LESLIE MOODY CASTRO: Can you explain your choice of title, “Ex-Voto”? Specifically, how do the story of The Barragán Archives and the work The Proposal operate in tandem with one another?

JILL MAGID: The Barragán Archives, which I began in 2013, is an extended, multimedia project examining of the legacy of Luis Barragán. At the core of the project is the question of artistic legacy: how it is constructed, manipulated, accessed, and controlled. In ideal circumstances, artistic legacy is shared, as a gift. The Proposal is a climactic artwork within The Barragán Archives project that includes a genuine diamond produced from the cremated remains of Luis Barragán, set into an engagement ring, and offered to Federica Zanco, Director of the Barragan Foundation, in exchange for the return of Barragán’s archive to Mexico and the public.

“Ex-Voto” ran concurrent to The Proposal’s exhibition in Switzerland, and its title refers to the series of four works I am showing within the exhibition. Collectively called The Miracles, each Ex-Voto is a cast tin horse painted by a professional ex-voto painter that I hired in Mexico City, whom I provided with images and texts. Ex-voto literally means, “from the vow made,” or “according to the promise I made.” The Barragán Archives is the result of many years’ worth of research and engagement, meaningful relationships, and forged partnerships and the ex-votos I made offer gratitude to those inspiring collaborations, our shared commitments, and to what I believe to be their miraculous outcomes.

A votive offering is a gift for the dead, intended to be buried with them, and not to be recouped by the living. An ex-voto, like a legacy, remains in the realm of the living.

How is this exhibition either mimicking the process of an ex-voto or acting as a metaphor for it?

To make The Proposal, and to do the necessary work and research of The Barragán Archives (of which this work is a part) required, I collaborated and partnered with many people and institutions, including the Barragán family, art organizations, non-profit organizations, government bodies, lawyers, professors, architects, and more. I wanted to make a work that would thank these partners, these bodies, for their collaboration and for our various relationships that grew from our collaborations. Together, we expanded our understandings of legacy and how it can be lived, and activated. Traditional ex-votos offered a beautiful form for gratitude, and they inspired my own versions of them.

You’ve talked about this project in terms of a love triangle in your exhibitions “Woman With Sombrero,” at Art in General in 2013, Yvon Lambert in 2014, and MAZ in 2014. Can you describe this role?

It is important to me that my work goes beyond metaphor, engaging the law and structures of control in both its finished form as well as through the process of creation. I believe that an understanding of how artistic legacy is constructed, shaped, manipulated, and shared is an important cultural issue. I don’t see art or an archive as a fixed or dead body, but as something alive and that continues to give. That’s not inevitable: to do so, it must be kept alive by remaining accessible, with the possibility for continual engagement. 

An artist’s work is complete at their death, but their legacy is in its infancy. I’m trying to understand Barragán and his legacy. And my effort to understand myself in relation to them is part of the work of The Barragán Archives, which I explored in the exhibition “Woman With Sombrero,” and others. While I was not permitted to see Barragán’s professional archive at the Barragán Foundation in Switzerland, I was given full access to his personal archive at Casa Barragán in Mexico City. Much of the first few years of the project grew from my research and hands-on exploration of the personal archive, and my inability to access the professional archive.

You have traditionally worked with systems of surveillance and loopholes in laws, as in the Failed States project (2012). Why did you decide to focus on Barragán and his legacy?

My work has continued to center around themes of access, power and the law since I first started showing in 1999. Before The Barragán Archives, I’d mainly engaged with government institutions such as CCTV operations, police, and secret services. With The Barragán Archives, I entered into a new territory of privatized power. I wanted to understand what it meant for an artist’s legacy to be controlled by Vitra, a corporation. To do so, I needed to engage with copyright law, intellectual property rights, and fair use doctrine.

I’ve explored questions around artistic legacy within my work before. Auto Portrait Pending (2005), is a work that confronts my own legacy, by way of my physical body and its relationship to the art market. To make the work, I signed a contract with a company to become a diamond when I die, which will be set in a gold ring. Until the diamond′s creation, the artwork exists only of the empty ring setting, the corporate contract, and a series of documents. While The Proposal takes on a similar form — a diamond with attendant paperwork — it does so in a very different context, with a different intention. The Proposal is a gift, intended to inspire another gift: the repatriation of Barragán’s archive to Mexico and its free accessibility to the public. 

There have been some criticisms of the project. Can you speak openly about this? And was it simply fascination that led to a genuine offer of the ring to Ms. Zanco?

Yes, I am always looking for opportunities in my work to directly engage systems of power, and to find the human core within a seemingly impenetrable system. In this case I found a powerful artist’s legacy that is constricted by corporate power.

Yet The Proposal is created and offered as a gift. It is both an artwork and a potential tool of negotiation. The ring avoids the market completely by not being for sale; it is non-transactional and therefore opens up the possibility of lasting relationships created by the act of gift exchange. The ring may only be exchanged for the return and public access to the archive.

Gift-giving is the transfer of property rights over particular objects. Property is not a thing, but a relationship among people through things. In order to remain alive, an artist’s legacy must be shared, experienced, and open. Offering the ring to Ms. Zanco is an opportunity to bring Barragán’s legacy out of private control and back to the commons.

What would happen after the archive is returned to Mexico? Where would it live, is there a plan?

As stated in The Family Agreement, a contract between the family and myself, about The Proposal:

The Artwork will exist in two periods: the proposal period and the engagement period. The Artwork will be displayed during both periods, as described in The Agreement.

The Artist will offer the Ring to the Archivist, in Switzerland, at the first exhibition of the Artwork. This offer will initiate the proposal period. In order for the Archivist to receive the Ring, she must agree to relocate the Archive from the Barragan Foundation, in Birsfelden, Switzerland, to a publicly accessible site or institution in Mexico. The Archivist may accept the Ring and the terms of the offer at any moment.

If the Archivist accepts the offer, the Family, the Archivist, and other relevant parties will negotiate the terms of the Archive’s relocation.

As you see from the contract, once The Archivist (Ms. Zanco) accepts The Proposal, she, the family and other relevant parties will negotiate a publicly accessible site in Mexico. This may be a library or a university, or similar, or perhaps even a new building built specifically for it. There are many possibilities.

The post “My work goes beyond metaphor”: A Conversation with Jill Magid appeared first on artcritical.

STEPHEN MAINE: When I heard about the IABF, my first thought was: terrific! My second thought was… what a load of work it must be to launch a new art book fair. I’m wondering for how long you’ve been focused on developing the IABF. What were the circumstances of its genesis? How did the idea take shape?

KAREN SCHAUPETER: When I first conceived of the idea, I wanted to get it out the door around February 2016, during either the time of the LA Contemporary Art Fair, or Paramount Ranch — things that happen at the end of January — or alongside the LA Art Book Fair (LAABF) in the second week of February. But the timing was tight and the venue I wanted wasn’t available, so I went down to Mexico City and did an artist residency about two blocks from the Material Art Fair. They said “Come do this in Mexico City.” So I had Mexico City and LA developing before New York — those locations are essentially available when I get there. It felt like I was already getting off the ground in three different locations.

I first announced in May 2016 that I would do the fair, and the response was fantastic. I was expecting… well, you never know. I thought people might be protective of the PS1 event. But the responses were nothing but positive.

I created the IABF to include people from all over the world. This is the first fair, so we’ll see what happens. It’s all open to interpretation — I have certain expectations but I’m trying not to let my expectations overshadow whatever will actually happen, or the democratic spirit of the event.

Is IABF in any sense modeled after the New York Art Book Fair (NYABF)? Do you see IABF as a satellite fair, in the way that smaller-scale projects have proliferated around art fairs such as the Armory Show and Art Basel Miami?

I don’t know what word would best describe it. “Satellite” is kind of unavoidable, since IABF is the smaller of two fairs happening concurrently. But my goal is to make something a little more digestible, and more of a hybrid of an art fair and a book fair. We’re definitely not modeled after NYABF, though some other things have been inspiring, like the Index Art Book Fair in Mexico City. That venue is amazing, and the sellers are not overly pressured — it’s a relaxed environment. I’d like to see that at the IABF. And at the LAABF, I liked seeing the zines and the smaller publishers alongside the limited edition publishers. Seeing the high and the low together makes everyone appreciate what it is they’re looking at a little bit more.

We’re not competing with NYABF, because there’s been such an incredible rise in book publishing that they just don’t have the physical space for everyone who wants to do something. It’s great, and it’s definitely the “institution,” what everyone wants to be a part of, but there are boundaries and limitations. With all the newcomers making great things, there’s plenty of room for another fair.

Why is the IABF scheduled for the same weekend as NYABF?

It’s part of my effort to be efficient. Bookmakers from all over the world are in New York then, so why would I do IABF in, like, October? With all the fairs going on all over the world, you have to respect people’s time. I think it will alleviate some pressure at the NYABF — we’re one stop away on the East River Ferry, at the Greenpoint ferry stop.

Fairs are a function of capital as well as culture, of course, so I’m curious about IABF as a corporate entity. Who are the fair’s primary backers? Have you been pursuing corporate sponsorship?

There is no financial backing for this. I’m very DIY by nature. It’s completely operated by me, putting in time whenever I can. Our director, Kayla Fanelli, puts in a lot of time. There are a lot of other people volunteering, but in terms of administration, it’s Kayla and me.

IABF isn’t set up as a corporate entity at this point. I want to get through the fair first, then figure out the structure moving forward. We might decide it should be a nonprofit, or remain a sole proprietorship, fiscally sponsored by a group like NYFA or Fractured Atlas.

How has the IABF attracted exhibitors?

