? Is your studio at home now still?

Zoë: Yes, it is at home. It’s on the ground floor of my home, and we live above it, which has been revolutionary because I can shut the door.

Grace: What is it like to raise a child in the context of your work? I imagine they ask a lot of questions.

Zoë: Absolutely. In my previous home-studio, I was really, for the first time, exploring this violent relationship, which of course, they had been a small kid during that time. And then suddenly, the truth of that relationship was being explored in art in our home. It definitely opened the door for some really beautiful and honest conversations between me and my kid. And also, I can recognize that the need for healthy boundaries became very apparent during that time. I’m about honesty, and I’ve always spoken to them like we are equals. That’s been really beautiful and beneficial for our relationship. And at the same time, this is a kid who needs to be a kid. So I’ve been learning on the job how to navigate that, and I’ve probably made some mistakes.

I can tell you that when they walked into the gallery–I took them this weekend to see the show–they were so proud. They were blown away. They loved that the first thing, the first piece, is the one of me and them. It takes a little while to see them in it and most people don’t notice them straight away. They see a woman with a black eye, but out of a bunch of appliquéd flowers, you see there’s this other form. It’s a kid on the toilet with blood in their knickers. Cleo was super proud of that moment being captured–I obviously had their consent–and also it being depicted in thread.

Grace: That’s so special. So often, women are saddled with the idea that either you can be an artist or a good mother or if you’re child-free, then the only thing that can fill that innate motherhood-shaped hole is art. I’m wondering how you understand the connection between motherhood and your practice, especially as your child seems to feed some of your work.

Zoë: Yeah, absolutely. Becoming a mother really opened me up. In my life up until that point, I had not taken charge of anything. I’d had my power already taken away from me by male forces by the age of 26 when I gave birth. Finding myself in this position, being pregnant, completely integrated with my intuition and my power, and commanding that space when I gave birth, then commanding space to raise and care for a baby, for some reason, I fell into it in a very natural way. Was I freaked out? Yes. Was it fucking hard? Yes. Was it infuriating at times? Of course. But for some reason, I was like, shit, I can do this. That feeling of capability really opened me up as an artist.

When it comes to the industry, as a female artist, there are so many judgments. One, as you touched on, is motherhood, the heaviness, judgments, taboos, and how you do or don’t fit into the right category of what is expected of you as a female artist, if you do become a mother and if you don’t. But also, there’s just so much crap put on female artists. Even when it comes to what we do in our spare time, what we look like, what we want to talk about, what we want to make art about, whether or not we like sex, fashion, love. It’s beyond. It sucks. I’ve tried to shut that out.

Grace: Is that difficult to do?

Zoë: So difficult. I mean, the art world definitely did not want me to have a place in it when I first started making work. It’s been over a decade of me continuing and keeping my head down and making work and trying to shut out a lot of the highly judgy sentiments that I was subjected to, particularly when I was first coming up.

Grace: I’d like to talk about your feminism, where it came from, and what it means for you, especially considering feminism as a popular ideology seems to have been de-radicalized.

Zoë: It definitely came from being the daughter of a super strong woman who was a socialist, feminist activist, voice of the people, on the front lines on the picket lines. I found this massive biscuit tin completely chock full of different badges that my mum had collected over the years, from like, Jews against apartheid to the miner’s strike to like, fuck the Tories scum, we hate fascists, feminists against fascists. It’s so cool. So for sure, super early, implanted in the home were conversations and ideas that questioned patriarchal constructs.

That was even something I had to explain to people when they asked about my name, Zoë Buckman. People would mistakenly refer to my dad as Mr. Buckman, and I’d be like, “Oh, that’s not my dad’s name.” I would have to explain. My mum and dad agreed that the children should have her name because she’s the extraordinary one who gave birth to us. That’s for sure where these ideas had their germination.

Becoming an artist in New York during the time that I did, the friends that I made, and the community that instantly embraced me here–for whom I am so abundantly grateful. Honestly, I would not still be making art if it wasn’t for a small group of artists and curators who just took me under their wing–within that community, I really learned more about the intersectional piece. I credit my friends and my community who took the time to criticize feminism to me and with me and talk about their experience of feminism. It really opened me up to understand a more intersectional experience.

Grace: Is Tended the first time you’ve talked about gender in a genderqueer way?

Zoë: In this series, it’s important to me that when I speak about the work or write about the work that I’m not misgendering any of the subjects depicted. If I look at Tended as a whole, there are three trans people who I’ve depicted in thread and one non-binary person. I am not making gender a focus of the work at all because that’s really not my story, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be profiting off of their journeys. When you look at the work, you have no idea which of these subjects is trans or nonbinary, right? But it was important to me in the writing about the series that I express it correctly, so as to not misgender anyone that I love.

I think also an important distinction is that I’m not cherry-picking the people that I depict in the work based upon like, oh, I need a trans woman. I need a trans guy. If I look at a photo, and it happens to be a drag queen who is also trans, doing makeup on my child for their ninth birthday, and what I see is this love and this tenderness and this moment of affirmation between these two people, that’s what I want to capture.

Grace: It feels very clear that the people you’re depicting are people you know.

Zoë: Exactly. They’re very much a part of my life.

Grace: Can you talk about the loose threads?

Zoë: First of all, I am not a professional embroideress. When you look at something that’s executed perfectly, like a really gorgeous piece of embroidery or lace that has been handmade, when it’s completely finished and completely perfect, you actually don’t cognitively think of it as being handmade. You just see what it is depicting. That’s a gorgeous flower, or that’s a really delicate, beautiful piece of lace. You don’t think about the fact that someone actually made this, and this is a manifestation of their toil and their hard work.

Part of the decision to let the threads be loose is first of all, recognizing and owning my own limitations formally, but also, it’s a way of saying, I was here. Here’s my work. Here’s my chaos. Here are my mistakes. There’s a knot there. This one’s dangling. This one’s now knotted into this one. And it’s all coming down. That’s important because a lot of the work is about that. It’s about the labor of our forms and our hard work. And also our messiness.

Grace: And what our physical bodies produce.

Zoë: Exactly, what our physical bodies produce. 100 percent.

Grace: I do want to know what’s next for you, but first, I want to congratulate you on the National Portrait Gallery acquisition. That’s so exciting.

Zoë: Thank you so much. I so appreciate that. That was a really big one for me.

And what’s next? I have work opening in a group show at SFMoMA next year. Then next September, I will have my first solo show at a museum in the south that will be up during the election. The work is going to span my practice to date looking at work that explores abortion, miscarriage, and birth. I’m not allowed to say the museum yet, but I’m super excited about that.

Tended is on view through October 14. Find more of Buckman’s work on her site and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Zoë Buckman On Tenderness, Her Evolution as a Woman and Mother, and Embroidering Her Largest Works To Date appeared first on Colossal.

Whether working with porcelain or spray paint on wood panel, Morel Doucet begins with beauty. His goal is always to entice his viewers, to instantly captivate and tempt even the most unexpected audiences to engage with issues of displacement, the climate crisis, and what it means to be an immigrant in the U.S. He approaches his activism similarly because, to him, they’re one and the same.

Doucet (previously) has become a steward of sorts as he advocates for his community in Little Haiti and grapples with how gentrification will ultimately change the Miami neighborhood. While vibrant and heavy with alluring botanical motifs, his work reflects destruction and highlights the flora, fauna, and people threatened by developers and anxiety about rising seas.

I spoke with Doucet via Zoom in September 2023, a few months after he closed his first solo exhibition at Galerie Myrtis and premiered his works in Chicago in At the Precipice: Responses to the Climate Crisis. We discuss those milestones, how his upbringing on his grandfather’s farm laid the foundation for his work, his proclivity for poetry, and why it’s important for him to tell his own stories.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Grace Ebert: What are we looking at right now?

Morel Doucet: This is a recent commissioned piece that I did for a group show at the Little Haiti Culture Center. The title is “From Bones to Belonging,” and the exhibition is looking at the Lincoln Park Memorial, which is a cemetery that houses a lot of the Black founders of Miami Dade. Over time, the cemetery has grown with vegetation, and so this exhibition is bringing light to the legacy of Black Miamians and their contribution to the city. I was asked by Miami photographer Carl Juste to do the skulls for the exhibition.

The subject matter and imagery are not in line with what I typically explore in my work, but I wanted to find a way to pay homage to various cultures. Blackness is not a monolith–you have Haitians, Bahamians, Jamaicans, Black Americans–and so I wanted to find ways to represent that diversity, which is why all the skulls are slightly different.

