Feelings of love, loss, and nostalgia are deeply interwoven in the practice of artist Bryana Bibbs. While caring for two simultaneously ailing grandparents in her Chicago home, Bibbs chronicled the periods before and after their deaths in weavings that incorporate objects from their lives. Just as one might pick up a pencil and paper to write through the difficult and overwhelming feelings of losing a loved one, she instead incorporated their clothing and beloved objects into her work, directly confronting the materials that once filled their days by interlacing them with threads and fabrics. Imbued with memories and the catharsis of making, these iterative works became the Journal Series.

We first contacted Bryana last year about an upcoming exhibition we were working on in Milwaukee that would explore issues surrounding mental health and, more broadly, the wellness of society. In one of our conversations about her work, she mentioned that “no one knows all it takes” to care for loved ones in their final days. The phrase instantly encapsulated our feelings about the show, and No One Knows All It Takes opened late this summer at the Haggerty Museum of Art.

I spoke again with Bibbs recently to discuss her practice and reflect on a series of exhibitions that have pulled her from Chicago to Milwaukee to Indianapolis.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jobson: Very recently, you’ve been involved with three exhibitions. You had a solo show at the Chicago Cultural Center. You now have a significant amount of work in the show at the Haggerty Museum of Art, and you have work on view with the Lubeznik Center for the Arts. I’m curious, as you were juggling these or approaching these different exhibitions, are they related in some way? Are they separate? How have you approached each one as you’ve been working?

Bibbs: I think that they’re all related to one another because I feel like the work that I have in each show is very much about the aftermath of my grandparents passing away. The Cultural Center show is so much about the caregiving of my grandparents, and the recent work with the mobile gallery in Indiana, there are two Journal Series works that were from when I was teaching at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. That was such a special time for me because I never thought I would be teaching at such a historical and wonderful place. Being in that setting, all I did was think about my grandparents, and being around the water and reflecting was really helpful for me. And now the work at the Haggerty is basically just the continuation, to me, of the work that was in the Cultural Center.

Jobson: You’ve spoken a lot about grief and trauma and loss and how it’s present at this time in the majority of your work. Obviously, nobody seeks trauma or grief and loss. But, is there something more to it for you? Are grief and loss something that you are interested in, and that you may continue to explore, or is it more of this is a response to the circumstances of where you’ve found yourself?

Bibbs: I think it’s a little bit of both. When I returned to my arts practice in 2019 from working in retail for a long time, I wasn’t making work related to the loss of a loved one. I was making work about mental health and my experience of going through domestic abuse. My work has always been a response to what I’ve been going through in my life. Did I ever think my grandparents would pass away? No, that’s not anything you think about in your day-to-day life. You don’t sit back and go, “this person eventually is never going to be here.” But now that they’re gone, it has unfortunately kind of consumed my brain. Now I’m like, oh, my parents, my dad’s siblings, my cousins, it’s become a reality now. And so because of that, I am interested in grief and trauma and what that means for me and what it also means for other people.

The way that my mom grieved her parents was so different than the way that I grieved her parents. She kicked into the “only child mode” of having to figure things out and make sure that everything was taken care of when they passed. But for me, I was like, oh my God. We just went through this crazy, traumatic, wild roller coaster for the last two years. And so I was able to sit in my grief a little bit more versus my mom. Whereas now that she’s had a little bit of distance between my grandfather’s passing and my grandmother’s passing, it’s starting to hit her a little bit more. Now she’s realizing she went through so much. So yeah, it’s a little bit of both. It’s about documenting my life but also trying to figure out why I grieve and respond to trauma in the way that I do.

Jobson: What do you do outside of the artwork to create balance in your life? I wonder if, in your case, the work itself is the way that you’re trying to find balance?

Bibbs: Yeah, I think the work is the balance for me. When I was working on the Journal Series, especially during the time my mom and I were taking care of my grandparents, I found when I was not sleeping well, [or when I would be up] helping my grandfather get to the bathroom and all that, I would pull out and start working on a Journal Series piece. If he needed something, I would go upstairs and help him out, stay up here for a little bit until he was ready to go back to bed. My sleep pattern was so jacked up during that time, but I would just keep working on the series.

Jobson: Take us back a little bit to when you first started working with fiber. Was it an immediate attraction?

Bibbs: Fiber, for me, started in undergrad at SAIC. I went into undergrad wanting to do abstract painting specifically, and I didn’t have the best time in that department. When I was picking out my second-year classes, I saw Intro to Fiber was on the list, and my grandfather actually used to quilt with his mother and his grandmother, but he never taught me how to quilt.

Jobson: Your grandfather quilted. That just seems unusual to me?

Bibbs: It is, yeah! I remember we were in this house, in the room that’s now my studio space, and I asked him, “Did your sisters [quilt] with you?” He said yes, but he hadn’t done it in so long that he forgot the basics to everything.

In the Intro to Fiber class, that was one of the things they may have been able to teach us, but we didn’t learn that. We learned everything else, like how to knit and crochet. We did a little bit of embroidery, and then we got to floor loom weaving, and I thought I was going to hate it because there’s math involved. The assignment by our professor Jerry Bleem–who I love very much–was to do a 10-by-10-inch square. I remember that repetitive back-and-forth motion with the shuttle—something about it felt very different than painting. Painting feels very quick and sometimes abrupt, especially as an abstract painter.

Weaving slowed me down in ways that were necessary for me at that time in my life. So I just stuck with it and took probably all of the classes that Jerry taught. I took his Intro to Weaving class, and then his twist class, which teaches you how to apply yarns and spin yarns and all this other stuff. I think that slow processes of weaving and fiber in general clicked for me in some way.

Jobson: Can you tell us about the We Were Never Alone Project?

Bibbs: That started in 2020. I’m a survivor of domestic violence myself, unfortunately, and I started it right after a few really successful weaving workshops that happened in public settings and institutions. I felt comfortable and confident enough that I would be able to facilitate my own weaving workshops. The first one was at Compound Yellow in Oak Park. It was me and five or six other women. Although I didn’t know who the other participants were prior to doing the workshop, I wanted to create a free, open, weaving workshop where people could get together, and, if they felt comfortable enough, talk about their experiences.

After hearing how beneficial it was for those attendees, I decided to keep the workshops going, though I haven’t done one since early 2024 because I want to be mentally available for people. [Because of] everything that happened with my grandparents–and recently my dad went through a stroke–I needed to take a moment to reevaluate and find a space that aligns with the project to continue to host those workshops.

Jobson: Are the workshops instructional? Or does everyone come together and use it as a work, therapy, and sharing period?

Bibbs: The workshops are about two and a half to three hours long. I tell people why I started the project, my own personal experience, and remind them that they don’t have to share their experience if they don’t want to. They just need to be here and be present in the space with other people who are going through the same thing. I recognize there’s a lot of anxiety and maybe even a little bit of fear. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that, even though they signed up, they weren’t sure if they would come. Some people feel like their experience is not good enough or might be less than other people, which is really hard to hear. So sometimes we sit together and talk about things not related to our experiences. Sometimes we do talk about our experiences, and people ping off of one another and say, “That happened to me, too,” or “Something very similar happened to me.” All of these conversations are happening while they’re weaving.