Mainly, I reached out to my email list, which includes about 700 publishers all around the world.

Can you give me an idea of who the exhibitors are? Will there be a concentration at the zine end of the spectrum, or of artist books/limited editions, or something else? And what price range can visitors expect to see?

We have over 60 exhibitors from the US and internationally. As to publications, there is quite a price range — from about $10 to $1,500. The mix is a little bit of everything, some of the zine-y/lowbrow/fetish material; the more crafty zines, using screenprint and woodcut techniques; and then higher-end publications and independent periodicals; a little queer culture; the independent gallery projects presenting one or more artists; and some larger academic things will be happening. Designers and Books will present their facsimile reproduction of an important avant-garde book, Depero Futurista, also known as the “bolted book.” The original dates from 1927, and it presages so much of where we’ve gone with graphic design over the past nearly 100 years. The new edition will be available for pre-order. It’s a great example of the book as a vehicle of communication, and of our effort to strike that delicate balance between art and commerce. 

You are a hybrid insofar as visitors can see original art also.

Yes. I wanted to open the door to smaller galleries, so they can present an artist’s work and not have to kill themselves financially. 

You’re keeping exhibitor costs affordable, then?

Exhibitors’ fees range from $250 to $2,500. I want to create a fair that’s more democratic and I hope to be able to keep a simply structured pricing arrangement. That way, gallery can get in for $2,500 and get 16 to 20 linear feet of exhibition area on two flat walls — and they can do whatever they want.

Nowadays, many if not most print publishers have some kind of online presence, but are any of your exhibitors involved solely in online publication?

No IABF exhibitor publishes online only, except for Tiny Atlas Quarterly. Tiny Atlas was started with the intention of making it a quarterly print magazine, but the Instagram handle took off, and the hashtag #mytinyatlas has something like 1.7 million photos attached to it. This is a project that is only about three years old. They have a huge community of people who embrace what they’re doing, and because they are a major part of the publishing community, it made sense for them to participate. It’s about the project, working with artists, and involvement with the community. Our lines are open.

Who is handling the exhibition design, and what is the concept regarding the look and feel of the visitor’s experience of the fair?

I am the creative force behind the exhibition design, much of which is rooted in being resourceful and democratic with materials and fees. Most of the contributions we have received have been in-kind with time, or majorly discounted flat rates. Kim Sutherland of Full Time-Part Time Design studio did our logo/brand element. I have help from interior architect Sarah T. Engelke, Faster Horse Designs, and countless others who are helping with poster layout, exhibitor catalog design, and printing: Nic Jamieson, Alexander Soiseth, C&B Printing and more. It’s really a grassroots project at this point. I think I have used up my friend favors for a while now!

How did you settle on the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse as a venue?

I’ve been in photo production for 17 years, and I’ve done a lot of location scouting. For IABF, I did quite a bit of legwork to find an appropriate place. A tip lead me to the Brooklyn Expo in Greenpoint, which wasn’t available, but the contact for that venue showed me a photo of their new space, the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, and I said, “Done! I want that space.” The vibe of this raw warehouse in Brooklyn is in some ways similar to the vibe of the fairs in Mexico City and LA.

Is any additional programming scheduled?

We have some help from a Brooklyn publisher called Perfect Wave, with performances daily from 5:00 to 7:00 pm, by Alice Cohen, The Vets, Sex Crystals, and Tropical Rock. There will be readings and panel discussions. Stephen Shore just started a new publication called Documentum, published by Fall Line Press, for which there will be an event. Hana Pesut, a photographer from Vancouver, will do portraits of couples who’ve switched their clothes, in the spirit of her book Switcheroo. It should be hilarious. We want to have some fun, and to keep a nice rhythm of something happening maybe every hour or two.

Of all the challenges this project undoubtedly presented, what was the biggest hurdle you had to clear?

Organizing during the summer was a huge challenge, because everyone is away. We were getting auto-replies from some people for the entire month of August. 

As a new venture, IABF has no financial track record as a baseline measure. By what criteria will you grade its success? Is exhibitor feedback important to you? I mean, in the event that exhibitors overall make money, gain contacts, get some publicity, etc. but the fair itself is not profitable, how will you proceed?

I’m determined, but I don’t want to be the blind leading the blind. I don’t measure success by what’s in the bank account, but I realize people need to sell their goods and make enough money that that they would do it again.

That’s a big part of the puzzle for a lot of the exhibitors, isn’t it?  

Well, maybe half-and-half. For some projects, it’s not important to make money. They have followings wanting to come see them, and we’re going to share in that. A publisher or gallery might go into it not expecting to be able to sell high-priced works. People have been managing their expectations in a healthy way. Everyone knows this is the first fair, and everyone — exhibitors and IABF crew — will be working hard to get people there. I think there’ll be a lot of interest just because it’s something new.

The bottom-line numbers are not the only measure of success. That will be based on the exhibitor experience and visitor experience: how exhibitors are taken care of, and how visitors feel about it while they’re there. Those are the most important things — without them, I don’t have a fair. I want it to feel roomy, with enough space to flow through and everyone getting proper attention, not lined up like trade show. The idea is for there to be movement, and a lot of people enjoying themselves. I think it will be like a breath of fresh air.

The Independent Art Book Fair runs at Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, 67 West Street, Brooklyn, September 16 to 18, 11:00-7:00. Admission is free of charge. For more information: www.independentartbookfair.com.

The post “We want to have some fun”: Karen Schaupeter Describes IABF appeared first on artcritical.

There’s a delayed shock built into the work of sculptor and video artist Yeshaiahu Rabinowitz, which is all the more effective for not being immediately apparent. Underlying his work, which at first seems playful, is a quiet but no less searing reflection of how it might feel to be a gentle, slightly built Israeli male facing the prospect of army service.

Rabinowitz makes sculpture out of soft materials like felt and cardboard to deal with hard subjects, including violence and war, fear and vulnerability. He keeps his subjects at a distance; the action is offstage. But it is Rabinowitz’s sense of drama that attracts attention to his work, starting with the life-size sculpture of a fallen horse made of cardboard sheeting, which he presented at his degree show two years ago — which led to almost immediate showings of his work at the prestigious Herzliya and Israel Museums.

His first solo exhibition, “Attributes of a Hero,” was staged at Hansen House, Jerusalem, earlier this year. The space was built as a leper hospital in the late 19^th century, and still retains a spooky, historic atmospheric even after being reinvented as an art center. Rabinowitz’s sculptures of hand-sewn, made-to-measure body parts — or coverings for body parts — are well suited to the venue, a stone-walled gallery space with domed ceiling and cobbled floor. And it’s not just because of the association of leprosy and losing limbs. The dim, cell-like space, with spotlights that cause the shadows of sculpture and viewers to move across the walls, adds to the theatricality of the work, but also — if I’m not looking too deeply into it — its melodrama, fakeness and subversive joke.

The limp, tailored shapes are scaled and segmented, like pieces of human and animal armor, momentarily bringing to mind Claes Oldenberg’s big, soft replicas of everyday commodities, being both strange and out of context, yet immediately familiar. Instead of a hamburger or household plug, we discover a bit of human torso, a horse’s muzzle, pair of legs, horns. As shells sloughed off by a living body, or waiting to be used, they emphasize a need for protection — not that they would be of any more use than the plug or hamburger.

These pieces could be theatre props, perhaps from an amateurish Shakespearian production, either abandoned or waiting to be used in a play. Then the gallery space could be a scene in Macbeth’s castle. In discussion, Rabinowitz says that indeed, Shakespeare and his views on the complexities of heroism are an intrinsic part of his plot.

The organically shaped shells or molds are casually but expertly cut and sewn. Rabinowitz trained as a tailor after his obligatory national service as a soldier in the Israeli army, and says he “entered the art world through the back door.” Conceptualism comes naturally to him. He makes his art out of the unlikely combination of soldiering and sewing, uses it to express irony and an eager enjoyment of being an artist, and expresses a worldview that is tragic, naïve and knowing, all at once.

In the exhibition’s eponymous video, Rabinowitz shows himself trying to become a hero. An observant Jew with a yarmulka on his mop of curly hair, he first dresses carefully in white shirt and trousers, the modest clothes of a yeshiva student, while telling about biblical war heroes. His personal training exercise turns out to be running around in circles in a disused city space, crouched forwards with his fingers raised like the horns of a bull. The gentleness of the smiling young man and the futility of his personal exercise are offset by fierce energy and determination, and undermined by his own amusement. It’s the histrionics of heroism: weakness and foolishness fueled by heroic fantasy and will power. It’s a far-reaching metaphor that includes the collapsing horse. War is a subject often returned to by Israeli artists, but Rabinowitz has his own way of making a lot of suggestions about it, and leaving them in the air.

The post Heroic Fantasy: Yeshaiahu Rabinowitz at Hansen House appeared first on artcritical.

The church bells chime on the hour and Raftery is pressed for time. At completion, the show will consist of 12 16-inch tondo paintings and a portfolio of 12 earthenware plates with transfer prints from Raftery’s engravings. Each plate depicts a solitary, middle-aged man, (the artist) working with great determination in an ornamental garden, chronicling every month of the year and his corresponding duties in the garden from inception to fruition, decline to dormancy. In January we see him in his bed reading seed catalogs, in March he is watering, in April digging out the lettuce bed. Cut to November and he’s taking out the dahlia tubers. Lastly, in December, he’s standing in the snow contemplating the next year’s planting.