Grace: How did you decide on the patterning?

Morel: They’re very organic. I was trying to be mindful with the materials that I already have in the studio. All of the skulls are ceramic porcelain. Some of them have ceramic decals. I also experimented with different glazes and spray paint, as well. I was just using everything that I had available to me instead of buying new stuff.

Grace: Let’s talk about your connection to Miami. You so often work with issues that are directly affecting your community, especially your neighborhood. I would love to know why it’s important to you to connect with not only the people who are around you but also with the native plants and animals in the area.

Morel: I was born back in Haiti, but I grew up on a farm and was raised by my grandfather. And so at an early age, I had an innate understanding of our relationship to the environment. With my grandfather, whenever we would cut something down, we would always plant a few things. Growing up with that mindset, and then transitioning from Haiti to the U.S., I noticed a lot of food waste, a lot of resources that are not being fully utilized. I noticed that within our culture and how we consume things, there’s this rapid waste all across the board, from food to common items like clothes, things like that.

I’ve lived in Little Haiti for the majority of my life, in and around it. Over the course of the last 20 years, I’ve witnessed the rapid change of development in the city. It went from a neighborhood that was comprised of mostly immigrants trying to survive a nine-to-five to becoming one of the most desired neighborhoods in the city. Because developers want this part of the city now, we’re being pushed out. And it’s really aggressive. As a result, I feel like it’s important to document the changing times because the Little Haiti that I grew up with over the last 20 years is different now, and I can only imagine what the next 10 years are going to look like. I feel like Little Haiti will be wiped off. A lot of the old, cultural nostalgia may not be there. And what is this new part of Miami going to be?

For the exhibition I had with my gallery, I started to look into the neighborhoods. Little Haiti sits on one of the higher elevations in the city. With the threat of seawater rise and if Miami Beach is wiped completely off the map, Little Haiti will probably be the next beachfront. As a result of that, the developers are like, “Oh, let’s start building in this part of the city now because it sits on a higher elevation.” Most of the time they buy a house, and they demolish it. Once the house is demolished, it becomes vacant land. The leaves, the flora and fauna, become the residue of what the energy and the experience of that space [used to be]. By going to these sites, gathering the plants, and incorporating them into the work, in a sense, it’s like carbon mapping, a carbon footprint, of that experience.

“Night Garden: In Moonlight the Stars Chatter” references the vastness of the land and the fencing. You can look at it as a portal, as a garden that becomes a site of memory, a site to honor the experience of what was happening there. This was the intent behind this body of work: pairing fencing [from the lots] with colors that are very bright. They’re very vibrant, which goes back to my Haitian roots. The colors in Haiti, the architecture, tend to be super, super bright.

Some of these iconographies are almost identical to Haitian metal workers who passed away in the 2010 earthquake. In a spiritual sense, I was using imagery techniques that come from my Haitian roots and some of the fabrication of the French scene and the metalwork. This is the base of what I was trying to explore with the solo show. There are a lot of moments of experimenting with the fencing and the metalwork. I’m referencing a place of home. What does that home look like? And how is that home transforming over time?

The largest installation in the show is comprised of 18 portraits, and the title is “God Told Me Stars Used to be Audible Through the Window Sills.” Again, I’m thinking about memory and the energy of the people that live in this neighborhood, how it’s transforming over time. I’m hoping it transforms into something better. Gentrification is not necessarily always bad. When it’s brought up, it’s normally in a negative term, but there are some parts in the neighborhood that could use some development. So I’m hoping that the change will give empowerment and benefit to some of the homeowners that are there.

Grace: I feel like it’s more of a question of community investment and how whoever is gentrifying is actually working with the people who are there. Who are the people in these portraits?

Morel: Those are the residents.

The developers are trying to coin Little Haiti “Magic City.” It’s a monstrosity of a project. There’s nowhere for the locals to exist. They’ve proposed mixed-development housing, but the rich do not want to live with the lower class. Their solution was to create a community fund, where people could tap into this money, and they could make things on their own. But when you have a community that lacks the support and the infrastructure to really manage funds properly, it becomes a waste. We need somebody within their team who’s going to successfully manage the fund. Don’t just throw money at it. You need to properly invest and develop that money so that it’s going to be there for 100 years to come.

They use this very coded language. The same developer was fighting to call the neighborhood its historical name, which is Lemon City. This part of the city used to be very populated with lemon trees, but that was back in the 1930s. That was part of Miami at the time, but in terms of the development contribution, the Haitian community is really who has contributed to the city. The developers wanted to undermine and erase that because they were trying to avoid branding it Little Haiti.

The community is going to be nowhere in this. This building is for people from out of town, from California, from New York. These condos are going to be like, $6,000 a month to rent, which is three times the average of what most residents in Little Haiti make. I don’t see where the residents fit into it because they’re going to be priced out. This is not affordable for anybody that lives there.

Going back to these homes that are being demolished, I’ve been gathering the metal exteriors and repurposing them to create what works with them. When you pair the leaves that come from the neighborhood with the metalwork and the residents, it’s essentially a map of the people and this experience.

Grace: It’s documenting a very specific time, which is really beautiful. What was the process like of preparing for that solo show at Galerie Myrtis?

Morel: It was absolutely labor intensive. I was supposed to have that solo show two years before, but when COVID hit, it completely shut down production. I had to find a way to pull through.

These portraits are all hand-cut with an exacto blade. The process is also very labor intensive–I’m not only repurposing and fabricating the metal facade, but I’m also cutting each of these portraits by hand. I’m not only having an interaction with the resident, but the post-production is very intimate, as well.

Another idea that I was thinking about within the exhibition was the idea of rest as an act of protest. Growing up with my mother, for example, she was working two jobs at points in her life to support us. As an immigrant, you don’t have that luxury sometimes. [The proposed developments] will probably bring a lot of jobs for people in the neighborhood, but then they become part of that same cycle where you’re just working to provide, but you won’t necessarily enjoy the luxuries of it because you can’t afford it or you don’t have the luxury of time to go and experience it.

In “Three Black Crow (Black Boys Rest on the Mythos of Fallin’ Dreams),” the idea is that as an immigrant, you have this big dream, but you’re caught up in the cycle of perpetual work, that’s working to survive. And it’s not necessarily having the luxury to dream and escape from that.

Grace: You’re so engaged in all of these very important political issues, and you just referred to this piece as an act of protest. I’m curious if you consider yourself an activist.

Morel: As an artist, the work that I make is inherently political. I consider all of my work to be double-edged swords: they entice and lure the viewer with beauty while reminding them of their complacency within the dying environment. I don’t have to say I’m an activist. The work that I make is inherently that.

Even on the commercial side, I did a project for Facebook, in their corporate office here in Miami. This is a piece that I did about the bleaching of the coral reef. It’s on the 20-something floor and overlooks the Biscayne Bay. When you’re walking in front of it, again, it’s aesthetically very beautiful. But then, as you’re walking by, you’re like, “Oh, why is everything white?” It takes a deeper dive into coral reef bleaching and how this is having an adverse effect on marine life, which is important for fishing and food. It becomes this domino effect.

I approach a lot of my work in a similar way, where there’s craftsmanship, technique, and then presentation, and then messaging. Messaging always is third or secondary in the work. I let the viewer appreciate the work first. It gives you permission to experience and live within the work without necessarily having to be overly burdened with this messaging. This is where climate activists are failing. If you go into a museum and you’re throwing paint on something, then you’re having the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve. Art should be used as a tool to further enhance what you’re doing. Why are you attacking artists or artworks of historical importance? I think it’s counterproductive to do that. There are successful ways to engage, have moments of play, without having to damage something.

A good example of that was when I did a project with Meta for Art Basel last year. I worked with an artist in Amsterdam, and we created this augmented experience [that reinterpreted the coral work]. It went from being this beautiful piece in their corporate office that was only accessible to their employees to bringing the work accessible to the public. It was a fun interactive.

As an artist who has been working in this capacity, these are more impactful than going into an institution and throwing paint on something. The public is having fun, and they’re learning in the same process. This is the same approach I bring to my classroom as an educator working in the museum: let people have permission to play, let them experience the work on their own terms, and then be like, “Oh, by the way, this is what this work is about.”