The majority of the people who participate are first-time weavers. After I share my experience, I’ll demonstrate with a cardboard loom and explain the materials and how to plain weave. Some people bring found objects and materials that are significant to them, and while they’re weaving, they’re still actively listening to each other, not necessarily staring people in the face, but focused on working. Then they might pause and respond to whatever a person just said, which I think is really lovely.

Jobson: I was thinking about the act of making while working through trauma or working through whatever issues somebody might bring. Do you think it offers a sense of safety or a sense of comfort, or what do you think the weaving adds to that moment?

Bibbs: I think it’s the comfort. It goes back to why I enjoy weaving so much: the repetitive nature. You’re doing things with your hands. You’re responding to color in a different way and material in a different way, and it’s tactile. All of those things can be very comfortable for people, and I think it’s what makes the environment successful for people to share and respond.

Jobson: A newer aspect of your work is printmaking—specifically, pressure printing—which made an appearance at both the Haggerty Museum and the Chicago Cultural Center. Can you talk about the relationship or the juxtaposition of showing these two mediums together?

Bibbs: Yes, printmaking is super new. A friend of mine who lives in Milwaukee, Linda Marcus, inspired me to visit an open studio at Anchor Press, Paper and Print. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to print. She suggested printing with my own weavings. But, for whatever reason, I thought about printing with my grandfather’s clothing even though I didn’t know if that was possible or not. I visited AP3 with Linda a few weeks before my grandmother passed away. I really enjoyed printmaking, though I had no idea what I was doing, but I enjoyed the idea of taking their clothing and archiving it before me and my mom decided what to do with their belongings. When a loved one passes away, people either give their clothes to friends or family or just donate them. I just want to go through as many of their clothes and try to archive them before that happens.

Another thing that I really enjoy about it—and very much feels like it relates to my work—is this idea of materiality. I love material. I love working with found objects, and so the fact that I can make prints and give the viewer an idea of what the whole object was before I cut it up or do something with it feels very new and exciting to me.

Jobson: When you’re working, do certain fibers or colors or textures carry symbolic weight when you’re thinking about memory or absence and that sort of thing?

Bibbs: I spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ house as a kid, while my parents were working full-time jobs. I was here in the morning and after school, Monday through Friday, and spent a great deal of time in a living room painted “Priscilla pink.” The pink has become this iconic color in our family. I wouldn’t get rid of it anytime soon.

You mentioned loss and absence—in my recent work that’s going to be in a show at the Indianapolis Art Center, I’ve been thinking about white and blacks and grays, and that has a lot to do with absence and loss. The texture that I tend toward in my large-scale works is an over-spun, coily, twisted texture. It feels very comfortable to me; there’s something very tactile and fluffy in a way I really enjoy. It also references when I was a painter and used thick body mediums and acrylic modeling paste. I loved using all those different forms in painting.

Jobson: Specifically with your weavings, is there an internal logic that you use when thinking about scale? A lot of the journal pieces are very small and page-like, but then you also make very large pieces. How do you treat scale when you’re conceiving a piece?

Bibbs: My most recent show [at the Chicago Cultural Center] is the first time I really thought about architecture. “Priscilla Made” references the seven front room windows of [my grandparents’] house. My piece titled “December182023 & August252024” references the doors to the bedrooms where my grandparents passed. Using those doors as a reference made a lot of sense to me and what I should do with the scale.

In more recent work, if I’m thinking about a certain story that I want to tell through colors and textures and forms, for whatever reason, I lean towards a 5 and a half to a maybe 7-foot piece. It still feels intimate like the Journal Series pieces do. But they can also feel slightly monumental, and the closer you get to it, there are all these textures, colors, and blends that viewers are sometimes attracted to when they view the pieces. I don’t know that I’ll necessarily get bigger. I like that kind of in-between.

Jobson: My favorite part of your current work is the fearlessness in incorporating found objects into your weaving–everything from a deck of cards, Disney ephemera, and things discarded in drawers. It seems like you can weave with anything. How do you pick what’s going into a work? And do you find it difficult to incorporate these things?

Bibbs: The objects I have used so far are from my grandparents. They’re discarded in drawers or cabinets and things like that, and they’re objects that I’ve forgotten about that maybe I used a lot as a kid, a little bit as a teenager, but haven’t used since. The deck of cards, for example, was so significant to me and our family history that it made sense to weave with. The same thing with the basement tile piece that’s in the Haggerty show. Not everyone thinks, “I can weave with a basement tile,” but it just made sense for me to use these materials as a way to mark time. [I want to] highlight my grandparents and their legacy and their story, and preserve their memory and my memories with them.

Even now, my uncle and two cousins sent me and my mom this beautiful bouquet of flowers marking a year since my grandmother passed away. I’m looking at them now, and they’re beautifully dried up. And, of course, I’m going to save them and weave with them, because it’s sad for me to see dried flowers and realize it’s been well over a year since she’s passed away. The Disney World stuff I used in the Journal Series, a lot of people have shared stories related to those weavings. I’ve heard “Oh, we’ve taken so many family vacations,” or, “Oh yeah, our family would take Disney trips,” and things like that. And I’m always finding new belongings. Actually, this morning, I found a bag of letters that my grandparents sent back and forth to each other in the 1950s.

Jobson: Are these … spicy letters?

Bibbs: I think so! But, I’m not going to read them (laughs). I feel like that’s between them. I read only one of them. My grandmother was sick, and my grandfather said he hoped that she felt better. That’s as much as I need to know because my grandparents were very classy and private people. I always joke with my mom about how my grandmother could have been the queen because of how well she represented herself. And although I’m not going to read all of the letters, I keep thinking I need to do something with them because they feel so important to me.

Jobson: One last question, what do you have coming up next?

Bibbs: I have a show at the Indianapolis Art Center that closes December 14. Next, I’ll be doing a family day on November 8 with the Smart Museum for Theaster Gates’ Unto Thee exhibition, which I’m really excited about. And the following weekend, on November 15, I will be facilitating a weaving program for the Haggerty’s Wellness Retreat.

Find more from Bibbs on her website 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 Bryana Bibbs On Weaving Through Trauma, Grief, and Loss appeared first on Colossal.

This conversation is an exclusive excerpt from NINA CHANEL ABNEY © 2025. Reproduced by permission from The Monacelli Press. All rights reserved. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jeffrey Deitch: Nina, I’ve always been inspired by your expansive vision of what an artist can do. Your achievement in painting and works on paper is really outstanding—as is your NFT startup; your interest in multiples—but I’m very curious about your interest in public art murals. We did several of them together; so Iʼd like to ask you to start [by speaking] about this expansive vision you have about being an artist and reaching a broad public.

Nina Chanel Abney: I think it first comes out of my natural inclination to work in many different mediums. Growing up and looking at [the work of] Henri Matisse and Andy Warhol, my understanding of a masterful artist was an artist who evolved their practice through experimentation with different mediums. When I knew I wanted to be an artist, I aspired to have a career in which each body of work propels my practice forward.

