You could say, I’m a child of family separation, I’m a child of war. I left my core family at the age of 13 and came here at 14. And what I didn’t know was how growing up in instability and conflict made me uniquely positioned to be in that kind of environment, because I understood what it meant to be a kid in that kind of environment. We always talk about how many people have died. And for me, that was an oversimplified and unsophisticated way of looking at the cost of conflict. I always felt like the true cost of conflict was in how many people lived through the conflict, those people who lost family members, kids, parents, uncles. Whose communities and homes and lives were impacted. That’s the true cost of conflict. And I always felt like if you measure conflict through that lens, the cost of war and the cost of conflict would no longer be justifiable. I think one of the biggest sorts of mistakes is looking at the cost of conflict through the number of people who die, because it underplays the cost.

It wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s that I was like,”I want to tell stories, and I want to do this kind of work.” So 9/11 coincided with me being focused on my career as an artist, allowing myself even the possibility of thinking, “Can I be an artist?” When you’re a kid, surviving and trying to swim, you don’t think, “Oh, let me just go into the arts.” I’d never had that privilege. So it wasn’t until I was in my mid-20s that I was like, “You know what? That’s what I always wanted to be as a kid. I’m going to give it a go.” I started working in installation work and video art in 2008. While I was at the same time trying to make rights and sell Hollywood projects and TV shows. And that’s sort of how it all happened. It was very organic. It was still all driven by two things. One, the need to survive as an artist, but also it needed to be broadly creative, and not limited. And here I am, still doing it.

Your feature directorial debut, Remote, premiered at the New York Film Festival. How did that experience impact your work moving forward?

I’ve been making stuff in one capacity or another for years. And I had directed shorts, documentaries, etc, but I’ve never taken the time to say, “Okay, let’s do my piece.” Then COVID happened, and everything shut down. And in that period in 2020, while we were waiting to see if the studios would open up, Mika Rottenberg, the co-director, and I started talking about something that we’d wanted to do since the first day we met, which was to make a film together.

At least for me, I never thought, “Oh, we’re going to do this thing, and it’s going to be at the New York Film Festival, and it’s going to premiere at the Tate Modern, and you name it.” We just wanted to have an outlet to do art. And 2020 was a bad year for many reasons. We had COVID, everything that was happening with George Floyd, and what was happening on the streets. There was an election that was coming up, which seemed quite consequential at the time. And this conversation that led to Remote was very much the way we were coping with that year.

Of course, it was wonderful to be at the New York Film Festival; it was a dream come true, as a New Yorker. It’s the festival that I always loved, it was where I would go every year to watch the latest Almodovar film. And that was my thing, you know, was, “Okay, what’s he got? It’s going to be at the New York Film Festival. I can’t wait to go see it.” And so that was beautiful. It was a very beautiful, meaningful experience.

You are working now on your project CURA, and one thing that struck me from this project is that it doesn’t rely on a specific narrative format for documentaries, like voice-over, verité, and archival. What is your intention in what you want to communicate with this project? Is there a specific point of view that you want to show, or is it more open to interpretation?

I think it was not an easy choice to make this film. I had to really find both the approach, but also answer the question of why, and why me? Or why us? And that came out of many conversations with the indigenous healers and tribal elders across Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, over the first seven months that we were really thinking about doing this. One of the things I learned is that, for many of the Indigenous people I spoke with, words were a problem. Words were a mechanism of lies, of deception. And some things cannot be expressed through words. So the challenge became, “All right, how do you tell a non-verbal story? How do you tell a story that doesn’t rely on words?” So that’s the initial impetus. And then, from my own experience of being there, I realized that so much of the relationship between these indigenous communities, these guardian communities, and the forest was not expressed through words, or not understood through words. It was very much about frequency and vibration, and this non-verbal relationship that they had with the spirits. And this thing, where they truly believe is a living entity. They believe the forest is alive, the rivers are alive, that the trees are alive, they believe that they are a sentient being and they’re in communication with, and they have a relationship too.