Grace: We talked a lot about beauty and using visuals to entice people and bring them into the climate conversation with At the Precipice. But I’m wondering, when you’re creating, who you’re making your work for. Who is your audience?

Morel: The audience is everyone. White Noise, for example, is an exhibition that I did at the African Heritage Cultural Center. I was intentionally being multigenerational. I had these pedestals that were 46 inches tall, and the younger kids in the exhibition could walk around, but they could only glimpse what was stationed on the pedestals. I was interested in the idea that these younger generations could see a little bit of the threat, but they have no permission. They’re just simply going to inherit the world that we are giving to them. So in the exhibition, I made sure that the pedestal was much higher so that all of the kids aged 10 and under could see the work directly. The pedestals were fabricated at eye level for the adults, so they were directly confronted with the work.

Going back to my audience, my audience is really everyone, but I try to focus on Black and Brown communities. Based on my experience, when I’m in rooms talking about climate change, there’s not a lot of representation for people that look like me. It’s not that they don’t care. They don’t have the luxury because they’re working. They’re trying to provide food for their family.

This work, for example, is called “White Noise, Let the Choir Sing a Magnified Silence (25 Affirmation).” It’s an allegory to talk about how we’re complacent. We’re sitting down, and we’re letting the destruction happen before our eyes. It’s a global effort, a global task to work towards that change, and it affects everybody. Within the work that I do, I try to highlight Black and Brown communities because they’re not represented in that conversation.

Grace: The title of that work is so poetic, and I know you have a background in creative writing. I’m very curious about your relationship to poetry now and how you title your work because they are all so beautiful.

Morel: English is not my first language. Growing up in the early ‘90s, I tried very hard to hide my Haitian identity. I tried to assimilate. I was very particular about diction and pronunciation. Even in my college experience, a lot of my schoolmates did not know I was Haitian-American at all. It was not until my mom came up to visit me, and they heard me speaking another language that they had to say, “What is that?” That’s Haitian Creole. “You’re not Black American?” No, I’m Haitian-American.

I was very much an introvert, very shy, very reserved. I had a teacher for writing in high school, who said, “You know, Morel, you’re really great writer. You should really consider taking a few courses in college. I think you’ll do yourself a disservice if you do not explore this area.”

I went to MICA, and then I met Dr. Chezia Thompson Cager. She’s a professor in writing and poetry at MICA. I had a liking to her. She was this Black Ph.D. When it came to representation, I never saw that before. By taking her class, I really liked poetry, that style of writing. In my senior year of MICA, I was her teaching assistant, and she got sick during that semester. I ended up having to take over four weeks of her class. I was absolutely terrified. I remember she pulled me aside, and she goes, “I wouldn’t have hired you as my teacher’s assistant if I knew you didn’t have the capacity to teach this class. Here’s my syllabus. You’re going to teach this class. Once I get better, I’ll come back.” She stayed home, rested, and she showed up that last week of finals. That gave me a boost of confidence that I didn’t see myself. She did, but I didn’t see it at that particular time. It was those particular experiences that led me into the realm of museum education.

Going back to answer your question, being Haitian American, coming from a really proud history of being Haitian, I learned that if I did not tell my own stories on my own terms, then somebody else would do it for me. Writing gave me access and an even playing field to tell my own stories in my own words. With my titles, I use them as a kind of gateway to let the viewer figure out what the work is about.

Grace: What’s your relationship to Haiti now?

Morel: My mom is one of 11 siblings, and most have two or three kids. I have over 35 cousins, and so there is a deep-rooted connection to Haiti. My grandfather on my mom’s side is still with us. He’s almost 90 and is still farming. Luckily, for my family, we live in the north, and a lot of the political turmoil that you’re seeing on news media, we’re not directly impacted by it. The hardest thing has been inflation and the resources. The gangs that control the capital have been disrupting the flow of certain goods, and so things have inflated as a result. But in terms of physical well-being, they’re better off than a lot of people in the south.

The piece you have in the exhibition at the Design Museum of Chicago was originally commissioned by the American Craft Council. The title is “The Hills We Die On (Flowers for President Jovenel Moïse).” It’s about the assassination and a little bit of his upbringing is behind the motif that I’m using in the work. There are moments in my work where my Haitian culture and identity come through, either in color and texture or just through wordplay.

“Tea With the Queen” is another great example. This piece took a deep dive into the idea of reparations. I’m imagining if the French government and Haiti got back together and had tea to talk about the idea of reparations, giving back Haiti the money that they paid for their freedom. What would that look like? What the vessels in the conversation be?

Grace: I was listening to a podcast that you were on, and you were talking about not learning Haitian history in high school. And obviously, you put so much research into every piece. I’m wondering how the experience has been for you to go back and learn about Haitian history and also what your research process is like now. I imagine you read a lot.

Morel: A lot, yeah! I’ve gotten better at researching since developing my museum curriculum. My last job was at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. My original title was the curriculum and tour coordinator, and then I became the school program coordinator. Online resources were one of my main projects.

Grace: You just stopped doing this not too long ago, right?

Morel: Last May. It’s been over a year now.

I’d been developing these curricula for the museum over the time I was there. I had all of these lesson plans for different grade levels from high school to middle school to elementary. In developing these lesson plans, I had to be really good at research, reading, and knowing how to take something that’s very dense and paring it down to where a third grader could understand or how to upscale it and make it a high school lesson plan. All these are skills that I eventually sharpened over the course of the last couple of years. This is like a legacy that I leave behind for the museum. And I’m very proud of it. I’m very proud of that work.

When it comes to researching the work, I’m reading books, looking at articles. I’m also interested in the material culture of certain things that I’m using. For example, “Night Garden: God Was Not The Author Of Confusion And Despair” has black glitter that looks like mica. If you’re standing in front of it, there’s this beautiful shimmer that happens in front of the work. All of this makes me very intentional with the material that I’m using in the work, and all of that comes from the research that I’m exploring within the work.

Grace: What drew you to education?

Morel: I started off as a young museum educator. I had my interview at the Miami Art Museum, which was closing down, and I started working at the Perez Art Museum Miami, which opened up a few months later. I was so early on in the museum that I had a construction hat on. It wasn’t fully open to the public yet, and so as an employee, by code, we had to wear a construction hat. I was probably like eight months out of college, one of the youngest educators on the team. To join a new museum and be at the forefront of developing the foundation of what the education program would look like, it was absolutely life-changing. I learned so much over the course of that time. Eventually, I was able to take what I learned to join ICA Miami.

I enjoy teaching. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the teachers who saw something in me. I got into the magnet art program because of an art teacher. She pulled my mom aside and was like, “Listen, your son’s got this talent, and there are these programs that will take his raw talent and cultivate it. Eventually, this could lead to a career for him if he really enjoys doing it.” The fact that my mom had that foresight and that she valued what the teacher had to say, I was able to get put into a specialized program.

I auditioned for the magnet program in fourth grade, and I got in in fifth grade. From fifth grade to high school, I was in a specialized art program. Painting and drawing have been my foundation, and ceramics came later on. I didn’t realize the privilege that I had growing up in the ‘90s. A lot of these schools don’t have these art programs anymore. The luxuries that I experienced growing up are not necessarily available to kids anymore because art funding is being cut back in schools.

I initially thought I was going to become an illustrator. Then when I realized what an illustrator was, I was like, “Oh, I’m never gonna have freedom. I’m gonna have to make work for an art director all the time.” I eventually left the entire field, and I just embraced making my own work instead.

Grace: Did you ever think that you would not be an artist?

Morel: There was a point, yes. I told myself that if I wasn’t an artist, I probably would have been somewhere in the medical field. It would give me the opportunity to work with my hands. Maybe some kind of surgeon or something of that capacity.

Grace: I’m curious about the way that you talk about yourself. In listening to interviews that you’ve done and reading your conversations, your story, your trajectory, the way that you talk about being an immigrant, being an artist, being from Miami, the traditions that you work within– porcelain and now Afrofuturism–everything feels very precise. Does this way of talking about yourself come really naturally to you?

Morel: Oh, not at all! Not at all. In my everyday me, I’m still an introvert. I perform well as an extrovert. When I’m an educator, I put on my teaching cap, I go into the classroom, and I do what I need to do. But I’m a homebody. I like being in nature, away from the chaos.