Deitch: I remember a discussion we had some years ago about proposing a balloon for the Macyʼs Thanksgiving Day Parade. They didn’t understand how great you were, but I was very impressed then—and that was some years ago—very impressed by your ambition to reach people with your art.

Abney: I have always appreciated graffiti artists and their ability to reach a broad audience. The idea that anyone could access art just by walking by it and the idea of being able to share my work with a larger public has become more interesting for me, showing people how you can discover art in the everyday—whether thatʼs a sneaker or a billboard. I am always looking to find new ways to do that.

Deitch: Our first project together was your great mural at Coney Island. Somehow, I had the instinct that we had to position you right at the center, give you the great entrance wall, and your work was phenomenal.

Abney: Thank you very much.

Deitch: Was that one of the first public murals you did?

Abney: Yes, it was one of the first. The very first one I did was in Newark, New Jersey, off of McCarter Highway with Project for Empty Space. They did a program where they worked with about eighteen different artists through a long span of the highway, and each artist got a section of the wall. When given the opportunity, I said, “Of course I’ll do it.”

Most everyone involved was a full-time graffiti artist. I completely underestimated what the project would entail. We were working crazy hours to avoid traffic, basically midnight to 5:00 a.m. It was about 1:00 a.m. and I went there with spray paint in hand, arrogantly thinking I could just start working directly on the wall. I realized, “Oh my God this is… an entire other way of working, a talent I don’t have.” I was on the verge of tears, panicking at 3:00 in the morning on the side of the highway, thinking, “I don’t even know how to do this.” It was a learning curve.

In that moment, I had to figure out how to translate my work into a large-scale mural. Thatʼs when I began using tape and creating stencils to adapt my imagery to a larger scale. That was the very first mural. After I conquered the first mural, I did one in Detroit with Library Street Collective and Coney Island came after. Fortunately, every opportunity led to another, allowing me to improve my technique along the way. I might still do a balloon [for the Macyʼs parade]. I found a loophole, I think.

Deitch: That would be very exciting. I love how you think. By the time you did your third mural at Coney Island, you had totally perfected it. It was incredible and so impressive to see you and your team. We more recently did this project in Miami with two gigantic multi-story walls and a tunnel, and that was phenomenal. It was amazing to see how you had put together this team that allows you to create massive works of public art.

Abney: At first, I was doing the murals with one studio assistant, which was labor intensive because I work intuitively. It truly felt like doing an extremely large painting in a very condensed timeline, sometimes less than a week. It didn’t seem sustainable. Also, I realized that maybe I’m a little afraid of heights. Thatʼs when I came up with a different strategy.

My friend JJ, who helps me manage my mural projects, introduced me to an amazing team of women painters who are capable of working on the side of skyscrapers with no fear. Theyʼre badass and have been helping me paint murals ever since. There’s great synergy.

Deitch: Oh, thatʼs fascinating. Iʼd like to talk about how you approach the work. I read in a previous interview that you do not do preparatory sketches. Is that correct? It seemed with the complexity your work, one would think that there are numerous preparatory sketches.

Abney: There are not. If I sketched the piece beforehand, Iʼd lose interest and wouldn’t want to paint it. The excitement for me comes from the unknown—the spontaneity and problem-solving in the moment to create a cohesive composition.

Deitch: Thatʼs extraordinary. It’s very rare that an artist can create these large-scale complex works without numerous preparatory drawings. I’ve seen that with Keith Haring, who would be able to start a large painting or mural in the upper left corner and move across, but thatʼs amazing that this is all internalized. It’s almost like a jazz improvisation that you do.

Abney: Each painting becomes a puzzle for me to solve.

Deitch: Something that I admire immensely in your work is the inherent rhythm of the composition: in classic critical art terms, one talks about the color, the edge, things that you associate with painting. Rhythm does not generally come up, but thatʼs something thatʼs so inherent in your work. Looking at a large painting of yours, I can see it move. I can feel the rhythm. Iʼd like to ask you about that aspect of your work, because thatʼs quite unique.

Abney: The work is rhythmic because I aim to create movement across the canvas so that the viewer’s gaze is never stagnant. To achieve this, I have created systems and techniques that utilize color, shape, repetition, and text. I want the work to keep your attention.

Deitch: Do you have a background as an athlete or a dancer? The rhythm is so physical.

Abney: I played tennis. I still play tennis. I played soccer, basketball… I was always very athletic when I was younger, and I play the piano.

Deitch: I didn’t know that. Do you have a classical training or was it more jazz piano?

Abney: Classical, but I have always wanted to learn jazz. I have several cousins who were self-taught jazz [musicians].

Deitch: Your improvisational talent goes into the painting?

Abney: Yes.

Deitch: Thatʼs so fascinating, because your paintings do have a sound, in a way.

Abney: I would love to learn jazz. I recently bought some books and a piano to try to teach myself.

Deitch: Did you get to the point where you were a performer also or was it more just your own study?

Abney: With classical, I performed in recitals as a kid with my stepsister, who was, at the time, learning opera. It’s so wild when I think about it. We would do some recitals together, I would play and she would sing. Outside of that, after a certain point, I didn’t really take it up. I feel like I quit after I realized I needed glasses or something. That was in the ’80s, early childhood, but I kept with it. I can still play now.

Deitch: Let’s talk about your trajectory. There’s an unusual year where you worked in a Ford factory, one of the only contemporary artists I know who actually had that kind of experience. It seems that and other aspects of your background had given you a sympathy for the working class. Your art addresses everyday people in the city, not only the art elite.

Abney: I am everyday people, I come from everyday people. My mom worked for almost forty years at the unemployment agency, my stepfather delivered Pepsi®. I come from humble beginnings, so being catapulted into this elite art world has been interesting. I still feel like an outsider sometimes, though I am a part of this “art world.”

Deitch: A lot of your work has a strong social-political message. Iʼd like to ask you about how you integrate messaging with the formal aspects of the work.

Abney: My whole way of working, from color, humor, and seducing the viewer into challenging topics in a way in which they want to stay, comes from my own experience with artwork. I noticed that with works that are overly didactic, people tend not to spend much time with them since they feel like they already have the work figured out. I want to create work that can be visually engaging: it can make you think, but also, provoke self-interrogation.

Deitch: It’s also fascinating the way you invite entry into the work by your use of humor.

Abney: When I was younger, I wanted to be a cartoonist. I love the most sarcastic animations. I was a big fan of Hanna-Barbera. Thatʼs where I got my sense of humor. With animation, you can walk the line of inappropriateness. I’m interested in that play, too.

Deitch: Do you have some plans for an animated film?

Abney: I actually wrote a cartoon with my partner, Jet Toomer, and our friend, Zoe Lister-Jones. We wrote a cartoon based off me and my younger sister’s relationship, but we threw a wrench in. We have turned the family structure thatʼs usually depicted in animation on its head.

Deitch: It sounds brilliant. Maybe I can help you to make that happen.

Abney: Maybe. I’m even thinking maybe a short film, centered around the same concept, and would love to do it at the Sundance Film Festival because they have an animation program. The film industry, from what I’ve learned, is so different, even in the approach to ownership and intellectual property. I feel like I’m more independent-minded when it comes to that, where Iʼd rather take the time and do it myself.