And I think that inherently is this sense of connection that they have to the natural world is what I realized was something that, as a cost of modernity or living in modernity, we have lost. And we get glimpses of it when we go hang out in the wilderness, we’re like, “Oh, my god. I feel so much at peace, and this is so good.” And we return and we forget again. And the reason we feel at home in the wilderness, in nature, it’s because that is who we are, that’s where we come from. Despite where we have arrived and how far we’ve come, we are inherently, as a being, creatures of the forest, creatures of the mountains, of this earth.

One of the things that came out of this process was recognizing that so much about conventional filmmaking made me go away from documentaries specifically, from conflict zones, and from this obsession with data and facts, and information. But we have an eco-anxiety pandemic. People are suffering from deep anxiety around the climate, and rightly so. And I think in part, you can say that this barrage of information and data, and doom and gloom, is what a byproduct of that was, is this eco-anxiety, which is now a big problem. And when you looked at these tribes and the way they existed, even though their conditions are extremely hard, they are still living in joy and hope. And I knew I couldn’t make conventional work. It had to find its own language. That it had to really rely on the modality that I was in the forest itself. And I knew that ultimately the character that had to emerge from this work had to be the forest itself. And I knew I couldn’t do that through conventional narrative means. And that’s why we took a non-verbal approach. And that’s sort of how I ended up where I am.

Since this project is so different from what you have done in the past, what are your hopes when it goes out into the world?

I think we’re living in a period of time where traditional institutions and legacy companies are no longer viable routes. Yes, it’s art, but it’s art that’s created within an economic framework, right? The reason these conventions are built has a lot to do with the economics of storytelling and media and film, and documentary. And they have nothing to do with actual artistic creativity.

And I felt, especially with this work, that I was going to go back to a documentary form that I didn’t want to rely on those things. So I had to take a very entrepreneurial approach to the work. And so that’s the approach that we’re taking. CURA is being made within what I find very valuable in the art world, which is these editions; you’re creating a work of art. There’s a certificate of authenticity; you’re selling additions to collectors and commissioners, etc., in advance. At the time, we’ve sold a couple of those already, and hopefully we’ll sell the rest of them, so that we can keep filming and do all that work.

I think partially what’s exciting about our Kickstarter campaign that we’re doing is that it incorporates some of these ideas. But one of the things that I did that I think is quite novel is that I said, “Okay, normally you have additions of the work. I’m going to take one of these additions and break it into digital editions.” So, several digital additions that I can sell directly to collectors. Now, those collectors are oftentimes inaccessible to so many people. But what if those additions were $500 or $1,000? Then suddenly people can collect a work of art that they own, that it’s always with them, like buying a vinyl, that you can play for your friends and family members, and your community. And your work, and you’re supporting a work, but you’re also getting something that you own in return.

I think this is about being aware of the moment we are in, and saying, “You know what? I can’t rely on these traditional institutions. If they want to come to me, great. But I can’t sit there and wait for gatekeepers to say, ‘Yes, no. It makes sense.’” If artists don’t find their own path to their audiences, then we’re facing what is a cultural extinction of sorts.

I want this to be a work of public art, so hopefully we can be available as installations in various places. In museums and art festivals as well. It’s something that we can take on the road and bring to people who don’t necessarily have access to the work. But also be able to digitally distribute in this way, around ownership and sovereignty, artists’ sovereignty, and impact. That’s going to be quite meaningful. And so we have our own life cycle in that way. And then if the conventional space, if the traditional institutions want to also play along, then we can find within this model a way to interact and also work with that space. But this allows us to maintain ownership and control, as opposed to giving everything away.

Following up on what you mentioned about how traditional institutions and legacy companies might not be the best path for artists, what role do audiences play in the equation?