The depth and wit of the narrative are conveyed with concise lines on luminous glazed and dynamically shaped plates. These will be displayed against thematically-coordinated wallpaper so that a complete world is presented through mastery of narrative detail and marvelous skill. There is both satire and profundity, and the lone gardener’s Promethean toil in his small but precious plot reminds us of our own struggle against time and the elements. But while contemplating the smallness and beauty of our single lives, the appreciative viewer might not fully grasp the extensive process behind this artistry; the number of people and inventions cultivated for this project: that ink was formulated, ceramic glazes invented, original plate shapes created and named, and wallpaper designed and printed. And then, of course, there’s the work of tending the garden, and it’s most important collaborator, the artist’s mother.

MARY JONES: You’ve said your title, “The Autobiography of a Garden” refers to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, because in that work Stein uses Toklas’s voice to describe their shared lives. To me, there many Alices in this project, including the garden itself, which belongs to your mother. Unlike the garden, she remains unseen throughout the project. What’s the relationship?

ANDREW RAFTERY: I started the garden for her, as a subject for her work. She’s a wonderful artist and she makes expressionist paintings of the flowers. At first, I just planted things I knew she would like to paint. She’s done so many paintings year after year of the garden, and it’s through her work that I remember and see it, more vivid than any photograph could ever be. In a way, her work completes the project and that’s always in the background. Even though she doesn’t appear in the work, she’s always there, and the sweetness of the time we’ve we’ve had together really comes through, because it’s her garden, too, and she absolutely adores it.

I hear she’s not alone in her appreciation?

Sometimes my mother wakes up in the morning to see people touring the back yard. Providence is a very friendly place and doing a garden in a neighborhood like this becomes a very public practice, something you do as much for your neighbors as for yourself. People change their route from work so they can see what’s going on in the garden. They’re always calling out to me from their cars and making comments to me as they drive by. When they see me out there with the easel it’s especially fascinating to them.

Your earlier work always took place indoors, in upscale malls where strangers evaluate each other and interact during commerce. In “Suit Shopping” and “Open House,” you critiqued social status through invented narratives transpiring in these semi-public spaces; the prurient curiosity of potential buyers at an open house, or the sly flirtations and homoeroticism of a man measured while suit shopping. But in “The Autobiography of a Garden,” you’ve moved outside, to a personal place of your own design, and you’re the only person depicted.

I think for the first time I wanted to put the lens of critique entirely on myself, and what’s emerged from this new work is a different kind of emotional tone. I’ve always thought of my work as satirical, but I don’t know if this project is anymore, it takes the risk of having a charge that’s a little bit deeper, a different kind of theme to it, that’s surprised me. I’ve always appeared in my pieces as a kind of witness, to show that this is a world that I know and whatever critique is in that world can be directed at me, too. I think the way I do it is fairly eccentric and relates very much to the way I make my art, the kind of planning and imagination that I bring to the garden overlaps with what goes into planning a print or any of my work, and it’s unlike anything else I’ve done before.

One of the most striking things upon entering your studio are all these models that you create for observational painting, part of your classical approach. Do you consider them artworks?

I don’t know yet, they’re so personal, after all, it’s me naked. I’ve shown the models that I made for “Open House,” but I’m not sure about these yet. Actually, the thing about them is compared to my other work they’re a bit provisional, I only take them as far as I need for the drawings.

I enjoy how they’re so loose and have so much vitality.

That’s what makes them so much fun to draw. The great thing about the models is they give me distance both from myself as a subject, but also the physical distance that I need to take from the figure, which is very different from anything I could do otherwise. It really helps.

Do you undergo the same process for every single image? Did you have to make a model for the painting of you in bed?

There are nine images with models. Actually, for an image in bed, I stuffed the bed with a dummy of myself which is the creepiest photo, but that’s how I did the drapery on the bed.

So you work from a photograph to make the models? Who takes the photos?

I do it myself. The photos in the garden are very specific to establish the scale.

Working from the photograph to the model, then from the model to painting allows a lot of slippage and infusion of expression, a facture that’s outside the photographic, or realism. Are you purposely creating a character for yourself?

The issue of self-consciousness is really central for me, to try to create figures that are not seemIngly conscious of being watched or posing. It’s very important to the tone of the narrative itself. If I can achieve that, the work becomes less theatrical.

Is the characterization revealing for you?

That’s why I do it. Here’s’ a project that’s so super-crafted, so super planned, and then there’s this by-product that surprises me.

What is important to you about your extensive process?

I’m inventing these images, they haven’t existed before, and as I go through each step the image becomes more believable to me, and more memorable. When I think about visual narrative, I think about what’s possible to show in a handmade still image that’s separate from a film or novel, and depicting very particular external details to reveal character and content is something I’ve always been interested in, and what led me to Stein’s writing. One of the things about engraving is that there’s no fudging allowed, you have to know where every single mark is going to be, so I need to know my subject thoroughly. I begin with the form of the body in sculpture, insert that into a grisaille painting of the landscape done from life to get the tonal structure and detail, and then I trace that onto acetate for the engraving.

Is the particular time of day relevant to each piece?

Yes. Each one tries to use the particular light of that time of year. For example, In February I’m using the kind of light that comes into my kitchen from a particular angle that is the never the same in other months. There’s a washed out light in August, the dog days of an overcast day. These things are very important to me.

It’s significant that you’ve returned to painting after such a long hiatus. What brought it back?

I can clearly remember when I stopped painting. It was during on my first sabbatical in 2001, I was working on a self-portrait my kitchen amongst the transferware. It was an oil painting and I was detailing the images on the plates. And I just thought, “I’m so sick of this.” That painting remains unfinished. At that point I turned to the engravings for “Suit Shopping,” I was so happy to be working with engraving because it had a natural simplicity to it, a necessary stylization that didn’t allow for all that detail. So, it was with trepidation that I turned to painting again. It was through the back door, in a way because it’s in black and white Flashe, and very close to what I do in drawing. I thought that this would actually help, as there’s a limitation to the kind of modeling I could do, and I wouldn’t be tempted to go as far as I would in oil painting. But the funny thing is that it’s come full circle. Just in June, I finished the kitchen painting, and as I sat there working on it, I thought this was the same painting I was doing when I decided to quit painting because there I am doing a self-portrait of myself in my bathrobe surrounded by all this transferware. I think it’s exciting that I picked up where I left off and found a new way to make it satisfying. When I quit painting, it was because I felt the drive towards a greater and greater verisimilitude and realism, a kind of smoothing out, which felt like a conservative impulse. I need to make it clear that my images are constructed fictions.

The transferware has made a transition from the background of your kitchen to the actual ground for the engraving. You and your partner, Ned Lochaya, are avid collectors. What’s your attraction?

Transferware for me has been a lifelong thing. As a child, my family had a set of Johnson Brothers pink transferware and I really loved it. I loved setting the table with it because there’s nothing like eating dinner and looking at a picture. I remember I took that set with me to graduate school, that’s how much I liked it. Then, once while admiring the big 19th-century brown transferware on the dinner table of print historian Richard S. Field, he said, “You know these are really prints.” That was a revelation to me. I started to think of transferware differently. Shortly thereafter, Ned started accumulating a collection that is now at about 1,500 pieces. That’s a lot of anything, but we live with it and use it all the time, and I also look at it as a print collection. Our collection goes to about 1850, but there are other artists who’ve done printed pottery in my collection, like Claire Leighton, who’s been very important to me.

Can you talk about the shapes and designs of your plates?

Of course, the big question for someone who’s never designed ceramics before, is what are you going to use? At first, I explored the idea of finding a potter who would design the shapes for me or use things that already existed. But then I saw that I could use paper, which I know really well, to invent my designs. So I started to play with tag board, and by using something that straightforward I could come up with many different solutions. It was so generative, I could refer to Victorian forms, which like mine are also often based on 6, 12, or 24 parts, or I could just use geometry to develop brand new shapes.

And once you had the design, how did you make the plates?

The pottery production has been an absolute saga in itself, and fortunately for me, Larry Bush, professor of ceramics here at RISD, has taken the project on. He really likes the plate shapes, which is a true compliment to me, and he figured out the production method, which is to use a hydraulic press with two part plaster molds. He also invented a special clay for the project, made entirely out of American materials. It’s a beautiful white earthenware, and people who know these things find it to be very close to a beautiful white 18th clay that Wedgwood once made, and he came up with the creamy clear glaze. He’s been super involved every step of the way.

And the engraving?

Just how to get an engraving onto the ceramic was also a dilemma. Millions and millions of pieces were produced in the 19th century in England, but that industry is really gone. I had really hard time finding any concrete factual information about the process.

I’m very surprised this information is lost, were you?

Wedgwood and Spode are closed, that industry is gone. There’s one factory left as a kind of heritage thing from what I understand. Industrial techniques are so vulnerable to loss.

Studio techniques are constantly being taught to new people through art schools and atelier practices, but when you’re dealing with assembly lines and everybody just knowing a little piece of the process, and with proprietary methods and materials, once it’s gone it’s very difficult to reconstruct. I called my friend in England, Paul Scott, author of “Ceramics and Print,” the first edition of his book has a list of resources, and from this list, I started calling people in England. They would say “Well, we don’t do that anymore,” or “We all just all got fired.” I did a lot of research on old patents and also on contemporary materials. We ended up making our own inks, and instead of printing on tissue paper like they did in the past, we used decal paper that’s used for digital transfers. The process brings together 19th-century technology and 21st-century technology.

When did you conceive of the wallpaper to put behind the plates?