Deitch: Well, thatʼs one of the greatest things about being an artist: You do not have a boss. Nobody’s telling you what you can do.

Abney: I don’t want to have to compromise my vision to make things more mainstream. When you’re not conforming, people might see it as risky, but there are communities that are rarely considered in film and television and thatʼs who I would like to prioritize.

Deitch: Fascinating. I anticipate you will be able to realize this.

Abney: I hope so.

Deitch: In your approach to your art, there’s a lot of references from the vernacular—you mentioned strip clubs and sororities—but you also have so many deep art historical references. I imagine you’ve deeply studied Pablo Picasso, Romare Bearden, Stuart Davis… I want to ask you about these art historical references that you build on, that are inside your work, that you must have studied.

Abney: Actually, funny story, Stuart Davis… I hadn’t even heard of him until I was working on a show called I DREAD TO THINK [October 18 – November 24, 2012, at Kravets Wehby Gallery, in collaboration with Anna Kustera Gallery, New York, NY]. When I was working on that show, Lowery Stokes Sims came to my studio and brought up Stuart Davis, assuming I was aware of his work. Immediately after that, I was obsessed. I didn’t know much about contemporary art until I came to New York for graduate school at Parsons School of Design.

The first show I went to was a Marina Abramović performance at the Guggenheim and my mind was blown. Parsons was an intense education because I was playing catch up to the contemporary art history while trying to become a contemporary artist, myself.

My references came from what was available to me when I was younger. I mean, everyone knows Picasso. I had field trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, where I learned about Chuck Close and Georges Seurat. I had some exposure to Black artists through The Cosby Show.

Deitch: Really? From the TV show? Thatʼs fascinating. It must be thrilling for you to see your work influencing artists who are of the younger generation.

Abney: It’s surreal to know that my work is being studied in classes. I still can’t believe it. Because I have become an influence to others, I feel a responsibility to keep pushing the boundaries of my own practice, exploring new mediums and delving into industries in which people who look like me aren’t represented. It’s crazy to think that I could be a part of art history. If you named the period of art we’re in now, what would it be? I don’t know…

Deitch: Well, you’re one of the people defining it. Fascinating to know that you studied both computer science and art, because most artists, if you ask, “What did you study?” they’ll probably say poetry and art. I think maybe part of the rigor thatʼs in your work comes from this study of computer science. Could you elaborate a little bit about that, about the dual mind that you bring to your artwork?

Abney: I intended on being a computer programmer because I couldn’t fathom having a career as an artist. I didn’t know how artists made money and I needed a sustainable job, but I didn’t like going to work. When I started the major, however, I quickly thought, “This isn’t for me.” It was hours of trying to figure out a program that may simply not work because of a missing semicolon.

Everything happens for a reason. My grades were horrible. I was barely holding onto my computer science major. And just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, I was helping a friend with his homework and he accidentally turned in a copy of my homework as his. When I get my assignment back from the professor, I have a big F written in red marker. I look at my friend like, “What happened?” The professor had circled my name on his paper—he also had an F. It was a major assignment, and she would not change my grade. That class was so vital, it put my major in jeopardy, so I dropped computer science and focused on art.

I also wanted to be a graphic designer. I was learning how to design websites during my summers off. I thought, “Graphic design, thatʼs how I’ll get paid as an artist,” but when I got out of undergrad, I got pretty much rejected from every graphic design program I applied to. I worked for a little bit and thatʼs when I said, “Maybe I’ll try painting.” Thatʼs how that all came about.

I still have a definite interest in graphic design… I feel like most people don’t realize that we were all teaching ourselves HTML code to create cool pages on Black Planet. We were learning HTML to play music play or feature graphics on our social media pages. I was fascinated by it.

Deitch: Prior to our talk, I was looking through the catalog of your exhibition at the Nasher Museum of Art. It’s very interesting to see how your work has evolved. The figures were much looser, Iʼd say a little less rhythmic in the composition, and progressively become more abstracted, the rhythms more complex. Iʼd like to ask you about the evolution of your work over this period.

Abney: My work was always critiqued for being too flat, so I had a specific preconceived notion of what a “good” painting was, and that was one that was rendered realistically. The earlier work is a by-product of this mentality. Over the last twenty years, I have been moving away from this way of thinking and towards abstraction, which I feel is more freeing.

Deitch: You’ve evolved a completely unique style thatʼs only you, that is instantly recognizable, which is quite an achievement.

Abney: Thank you. It’s been a long journey to block out the noise and be in tune with my own voice.

Deitch: You have your own artistic vocabulary thatʼs yours. It’s remarkable. Very few artists can achieve that.

Abney: Thanks. I’m still trying to unlearn a few things that have been restrictive to my practice, but I feel like I’m now at 80 percent of my true artist voice. There’s still work to be done.

Deitch: It’s good that you still have another 20 percent to achieve. Something that fascinates me is that you’ve been able to put together a narrative, where some of your work tells a story with an abstract set of images. Thatʼs quite rare to be able to be narrative, bold, and abstract at the same time. I think thatʼs quite an achievement.

Abney: When approaching my work that is representational, I aim to figure out the least amount of information needed. Thatʼs how I approach the imagery in my work now. For example, what’s the least amount of information needed for one to register a figure? How do I break this down to the simplest form? I try to remove unnecessary information to create a language that becomes universal.

Deitch: Another characteristic of your work is the integration of text. You’re using text almost as an abstraction, but it also becomes an essential part of the narrative.

Abney: I started using text because there are certain things I felt I just couldn’t paint. Some things just need to be said plainly. I also see letters and numbers as forms and shapes. I’m also interested in the use of text in advertisements.

Deitch: I look at your work as taking Pop art into the present.

Abney: I love Pop art, so thatʼs what I would hope to be achieving right now with my current work.

Deitch: You’re expanding into other media—some ambitious sculpture is coming. Iʼd like to ask you about your sculpture in relationship to the painting.

Abney: I’ve always wanted to work in sculpture, but I was waiting until the right moment. I could not figure how I could organically translate my paintings to sculpture. I had no idea what my sculpture was going to look like. It took so much time to figure it out and now it’s finally here.
I took the first step by making a vinyl toy, which allowed me to see how my work could look three-dimensionally. That was the start and things have been quickly evolving. In the past year alone, I’ve made over ten sculptural works. Eventually, I want to do large public sculpture that can be interactive. I’m not necessarily interested in creating monuments, but works that people can sit on, sculpture that is functional.

Deitch: I read some exciting news this week about your being selected as one of the artists commissioned for New York’s new John F. Kennedy International Airport terminal. It seemed that you were thinking of doing a sculpture.

Abney: I am. I’m working with a material I’ve never worked with before, stained glass, inspired by New York City iconography.

Deitch: That will be brilliant. Now, we’re here at Pace Prints in New York City for this conversation, and you’ve really reinvented how to make a print, how to make collage. I’m fascinated by how you’ve taken this well-traveled medium of all the artists who have made prints or works on paper and you’ve done it in a fresh way.

Abney: I held out for years when it came to doing prints. Many printmakers or print shops would approach me and say, “You know, your work would translate so well to print-making,” and I would turn them down in hopes of working specifically with Pace Prints. Also, my understanding of prints was limited. When I thought of an edition, I only thought of an image of an existing work. So for the longest time, I was not interested in doing this.