But teaching has helped me get over the anxiety. What I tell my kids is, “Be you. You’re enough. Be authentic to yourself. Tell what you know and what you’ve lived. The right people will gravitate towards you, and the right opportunities will come. Don’t conform for the industry or don’t conform because it’s trendy. Being authentic is what eventually will get you to where you need to be.” I move that way. I can only talk about what I’ve lived and what I’ve experienced, and I think that is enough. The right moment, the right opportunities, will come as a result of that. I don’t need to conform or adjust myself in order to fit a certain mold.

Grace: What’s next for you? What are you working on?

Morel: Right now, I’m in a little bit of an artist block. I just had this major solo show in the spring. I just finished a commission. This is my last big project that I’ve done for the summer, so now I’m in this period where I’m trying to force myself to take a break, take a vacation, recalibrate, recharge before I can go back into production again.

What is ahead of me is public art. I’m working on two major public art commissions. One of them is for a new courthouse in downtown Miami. I’ve been commissioned to do something special for the waiting rooms. I’m also working on a tile project for a mixed-development housing in Miami. I’m nervous. Public art is scary for me. I told myself that I wouldn’t have gotten here if it was not the right time. Everything is timing. If I got the opportunity, then it’s the right time.

Three of Doucet’s porcelain busts, including “The Hills We Die On,” are on view in At the Precipice through October 30 at the Design Museum of Chicago. Find more of his work on his site and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Morel Doucet On Beauty, Gentrification, and Why He Uses Poetry to Tell His Story appeared first on Colossal.

For Chris Pappan, distinguishing between the past and present, the present and the future, is irrelevant. Time, for him, is circular and cyclical, something that ensures he’s able to connect to those who came before him and also to those who will after.

A citizen of the Kaw (Kanza) Nation and of Osage, Lakota, and European descent, Pappan (previously) is invested in honoring his ancestors while emphasizing Native American contemporaneity. He often works on municipal ledger paper and other found substrates to depict people in photorealistic detail, mirroring their faces and forms and creating myriad metaphors for split selves, distortion, and human interaction that transcend time and space.

I spoke with Pappan after the opening of At the Precipice: Responses to the Climate Crisis, which includes the artist’s meticulous triptych of two figures, “Howageji Nizhuje Akipé (Where the Rivers Meet).” Configured as a “Y” shape to reflect the Chicago River, the works are exemplary of Pappan’s painstaking devotion to rendering the most minute details and to showing how actions of the past continue to affect the present. In this conversation, we discuss his evolution as an artist, the complexity of Indigenous life in Chicago, and the importance of his new collaborative venture, the Center for Native Futures.

Grace Ebert: I want to start with your background. You grew up in Flagstaff. How does that inform your understanding of yourself and your work?

Chris Pappan: As far as my work is concerned and my practice, I’ve always been drawing. I graduated from high school in Flagstaff, and my last year there, I was in two art classes and constantly drawing in all my other classes, like English and math. I always got the work done, and the teachers were pretty chill with it. I passed. I wasn’t getting As or anything, but they could see where I was going.

Grace: And your grandmother encouraged you. Is that right?

Chris: Yeah. When I was younger, she was always telling me about how artistic my mom is and told me, “You’re probably artistic, too.” At that age, you’re just like, “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. Whatever.” But she kept at it and then passed away while I was still in junior high. Her words always stuck with me. Once I started really developing more of a practice and getting out there, then I thought it was important to honor her through art.

Our people believe that our ancestors are always with us and watching over us. I think that’s very important. In a lot of my work, I try to honor our ancestors in that way. I’m always looking at old photographs, and I feel like I’m communicating directly with them. Whether they’re my direct ancestors or indirect ancestors, that’s really special.

Grace: How do you think about your work in the broader tradition of your ancestors and their art practices?

Chris: When I graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts, I wasn’t really quite sure where I wanted to go with my work. While I was there, in Santa Fe, I was trying really hard to not get put into this Native American art pigeonhole. Growing up in the Southwest, you see it all the time. You see successful artists conforming to certain modes of expression and a certain visual language that is supposed to express our culture, but I feel the homogenization creates a “pan-Indian-ness” and reinforces a mono-culture, which is still true today. But nowadays, there’s more acceptance of different modes of expressing our culture and who we are and our own experiences.

Circling back to my time in Santa Fe, I was trying to stay away from that. The importance of my time there was more about connecting with other Native students and learning about that side of my culture and my identity because I didn’t really grow up with it. It was really important for me to connect with other people, other artists, and young artists, who have had similar experiences as me. That was more important for me than trying to develop my visual language.

Then I came to Chicago with [my wife] Debra and went to the School of the Art Institute. I couldn’t continue my education there, and then thought I could develop my practice/business on my own. I ended up getting a job working for an art gallery here in Chicago, and that’s when I started to do the ledger drawings. To me, that was a direct correlation between my work and influences and ancestral art or a traditional art form. I saw this as an opportunity to adapt and possibly change it, which I think I have been successful in doing.

That’s my connection to the ancestral artwork. I don’t want it to stay in the past. It’s about the present and the future, as well. It’s not one-sided or linear. It’s circular or cyclical, more about our experiences as Native people today, how that’s informed by the past, and how it can be in the future.

Grace: How does this understanding of time inform your work?

Chris: Looking at historical portrait photography, I’m putting myself in that moment. The photograph was capturing a single moment in time, which was the present then. I’m bringing that presence into today. With these artworks, being in a frame in a museum somewhere, they’re preserved for the future. Hopefully, my descendants and other folks will be able to see my work and go back through those layers of time again.

For me, it’s all about those different layers. When I’m creating these works, I’m putting down different layers. I’m starting with the substrate, the ledger paper, and then building on top of that. I’m thinking about what other layers will be added to it later on, whether it’s people looking at it or whether it’s put in a book and going somewhere else.

Grace: Where do you source your photos?

Chris: Wherever I can find them. There have been a number of books published of photographs of Native Americans. The good side is that they’re preserving that moment in time and actually documenting these peoples’ lives in that moment. But the bad side of it also is the manipulation of those images and using them as propaganda to perpetuate ideas of the “savage warrior” or the “vanishing race,” that sort of thing.

There’s a book that was published by the Smithsonian that collected photos documenting the times Native American tribes went to Washington, D.C. There were delegations to fight for land rights or to cede land. The government made an effort to take portraits of everyone that was coming to do business. There’s this thick book of all these portraits of people that came through Washington, D.C., and there’s an illustration that documented this photographic process: There’s somebody sitting in the chair with the screen behind them, and everybody else is looking at him. Watching that whole process, it’s really interesting.

Unfortunately, a lot of the photographs in the book are really small, so they’re hard to work from as a visual resource, but it’s still really interesting to see. The amount of people that came through is amazing.

Grace: And then I’m sure there’s also the element of looking at those photos and thinking about the agreements that probably came out of those meetings that were not honored.

Chris: Exactly. I think about those agreements that were broken and the surrender of all this land. The entire state of Oklahoma was supposed to be Indian territory, and then non-Natives still moved in, displacing thousands.

Grace: The work that you’ve made for At the Precipice talks about the connection between land and people. Who are the figures in these pieces?

Chris: I came across the photo of the Sac and Fox man who becomes the North Branch of the Chicago River in the work, and he is unnamed in the photograph. It made me think about another project I was working on for a group on the East Coast. They wanted a portrait of one of their leaders who has gone unnamed throughout history. I don’t know if either she decided on her own anonymity or if because she was a woman, she didn’t need to be named. There’s a power in that: our people decided that they could keep their identity to themselves and not have it distorted throughout time.

He’s Sac and Fox, and the other man is named White Eagle. He’s Ponca. Their photos were taken while they were in Indian territory. The Sac and Fox were originally from this area and were eventually moved down to Indian territory. Those photographs came from the collection of the Huntington Library in Pasadena.

These photographs speak to me sometimes, whether the way that people look, the way they’re standing, what they’re wearing. It really affects how I feel about the photograph and will make me want to draw them. I see the textures that I think would be really fun to draw or if there’s a direct correlation with a show I’m working on. The Sac and Fox person was displaced from Chicago so I thought it would be good to bring him back home.

I was thinking about sharing him on social media to see if anyone recognized him, but maybe he doesn’t want his name known. So I think I’ll just honor that.

Grace: Many of your works featured mirrored figures or split figures. How does that process work? In “Howageji Nizhuje Akipé (Where the Rivers Meet),” you draw full faces and then replicate differently sized portions of that same face.