Right now, artists often assume their audience is a buyer, a commissioner, or an executive, and that’s a problem. Making a film that must pass through conventional channels means assuming the audience lacks a deep or immersive understanding of the story, the issues at hand, or the artistic context, let alone the people behind the work. That assumption leads to self-censorship and manipulation. Even those of us who say, “You say what you need to say to sell it, and then you make what you really want,” eventually realize: if you’ve been through this process, as I have, that’s not how it works in reality.

Once you enter into that mindset of, “I’ll do the song and dance just to get the project commissioned,” you’ve already started down a path that alters the core of the original idea. Now, I’m not saying that this process is always negative, there are great executives out there who truly know how to support and shape an idea. But the reality of the marketplace is harsh: artists are often underpaid, overworked, and desperate. This is not a level playing field. It’s not a space where most artists hold real power. A few might, but most don’t.

Even the best advice comes at a price. Sometimes the baby goes out with the bathwater. Sure, it’s necessary to drain the bathwater, that’s part of the creative process. You shape, chisel, revise. Friction is necessary. We want friction; the best work often comes out of it. But the problem is, that friction has become distorted. Even well-meaning executives are worried about keeping their jobs. Data has become supreme, it’s driving all the decisions. Do you think documentary executives really believe everything should be true crime, cults, controversy, or celebrity-driven stories? No. They’re being told that’s what works, and they’re just collecting their paycheck while prescribing that reality to others.

That’s why, for me, choosing to say, “My audience is my audience,” and proving the value of a project by engaging that audience early on, that’s a form of liberation. I prefer that space of autonomy, of artistic sovereignty. It allows me to be true. I can sleep at night knowing that the conversations I’ve had—even the ones across the metaphorical forest, have been delivered honestly. I might not always arrive at the final destination, but what I make will reflect what was truly said and intended. And I believe that if you stick to that path, you have a real shot, a far greater one than in the system we’re currently trapped in.

What is one piece of advice that you received that helped you in your career?

Having no other choice. If you’re an artist, it’s just because that’s what you have to do, right? And turning that into a creative source as opposed to a source of desperation was the best advice. You don’t have a choice, and the people in this economy, which is called the arts, are well aware of your lack of choice. But if you liberate yourself from that lack of choice and make it a creative force, as opposed to a desperate need to just get forward, then you’re much more likely to actually get to where you wanted to go. So that was great advice. And the best advice I can give artists like myself, who don’t come from a conventional privileged background, whose stories that they care about or grew up around, isn’t what is dominant… It’s don’t shy away from your otherness. Your otherness is your superpower. Embrace it.

I truly believe that artists will survive, not based on this abstract idea of a global audience, but through small communities and small audiences, and local community power, that you build from the ground up. And that’s where artists always belong, and that is sort of the field, the farm that we have to cultivate, to be able to grow our work. And in that environment, your otherness is what helps you grow, not this sort of trying to fit a mold of mainstream conventions.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Miriam Garcia.

I started doing graffiti as a kid, hopping on the side of the freeway and doing pieces or just tagging on the Muni. That was my introduction to wanting to paint publicly. But around 2007, 2008, we put up the Edward Said mural at SF State. I was in the General Union of Palestine Students at SF State, and I was on the mural committee. The process of the mural had started before I had ever got to State, but it got interrupted by zionists who didn’t want us to put up a mural, so it was on hold for a while.

The administration tried to bring us in and say, “Hey, there are some images on your mural that we don’t approve of.” It was an image of Handala, who’s the cartoon character created by Naji al-Ali, a Palestinian artist who was assassinated in England. Naji al-Ali was a child refugee, and he created this character out of the story of a Palestinian refugee child with no shoes, always turning his back to the world because he felt abandoned. And the whole thing is that he’d never turn back around until Palestine is free. The name Handala means bitter. It’s like a type of bitterness that’s very bitter. That’s where the name came from. Handala is very representative of Palestinian culture, Palestinian refugees. We can’t talk about freedom or justice without talking about the refugees.