I got a C in my printmaking class. I didn’t have enough patience for the process. I did an etching, and it was the most tedious thing, so I never thought I would end up loving printmaking. Fortunately, I was introduced to [President of Pace Prints] Jacob Lewis and the printmakers of Pace Prints. I was blown away by the work that they were doing.

We started working together, and it’s such a collaborative process. We challenge each other to think beyond traditional printmaking and create unique works that explore collage and expand the conversation around paper as a medium.

Deitch: Well, your prints have the impact of complex paintings.

Abney: Thatʼs what we hope to achieve.

Deitch: Of all the important contemporary artists I follow, your work is sexier than almost anyone else’s, but it’s never vulgar. Iʼd like to ask you about how you insert the sexuality and the sexual power in the work in this strong way thatʼs elegant and impactful, but never vulgar.

Abney: It comes from a sincere place of wanting to destigmatize the idea that sexuality is vulgar… and thatʼs one of the reasons I moved to New York—it’s forward-thinking energy fosters self-expression and challenges outdated norms.

I’ve always wanted to tell you that when I first came [to New York] to go to graduate school, your gallery was one of the first that I went to. You had a show with Kehinde Wiley with a band that performed on Wooster Street and that blew my mind. It was a very impactful experience that expanded what I thought of art as an expression and as a career.

Deitch: That was our goal, to inspire people. I really, really love hearing that it had such an impact on you.

Abney: I have always wanted to work with you because your exhibitions are ambitious, fun, smart, and not so uptight. With our February 2025 show [Winging It], it’s a full circle moment.

Deitch: Let’s close by talking about what you hope to realize in the next few years, expanding your work, both pushing the painting practice and also expanding into more popular areas.

Abney: I want to prioritize sculpture and public work in the coming years. Right now, I’m very interested in installation. I’ve been thinking about Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms—something more experiential that can travel. Also, animation production, and I can do something new in that space that hasn’t been done before. I’m also very much interested in creating more products, specifically, sneakers.

Deitch: A lot to look forward to.

Pick up a copy of Nina Chanel Abney, which will be released on October 23, in the Colossal Shop. Limited signed copies are available from Phaidon. Find more from the artist on her website 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 Nina Chanel Abney and Jeffrey Deitch On Finding the True Artist’s Voice [Exclusive] appeared first on Colossal.

Having grown up in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, where Cook County Department of Corrections sprawls across 96 acres, Maria Gaspar has always felt the haunting presence of detention. As a child, she visited that jail as part of a Scared Straight program and, through the years, became more involved in conversations about mass incarceration, abolition, and spatial justice.

Both an educator and practicing artist, Gaspar has put collaboration, compassion, and critical thinking at the center of her work. At the School of the Art Institute, she teaches students to develop interdisciplinary, research-based approaches to art making. Outside the classroom, she strives to engage communities that might not otherwise be brought into the creative act, whether that be local teens and their families, activists, or people trapped inside the carceral system.

Following a studio visit last fall, Gaspar and I met virtually in May to discuss her practice and Disappearance Jail, an iteration of which we would be working on together for No One Knows All It Takes at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee. In this conversation, we consider the necessity of care in collaboration, the possibilities of abolition, and how healing is always political.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Grace: Can you take us back to the beginning of Disappearance Jail? What was the impetus for that project?

Maria: When I began the project, it was the height of the pandemic. I had already spent a number of years working in prisons and with incarcerated people. I had just had my child, and I was unable to return to Cook County Jail to teach a series of workshops due to the jail being a COVID hotspot. I was trying to figure out what to do, how to respond to the moment, and was mostly at home. I wasn’t able to get to my studio at the time.

I was thinking a lot about ways of making this static and rigid place more porous through materiality. I’ve done it in various ways, including performance and installation, as well as other kinds of site interventions. But I was curious to see what it would look like, materially, using a photograph. I took to my home printer and started printing out images of Cook County Jail I had taken over the years. I continued to print out photographs of all Illinois prisons. Using materials I had around me, I began experimenting with types of perforations. I cut them into pieces, much like an erasure poem. I tore them, and I hole punched them

At the time, I performed a piece where I cut up text from the jail’s website and then pieced it back together like a concrete poem. It may have happened at the same time when I was working with paper and cutting things up that I then took to my hole puncher and started hole punching this iconic image I took of the jail in relation to a major thoroughfare—26th Street in Little Village. I’ve gone back to that photo many times.

That led to the current project, where I am making porous all images of jails, prisons, and detention centers in the United States. Visually, I was playing with the shadow of the scanned punched-out image and noticed how the gaps started to take on their own form. I liked how that looked, and then I kept doing it.

Grace: Is the project related to Disappearance Suits, or do they just share a name?

Maria: There’s a connection. I’m interested in the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of places like jails and people and bodies, the way people are extracted from communities and put into prisons. It’s an ongoing project, but when I first started it, it was about examining the way brown appears in various spaces. It was certainly talking about a political identity and a racialized body.

For me, it connects to the ways jails and prisons function and erase predominantly Black and Brown or poor communities. There’s a relationship, and I was very conscious of that title, of reusing it or applying it to the perforated images of jails. It’s interlinked in my mind, separate projects, but linked in many ways.

Grace: Invisibility is something that I wanted to talk about in relation to the exhibition at the Haggerty Museum. One of the things we’re thinking about with that show is the ways we societally conceal problems, particularly issues like addiction, trauma, and mental illness, all of which can push people to the margins without care.

This invisibility, coupled with the belief that people who have committed crimes deserve whatever punishment comes to them, seems to lead to the idea that people who are incarcerated are less than human. I’m curious, as an artist working with incarcerated people, how you ensure that people are able to show their full selves?

Maria: As a society, we normalize the way we mistreat people in the criminal legal system. This idea that they’re less than is felt not only within the carceral boundaries but beyond. It’s felt when you’re thinking about people from a lower economic status or a racialized group or some other marginalized identity. So the carceral aspect is just one part of it. Like you’re pointing out, it’s a bigger systemic issue. 

Working with incarcerated communities or about incarceration is high-stakes work. It’s quite different from what an artist is doing in their studio with a discrete object. I teach at an art school, so I think a lot about how we’re educating younger artists, especially those interested in activist or community-based practices, particularly if they’re not coming from or don’t have experience in that space.

In my experience, community-based work with incarcerated communities is both tender and political. It often involves a group of people who may be different from what we are accustomed to within a very white and homogeneous artistic environment.  This work means that you might be in meetings with the sheriff’s department or with violence prevention workers. There is a system that is uniquely different from the art school or museum context. 

Therefore, as an artist, I believe one must be thoughtful and open to collaborating with diverse groups of people, but it also needs to include a power analysis. Within those groups of people are different kinds of power structures and hierarchies. Navigating between these various systems is quite challenging and sometimes disorienting. At the end of the day, one has to really think about what the core values are. What is the intention behind the work? What is most important, and how do you make sure that as you’re navigating through these spaces, you’re not compromising the work and what the work means, and that you’re not compromising the lives of people who are in the most vulnerable state, which are the people behind the cages? That’s one piece, remembering that you can’t just take a risk out of whimsy. You have to remember that you’re dealing with people’s lives and lived experiences, and it must be with utmost care.