Chris: That’s something that I’ve just started to do in my work. I was inspired by another Native artist. She has this whole scene in her mind and then she’ll repeat it in portions so it creates this vast landscape. And I was really inspired by that. For me, it’s an entirely different way to distort figures, which is something I’ve been intentional about in my work for a long time.

A number of years ago when I first started doing these ledger drawings, I saw a lot of people working from old photographs: “Here’s a painting of Geronimo and Sitting Bull.” That sort of thing. It’s very familiar to people, and I liked that but I wanted to think about how I could approach it differently.

It started out with mirroring, which was a complete accident. I was tracing the outline of a photograph and transferred it to the ledger paper. I did it backward from how I intended, and thought, “Oh, man, I messed this up,” and then I was like, “Oh, wait, what if I just do another one right next to it? Or on top?” And I realized that this is weird, this is cool, and I really liked it. It was one of those happy accidents, a Bob Ross moment.

But getting serious about it and putting it into a Native artwork context, it becomes this whole other thing about identity issues or traveling through time.

With this exhibition, I just went crazy, I guess. Even with the mirroring and the overlay, as it is in the bottom drawing [Sac and Fox man], your perception of the figure becomes different. You’re perceiving something else. You said it’s different sizes, but it’s not. It’s basically taking one section and then repeating it, then the next section and repeating it. It’s very manipulated but organic at the same time in how it comes together and breaks apart and comes together. I think it’s analogous to how human beings are reacting to each other. We come together and then break apart, throughout history, throughout our lives.

It can also be a metaphor for breaking Chicago up into a grid and how our lives interact in this grid. That’s all part of colonization, establishing the city, making it into a grid, and dividing it all up but still having this identity as one city. The river runs through the middle of it, which speaks to how humans have interacted, then destroyed the environment and are now trying to rectify the sins of the past.

Grace: I’m just realizing that when I look at your works, my eyes go immediately to the full faces. I feel like there’s some metaphor there about recognizing a face or the difficulty of looking at distortion.

Chris: Yeah, that makes sense, seeing something that you recognize rather than seeing what’s there.

That’s also interesting because somebody at the opening of At the Precipice was saying that his eye goes directly to that third eye right in the center. That’s what I love. People perceive it in different ways. There’s this weird, abstract thing that happens, and people will see things that I didn’t intend. But, again, it all speaks to that distorted view, that image of us that’s been manipulated over time for a certain agenda. And Native people also perpetuate that, as well.

I wanted to stay away from Native art when I was at school because of falling into those tropes and perpetuating those stereotypes. My work is taking that stereotype and flipping it around, distorting it to show that that’s not who we are. It is not only who we are.

Grace: That reminds me of the exhibition that you did for the Field Museum a few years ago, which was a corrective. As you reflect on that show at this point, how do you feel about it?

Chris: As far as my contribution to the Field Museum, I feel good about what I did. But unfortunately, I don’t feel like it’s made a lasting change. They thankfully saw that there was a need to take out the old exhibit hall and redo it. That’s good. There were positive changes made, but unfortunately, it was only a superficial change. That place needs some deep institutional change and rectification that is not happening. Now it feels like they’re doubling down and reinforcing what the old exhibit hall was perpetuating: Natives only exist in the past, and all of our culture is up for grabs. I know they feel they went too far in community collaboration with this new exhibition [in that the institution has no voice], and so they’re trying to take it back to what it used to be because they don’t trust people to be the experts of their own culture.

Honestly, there was hesitation and reluctance to show my work there, but I felt that my work could be a positive change. I learned a lot from that. I learned a lot about how people perceive Native people and why they perceive that. It’s because of what [people at the institution] have said and what they haven’t said about us, and what they choose to show about us ]spiritual and sacred objects]. Would I do it again? Probably not.

Sometimes you have to do these things and find out. A lot of people were like, “Are you sure you want to do that? That’s very brave of you.” At the time, I’ll admit, I was a bit naive, not really having a museum background or fully understanding the depths of the issues there. I felt like I could do some good there, and I did, but now, there’s a lot of pushback. I don’t understand why they can’t just move forward and why they have to entrench themselves in these old ideas.

Grace: Chicago is such an interesting city. I always think of us as being progressive, and there are changes, like the Chicago Monuments Project. And yet, at the same time, we have the Blackhawks.

Chris: Right. Toward the end of my exhibition there, the Board of Trustees at the Field Museum elected the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks to be their board president.

A guest curator of another exhibition there then became good friends with the owner’s son, who was running the Blackhawks Foundation. So then you had this Native American trying to champion the Blackhawks Foundation and “all the good” that they’re doing for Native people. And we were like, “What are you doing? This is insane.” There are people here who are trying to get the name changed for so long. But this is the M.O. of an organization with a racist mascot: Once they see any opposition coming, they’ll throw tons of money at it and hope goes away. It’s even better for them if they can get Native people on board to say: “I’m Native, and I’m okay with this.”

But who really benefits from that? It’s only a handful of people, and it doesn’t benefit the community. The team has tried to “educate” the team’s fans by having information booths at the games and bringing Native veterans out on the ice for every home game. It’s a sad show. It’s sad to see Native people used that way. Then the fans will say: “The Blackhawk tribe is okay with this.” There is no Blackhawk tribe.

Grace: It’s all so empty.

Chris: When you walk by the store on Michigan Avenue, it says “the best uniform in the NHL.” I’m like, holy hell man!

Grace: This feels like a good time to talk about what you’re doing with the Center for Native Futures. How did you decide that that was something you wanted to do?

Chris: Yeah. It’s been many years of dreaming. Debra and I wanted to start our own gallery here in Chicago a long time ago. Any Native American art representation was either very stereotypical [Field Museum] or very rarely, if ever, at the MCA and Art Institute. But we didn’t know how to start a business. You need a lot of money to buy a storefront and get a business running. This was at the time when I was working at the art gallery downtown, so I was still learning the business and how to be a full-time artist.

Debra started volunteering at the Field Museum because of my exhibition and doing community engagement. The museum received funding that stipulated community engagement as a full-time position, so they got the grant and brought her on to do that. We still had the dream but had to put it on the back burner. I then got laid off from my job at the art gallery, but it was a really smooth transition into doing art full-time.

And then the pandemic happened. We brought a couple of other friends into this idea of starting a gallery here. Artist Andrea Carlson then brought it up to the previous director of the American Indian Center, who started a 501(c)(3) for us. We were doing everything online, and we were also doing a lot of consulting for organizations. It just really grew and grew and grew to now. A big turning point for us was the Terra Foundation giving us seed funding because they loved the idea of what we’re doing and saw the importance of our mission. It was like, oh, this is really happening now! Here’s the money we need to start.

We were also consulting with the MacArthur Foundation, which owns the Marquette Building. Going back to Chicago and its difficulty and weirdness with Native American representation, the lobby of the Marquette Building features these amazing Tiffany murals. I wish that the subject matter was different, but it’s a perfect example of cognitive dissonance. You’re looking at this really beautifully done mural, but the imagery is like I’m watching Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves.

The foundation wanted to do some sort of intervention with that. There’s this causeway in between the Marquette Building and the building next to it that had this little exhibit about architecture. That has since been taken out, and they are installing an exhibition about Native Americans from the area that reimagines the busts that are also in the building of Native leaders. I contributed to that in reimagining those busts as drawings. The foundation also had all this empty storefront space due to the pandemic and asked if we would be interested in using that space, which then helps to counteract that narrative that the murals are telling.

Grace: And now that you have that space, what do you have planned?

Chris: We are shooting for our grand opening on September 16 and 17, 2023. We will have a large group show with many of the artists that we’ve been working with, up until now.

It’s good that we’ve been dreaming about this for a long time because going out into the Native American art world and meeting all these great artists and wanting to bring them to Chicago, we’re able to do that now. We easily have ten years of programming that we can do. It’s just making sure that we have the money and the time to do it.

Pappan’s “Howageji Nizhuje Akipé (Where the Rivers Meet)” is on view in At the Precipice through October 30 at the Design Museum of Chicago. Find more of his work on his site and Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Chris Pappan On Connecting to His Ancestors, Stereotypes, and the Center for Native Futures appeared first on Colossal.