Eventually I helped paint a little bit of that mural, and it was at that time that I said “All right, you know what? This is really what I want to do. I want to pursue my art and I want to make the focus Palestine.”

The first wall I ever painted in public that was legal, was a wall given to me by an artist named Cuba, who was part of a bunch of crews… the Ex Vandals, and the TMC crew as well. He was one of the first graffiti writers in San Francisco, but he was from Baltimore. He was doing pieces in the ’80s. Some of my friends who are some of the most OG graffiti writers from San Francisco said in their own words that Cuba did the first piece in San Francisco. So I was very honored to know him. Rest in peace, Cuba.

For him to give me my first wall meant a lot. He cared a lot about Palestine. He saw me drawing one day in Muddy Waters on 16th and Valencia, and he hadn’t seen my art. He’s like, “This is what you do? Man, come with me” He made me get up and follow him, and he took me to Clarion Alley, and he’s like, “Here, man. You take this wall. Use this wall, man, but don’t fuck it up, just keep it going. You have to upkeep it if I’m going to give it to you.” I said, “Of course, man. I’ll never give this wall up.” So I’ve been working on painting on that wall for years. He catapulted me into taking muralism more seriously. He saw my vision and he appreciated it. He was a dope dude.

So your first wall was in Clarion Alley?

Yeah, my first space where I started painting consistently and on a legal wall. It was a good little space. It didn’t feel like a gentrifier space. Muralism in San Francisco can be tainted by gentrification. The gentrifiers, they like murals because it keeps graffiti away. But you can’t really separate muralism from graffiti. It’s like hip-hop and rap. It’s part of the same culture.

Sometimes it’s even the same painters. From what I can tell, skate culture in the city has been a source of inspiration for you, too.

Skateboarding was a big part of my early childhood. When I was about 12 years old, I started skateboarding and I just jumped into the culture. My older brother started skating a few years before me, and I fell in love with it because it was just a form of freedom. It was a form of expressing myself creatively. I was not into normative sports and stuff. I was not into sports, I was not into competitive sports. I didn’t like the culture at a young age.

I never felt included in anything that was typical American. I felt connected with skateboarding because it was kids who came from similar backgrounds to me. Even until this day, I still gravitate towards that culture.

A lot of the people who do graffiti are also skaters, so it all mixes together. When I was in Palestine in 2019 and 2022, I had the opportunity to paint at skate spots and the skateparks out there, which was something I always wanted to do as a Palestinian and as a skateboarder.

Tell me more about that experience. When were you there and what was that like?

When I went to Falastin in 2022, I was doing projects in Jerusalem and all over. I ended up hooking up with my friend Aram Sabag. He’s from Nablus, but he’s one of the skateboard movement leaders in Falastin. And he was like, “Yeah, come paint here, come paint there.” So I just hopped around with him and we brought paint and I would just paint walls that needed some love.

There were a lot of white kids from England who were all part of the Skate Pal thing. And even though they’re sweet kids… I shouldn’t even complain that they’re there because it’s dope, but it’s still kind of… bittersweet? Because we don’t get to go back. So it’s just tough when you see Europeans there. Like all my cousins who’ve never even been to Palestine, I’m like, “Man, I wish they were here.” It shouldn’t be a big deal, but I’m old school in this way. I wish I could see more of my people going there.

The first mural that I was introduced to of yours was the one in Oakland at the Solidarity Wall on 26th. Since then, you’ve done these really epic murals throughout San Francisco. What has that journey been like for you?

It’s taught me a lot about myself. It’s taught me a lot about the community here in San Francisco. You learn a lot when you put something out there that has to do with what’s happening in Palestine. The reaction tells you a lot. My first piece I ever painted in Clarion Alley was completely defaced. I thought it was this person I knew who was a tweaker, but it wasn’t them who messed up my piece. It was an actual zionist. It may seem like there’s a lot of people out there who feel like that, but the reality is, no, there’s not. But the few people who do have that strong anti-Palestinian sentiment, they have the audacity to destroy my work.