I also value the ways in which artists can be subversive, the way they can be wild and wacky, audacious, and joyful. Artists are not always taking the preconceived pathway. We’re often pushing those boundaries. And so I also want to honor the creativity and creative capacity and possibility that not only I hold but that my collaborators hold. How do I create the conditions within a community-based practice that feels creative, even within the limitations, even within the precarities? How do we recognize those limitations and precarities and move forward? How do we work together while also finding ways to flourish and nourish ourselves within a creative environment? Those two things aren’t always compatible, right? Captivity and creativity, or the freedom to be creative, work against each other. They’re meant to be in conflict.

But we have seen artists who are incarcerated supercede their environment. I love how people like Dr. Nicole Fleetwood highlight those artists in her exhibition and book, Marking Time. I feel like my role as an artist, with the skills and the tools that I have gained over the years that I continue to sharpen, continue to learn from and continue to add to, is that I want to find ways to soften those boundaries, make those boundaries porous, so that there’s something to be gained, that there’s something meaningful, that we can make together. It may not be this polished, highly finished work at the end. It might be the beautiful process that we just engaged in that we can’t even put into words. That is meaningful to me. That’s worth it when we can be in a room together, building something transcendent where people feel like they can be themselves

Christopher Coleman, one of the “Radioactive” ensemble members, said something so powerful in a podcast interview we conducted a couple of years ago. I think they had asked him a question about what his experience was like being part of the “Radioactive” project, and he said something along the lines of, “It was so transformative that even the shackles came off the hands of the guards.” I thought that was such a potent image. What it said to me was that not only is the carceral system oppressing those who are incarcerated, but it’s also oppressing the staff and all the other people who work within those systems.

This leads to other questions about how these systems become the primary economic driver of an entire community and how we rely on them. Why do we depend on them? To me, that was a compelling statement that went beyond ourselves.

Grace: I think a lot about the phrase carceral-impacted people or justice-impacted people. I understand why we use that phrasing, but it bothers me because we are all impacted. The threat is always there. I reread Are Prisons Obsolete? a couple of weeks ago, and there’s a point about how anyone unwell, anyone deemed unfit, anyone outside the norm gets put into prisons. By hiding people inside, we don’t have to confront any of these issues on a deeper level that could prevent them from happening in the first place. It creates this necessary remove to keep the system in place.

Maria: Yeah. I’ve been consumed by rage over what’s been happening in the last few months regarding the kidnapping of immigrants. We saw a version of this a few years ago with incarcerating entire families and children in immigrant detention centers. We’re seeing this in ways that maybe we hadn’t quite seen before. It’s absolutely brutal. The ways that people are being dehumanized and mistreated and abused, there’s a political rhetoric around normalizing this. We have to fight against it. 

While I am filled with rage, I am also hopeful. I think people are recognizing that this is a larger issue. We’re entering this fascist political moment, and we have to fight back. We have to defend each other and love each other and take care of each other, our neighbors, our community members, our students, and our loved ones.

I do feel like abolition has become more possible given how people have been embodying it in these different ways. It’s about this process. It’s about learning and relearning and holding each other accountable but also holding each other with some love and some hope. I hope that’s the direction we’re moving, but it’s going to take a lot of work. 

Grace: That’s one of the reasons I was so drawn to Disappearance Jail. One of the biggest questions about abolition is what will we have instead? Your project puts that question in the hands of the public in a way that allows everyone to reimagine what’s possible. I’m wondering how you set up that experience. How do you bring people into that conversation if they’re either skeptical about the idea of abolition, the way that art can be effective in these very real world problems, or maybe they feel they’re not creative enough to participate in something like this?

Maria: I think of it much like doing a public artwork. I’ve mentioned that I come from a mural background. That was my entry point into art making. What I recall from those experiences and working with local muralists in Chicago was that it was almost always a very inviting place. There was always an invitation to engage. Engaging meant cleaning the brushes, or engaging meant putting paint on the wall, or helping create the design, or helping take the scaffold down or up, but there was always this invitation to be a part of it. I feel fortunate to have had mentors who created those conditions where I felt like I could be part of something more. 

I do the same for Disappearance Jail. There are people who can get down with abolition, who understand it or are trying to understand it, who are interested. There might be others who are against it or don’t understand it, but are curious. There are all these different positionalities. The punch party is an invitation for you to come. I have not had anybody yet say they don’t want to punch anything out. Everybody has punched out an image so far. And we’ve punched out around 2,000 images, so at least that many people have punched out images of carceral facilities and have thought about what they want to see instead.

I guide folks through a set of five prompts, and we start with something like, Imagine freedom. What does it feel like? Taste like? Sound like? They need to take some time to think about what freedom means to them. Sometimes we do this in groups, or sometimes we do it individually. It depends on how people want to engage. Usually, it’s guided, so I’m giving people some context. I’m giving them information about the work. 

In some situations, we’ve had co-facilitators. I co-facilitated a one-punch party in California with Christopher Coleman, who I mentioned earlier, who was part of the “Radioactive” ensemble. I’ve also done it with other people who are local to that city, who may come from a community-based practice or local movement. We lead groups to think about these specific jails and prisons that they might recognize or maybe they have a connection to. I’ve had people share that their loved ones were incarcerated or that they have family members who work in those facilities. There are so many different connections, and sometimes people will share publicly, and sometimes they’ll just tell me.

I ask them to create a mark using the hole puncher and to imagine what, instead, they would like to see. Sometimes we’ll hold writing workshops, where participants can write a little bit about what that means to them to punch out. At other times, people will simply say it while they’re punching it out. They’ll say something like love or joy or community. It becomes this embodied experience of creating the perforation, creating the hole, and imagining a world without prisons.

I collect all the perforations that will be transformed, possibly composted one day. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would mean to compost or transform those materials into something else, to let something grow. The Disappearance Jail images are printed onto rice paper. It has a kind of softness to it, but it’s also quite resilient as a material. Sometimes hole punchers get stuck, and a bit of tearing occurs. It feels a little like fabric. It’s interesting as a material to think about its relationship to fiber and fibrous things that grow from the ground. 

Grace: I love the compost idea. That’s beautiful.

Maria: I like the idea, too. I recently got into making paper. It’s such a beautiful process of making paper pulp and just working with scraps, you know? I think it’s such a beautiful transformation.

Grace: That was one of my favorite things to learn how to do as a kid. I wanted to do it all the time because it just feels so good. It’s soft, and touching the pulp is so satisfying. 

Maria: That is important to me, that touch feels good. That’s sometimes a strange thing to say when you’re looking at this image of a punitive system in your hands, right? And everything it represents. However, there’s something about the participant, being able to manipulate it, that’s really important: to cut away and be with the mark. 

I made some guidelines for the perforations because there was a point in one of the cities where people were starting to add words. They were quite beautiful–they’re lovely–but then I had to step back and really think about what that would mean to see a bunch of words. I decided to add a guideline that focuses on marks, rather than words. I’m inviting people to make a puncture without a word, so that the mark could be felt more by the viewer. 