When you do an 8-year project, you have many opportunities to talk about it as a work in progress. I knew I didn’t want ornamental borders on the plates, like traditional transferware, but I did understand that these borders function as an opportunity to comment on what’s in the interior. I started thinking about a way to extend the work and began making pattern motifs based on the garden. I looked at an old style of wallpaper, a French style called “Dominos” which allows a patterned ensemble to be created from nine-by-12-inch sheets. Mine is similar and done in letterpress. Doing the wallpaper is what encouraged me to also make the ornamental cartouche for the back stamps with the title and the month of each plate. I’ve always been so dedicated to representation, and working with patterns and geometry has opened up a new world for me.

How did the fanciful names for the plate shapes come about?

The thing I didn’t know about ceramics is that once we press a plate, we have to spend at least half an hour trimming, sanding, and refining each one. When you do 1,500 of them you have to have, first of all, a lot of people to help, and along with the labor and time involved, an intimacy with each shape develops, and all of the forms got names along the way. Larry called the October shape “Fox Points,” because it reminded him of the landscape of the Fox Point neighborhood of Providence, but to me it suggested Chrysthanthemums. The May shape has this sort of lobed form, which is definitely our lettuce shape. I think the most poetic name is for the November shape. One of the assistants began to call it “Swan Wings,” and I think when you look at it just knowing that emphasizes the poignant quality of the waning light of November.

As in your earlier work, time is very specific in the garden, but your character is hard to place. Why?

One thing in my earlier prints that I was really trying to avoid was that sense of reflecting American regional arts and regionalism. That’s why I took on that extreme quotation of 17th-century engraving techniques. Don’t get me wrong, I love American regionalism, I grew up surrounded by it in Washington D.C., but I felt it might be dated, it’s a movement that went out by 1938, and it’s so discredited now, But in this new work, I wasn’t trying to mask it, I really went for it. With the house being from 1929, the way I dress and with the hats I wear it could conceivably be 1945, and then there’s something about the historical character of the neighborhood, and even the style of the garden, that taken all together implies this broad swath of periods. That kind of regionalism was brought into this project, and it’s very new.

Are there political or personal implications for this?

An artist I have been thinking about recently is Grant Wood, and the tragedy of Grant Wood is that he was in the closet. In some ways, Wood’s Daughters of Revolution or Parson Weems’ Fable, are very gay works with a pointed critique from an outsider’s perspective. Some unbelievably humorous things are carefully placed in the paintings, such as the transfer-printed Blue Willow teacup held by one of the aged daughters that is our key to understanding her pretensions. But in some cases, such as the weird interpretation of the George Washington cherry tree myth in the Parson Weems picture, Wood’s meaning remains ambiguous, as if there were some things he could not make explicit. As with Wood, you could see my work as “very gay” in its sensibilities and the avocations depicted, especially in the case of the extended self-portrait in “The Autobiography of a Garden.” But because I don’t have to take on the pressures and prejudices faced by Wood, and have the privilege of being open about who I am, I’m free to use the conventions of American Regionalism to create new subjects. Maybe I’m a little like Grant Wood if he’d been out.

September 10 to November 5, 2016 at 515 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, info@ryanleegallery.com

The post The Autobiography of a Garden: Andrew Raftery in Conversation with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

DARREN JONES: What experiences learned in your earlier days, starting out in the 1980s, are still relevant to your work today? What’s been consistent from then until now?

NANCY WHITENACK: Everything remains surprising to me. When someone walks into the gallery, you cannot ever assume anything about them because of how they look or dress. That they are walking in means that they’re interested in art. Don’t discount people, and treat everyone with respect. I learned that early, and it has always been true. Also, we’ve had so many ups and downs, economically, and even if I’m wondering how the rent is going to be paid, something always catches; I have learned to trust that I can keep going, that I can tighten up, be lean if necessary, but I know that I am going to be able to continue to do this.

In my estimation it’s so little about commerce, it’s really about the artists, and how they create and the ideas that come out of that. It is artists who have sustained me. I work with artists long term, and when I take an artist on I place a great deal of trust in them and what they do, and I learned quickly that I have to take on work that I think is substantial, and interesting. Otherwise how can I show it in good faith, much less find someone to own it?

What are the main changes that you have witnessed during the years in Dallas, and how have they affected the art scene, and art dealing in the city?

When I opened, contemporary art and going to galleries was not something that people did. We had openings, and we’d have people in, but there wasn’t an enthusiastic embrace. Several key points made a difference. Certainly the Rachofsky family, the Roses, and the Hoffmans, who decided to give their collections to the Dallas Museum of Art, made a quantum difference in how people paid attention to the magnanimity of the gifts and material, and that caused people to look more, including at contemporary art.

The Dallas Art Fair has been a boon, not only to the Dallas public but to dealers coming into the city, who discovered that there are amazing collectors here, incredible wealth here, and great art being made here. Also the collaborative groups of artists who finally decided that they cannot sit back and wait for someone to come to them, and so they organize exhibitions and pop-up shows, which have revitalized the whole art scene and have filled it with activity. Several years ago curator Gabriel Ritter did a summer show at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) with a number of these groups, which was really helpful. It was sensational because it brought further attention to what is happening here and signaled to collectors here to look in more depth at what is happening in Dallas.

With all the progress that is being made, is there anything that has been lost, that you would like artists today to experience?

Years ago, a large group of artists used to meet every Saturday morning at Kuby’s Sausage House, and whoever got there grabbed a place at the table. It was a great time to get together, check in and talk. I don’t know if that happens anymore. Today, I get a sense that artists can often feel isolated; beyond the gallery-going they don’t perhaps get that kind of interaction. Frances Bagley, a sculptor, and a group of women would meet regularly for critiques; it’s been documented in a recent DMA show. So if those kinds of things were lost it would affect how artists connect to the community.

CentralTrak, a residency at the University of Texas at Dallas, has enlarged the parameters of what this city is and how artists perceive it. CentralTrak is a place where artists gather, hold panel discussions about artmaking, and talk about the difficulties that artists face. CentralTrak’s success in addressing such issues is down to the director, Heyd Fontenot.

Can you speak about some of the differences between the art scenes in Texas’ major cities and, I have to ask, whether there are any rivalries in their relationships?

Houston has always been the art center in Texas, and it has changed. Bill Davenport, who used to write for Glasstire, came to my gallery one day and said “What is it with you guys? Why is everything going on here?” He’s Houston-based. There was a sense that maybe Houston had lost some ground and that things were just really exploding here. He wanted to know what was making that happen, and we talked about the reasons. I loved that, because we’ve been the banking capital, not the art capital. And that has changed now. San Antonio is a unique city that has some interesting things going on in the art scene.

What I don’t understand is Austin: it has a lot of artists. It has some of the greatest art collections of any university, too, and an art library that puts NYPL’s resources to shame. But there are so few galleries. It is the number one city in terms of the coolest place to go, and for music, but not for visual art. I know why Houston was the art center. It has always had a very integrated sense of the city, in terms of ethnicity and urban development, certainly in terms of city code: a bar sits next to a residence building, sits next to frame shop, next to a church, next to a mausoleum. I think that with so few zoning laws, it made people more tolerant of their neighbors and more open. It causes people to think about how they are going to get along with whatever is happening next door.

In Dallas we are incredibly separated, and constructed to divide neighborhoods. The consequences are that when you go to most any cultural thing, it is predominately white, and that is a tragedy. And that’s got to change. The DMA has changed radically, because of its former director, Bonnie Pitman, who came in initially in the education department and she set about making people feel welcomed there. And if you go on the first Friday night of the month it is packed with a diverse mix of visitors. That’s what has to happen if you want a city that believes in itself and believes in the artists who are here. People have to feel that they are part of the whole. That’s always been on my agenda. Fort Worth is very independent and down-to-earth, and they really support what is going on there without looking to what’s happening in Dallas, although they don’t have many galleries. And of course they have these great museums like the Kimbell and The Fort Worth Modern. 

Is there a sense that an artist needs to leave Texas to gain notice, and has the forming of artist collaboratives arrested the movement of artists out of Dallas?  

Earlier, I would have said yes, if your intentions are to be successful and make a name, you’ve got to go to New York, and find exposure, get in the galleries there. Now, I think that is less the case. The groups of artists that have come together have created a sense of community and a sense that there is something here worth investing in. When you look at artists such as Arthur Peña, Francisco Moreno, Eli Walker, and others, they’re making good tracks, and getting attention. They have stayed right here, and have been self-motivated to make things happen. That’s what it’s about.

Stephen Lapthisophon has been of enormous importance, at the University of Texas at Arlington. He’s mentored a number of people — Jesse Morgan Barnett, Michael Mazurek, among them — who have plugged in right here and are really making things happen. Stephen has been really important in being a mentor, pushing people to get out there and do it. Younger artists have a different sense of who they are, and what the potential is and that anything is possible. You’re here? Dig in! It has fomented a different sense of energy for what is going on in the city.

Then you also have the mid-career artists who galleries and museums need to pay attention to, guys like Jay Sullivan and Robert Barsamian, who have been working hard and doing great work all along. So there is a balance to be found between supporting more established names and newer artists. We’ve just taken on Anthony Sonnenberg, who is fabulous, and I’m very excited about that; we dance with him, but we also have to make sure that we’re putting on really good shows for guys who have been with us for a long time. Making a community happen takes artists who are committed to being here, and doing things that are not commercial and engage us in different ways. And then galleries have to take risks, too. Anything can happen here in Texas: it’s part of the mystique but it’s the truth. And I have seen so many things come together in the last eight to 10 years to promote Dallas as a cultural city.

What do you rely on, recognize or look for in an artist? What tells you that you can work with them? 