In 2020 during the pandemic era, it was like my work was getting messed with daily. These people were probably home all day and they had nothing else to do, so they’d just come out and try to destroy my work. I didn’t really get much support at that time from my community. People weren’t really checking in and I just didn’t really ask for it either.

During this genocide, my Instagram account was banned and I lost all my followers, and that was a big part of my platform. It allowed me to have enough traction to maybe sell a couple prints every week, or just have enough money to sustain. I was struggling then too, but it was nice to have that many followers because I had access to more folks.

Can you share a little bit more about that tension for you around not having community support for so long? What has it meant for you to struggle as an artist in the Palestinian diaspora?

I am a Palestinian. I’m born and raised here on this land, and my parents as well. Both my parents were the first kids to be born in the United States. I grew up knowing my culture to an extent, but my perspective was different because I also identified with other struggles. As an artist, I had a vision to educate through art. That’s why I started doing murals. I think a lot of other people who are involved in the struggle are thinking intellectually. I’d always get frustrated with that, because I believe intellectualism is only going to get us so far. When it comes to being in the streets, art connects us more. Poetry, music, visual art, all these things are so important for us. Which is why I get annoyed when they become tokenized and exploited.

There seems to be some thread around integrity, but also resources. Maybe it’s also coming from graffiti culture as well?

It’s just being part of underground cultures that are very, very opinionated. I’m definitely very opinionated about a lot of stuff, and I don’t want to come off as arrogant or being a hater, but I just think that it’s important for people who want to be involved in the arts to understand that you can’t just get into the arts without being an artist first. Don’t try to make art or try to make money off of art if you’re not a freakin’ artist. Then you’re just a curator, then you’re just a gallery owner. It’s exploitative in a way, because it takes away the space of artists. It takes away space from artists, to give us an opportunity to do stuff.

How have you been able to sustain yourself as an artist? Because you’ve been doing this for two decades?

In my 20s when I was doing mostly hip-hop performances, I would just do shows and I would never get paid. I’d just do shit for free. We were the early artists before social media, so we got taken advantage of a lot. In my late 20s, early 30s, I started getting more into my visual art. I didn’t start actually getting money for that basically until the Palestine Oakland mural. And we all got paid $700, but it was over a month-long project. That was the first time I got paid. That showed me that I need to keep getting paid because, if this is what I’m going to do, I have to sustain myself.

When I started to take my art more seriously I started making and selling prints and T-shirts, and now I’m making hats. It helps, but it’s been a struggle, especially during this high-intensity genocide. I don’t really feel fully comfortable promoting my work, selling my work, online if I’m not giving a lot of the money to my people. At the same time, it’s kind of ridiculous to feel like that because I got to survive, dude. No one’s going to take care of me.

Can you say more about that? Because that does feel like a real tension for a lot of people right now, specifically for Palestinian artists.

For me, it was a waste of my resources to focus on raising money when I know that’s not my strong point, and I know it’s not going to be easy for me to do. It’ll take me hella more resources.

I don’t have a lot of rich people following me. It’s mostly working-class people who follow my work and people who are not balling by all means. I don’t want to sound insensitive because it’s such a critical time… But they’re not even letting the trucks into Gaza. There’s hundreds of thousands, tons, of food, tons of resources just sitting there that are not getting in. And this is the result of probably a couple billion dollars that people donated.

I’m not going to lie, though. If there was a freaking donation box for M16s, then shit, I would fucking hit that. I would definitely, but then I would be on a fucking watch list.

It doesn’t sound insensitive to me. It seems like you’re very clear on what your role is.

Even saying all that with my chest, I still feel bad. I still feel bad that I’m not sending money to Palestine or to families. Because how can I not feel bad? We’re in a place of plenty. We have everything we need. But the reason they don’t have anything is by design. It’s not like it can’t get there. It can, but they won’t let it.