Here’s what painter Amy Sherald (previously) has always known about herself: She was born to be an artist. She was born to bear witness to Black life, painting, in her own words, as a “corrective” to the struggle story that’s often the only one told about Black communities. She was born to fulfill the dreams of her ancestors, particularly her mother who, according to Sherald, “was supposed to be an artist but wasn’t given the opportunity to do so.” And though she didn’t actually say this during our video interview, I’ll add that she was born to bear witness to Michelle Obama and the fullness of the former First Lady’s accomplishment in a single, stunning canvas that captured not just Obama’s vibrance but her deep-seated strength.

Though Sherald admits to being socially anxious, she is also thoughtfully chatty and open when we speak early on a Saturday morning, coffee in hand. My favorite story she shares during our interview is about turning down tickets to see the band New Edition perform when she was a girl because of school. “I wanted to stay home and study for a science test I was going to have the next day about ants. I was really into it, so I was like I don’t want to go.” I appreciate this story because it testifies to her focus, her determination, and her discipline, traits that are still very much present in adult Sherald.

I first saw her work as part of the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which she won. In the 54 x 43-inch portrait “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance),” a stylishly dressed young Black woman wearing a bright red hat gazes steadily at the viewer while holding an oversized teacup and saucer in her white-gloved hands. The work features several Sherald hallmarks: the grayish skin tone that confounds any ideas of colorism, a beautifully rendered background devoid of context clues, and the subject’s open, direct gaze. With the exception of the clothes, which cannot necessarily be pinpointed to a particular era or style, the portraits are almost minimalist. Sherald is not interested in putting her subjects on display. Rather she’s interested in stripping away any preconceptions (or misconceptions) about each character, allowing the viewer to have an eye-to-eye encounter with the subject. That subject invites the viewer, “Get to know me… as I actually am.”

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Paulette Beete: What’s your origin story as an artist?

Amy Sherald: I started drawing when I was too young to remember so I feel like it was my anointing in this life to be an artist. It’s something that I, even at a young age, really wanted to learn. I remember being frustrated when I was like six, five years old, wanting to make a masterpiece, but I didn’t have the skills. My crayons weren’t giving me Leonardo da Vinci. I think that we’re born who we are. So in a lot of ways, I’m still the same person now, still very self-critical, trying very hard to get it right. And I still don’t feel like I’m good enough all the time.

My weekends were spent playing basketball in the yard or walking through the woods behind my house or going into the homes that they were building in the neighborhood and getting scrap wood to build stuff like desks and tables for me to draw on. I’ve always liked working with my hands, and I used to want to be a construction worker. That was my dream job, that or a car mechanic or something like that.

At Clark-Atlanta University, I started as pre-med and struggled. It’s not that I’m not smart. I am, but I’m not a science person. I finally changed my major after much anxiety and feeling lost and like, what am I doing in college. I didn’t feel like I was really getting anywhere. I changed my major to art, and that pushed me immediately into my destiny. I felt like I was finally moving with the current and not fighting against it. It was kind of scary because it’s not what my parents wanted me to do, by any means. But the universe sent me my painting instructor Dr. Arturo Lindsay at Spelman College [where I’d transferred] to be my guide during that time because I didn’t have anybody to be a mentor to me in a way that I needed.

Paulette: How do you define the term portrait, and why do you think you’re drawn to portraiture as the lens through which to tell the story of Black people?

Amy: I define it as a painting of a person, but you can also create a portrait of someone with words or with anything because what makes a portrait powerful is that it leaves you with a feeling, and that feeling is what essentially creates the portrait. If the painting is doing what it’s supposed to do, you should feel the feeling that you feel in the presence of this individual.

Now, for me, I draw a line between regular portraiture and what I do because I think that I would put some portraiture in the category of passive. When I say passive, in my mind, I’m seeing a woman who’s sitting in a chair and gazing out of a window, and this is a painting of her, and I’m looking at her look out. So she’s in a passive position. She’s not aware of your presence; you’re just kind of a voyeur in the moment. The people that I paint are almost soldiers if you will. They’re present, they’re willing, they’re open, and they want to meet you as the viewer.

Portraiture, for me, is having the opportunity to tell a story, to tell my story, to tell our story [as Black people], to have the portrait work in ways that are creating a counter-narrative, a corrective narrative, but then also a narrative that can carry us into our future selves. They have the capacity to be mirrors for today and also vessels to look through to see into the future.

I’m purposefully living in a way that allows me to be in touch with my deepest self, my inner child, so that I can really understand what it is to be human without the defining constructs and struggles that we have because of race and our histories, globally speaking. I think it’s different from portraiture that we think about historically, which was for documentation of wealth or land or status. My portraits are here for self-reflection.

Paulette: One of the elements I find really interesting about your work is the backgrounds. They are absolutely beautiful, but they don’t locate the figure in a particular space.

Amy: I was trying to step away from context. Context really influences how we see things, and I wanted the figures to stand as individuals within their own stories. It’s like being in an elevator with somebody. It’s just you and that person, and you’re in this box. For the time that you’re in the elevator, you wouldn’t know if maybe the person on the elevator might be going home to a mansion or to a cardboard box on the street. I want the eyes to tell the story. I want the clothes to speak.

I enjoy seeing plays that don’t have a lot of props. Sometimes it’s just one or two characters on a stage, and you have to imagine everything else. I’ve seen a couple of plays where I was fully impacted by the minimalism of everything that I saw. I saw more than what I was given to see, and I felt more. I imagined the places that they were speaking of. I enjoy that challenge of not giving (all of the context). I just want it to be solely focused on the character.

Paulette: You’ve said in past interviews that you think of painting as a resting place. Can you say more about that? And do you also think of painting as a resting place for yourself as the artist?

Amy: I do think of it as a resting place for me. I think because my paintings are quiet, they’re a respite from the rest of the world. We see so much all the time. I can’t even look at it anymore. In the news and social media, when things happen, the videos are posted, and you want to see what happened. You want to see whatever injustice. You want to see it, but I can’t watch that all the time. I can’t constantly internalize that level of deep pain and then also the aggression that you’re watching without cleansing my spirit afterward.

That’s the work my work does for me. It allows me to go back to a place of play and imagination and hope. [The people in the paintings] live in a world where possibly life is different, where children can be children, and young people don’t have to worry about police interactions or gun violence. I think in order to make it through without carrying this trauma, because I feel like trauma can be delivered secondhand, it’s important to have a resting place. And so I started using that vocabulary around the work as a way to offer something in the moment.

Paulette: I agree that because you’re having an interaction one-to-one with the figure, there is that moment of stillness, and you can get absorbed more into it. It’s really beautiful. I’d like to ask you now to speak about the role of titles in your work—how you use them and how you come up with them.

Amy: It’s my least favorite thing to do. It’s not that I don’t like doing it. It’s just that it takes me like a year to name a painting. I need to live with it. For a while, my sister was naming them, but now… I read a lot of poetry. It’s been really nice to draw these connections with the images and works of Black female writers and poets like Lucille Clifton, for example. I feel like poetry is one of those magical things that allows us to really tap into our deepest emotions and really speaks volumes to our potential as human beings. Sometimes these paintings that I make really match that imagery that these women writers words were speaking at the time. I find it really fun to pair them like I’m illustrating a Lucille Clifton poem—or Gwendolyn Brooks or Elizabeth Alexander—and how it speaks about the Black interior. That really allows me to see what I’m doing in a more fulsome way.

Paulette: You’ve spoken about your paintings as a way for Black people to be seen as a whole, where it’s not just about your race or your gender, but it is who you are at your core. And yet, you do this historic painting of Michelle Obama, and the headline is “First Black artist to paint first Black First Lady,” rather than “Incredible woman artist painting incredible woman lawyer who’s done all these amazing things.” How did you navigate that conversation?

Amy: I used to say whenever these conversations come up, there’s moments where I do need to be Black, and there’s moments where me being Black isn’t important. It depends on the day. Some days I’m an artist. Some days I’m a Black artist. Some days I’m a Black female artist. Some days I’m an American artist. Some days I’m an artist from the South. I understand the importance of the moment and needing to state that. The headlines could probably have been written more eloquently. We tend to take big moments and summarize them into a two-minute read.

Paulette: Over the past several years, the visibility of your work has grown exponentially. How do you deal with what I imagine must be the enormous pressure of being so well known?

Amy: I feel that desire to show up [to everything] because you want to show up to these things. But then you realize that if you showed up to everything that you’d probably be in your studio, like four months out of the year. I have social anxiety, always have. I went from being a deeply introverted person to someone that had a public life, and that wasn’t easy. It’s definitely easier now, five years later, because I’ve had to exercise that muscle. And there are aspects of it that are performative, I think, because that’s just how you survive. But I had to [learn to] say no because I had to protect my peace, and my peace is my practice. Where my peace is is also where my energy lives that I need to make the work. For me, that comes from profoundly and deeply quiet moments. There’s a busyness that I think destroys that for me.