Grace: How do you think about senses when you’re creating a community project? That feels so much a part of embodiment.

Maria: There was a point in my practice doing community work where I was dealing with a surface through images and language. I started to feel like it wasn’t enough to just deal with the surface. Then that work changed. We were looking at the jail, thinking about the wall and making that porous. I did it through screenshots of the jail using Google Earth. 

I wanted to take a different approach and to think of it like something that can be shaped and reshaped, abolished, or deconstructed. I was also beginning to do more performance work. I was really excited by the possibilities of movement and touch and creating these different kinds of compositions by way of the body or bodies together. We did some performance workshops for the “Radioactive” project, where we moved around in the room using  Augusto Boal-inspired performance exercises. Touching in jail is prohibited, so it was a particular kind of touch using just our fingertips.

There was something very sensorial, and there was a connection being made. For me, that was a moment where touch became really electric and in some ways radioactive, right? I thought that was a beautiful way of coming together, that we can be together through conversation and through drawing and through these collaborative exercises, but also through movement. 

I’m always trying to make things that feel embodied. I completed a project where I created a large textile curtain called “Haunting Raises Specters,” where it was essentially a visual representation of the jail wall, which can be arranged and rearranged in various configurations as an installation. I really wanted people to experience both sides of that textile, but you don’t quite know what is what side and also that the wall is movable. It could be gathered. It could be opened up. People can participate in it somehow. It’s essential to me that it feel embodied, and so I think that’s how I come to touch. 

Grace: I wanted to ask you a little bit about wellness. I think embodiment can sometimes be tied to influencer wellness culture and can mean a lot of different things to different people, particularly as we think about identity and positionality. Do you see there being a distinct connection between embodiment and collective or even individual well-being in your practice?

Maria: That’s a good question. Recently, I’ve been thinking more about healing. I mean, I think I’ve always been thinking about healing. Being together and being in community, it always has healing potential. We know that we’re not solitary beings.

It must be grounded in a consciousness of political struggle. I can’t think of wellness without some kind of political stake. Without it, it would feel really disconnected. It has to be grounded in understanding the different types of struggles that we have on an individual or community level, or neighborhood level or city level. There’s a political condition that needs to be recognized and identified, and considered when you’re thinking about what wellness means.

The Colossal-curated exhibition ‘No One Knows All It Takes’ is on view through December 20 in Milwaukee. Find more from Gaspar on her website 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 Maria Gaspar On Abolition and the High Stakes of Working with Incarcerated Communities appeared first on Colossal.

One of Amarie Gipson’s many gifts is an unyielding desire to ask questions. Having worked at institutions like The Contemporary Austin, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, Gipson has cultivated a practice of examining structures and pushing beyond their limitations. Her inquiries are incisive and rooted in a profound respect for people of all backgrounds, with a central goal of expanding art’s potential beyond museum walls.

A true polymath, Gipson is a writer, curator, DJ, and founder of The Reading Room, an independent reference library with more than 700 books devoted to Black art, culture, politics, and history. Titles like the century-spanning African Artists sit alongside Toni Morrison’s novel Sula and Angela Davis’ provocative Freedom is a Constant Struggle, which connects oppression and state violence around the world. The simultaneous breadth of genres and the collection’s focus on Black life allow Gipson and other patrons to very literally exist alongside those who’ve inspired the library.

One afternoon in late April 2025, I spoke with Gipson via video about her love for the South, her commitment to meeting people where they’re at, and her hopes for The Reading Room.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Grace: I’d like to start at the beginning. Why start a project of this nature in Houston?

Amarie: I am a student of so many incredible Black women writers, artists, curators, thinkers, and theorists, and I really take seriously the advice that I’ve gotten through reading their work. If something doesn’t exist, you should start it. I’ve moved and migrated through these great United States for some time, and when I moved back to Houston seven and a half years ago, The Reading Room didn’t exist. I needed it to happen. I wanted to experience my books somewhere outside of my apartment, and I also wanted to create a destination for folks when they came to town, so that my friends know that they have a cool place to land. Those are the two main reasons: it didn’t exist, and I wanted somewhere to go.

Grace: There’s a thing that happens in Chicago all the time–I think it happens anywhere that is not New York or Los Angeles–and the ways artists think about their careers and what it takes to be successful. There’s often this perception that to reach a certain level, they need to go to one of those two cities. And I would imagine Houston has a similar feeling.

Amarie: Absolutely. I think it’s important that everyone leaves home at some point. But don’t leave because you don’t think that anything exists here. Leave because you want to see what else there is and bring it back. Come back home and create the things that you want to see here.

I don’t think I could have The Reading Room in New York. I don’t think I could have The Reading Room in Chicago. It’s not my home. I feel more empowered here. I feel safer to have created something like this, especially in a state that is so extremely suppressed, politically, socially. But culturally, we stand firm, especially in Houston. So, it felt natural.

Grace: What area of Houston are you currently in?

Amarie: The Reading Room is currently located in north downtown, right across the way from the University of Houston’s downtown campus. Downtown is not the most exciting place in the city, but it is a meeting point for all different types of cultures. The Reading Room lives inside a hybrid art studio called Sanman Studios. There are two units. They function as an event space and production studio. There’s an art gallery, an artist residency work space, and The Reading Room. This is Houston’s creative hotspot.

Grace: I’m wondering how your institutional training has influenced The Reading Room. How have those experiences pushed you to make something that is decidedly not institutional?

Amarie: I was just thinking about this a week ago. I came into the curatorial field around 2016, and that was at the height of philanthropic institutions looking for ways to diversify. One of the solutions was to introduce younger, undergraduate-aged students from underrepresented communities to the field. I did the Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I was a junior in college at the time, and this program really gave me a crash course on what museums are like; how the exhibitions are produced, where the art is stored, and how curators work with other departments. I spent two years at the MFAH in the Prints and Drawings department, and I was always looking for Black artists. I realized quickly that if no one’s here to advocate for this work to come out of storage, no one’s ever going to see it. I was trying to sift through the collection, find, locate, and make these works more visible.

I also recognized early in my career that people are really important to me. I started asking questions: What are the functions and responsibilities of art institutions? What are we really supposed to be doing? I know what we have done, but what is the purpose? I eventually took those questions to Chicago and New York, and I moved around to different museums to try to find the answer.

A turning point was when I got hired at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which, for any young Black person in the art world, is the pinnacle. It’s the place. It’s where a lot of careers start. Many folks’ first job in the art world is at the Studio Museum, and they’re being shaped and molded to continue in the field. However, shortly after arriving, I realized the Studio Museum was not the place.

In 2020, I looked around at all the different institutions across New York sharing statements of solidarity and pledging institutional and systemic changes. I wanted the Studio Museum to do more than say, “We’ve been doing this. We’ve been committed.” Because what are we doing and does that commitment to care only benefit Black artists, or does it show up in our consideration for all Black people? There are real Black people who are being targeted and locked up for protesting the fact that police are murdering us. What more can we do to connect to the people? How can we bridge the gap between the folks who care about Black art and those who care about Black people and the things that affect us? What about the people working in and for the museum? What are we doing to support the struggle outside of working our lofty little museum jobs? The response that I got is that the institution is going to keep doing what it’s been doing. And that just wasn’t enough for me. I worked in my whole career to get there, but I realized that it was not the place I thought it was or hoped it could be.