This is why our job here is to just keep the pressure [on] and keep Palestine in people’s minds and keep that name coming out of people’s mouths 24/7. Our solidarity is picking up. More and more people are waking up.

Do you feel that’s the role of your work? Keeping Palestine in people’s vision?

I always tell people I’m in this shit for the long haul. I’m not here for the moment. I’m here for the movement. I would say my role is a cultural role to help inspire my people who are artists to pursue their art or any creative means to tell their story. To educate others. To be unapologetically Palestinian.

Could you share a little more about your mural process? What does conceptualizing it versus actually getting it up on a wall look like?

It depends on the wall. Some murals I paint I’ll sketch out the idea. When I painted my mural on Cortland and Mission, it’s the one that’s been defaced multiple times, it says, “Resistance is justified when people are occupied.” That piece, I just freestyled it.

I kind of have these go-to images that I like to paint. I love painting cities. Cityscapes. I love painting trees. I love painting people. And when I want to make it strong and bold, I will add elements of the military occupation. Negative elements. Tanks and bombs and stuff like that. That’s when I just want to make things clear.

I’m using that piece as an example because it’s one of my favorite pieces creatively, I just did whatever I wanted to. That’s usually when my art comes out the best, when there’s no limitations.

I just wanted to draw the image of a kid with a rock slinging it toward tanks and helicopters and bombs dropping. I wanted to show that this is what the fight for Palestine is about. Just being an artist who paints what I paint, my work is going to be a counter message to, say, AIPAC. It’s counter propaganda. Because of the imagery I’m painting, it’s counter to all that.

How different were the choices you were making around what you painted in Palestine then? Because those are scenes they live daily, so I imagine you don’t need to remind people of the reality of the occupation.

That’s a good question. I thought about that a lot, especially in 2019, when I was painting in Balata Refugee Camp, which is the biggest refugee camp in the West Bank. They see a lot of violence.

I painted a mural with an elder man playing the oud and then a woman holding a tray in her hand. On top of the tray, instead of food or olives, was Jerusalem. Then I did a cityscape, and then I did some mountains, but I put words inside the mountains. Words like friendship. Solidarity. A bunch of positive words. It’s mostly for the kids because it was right on the UN school that was really dilapidated and run down. Those are the images I painted for them.

But some other kids were like, “Come here. Come here. I want you to paint my store.” And they would just grab me by the wrist and just pull me toward their house or their store. And they’re like, “Paint something hana.” And I’m like, “What do you want me to paint?” “Hatt sittash, hatt sittash.” They want me to paint an M16. So I would paint a character, with a Hatta, a Keffiyeh, and then I’ll paint some cactus, and he’ll be holding the M16.

That was for them because that’s what they wanted. And I couldn’t say no. So fuck, yeah, I painted it. Then another person took me to paint on their house and I painted a handala. That’s what they wanted to see. And then I painted two martyrs. Everybody was pulling me left and right, man. Because I was the only Palestinian painter. There was this girl from Brazil and this dude from Peru, but they’re in la-la land, painting elephants and shit. It was pretty funny, man. It was like this guy painted this psychedelic ass elephant and everybody was just staring at it. They had no idea what it was supposed to mean. They painted over it when he left.

I just painted what they wanted to see. I felt like it was more for them to tell me what they wanted to see, because I’m leaving in a month. I’m not going to be there. They’re going to be there. But I heard all of my art that I painted is still up and still riding, so they liked me. It made me feel good to have that respect from them, because I know that they’ve been through hell. Life is tough in the camp. They made me paint a couple martyrs and I learned a lot about the society back home.