I really want them to be decent people! [laughing] Why work with a cad? It’s my good fortune to work with artists who are the most generous people I know. I look for someone who I think is honest and who is willing to give as well as expect us to give. It is a two-way street! It has to also be work that I am stimulated by and causes me to ask questions and want to dig in more.

I want to make sure that one artist doesn’t overlap too much with another, so that each artist has some breathing room in their style or manner and there is nothing that is so close that it becomes uncomfortable. I like things to be distinctive. We have a broad spectrum of artists, and what delights me about that is that you never know what to expect here. I look for artists with a deep sense of craft, and that know how to put elements together. I don’t meant that it has to be meticulous because I also love work that is raw, but I am fascinated by intricacy and when it takes an almost manic energy to make the art happen, I’m very drawn to artists whose work consumes them.

What are you working on now, even outside of gallery exhibitions? What is exciting to you right now?

I stay involved with the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas (CADD), of which there are 12 members. I, with others, have been really involved in trying to make the dealer group impact the community in ways that help artists and promote the idea of contemporary art. We do two events a year, one is the CADD FUNd, which is a soup dinner where we invite people to listen to six artists make presentations about projects they want to do that they don’t have money to do. The dinner costs $40, which goes into the pot, and then there is a vote at the end, someone wins, and they take the pot home. That is about engagement, which is important to me. We work at community outreach, we do bus tours to get people into private homes too as a way of looking at how and why people collect art. The LGBT Resource Center has just built a wonderful new building, and it’s been fun to work with artists to donate work to the center.

Community is important to me. These interests are about what a community can be.

The post “Why is everything going on here?”: Nancy Whitenack Talks Dallas Art appeared first on artcritical.

PAUL D’AGOSTINO: As an artist, you very fully identify as a painter, and you very fully imbue your paintings with your identity, but not necessarily with you. Your paintings are not portraits or self-portraits, really, but I see them as portraits of you as a painter. What kind of identity is it that you want your viewers to see? Which Marie is it? It is not simply, “Je suis Marie.“

MARIE PETER-TOLTZ: Walt Whitman says, “I contain multitudes,” and Rimbaud wrote, “Je est un autre.” That would be my answer. Let me be the four billion people I want to be.

Four billion? That’s a suggestive number, a crucial number. It relates to your thoughts about painting as history, this patriarchal aspect of, or backdrop to, painting that we’ve talked about before. It’s a backdrop that is relevant to your work, and to your act of painting, but it doesn’t have to be relevant. Or you don’t have to want it to be. But in a way, you do want it to be. You want to acknowledge that there is a patriarchal history to painting, and to acknowledge that it never goes away as history. But your belief is that it can be transformed in a contemporary setting. In this sense, rather than working against it, you are using the painting process and the imagery to speak through that tradition.

Yes. I am hoping to give the viewer another understanding of painting, taking it outside of these old binaries dividing men and women, or male and female artists. In the same way, I want to challenge the binaries of whether you define yourself as a figurative painter or an abstract painter. I don’t think it belongs to the contemporary artistic conversation, although it is always brought up as an issue. Ultimately, it’s about painting, and hopefully we can go beyond this binary thinking.

My problem with the figurative “versus” the abstract issue in painting is that it is such an old one, and that the conversation is kind of tired, and it’s always blurred, and so there’s not much of substance to say about it.

I agree.

I’m not even sure that it’s still an interesting question. We’re talking about a couple of generalizing adjectives. We can use them to describe an abstract or figurative work. But you already know which it is when you look at it. And how often is it simply both? You can label ‘representational’ a painting that is geometric abstraction, if for example you find out that the triangle in the painting is the artist’s perception of a mountain.

That’s a good example.

How would you describe a still life with a bunch of fruit? Figurative? Or is it not figurative? What if you were to find out that a series of twelve still life paintings of fruit were done before an artist died alone in her studio? Let’s imagine a painter who painted geometric abstraction for decades, but the last twelve paintings she made were these still life paintings of fruit. Is it interesting to say that late in her career, or I guess at the very end, she turns to figuration and representation? Isn’t the genre and subject matter much more compelling, conveying through her final twelve paintings something about life, loneliness and quietude? Maybe that’s not a fair example. Maybe I love fruit far too much.

So here you are bringing out the relevance of autobiographical elements into the artist’s work.

Yes, so maybe it’s not fair. But it does go back to the patriarchal backdrop to painting as we’ve discussed it in your work. If a backdrop is known, if that knowledge is not lost, then it’s there whether you want it or not, whether you agree that it’s relevant or not. If it can inform the viewer, then why not address it? Looking at your paintings, we can certainly acknowledge the biographical elements, which become clearer the longer one looks at the paintings.

In this latest body of work, I was telling a story without a narration. They’re more like the metaphorical landscape of someone’s intimate journey. I am hoping that the viewer is able to enter the painting without having to understand the biographical facts. Narration is something I was doing more of in the past. Narration as a means for painting.

Prose as opposed to verse?

Yes.

So the more you move away from prose, the more you enter the symbolical or more deeply metaphorical realm of poetry.

Maybe more like the difference between a novella and a fictional diary, for example. Maybe something like The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, because it can be opened in the middle and understood.

Pessoa, yes! And this is an interesting idea with regards to painting: looking at a painting as if it’s what you’ve found on the page of a book opened up to wherever, accepting what you are presented with.

In the films from the Nouvelle Vague, the story unravels in a way that each character depends on the other to help the story unfold. With this exhibition, the personnage principal is a satellite for the others. Jean-Luc Godard or Philippe Garrel would choose actors organically, depending on their relationship with one another. Once I had my lead actrice in one of the paintings, I could continue and make the others. I struggled to find her.

Which painting was it? Or which actrice?

L’Éternel Féminin. My female yellow Christ.

One thing I find quite remarkable in the show is how challenging your colors are.

I know!

They’re very difficult colors to deal with or even imagine in successful paintings. A huge yellow painting. A huge orange painting. Not easy. In your works, I gravitate more toward those with darker palettes. But when I look at the others, I don’t come away with the sensation that I was looking at the big yellow one, or the big orange one. They engage the viewer on a completely different level. The thing I like a lot about your centerpiece painting, Je suis le tigre dans la montagne, is that it remains vague, dreamlike, nocturnal. Its ambiguity makes you want to keep looking and discovering. You keep looking for that thing that is there but isn’t. You have taken the symbolism a step further in that one, and you’re taking the viewer with you by making such a move. We’ve talked about how the mother and the child figures in your work connect to the history of Madonna and Christ representation. But here the mother takes on, or you take on, the image of a tiger. It’s a challenge to your viewer. You have to find the mother to comprehend the child. Going deep enough into this nocturnal landscape allows one to locate a history. You’re taking the symbolism further into the realm of poetry.

This is what I wanted. Once I could get away from the word ‘mother’ in this one, or the obvious “mother” figure, then I felt I could convey her more honestly. How was I to communicate this? It was difficult. And ultimately, who is our audience?

With whom do you communicate in your work?

Oh, I don’t know. With myself, to begin with, and with history. This isn’t unique. It is probably true for all artists or writers. In some way, we would like to communicate as an echo that goes both ways, forward and backward. As creative agents, we are using the backdrop of the things we have absorbed in the past to reverberate something new into the future. We want to absorb, convey, transform. Echoes.

Or we transform ourselves, then even the viewers, in some capacity. My paintings can be like my creation of transformation through painting.

These paintings transform you?

I think so.

This must be something you have been thinking about for a while. How do you imagine a painting can change a feeling of self?

By expelling oneself onto the canvas.

So let’s imagine that I have been doing self-portraits for a decade, and then one day I come to the realization that I don’t recognize myself in these representations. I realize I want to convey my “self,” not myself. And perhaps I decide that my “self” is a very small turtle. So I start painting my ‘self’ as such, and that would transform how I think about myself even outside of the paintings. Is that what you mean?

Yes. And a turtle, how liberating that would be! You have a turtle.

Yes, Cecco. He can be a bit boring, and he’s always stuck in his shell. So yes, I can totally identify with myself as a turtle. But anyway, going back to your idea of being transformed by your paintings, one could say that being transformed by one’s art seems like a dramatic exaggeration, but on the other hand it can be utterly true.

Absolutely.

Someone could think that Painter A is lying by saying, “I so love the material of paint, and when I paint time goes away, and I lose myself in the process,” Etc., but everyone who paints knows that there’s a truth to all of that and can relate to the idea of time flying by, to the love of the material. So in a way, your feelings about the transformational aspects of painting also have this quality of seeming like dramatization or exaggeration, but also being real, actual, true. The more you identify with the transformed aspect of self, the more it becomes metaphorical, and eventually even more transformative.

And more transcendental.

Like passing through something.

Getting away from the literal depiction.

Creating a portrayal, not a portrait. A conveyance.

If you think of wild animals, you think they are dangerous, feral, destructive, but they’re also nurturing and protective. So with the tiger, I’m conveying with paint how it feels to nurture and care while being feral. The allegory of the tiger became an implication and depiction of my ‘self.’

How can you convey “caring” in a painting? Like, without simply portraying ‘caring’ faces or something? That’s a really interesting idea. How can one actually express, in a painting, that one cares? There’s something else there too, because when you really care, you always worry.

I know. I worry about my paintings!

You worry about them, great! It’s invigorating to care and worry. It can make you feel alive. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. But speaking of exaggeration, we’ve talked about your fondness for Baroque art and the Mannerists. What do you find interesting in them?

My inspirations are fluid and constantly changing, from my painter friends to Michelangelo! But I did live in Vienna, so the Baroque churches and the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s collection certainly impacted my aesthetic, even subconsciously.