Paulette: And how do you keep that pressure from affecting the work? How do you move on from painting Michelle Obama, for example, and start the next canvas?

Amy: Waking up the next morning, I’m saying, “I have to get back to work.” It was really as simple as that. I have bills to pay. I still want to have my first museum show. I still have these career goals that I’ve set for myself. I’m trying to become an important artist. You just do it, you know, and carry the holiness and the validation of that moment and let it empower you and embolden you to be even bigger and brighter. And wake up and go back to work.

Find more of Sherald’s work on Hauser & Wirth and in Art21’s new season of Art in the Twenty-First Century.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Amy Sherald On Bearing Witness, Social Anxiety, and Finding Respite in Her Work appeared first on Colossal.

About sixteen percent of the global population lives with a disability, and a portion of people in that group, approximately 57.7 million, are amputees with limb differences. Disability designates the world’s largest minority population, and as with any identity category, the experience is unique for each person, their backgrounds, lifestyles, and goals informing how they understand and inhabit their bodies.

Sophie de Oliveira Barata knows these variances well. For more than a decade, she’s been at the helm of The Alternative Limb Project, a Lewes-based studio that makes custom prosthetics for people with amputated or missing appendages. The designs range from uncannily realistic to fantastic, fairytale-like creations that fall at the intersection of art and medicine, a unique meeting point she discusses in a new interview.

In May 2023 via Zoom, I spoke with de Oliveira Barata about the young girl who helped inspire the project and the balance between form and function when designing medical aids. We also discuss how cultural conceptions of physical disability have evolved, the importance of inviting people in to conversations about differences, and the imaginative, empowering possibilities of alternative limbs.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Grace Ebert: Can you take us back to the beginning? I’d love to know about your background in special effects and medicine.

Sophie de Oliveira Barata: I’ve always had an interest in the arts, and medicine has always run alongside. I studied a foundation art course, and I was working at the hospital at the same time. My curiosity for special effects came about through a hospital program, which involved reenacting a big disaster to see how they would cope. They would have makeup artists on board, and so that got me interested. Even though I was wanting to go into fine art, I thought I could do something a bit more vocational. I studied special effects at the London University of Arts. I learned prosthetics, body makeup, and conceptual designs, as well as working with costume and technical effects. I was going to go into the film industry, and then I heard about a job making prosthetic limbs for amputees.

I was at a place called Steepers Group for eight years, learning how to make realistic-looking fingers, toes, partial feet, partial hands, and full arm and leg covers. I even made a bottom for someone. I always got partnered up with people that wanted something way out. I kind of missed the art side, even though it was ultimately really challenging and rewarding. Trying to mimic skin tones without the tricks of the camera was really challenging. It was a great job, but I missed the kind of free-thinking that the arts gave.

I stayed behind and made loads of costume pieces, and they didn’t realize I was there until like four in the morning sculpting. I had so much energy then. I’d wake up and cycle around the block and pretend I’d been home. I’d squirrel away all these creations that I’d been making overnight, and then I just thought, “ What can I do with this? Can I combine the two somehow?” At the same time, there was a little girl that was coming to the clinic, who wanted something a bit different, some drawings on her leg, cartoons. I could see from a rehabilitation perspective she was really excited about that. She was in a terrible accident and had her leg amputated at the scene, and she got a realistic leg made every year through insurance. But rather than have a poorer version of what all the other children had, she was able to have something quite fun, and she was interacting with the whole process a lot better.

Every time I saw her, I would be encouraging her to do this and that. From a rehabilitation perspective, I thought “Oh, wow, what about wearable art?” Then I started experimenting with some ideas, and I typed in amputee model and found Viktoria Modesta on the front cover of Harper’s Bazaar with a prosthetic leg to one side. It told her story of wanting an amputation at the age of 16 because she had problems with her leg and loads of operations and a past of bullying. She didn’t have any emotional attachment to this leg. So for her, the story was really empowering, the idea of embracing a prosthetic and seeing it for something completely different, as an example of her kind of courage and her bold attitude. She was excited about the idea of wearable art.

One other woman I was working with said, “I’ve not really considered myself as being beautiful, and I thought I’d lost that part of my identity.” So I thought, “Oh, from an identity perspective, there’s something really in this, as well.”

I then set up The Alternative Limb Project in 2011, where I continue to make realistic-looking limbs because I could see there was a need for them. For some people, the idea of having a realistic limb would be a body balance thing or not being first and foremost known for being an amputee. One woman had a terrible accident, and she said she hadn’t come to terms with the idea of being an amputee yet, so to have a realistic leg meant that she could come to terms with it without having everyone else’s opinion chucked at her. She could come to it in her own time.

I did the realistic limbs and then the alternative limbs, each one being completely unique and different, reflecting the person’s character. Now they’re for performances, too, and exhibitions.

Grace: I’m wondering about the difference between realistic-looking and alternative limbs.
You’ve spoken about the empowerment of having both options, but what do you hear from people who are coming in to work with you on these designs? How are they thinking about power?

Sophie: It’s more celebrated now, and people are much more aware of limb difference. There are a lot of agencies now looking for models with limb difference and adverts, films looking to showcase different bodies, embracing body diversity. You’re seeing more and more of this, and people think about disability in a different way.

And with wars like Afghanistan, wounded soldiers are coming back. One guy, Ryan, who was ex-military, said he was so used to being amongst his comrades, who would all make these jokes like, “Oh, that’s just a scratch wound,” and they’d all be missing big chunks of their body. They were so used to seeing that and all these replacements they had access to. Going out into civilian life, he would be stared at a lot, and he said, “I really want to give them something worth staring at. This is nothing.” He wanted something that would bring that unspoken dialogue that allows the person they’re interacting with in on the conversation. It’s not a starting point of pity.

With the limbs, I’m bringing emotion that isn’t necessarily negative. I was walking with Ryan, and someone was like, “Oh, wow, that’s really cool. That’s amazing.” Suddenly, he was empowered, and it was a playful kind of trickery, an optical illusion. It was just a refreshing conversation. It’s a bit like fancy dress in a way. It’s like an icebreaker. And more deeply your showcasing how you feel about your body.

A lot of people say it’s really empowering, almost like their alter ego coming out. For Viktoria Modesta, a spike leg had come to her in a dream, and it was like the ultimate form of power dressing for her. The leg is like a stiletto, but on a point, a big spike coming right down from the knee. I can’t really speak for her, but if you’ve kind of struggled with bullying and identity a lot, and then you’re able to take control over your body and how you want to come across, it’s empowering.

A lot of people who encounter the prosthetics respond by saying, “Wow, that’s so cool. I really want one.” That would never have been the case in the past. Even if anyone stopped to think about it, they wouldn’t perhaps want to be an amputee.

There was one woman who was born with a limb difference below her elbow. It never really bothered her, and she hid it quite well. She would be speaking to someone new, and then suddenly she’d realize in the middle of the conversation that they’ve noticed that she didn’t have full arms. It was almost like you could cut the tension with a knife. She said she wanted to freeze the moment and say, “Hey, I’ve just noticed that you’ve noticed that I’ve got limb difference, and it’s all okay. Don’t worry. This is what happened.” But instead, it’s this awkward thing you bumble your way through. Having something alternative would address that subject straightaway.

I think it’s personal, bringing a bit of your soul and personality to the foreground and showing people how you want to be seen.

Grace: I really like the idea of inviting people into the conversation. It’s not any person’s job to explain why they are missing a limb, or why their body is different from another body, of course, and at the same time, I can see where that would be really empowering to have it be so obvious.

Sophie: Yeah, exactly. Interestingly, there were two people who had realistic limbs–I think they were both legs–and they said they would quite happily invite people to talk about it. They’d be like, “Wow, isn’t this amazing? Doesn’t it look so realistic?” They would almost be of a similar ilk, but their choice of having a realistic limb was as a body balance type thing and not be first and foremost known as an amputee.

When I used to work for that company, we would get sent all the information, and we wouldn’t actually see the clients. That little girl that I saw was quite rare. We would get sent information from prosthetists all around the world, casts, pictures, and color references, and we would make it to that spec. We would not necessarily see the amputees, so you make something and send it off, and you wouldn’t actually know whether it was right.