And so I left that job and found a way to connect my beliefs with my actions. I’ve taken all of the skills that I’ve learned—how to build relationships, how to listen, how to analyze and organize things, record keeping, data management, object management, storytelling—and do something totally different, something that prioritizes everyday Black people in a way that boosts our intellectual, cultural, and creative capacity. If it’s increased access to literature, if it’s increased access to culture, if it’s just a place that has air conditioning, a place where people can come and hang out, so be it. It’s making space for it all in a way that hopefully destroys the out-of-touch, elitist hierarchy that surrounds “the work.”

Grace: That’s one of the things that I think is so powerful about The Reading Room and the work that you’re doing. Art books are notoriously expensive, and other than sporadic free days, museums generally are not cheap either. You really do balance such a strong aesthetic perspective and a critical rigor typically associated with institutions with the accessibility of something like a public library meant for truly everyone. I wonder, on a tangible level, what goes into making a space like that?

Amarie: I didn’t have a physical space when the idea first came to life. I started working on the concept in the summer of 2021. I passed by an old American Apparel storefront in this neighborhood in Houston called Montrose. I remember going to that American Apparel as a teenager. I never could afford anything, but I was always going in there to try stuff on. I looked inside, and I was like, what would I do if I had the space? At the time, I didn’t really know how anybody could afford anything outside of paying their rent. People who had small shops, coffee shops, small businesses, kitschy little stores, I was like, what do you need to do in order to make this happen? I eventually found my way to Sanman. I met Seth Rogers, the owner. I was working for a magazine, so I started asking him questions.

I was also DJing at the time. I had been DJing for four or five years prior to moving to Houston, but my DJ career blew up when I moved back because the culture here is so rich. Nightlife is a huge part of the city. I started saving my money from my day job, gigs, and partnerships. I would be at the events that I would play, and I’d be yelling to people over the speakers, “I’m building a library. I’m building a library!”

I lost my job at the magazine in the fall of 2022, and I had come upon enough money to focus fully on The Reading Room. I built the website to anchor the concept. I scanned the front and back covers of 325 of the books that were in the collection at the time. I built a strong relationship with Sanman and hosted a two-day, in-person experience after I launched the site. There were about 130 people who came that weekend just to hang out. Someone approached me and said, “I didn’t even know this many books on Black art existed.” That was the moment everything made sense, when I realized I’m on the right path.

Because this is a reference library, where the collection doesn’t circulate, we’ve got to do programs. Every single program that we do is inspired by or connected to a book that’s in the collection. That’s bringing people in, and it’s leaving them with a reading list so that they can keep coming back. That’s been the formula so far. My ambition is to garner enough support and community response so that when I break out of a shared space, the traffic is steady and the impact deepens.

Grace: When we think about meeting people where they’re at, so much of it is about creating multiple entry points into the work that you’re doing. When someone comes in, what does that process look like? How do you engage with them?

Amarie: It depends. Most folks are just like, oh my god, I love this space. Some other folks will be like, I’m working on a project about Black hair. Do you have any books about hair? And I’ll go and pull books about hair. I’ll explain the relationships between the books on the main display and point out how I’ve selected and placed things, then give a crash course on where you can find what.

So even if they don’t know what they’re looking for, pointing them in a direction, they’ll be able to wayfind. It’s a destination for discovery. You come in, and you fall down a rabbit hole.

Grace: I think of curation primarily as a way of providing context. I’m wondering how the vastness of your collection—in that there’s history, politics, and culture, and you’re not focused on only having visual art or photography—manifests as part of your commitment to accessibility. What you’re doing in making these larger connections and providing context so that people don’t need to read an artwork or image through a traditional art historical, canonical perspective, but rather can approach it through music or politics or a cultural moment, feels like an accessibility move to me.

Amarie: You said it so beautifully. Seriously, that’s it. The books that people are familiar with are what’s going to draw them in, and then they’ll see that the bulk of the collection is about visual art. Hopefully, what they know is a gateway to what they don’t know and what I want to share. If you open up Arthur Jafa’s monograph, MAGNUMB, I want you to know Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman. You gotta know all these people. Their books live here because they’re in conversation with one another. The artist’s monograph lives alongside the anthologies or the novels that inspired the creation of the work. The collection focuses heavily on visual art, just because that’s what I collected. I’m thinking about visual culture at large, but also history. How do we situate these objects within a larger continuum? We live within that continuum, so it’s important to see everything in concert with one another.

To your point about accessibility, it starts to tap into that more tangible effect, tangible impact, right? We can have conversations about politics in here, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be through the lens of an artist, but because the book lives in the collection, we can sit and talk about anything, right? We can talk about democracy or the lack thereof. We can talk about the American flag. We can talk about anything because there’s something here that’s going to help us situate it. We can listen to the music. There are so many intersections, and having collection categories that expand beyond art and design allows for that.

Grace: I was reading an older interview with Martine Syms recently about her publishing practice. She talked about publishing as a way to make ideas public—and then to use that to create a public around an idea because you have shared reference points. That feels very similar to what you’re doing. The Reading Room, by bringing people together and allowing these conversations, is actually creating this collective idea and an opportunity to have this shared way of thinking about something.

Amarie: For sure. I think about that a lot. Art books, not only because of the price, are largely inaccessible to the public, but are also inaccessible to artists who deserve them. You have to go a long way in your career before somebody feels like they care enough to make a book for you. You usually have to wait for a major retrospective or survey exhibition. Or if you’re really young and hot and you’ve got gallery representation, they might make you a book.

I’m also thinking about how The Reading Room can be a source, a bridge, or a doula that finds ways to amplify artists who are being overlooked or have been working for a really long time and still don’t have books, how their work can land in the hands of the public in a way that is accessible. I’m hoping to start a publishing branch of The Reading Room in the next couple of years. I’m going to start with zines this year and see what happens.

I’m also thinking about the legacy of independent Black publishers across history, coming out of different cities, and what it means right now in the age of misinformation, to create a platform for truth. Yeah, it will be making art books. But we’ll also be making political pamphlets, recirculating ideas from the past. How many people know what the Black Panther Party’s 10-point platform really was? What if we made posters? How can we apply those things today? I’m interested in all of that. I want to do every single thing that I couldn’t do in those museums, that’s too taboo or too controversial to do in a museum.

I feel way more present and clairvoyant than ever before. I realized that for the first year of running The Reading Room, I was like, I’m not reading enough. I was focused more on the structure of this thing, filling in gaps in the collection, all of that. Last summer, I made a summer reading list for myself, and I read ten books. It felt so good to just stop and read. I feel healthier, calmer, and stronger. I’ve been transformed. I want that feeling for everybody.

The Reading Room is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday at 1109 Providence St., Houston. Explore the collection in the online archive, and follow the latest 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 Amarie Gipson On The Reading Room, Houston’s Black Art and Culture Library appeared first on Colossal.

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. 

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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.