A major element in Baroque art is the attempt to convey, materially, transcendence. Baroque uses exaggerated details, decoration and exuberance to suggest that things can transcend. Is that what inspires you?

Yes. And the fullness, the rich colors, the general intensity of Baroque paintings has always inspired me.

The colors, yes. On that note, why is your “yellow painting” yellow?

If you are interested in the psychology of colors, yellow connects to hope and joy. So that painting is “the hopeful female crucifixion.”

You must be eager to see where the paintings will go, how much more they might continue to change you as they also change.

It is more about how much further I can take it. The process of transformation has to happen intrinsically. Making art is ultimately about improving as a person. There is nothing more humbling than trying to make a great painting. You carry that into the world. In the same way meditation is transformative, painting is transformative. It changes you every day.

And sincerity seems crucial. It has to be a sincere transformation, or a sincere pursuit if you want to communicate more, and communicate better.

That’s right. For example, a lady I didn’t know came to the opening, and she cried while looking at the paintings.

She cried in front of your paintings? Broke down in tears?

Yes.

That’s wonderful!

I know.

The post “Je suis le tigre dans la montagne”: Marie Peter-Toltz in conversation with Paul D’Agostino appeared first on artcritical.

PAUL MAZIAR: Take us back to Buffalo in 2001 when Cuneiform Press began. As I understand it Robert Creeley, a key influence on your work, was there.

KYLE SCHLESINGER: Wow, that’s a blast from the past. Bob was and continues to be a huge influence on me on so many levels: the art of collaboration, poetry, poetics, grace, generosity, and a general ease of movement and insistent curiosity towards the world that is absolutely singular. He was the busiest guy in town, but when you sat down to talk he didn’t miss a beat, remembered everything, which taught me a lot about presence, giving your attention to whatever’s happening on a particular occasion.

Just before I left for Buffalo I had a stint teaching high school English in a mill town in northern Rhode Island. I was fine with the work, but a terrible disciplinarian; he suggested that I come up to Buffalo, get an advanced degree, and try teaching college, which is exactly what I’m doing now, 15 years later and a little bit grayer.

I started Cuneiform with the intention of publishing experimental work by emerging poets — very simple chapbooks by people like Patrick Durgin, whose Color Music (2002) has, to my mind, totally held up over the years. His wife’s brother made some punk collages on a photocopier and we printed the images on a Print Gocco, a little silkscreen kit that was briefly big in Japan. I’d throw a proof in Patrick’s mailbox at night, he’d make any corrections after dinner, then I’d go back to the press, make changes, and repeat for the next page.

I love the low-fi action that comes out of your printshop. The punk show posters you recently did look great. I’ve also seen Cuneiform’s phenomenal book by Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, your call for musicians’ manuscripts for Cuneiform, and heard that you’re moving into a camper on a California beach, to surf and write a book about Bill Callahan.

The Sheff book is definitely the strangest thing I’ve done with Cuneiform. I emailed him, saying that I think his essays on music are the best since Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, and that I’d like to collect them as a book.

He was very busy, but it occurred to me that books don’t always have to be published in large editions, that, as with book artists, sometimes just a copy or two can do the trick, that sometimes you make a book just because you want it to exist. So I tracked down every essay I could find, started copy-editing and fact-checking just like I would any other Cuneiform book, designed it, got it printed and bound by hand, the whole nine yards, sent him a copy and kept one for myself. Took about a year, a ridiculous amount of work, but it turned out perfect since many Okkervil River songs are about keeping it real, and the virtues of failing in a world with a conservative notion of success. That’s the first in this music series and others will follow, though they’ll be printed in standard editions, distributed properly, etc.

This failure virtue is part of what charms me about poets like Alfred Starr Hamilton. It seems to be something that we don’t find so often these days, do you agree? For instance, you took me to that Katherine Bradford exhibition in Portland, at Adams and Ollman; we were both pretty tickled by the show.

Every artist I talk to is in the same boat: how to make a living and make the art they want to make. Not just in the United States, but Canada, Mexico, Australia, Europe, and so on. Everyone’s wondering, maybe even a little nervous, how life can be more meaningful, but no one can say why… Or can they? The MFA and the National Endowment for the Arts killed art in America, which is why I can say that I feel a strong sense of connection to various artists of the last 40 years or so.

Lou Reed said something like, “There’s a door, and behind that door, is everyone you’ve ever wanted to meet. Then the door opens, and you stand there wondering, knowing that once the door closes, you can’t get out again.” And that’s the danger of monetary success, to my mind. Once you write a “Paul Maziar poem” you can’t write that poem again. Goodbye, Paul. The surplus of art versus the demand for art is at an all-time low, which leads us to an interesting question: Why do you want to do what you do when there’s really no social need or viable economic gain to be had? Is it personal happiness? I’m on board with that; I want everyone to do exactly what they want to do every day, all the time, but I also think that’s the real question we all must ask of ourselves, not specifically related to the day-in/day-out fact of our lives, but taking ourselves, as such, out of the equation.

I know that could sound pessimistic or jaded, but I don’t mean it to come across that way at all; it’s actually quite the opposite. The artist George Herms said, in a recent lecture I attended, “The single most important fact of my existence is that the population of the Earth has doubled since my birth.” I take the sentiment seriously, or as William Carlos Williams once remarked, “An empty space is the sign of a poor economy.” We’ve got a revolution going on, one with more talent and underutilized artistic resources than ever before. So let’s storm the fucking gates and build a world we want to live in, with history close to the heart.

I was charmed by that Creeley anecdote in The Art of Collaboration (Cuneiform, 2015), where he, having seen your letterpress printshop digs, asks why you haven’t gone all-digital, adding “If we had the internet in the fifties when we were editing the Black Mountain Review, we would never have done things this way.” It’s worth pointing out that you’re no extreme model-acolyte (you didn’t follow his line of thinking comme ça). Do you view art online or strictly in museums and galleries?

I keep a foot in both worlds. I teach classes on New Media Theory for a living, so I’m always reading up on the latest advances in technology. I think it’s something artists need to be aware of on multiple levels, but in terms of my personal practice, the more unplugged I am, the happier I am. It would never occur to me to look at art that has been reproduced digitally, nor am I partial to computer-generated art. On a recent trip to New York, I was happy to see a return to painting in the galleries I visited; no more projectors and flat-screen installations, and that’s something of a relief to me. I feel fortunate to have grown up with a typewriter and records, moved to CDs and word processors, and now I have a computer I use as strategically as possible. Mostly you’ll find me reading books, listening to records, and visiting as many artists in their studios and galleries as possible. The all-consuming pendulum of the digital age has hit its apex, at least in the art world, and for people younger than myself in particular: The tangible, sensual, real-time experience of creation is making a major comeback. The desire to get one’s hands dirty is an inexplicable fact of being.

How does your digital music listening experience stack up to your vinyl collection?

Being very much aware of the havoc corporations like Spotify have inflicted on the music industry, I’m adamant about the listener’s responsibility to support musicians because their livelihood is at risk. Needless to say, were so many musicians any less committed to their practice, we would live in a world of silence, barring only the most mainstream pop celebrities.

That said, I have a Spotify account and use it regularly to hear sounds I’ve never heard before; in that sense, it’s a practical tool to have. But if I like something, I’ll buy a ticket to the show, a record or two at my local shop or directly from the musician. It’s actually rather shocking, and saddening, to realize how popular one has to be to make a sustainable wage as a musician. If everyone at a concert threw in $10 into a tip jar, then that musician who just entertained you for a few hours might not have to get up the next morning to mow someone’s lawn or mop the floor of a brewery.

In 2006, Bill Berkson and Bernadette Mayer published What’s Your Idea of a Good Time?: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985. What’s your idea of a good time?

Exactly.

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Carlos Rigau is a Cuban-American artist, raised in Miami’s Little Havana and currently based in Brooklyn. He works principally (though not exclusively) with the moving image and what he terms video-sculpture. Rigau co-founded and now runs General Practice, an experimental space in Bushwick dedicated to exploration and collaboration between artists. Rigau also hosts “General Practice Presents,” a New York cable access show filmed at BRIC studios and broadcast on Wednesdays at midnight. The program expands General Practice’s ethos toward collective behavior, and has featured interviews with the Jack Roy collective, artist-run music label Primitive Languages, and end/SPRING BREAK, a Miami/NY artist group.

Underpinning Rigau’s prodigious output is his natural facility as a charismatic social organizer. This manifests through his ability to bring people together via art events, after-parties, and openings, from the Lower East Side scene to major city institutions, where he often DJs. During Art Basel Miami in December, Rigau worked between his solo show, “Santa’s Toy Shop Goes to Cuba,”“at Meeting House, a presentation at Pulse Fair with LMAK Gallery, and an extensively covered — yet controversially cancelled — beachside performance called Dance of the Designer Refugee, for Untitled Fair in collaboration with Helper Gallery. 

Within his own practice, a founding interest and constant theme, is the subject of artifice. Rigau explains: “It’s to do with where I grew up. Artifice is a big part of Miami life, and accepting that aspect of the city is to acknowledge my own upbringing within it and how that background informs my work.”

It was during a trip to Las Vegas — a city that takes artifice to greater excess than perhaps anywhere else — that an informative irony was revealed to him. “I was standing there among these facsimiles of great buildings, these copies of European capitals and iconic works of art — the Sistine Chapel, the garish beauty, the pinging cacophony of slot machines. It just hit me, that it isn’t fake. The facsimile is more lifelike today, certainly in terms of our data selves and the skewed realities we present. The plasticity of Miami (or Las Vegas) is real and it is authentic and it is a great thing — not as a copy of the original Venice or New York, but great in and of itself.”