When I started working for myself, I invited the client into the process. There would be moments when they would come in, and I would be sculpting while they were still there. When you’re part of the process of the limb being made, you’re more likely to take ownership of it. You can see that the color match can be amazing, but then, the next minute, when you walk into a room, you go cold, and the prosthetic stays the same temperature, the color differences are noticeable.

There was one woman, and I had made her a realistic-looking leg. She had lost her leg due to blood circulation problems, and it was so hard to match her because she was changing color all the time. We settled on some colors, she left, and when she came back a couple of weeks later, she put it on, and we were like just like, “Yeah, we did seem to get it right, but now it’s not.” As she walked around, her body camouflaged to the legs. It was just the fact that her blood circulation wasn’t the same when she walked in as it was later.

A lot of it is about expectation. Some people have an idea that it will just be exactly the same all the time, and your body is a living organism, which is impossible to replicate. In some ways, it’s easier to go for an alternative because you haven’t got to match something that’s just changing all the time.

Grace: How many people do you have on your team right now?

Sophie: It’s really small. I’m basically just running the project, and then I collaborate. I have a Chris Parsons who is a prosthetist that’s in-house. I usually work with the amputee’s prosthetist, but they could come to me, and they could work with the one that I have in-house, which means that we can work together straight from scratch. So rather than getting a limb structure and me dressing the limb structure, we can actually design it completely. But I need a prosthetist who’s clinically trained to sign everything off.

In terms of collaborators, I initiate ideas, designs, the concept with the client. My specialist skill is sculpting, but I can do other things. I tend to work and collaborate with glass blowers, woodworkers, metal workers, people who know laser-cutting, CNC, CAD designers, product designers, and electronic and mechanical engineers. Each piece is completely unique, and it calls for a different range of skills. I’ll usually get the team together and then oversee it and join the dots. Sometimes I have a making hand in it, as well.

Grace: What is the balance between form and function when you’re designing one of these pieces?

Sophie: Normally, in prosthetics, there’s a kind of triangle. You’ve got the fit and the comfort, the functionality, and then you’ve got aesthetics. You want to sit within that triangle, but if you want to push anything to an extreme, the triangle peaks at one end. Sometimes, the others suffer but not always. The running blade is a perfect example. You can get a really good fit, it is completely unique and elegant in style, and then the function is obviously amazing. It’s not always like that, but it depends on the purpose. I make covers for people that want it for every day, and then, like I said earlier, I’m doing more pieces for performances and exhibitions, in which case, I’ll find someone that I think has an interesting story, a really strong look, or is an interesting character.

There’s a pole dancer, and a prosthetic limb was made for him. He could only use it for traveling between the two poles and when he was up in the air because the socket was completely free in the back. Normally, it’s all the way up against the calf, but because he needed skin on the pole, it needed to be exposed. This meant that it wasn’t massively safe for walking, but it was perfect for pole dancing. There’s a balance, and we look at the risk and what’s necessary.

Grace: I imagine that extends into the materials, as well? Glass and wood could be extremely heavy.

Sophie: Yeah. Some things are heavy, but actually, it’s all about the fit that determines the comfort. If you’ve got a shopping bag that’s just got one strap, and it’s dragging you down, it’s gonna be really uncomfortable. If you’ve got a backpack and all the straps in the right place, then you can take a lot of weight. A lot of it is down to the fit of the socket in the first place.

There was one arm we made for a woman for her wedding, and it had a crystallized resin forearm section. It was quite heavy. She actually preferred the weight. She said, “It feels like my other arm as opposed to this super light thing.” There’s a balance.

We just have to talk about things like that. If someone wants something metal plated, it’s going to be much heavier. And, for example, glass would be encased within a surround or would have to be a certain thickness where you could literally just chuck the glass on the floor, and it wouldn’t smash. It’s super strong.

A lot of these pieces now are more concept pieces for exhibition. Kelly Knox is a good example. She’s a model and has no arm just below her elbow. She was born that way, and she said, “I’ve never got on with prosthetic arms. I’ve always found them cumbersome. I love what you’re doing, but from a disability activist perspective, you’re hiding what’s there.”

We decided to make her socket gold so you can still see the shape of her limb, and then we ghosted the rest of the arm in perspex and resin. She had a heartbeat sensor connected, so she had this little ticking in the wrist that translated her heartbeat into the prosthetic. Even though it’s not something she wears, it was a project exploring prosthetics from an angle that isn’t normally explored. That’s what the project’s about, addressing it from a completely different angle. Since normally prosthetics are about fit and function, extreme sports, and this is all arts and psychology.

Grace: What are the technical advancements since you began the project in 2011?

Sophie: Prosthetics are having more modular components. You used to have a limb, particularly a lower limb, for different activities. If you suddenly become an amputee, that’s a shock. You’re like, okay, so I have to have a swimming leg and then a running leg. Now, a lot of the big prosthetic suppliers are starting to build modular systems, so it’s easier to swap in and out.

Since my project, and also the awareness of prosthetics, there are more online shops with really user-friendly customization. It’s affordable as well. Each piece that I make is completely unique, with different processes, different materials, and loads of experimentation, whereas these kinds of shops just need a scan of your other limb, and they reverse it. You can choose different shapes and how it clamps on. It’s really user-friendly and affordable. There’s a lot more customization going on. Open-source programming, as well. They’ll have sensors in the forearm, so it picks up your muscle group. You learn to twitch certain muscles, and then they trigger the different movements in the fingers. There are more complex systems, like computerized knees and ankles which help people power up steps and inclines.

Osseointegration happens a lot more, too. That’s a surgical procedure with a titanium implant that’s kind of knitted into your bone. It permanently sticks out, and you attach the limb directly to that so you don’t have to have a socket. So for a leg above the knee, you would have this pole sticking out of your thigh. Rather than having a whole socket around your whole thigh and having to change the sockets all the time because of swelling or weight loss or weight gain or rubbing or whatever–all the uncomfortable things that make you need to change your socket all the time–you don’t have to have that. Because the limb is directly attached to the pole and that’s directly knitted into the bone, You walk and then you get the vibrations that come right through to your body so you get feedback from the ground. There’s a lot more of that going on.

Even insurance now. They used to say like-for-like, meaning they would offer something close to what you had before so a realistic cover But prosthetics are just not the same. You’re not the same person anymore. Psychologically, you don’t see your body in the same way. I can see that it makes it easier to calculate costs. We fought that for one case, and I think we were the first people to do that. We had an alternative limb that was through insurance. They’re doing that a lot more. I was recently invited to talk to a load of insurance claim case managers and solicitors to discuss the importance of identity and the psychological benefit of getting the aesthetic right for the use. It helps with socializing and acceptance.

In terms of The Alternative Limb Project, it just started with me experimenting, and then obviously collaborating with other people that could do amazing things. I worked with this girl called Dani Clode on this vine arm. This is probably the most exciting one, which is alternative in style and function, but also control. She controlled it through her toes, so she moved her big toes deliberately up and down. They hit these sensors that would then trigger the action, Bluetooth to the arm, and the arm would coil, depending on which sensor you hit. Alternative functions are the kind of things that I’m interested in.

Grace: I would imagine that exhibitions are bolstering that goal in that they’re bridging the gap between healthcare and art.

Sophie: Yeah, that’s so right. When I first started, I used to get loads of people going, “Oh, so what you want to do is you want to put all your work in like specialist magazines, like rehab magazines.” But I really wanted to put it out there for popular culture and have it impact loads of different people in different worlds.

One limb, the wearer said it was like a VIP badge. With the prosthetic, he got to enter a world that he otherwise hadn’t before. He got into presenting, and because the limb was high-tech looking, he was going off to all these tech conferences. It was almost not even about the arm. It was just about what the arm offered, like from a psychological to a human interest perspective. The arm was forging connections, which is what we were speaking about before. It’s that dialogue.

Grace: What’s next for the project?

Sophie: We’re looking at big sculptural pieces, public art, that are all related to limbs. It’s just making it massive and playing with scale so you can walk around inside. These would be immersive, big art pieces that say something about the topic, as well as exploring more unusual and alternatively interactive standard-sized limbs.

Visit The Alternative Limb Project website and Instagram for more. 

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Sophie de Oliveira Barata On The Alternative Limb Project and the Nexus of Art and Medicine appeared first on Colossal.