Relatedly, Rigau looks to the the darker side of Miami life: the extremes of social economics, lurid newspaper headlines, drug use, unusual behaviors. “Sensational things happen in Miami. Maybe it has something to do with its position as an apex of the Bermuda Triangle,” he says. “I love that aspect of Miami that is like an adolescent looking for attention.” This too percolates into his working method, so that a thread of discontent is extant. He asks “Why do so many weird things come out of the city?” He aims to locate the viewer in a moment where accepted understanding of one’s place in the corporeality of daily life is jarred or shaken by confrontation with the unexpected, the esoteric or even the mystical. “The frustration of the underclass and the anger permeating some of my work is an outcome of the artifice. It’s not an antidote — it’s an outcome. I want to create through artifice, and to create some kind of disturbance in the everyday.” That attitude is exemplified in Rigau’s current solo exhibition “Delusions Through Details” at LMAK Gallery in New York.

The exhibition consists of a single video sculpture with two projections, seen from opposite sides of the gallery. The films are housed in a box-like structure typical of department store-style Formica display pedestals. One video shows a window with an unremarkable urban view across city buildings. Through extensive editing, the scene becomes dislocated, as layers, including crackling bubble wrap, appear to obscure the window. Strange symbols of an unfamiliar language emerge on the panes, and spots of melting flames drip and sizzle in gravity-defying directions. The other screen shows a model skull on a white workbench, replete with hat and pin, in enigmatic, muted colors. An aproned figure standing behind the skull begins to break it apart, fingers frantically working, until it is in pieces, at which point the video reverses and the skull is marvelously reformed, as fragments of Styrofoam cranium weld back together.

Both videos are so painstakingly altered from their opening frames that visual understanding is arrested and any linear narrative of what is happening is corrupted. “Everyday materials sometimes are charged with something beyond their functionality,” he explains. “When I’m around bubble wrap, I want to pop it. It is at the point where your senses are fully engaged, that things start to feel otherworldly.” A potent aspect of the work is the seeming contradiction of quotidian items and magical symbolism. “Through editing and shooting, the image reveals optical tricks,” says Rigau, “as when a glass in front of the window ‘breaks’ and the viewer sees another layer of glass behind. Other times layers are removed by ‘cheesy’ artificial editing effects. These approaches to editing add up to an affect of disembodiment upon the viewer.”

“Some members of my family have practiced African-Caribbean religions such as Palo and Santeria. For example, you’re driving your new car and you feel under the seat and find that there’s a decorated coconut shell, and you think, How did that get there? It turns out to be a good-luck amulet — blessed, I believe, by Elegguá, the custodian spirit of travel — and placed there without telling the recipient, Rigau says, returning to his familial and cultural background in Little Havana to provide insight into this area of his work. “This interaction with an unknown realm pierces the humdrum of what we expect while driving from A to B. That has imbued me with an acceptance of a certain darkness in life. I’m not a practitioner of these beliefs, but they are a part of my early experience and I do think that there is a supernatural world, or a not visible or understood world.” 

Ultimately, Rigau considers artistic process to be art world language for what could be more accurately described as “ritual.” His ritual — subtly informed by autobiographical, magical and historical frameworks — involves a constant process of making and destroying within the physical backdrops he sets up for his videos, similar to the way that a priest or shaman would set up specific environments to aid the practice of their rites. The results are often mesmerizing spatial and dimensional experiences where visual uncertainty and symbolic motifs cause a temporary fusion between the familiar tropes of daily life, and unknown planes that may lie just beyond our comprehension.

The post Plastic Darkness: Carlos Rigau and His Work appeared first on artcritical.

curated by Bella Easton and John Stark
January 4 to February 19, 2016
19 Neptune Quay
Ipswich, Suffolk, England, +44 01473 338654

Royal Academy-trained painter and independent curator Bella Easton lives and works in South London. Last year she interviewed regular artcritical contributor Paul Carey-Kent about his show “The Presence of Absence.” Carey-Kent now takes the other side, talking to Easton about the latest in her series of “Collateral Drawing” exhibitions.

PAUL CAREY-KENT: You are, first and foremost, an artist. How did you come to be organizing exhibitions?

BELLA EASTON: I grew up in a creative family: my father is a painter, and mother an oil painting restorer. For as long as I can remember I knew I would also train as an artist. After studying at the Royal Academy Schools, I exhibited my work for some years before I started organizing my own exhibitions nomadically. I then set up and ran a project space in South East London for four years, to 2015. I continue to promote and collaborate with others and have many future projects and exhibitions lined up in the UK and abroad. Being both artist and curator has enabled me to work with a diverse range of artists, writers, journalists, gallerists and curators.

What is “collateral drawing”?

Collateral Drawing is an on-going project run under my curatorial platform, BEASTONprojects. For each project I invite a co-curator, such as you, Paul, for the Berlin version. Collateral drawing explores the by-products left behind from the artist’s working process. Each invited artist reveals elements from their practice that would otherwise remain unseen by the public, alongside a finished artwork. That can take many forms, but I’m especially fascinated by the way each artist’s methods inflict marks on their surroundings. Whether dripped, scratched, taped, cut, erased, smeared, or hammered — all are repetitive and typically unguarded instances of drawing. The wall, floor or table acts as a raw surface to capture these ongoing ritualistic activities. Those work surfaces are rarely displayed, but hold a fascination of their own: not just as a documentation of the creative process, but as an insight into the relationship between what is subconscious and conscious in the artist’s work.

This is the fourth in a series of shows on that theme. Why a sequence, and how many do you expect there to be?

When Collateral Drawing was launched at Plymouth College of Art, two years ago, there was no particular emphasis on where its 10 artists came from. Subsequently, the artists have had some connection to each venue’s location, including at two international project spaces. Beton7, which was staged in Athens in 2014, showed Anglo-Greek artists. And rosalux, in Berlin in 2015, brought together artists linked to London and Berlin. The fourth show, in Ipswich, features 16 artists with an East Anglian connection.

The whole project is documented through the Collateral Drawing website. I’m keen to expand the sequence as far as I can take it. Three more are planned for London, Margate and Toronto in 2016 and ‘17. I am aware, though, that funding will be necessary! I hope it will eventually be possible to produce a book of the project.

Where is Ipswich, and what makes a good place to put on this show?

It’s near the East coast in Suffolk, East Anglia. Collateral Drawing will be presented in a public gallery within the new university site at Ipswich Docks. Having begun my artistic training in Suffolk, I have always been aware of the vibrant artistic community East Anglia attracts, and am at a stage in my own practice where exhibiting the project on home territory provides a platform for my own artistic reflection.

The series feature a high proportion of painters. Why is that?

I’m not sure that’s been planned, but perhaps my painting background has led me to work with curators who, like me, are inclined to select painters; and painting does provide a visceral and tangible way into the collateral process. That’s changing though: this show includes some artists who don’t work in conventional terms of painting or sculpture. So that the notion of collateral drawing is being challenged and expanded. I’m expecting the London CD to include several photographers, and I’m co-curating the 2017 Margate CD with photographer-curator Julia Riddiough.

Are studio visits an important part of the process?

The ideal would be to visit each artist’s studio. That isn’t always possible, but I am always conscious of the importance of picking up on the subtle habits each artist’s workspace holds — and which they themselves may not recognize because they’re so absorbed in the making.

Could you give an example or two of collateral drawing that struck you from the previous shows?

Goodness, that’s a hard task. It’s all interesting. I was intrigued by Frances Richardson’s use of an eight-by-four-foot sheet of MDF as a work surface, which, over time, built up drill holes and saw marks. It was beautifully intricate and like an artwork in itself. Or there’s the way Mark Titchner’s paperback books related to the inkjet prints set alongside them, which edited and magnified their back covers to a point where the statements printed on them were reinterpreted.

Has there been a line of development over the first three versions?

There has been a gradual process of editing down how many collateral elements represent the process of each exhibiting artist. John felt there needed to be a further reduction with the current CD and as a result we feel this has achieved greater clarity between the collateral clues and the finished artwork.

You’ve included your own work each time. What do you think you’ve gained from that double involvement?

It’s helped me to be far more objective about my own practice, and made me consider the methods I use more thoroughly and openly when I return to my studio. It is a very direct and honest way to develop as an artist, similar to peer learning.

You also have a co-curator, also an artist in the show and a local resident. Can you tell us something about John and his work, and how you have collaborated?

We were introduced through John’s gallerist, Zavier Ellis and found we had Suffolk in common. John recently moved to Aldeburgh with his wife, Da-eun, after living in South Korea. We both studied at the Royal Academy Schools, albeit at different times, and I like John’s philosophy and humorous outlook on life. He’s been a real asset.

The last time I saw Glenn Brown’s work, it occupied the whole of the Gagosian booth at Frieze. How did you persuade such a high profile and commercially successful artist to take part in such a modestly funded and provincially located show?

Yes, and John was especially thrilled when Glenn agreed to take part as he admires him very much as an artist who — like him — has made a successful career from re-working old masters. Glenn grew up in Norfolk and now lives and works between London and Suffolk. He really liked the unusual concept and was very understanding about the (lack of) budget. He has loaned a drawing from that Gagosian project, together with palettes and his light box, which holds photo reproductions. Glenn likes to support worthwhile local projects, and in 2012 he exhibited in the Aldeburgh Festival’s visual arts program.

Ryan Gander is also well known internationally. I imagine, with his love of playing with what a work of art can be, that he took particularly readily to the concept of the show?

Yes like Glenn, Ryan also lives between London and Suffolk. He instantly agreed to participate and is showing Things that mean things and things that look like they mean things (2008), a fictional documentary film that explores the production of an artwork that doesn’t exist. That brings an interesting angle: John describes Ryan, Daphne Warburg Astor and Kayle Brandon’s works as “utilizing the collateral, which then feeds back into or becomes the art work, a chicken and egg situation which could be described as an ouroboros.”

You are also featuring Matthew Collings and his wife, Emma Biggs. He’s an artist better known as a critic, especially on TV. Did he have anything to say about CD from that perspective?

Yes, I can quote him:

I think criticism is unrecognizable now. In practice it’s someone that calls him or herself a critic saying more or less random things, whose only purpose is to make clear to an audience that figures and ideas in art with which the audience is already familiar are very well known to the critic as well. From the position of the sort of art critic I am, I would say the Collateral Drawing is really well conceived because it brings into focus the process of making.

Matthew and Emma have made a painting for the exhibition and show an old studio table that has years’ worth of layers of cheap paper masking taped to its surface, placed as a way of always having a more or less clean and tidy surface. Matthew states that, “at the stage we offered it to the Collateral Drawing exhibition it had some scribbled quotes in charcoal on it from YouTube interviews with Francis Bacon because I was writing an article about a show called ‘Bacon and The Masters.’”

Daphne always records the work she makes each day. How does that flow into the collateral way of things?

For CD she started working on May 22, 2015, in a temporary studio in an empty garden shed on a farm surrounded by plants, bees and migrating birds. Her collateral is through recording and collecting, and her work is always connected to the land. Elements, such as wheat and pollen in this piece, are then utilized to make the drawings, which are incorporated into the final installation; so there is a slippage between the collateral and the final artwork which John and I found very interesting.

I often find that unexpected conjunctions emerge from a group show. Is that the case in Ipswich?

Always. These formal things are what interest me the most in bringing a show together. This exhibition seems to adopt a visual contrast between the industrial and synthetic versus the raw and earthy. There is an interesting dialogue between the real and the unreal. And light is important in many of the works. Trisant’s shiny enameled paint surface draws the outside in, whereas Chris Hawtin’s sci-fi landscape creates a synthetic light through its painted illusion; the ethereal illumination in my fabricated landscape contrasts with the intimate candlelit space of John’s painting. And there’s much more: you can find surprising conjunctions through all the artists shown here.

The post “Surprising Conjunctions”: Paul Carey-Kent and Bella Easton Discuss the Collateral Drawings Series appeared first on artcritical.

We don’t talk much about “art” when I see Jeremy Davis. We end up goofing around or talking about songs, movies, just about anything else. Sitting down with him in his Portland studio, I learned more about his philosophy and process than I ever would have otherwise. Davis has most recently shown his art at the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at Oregon State University, with permanent installations of his work there, as well as The Studio Museum in Harlem’s “Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art.” During this studio visit, Davis and I got to talking about his most recent paintings and a few of his affinities found on Tumblr.

I walked in to see a massive painting he’d been working on. The painting brings together imagery inspired by the cover of We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite; an Oregon State University student protest; portraits of John Coltrane, Max Roach, and Charles Mingus; a quotation from Ralph Abernathy; and a large black gestural stroke on an abstract background of yellow and orange hues. At eight-by-six feet, this commissioned piece goes along with 25 smaller portraits of black leaders for the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center at OSU.

PAUL MAZIAR: What are you working on?

JEREMY OKAI DAVIS: These 25 portraits lining the wall and this painting that’s been kind of morphing over the past few weeks. I’m trying to keep things loose.

I was talking to a friend who was here earlier and was telling him I want to do a really gestural black stroke across the painting. It’s funny because I’m kind of over-thinking it, when the idea of gestural is to just do it. I think I need to be in the right mindset to be that free and loose. It’s kind of intimidating. Usually it happens if I’m working on something else. If I’m doing something, I’ll look over there and think, Now, it’s time.

Do you think that gesture has anything to do with the sounds you hear from the Roach album? It has a lot of moments…

Punchy moments. Maybe that’s what it’s gonna take. Like when Abbey Lincoln screams. Maybe it takes getting invested in those tracks to make me do something crazy. Like a moment. The painting is called Predicting a Movement.

You’re waiting for the moment to make that brush stroke… you want to get around doing it a certain way.

I want to make an actual gesture. It’s difficult, though. I want it to be gestural, but to tell yourself to be loose and free, you’re putting yourself in this box. And for me that mark is such an important part of the piece. I want it to be free, but it’s a big part of the piece so it has to be right, strange.

Where are these images from?

The OSU archive. In 1969, the Black Student Union had staged a walk-out, when Fred Milton, an OSU football player, was asked to shave his beard; he didn’t want to, and the coach threatened to kick him off the team. They did a lot of things like this, but this image is one I was really drawn to. The image of union and movement.

Is that what accounts for the drips and splatters in your figurative paintings?

I think so. For me the drips and that kind of thing make it feel more like a painting. When you get in close and tight on them, taking little squares out to look at, they’re a bunch of little abstract paintings. That’s how I come at it, instead of smoothing out everything.

When I go to galleries and museums, I enjoy myself more when I move around the paintings, seeing how the work shifts. The richness and buildup of the paint are super important to me. I get disappointed sometimes when I see something online that I really love, and I go to see the piece in person at an art show — and it’s exactly like it was on the Internet! Like a flat jpeg with a smooth surface, etc. — no improvisation. I think you hope for a new experience.

There’s this other element to your paintings that, to me, is shared with jazz, experimental music and poetry — where you return to it and see something new. Like you’ve never encountered it before.

I’m just now starting to get into jazz and investigating it, listening to Money Jungle (1963) a bunch; I’m getting so much out of it. Every listen feels different, depending on your mood. That’s the amazing thing about jazz: it’s timeless and location-less.

I see a lot of movement in Predicting a Movement. Has this album been a recent influence?

I don’t think one song in particular, but yeah, jazz in general has been.

I was going to bring up affinities. Your Tumblr has a lot of good stuff on it. Some of it seems to have a timelessness about it. Do you think much about tradition or trends?

No. I don’t think about that at all. Well, I do. I think about them and try to avoid them.

You’ve got a lot of powerful imagery here. How about the museum guard photograph, where the man is standing there looking at a painting?

That was a film shot at the Portland Art Museum. My friend Nate and I were just walking around and we saw him standing there looking at that painting for a really long time. It’s a really great painting: just the sea, that’s all it is. It’s one of those things you can just get totally lost in; the water starts moving if you look at it long enough.

Imagine how many times he’s seen that painting!

Maybe he does that every day; maybe getting lost in that painting is his break.

Vince Staples’ Señorita (2015) video is amazing. At the end where he opens up his coat and it’s just a black hole. That part is insane!

That is a crazy video. I’m super inspired by a lot of what’s happening in hip hop right now. There was a long period of time where musicians weren’t considering their audience, and the music videos weren’t considerate of the audience either. It seems like right now, more than the last 15-20 years, the artists are really thinking of the audience and this video is just another example of that.

Everything in that piece, considering the cultural climate right now, is really important. I think I posted two in a row, that one and Close Your Eyes and Count to Fuck (2014) by Run the Jewels. They share similarities. The Vince Staples video is like a zoo, basically, where people are just watching the chaos, like all the news reports right now. And with the Run The Jewels song, with Zach de la Rocha, the scenario is a young black man and a middle-aged cop. They’re just wrestling, moving through the streets; it’s a choreographed fight. They end up in a house pouring milk all over each other and end up totally exhausted at the end. It’s supposed to show a dance that cultures have been having for years and years and how we’re trained to fight, trained to be at odds.

It seems like you’ve always had cultural references in your paintings.

Definitely. Whether it’s just pop culture, celebrity news, or the real news that people want to pay attention to. I pay attention to it all. It makes its way into my work, always. But it’s never in your face. I’ve always tried to make sure my paintings aren’t grandstanding. I want people to see it, think about it, go home and let it stick. They hear a news report or they’re listening to jazz and might think of this painting. I just want these little moments in time with my paintings to kind of bubble up.

What’s the idea behind the series of smaller portraits?

I wanted to find inspiring African-Americans from history. Pictures of them, not as kids, but young, before they were legendary. The reason being is that I wanted them to be relatable to the kids who’ll see them. To show possibility: they were bright-eyed kids just like you. So it’s these and then the Lonnie B. Harris portrait with the rest alongside him.

What’s next?

My mom’s from Liberia and I am just now realizing I don’t know a lot about her. I want to do a body of work that’ll be an investigation of Liberia and her in some way, relating to the disconnect that I have from my mom and Africa. A charting of my education of where she came from in my paintings. I have images in my head of what it’ll be, but I’m not sure yet.

I’ve always tried to temper my excitement, but it’s hard for me to think about this work being at OSU for all time and not get stoked. This stuff is going to be permanently installed. As an artist, that’s kind of my goal, to inspire for all time. I look at someone like David Hockney, and a lot of these artists, the pieces they made in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I still call back those for inspiration. To think that the possibility is out there that some kid in 2070 might stumble into the Cultural Center and see my paintings and decide to be a painter, is pretty amazing. I think that’s the kind of the goal for me. It keeps the ball rolling, you know?

Are all children artists?

I think so. Everybody has a creative side. I think everybody can exercise that if they choose to. Some people don’t have the desire to exercise it, they have other things that are important to them, which is fine.

It takes a certain person to let it take over. It’s a fun thing to do, but to let art take over your life is kind of scary. To let it be the thing that you do can be kind of frightening. I think everybody isn’t a genius, but everyone has the capacity to be a genius at their chosen vocation.

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