I painted a guy who was killed by the Palestinian authority, Hasham. This mural was on the main street. So I felt a little bit shifty too. I was like, am I going to get in trouble for this shit? Somebody going to ride up on me? But the people really appreciated it. I was painting the guy’s leg, it was really funny, and some guy came up and said, “It doesn’t look like him at all, man. Who is that? It doesn’t look like anything like him.” And I was like, “Look, bro, I’m working with six spray cans. I don’t even have the right colors. I don’t have the right tips. I’m just doing this with very minimal resources. I’m sorry, man, if this is not exactly like him.”

He came up and he’s like, “Mish M’bayan Mish M’bayan.” I’m like, “Man,” I was like, “Bro, get the fuck out of here. I’ve been here for three hours, bro.” There’s no more light and I’m over here painting this freaking portrait and there’s like ten people crowded behind me. I couldn’t even back up to look at the painting, because everybody was on my ass. So they were really excited and they loved that I was doing it, but they were also just right up in it.

That’s hilarious. That honestly just feels so Arab.

Oh my god, so Arab man. It was hella funny, because I’d be on the wall painting and this one white dude, he was painting that big ass elephant, like I said. And the kids didn’t really like him, because he wasn’t being very nice to them. I caught him yelling at them one time, and I was like, “Don’t be yelling at the kids here, man. You’re here for them, bro. You’re not here for your elephant shit. You’re here for these kids.”

So the kids started stealing his cans. Maybe he noticed one or two, but they were taking a good amount. So the kids came up when I was painting and they thought they were going to be slick, and they took a few of my cans too, and they ran off. I chased them. It was so funny. And then some of the kids who were with me, hanging out with me all day, started chasing them with me. So I chase these kids all through the camp, from one side of the camp, literally all the way to the other main street.

And I kind of gave up at one point and I was like, all right, I’m just going to go back. I was with these other kids and they walked back with me and they were talking shit about the kids who stole the cans. They’re like, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. We’re going to get them back for you.” It was so funny, 20 minutes later, I’m sitting there and these kids come up and they have hella cans from those guys that stole them. They brought me back like cans and more cans, it was so funny. I’m like, “Good job, man, good job.” They were the best man, they’re so damn sweet. And just full of life, full of love.

What advice would you give to younger artists?

I’m going to use a System Of A Down song: Follow your inner vision. Follow whatever inspired you in the beginning. Never forget that and always stick with that feeling, because it’s like the feeling that you get when you’re a kid, that motivation or something you get excited about, that should never leave you as an artist. You should always have that.

I don’t know if there has been any other time in history that’s been this challenging to stay mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy, stable… It’s been tough. It’s almost unfathomable to imagine, to witness what we’re witnessing. This is not normal at all. We’ve been numb to it, but it is scary. It can be really draining to our creative senses. It kind of makes me feel like I want to isolate myself more. So it’s important to stay around good folks. Just stay around as much positivity as you can, and I hope that you are also taking care as much as you can.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sarah O'Neal.

I think I definitely always wanted to be a writer in some capacity, but I don’t think that I quite understood what was possible. I remember being a really little kid at the doctor’s office with my mom, and there were wildlife photos in the office, and she was like, “Oh, the doctor’s son took those. He’s a photographer.” And she was also like, “You know, he takes [these photos], but he also has another job.” It’s such a funny little thing that stuck with me. You cannot just be an artist. You have to have another job. I internalized that.

I interned at magazines. I’ve done a bunch of marketing work. There’s no shame in that. I do think you come back around; it is just a balance. I don’t think that it’s impossible to be a very fulfilled, great artist and have a day job. We all need to make money. That’s really valid. But it took a lot longer for me to actually write a book. The internet was the gateway for that, because the internet had no rules. I think I wanted to be a writer, but I don’t think that I gave myself permission to be a writer until many, many years later. And I was really unhappy and self destructive, because I was subverting what I really wanted to do.

In one of your newsletters you listed all the things you did instead of write when you were on deadline, which is deeply relatable. What is it about writing that breeds procrastination? Is procrastination just part of it? Why is writing so hard?!

I don’t want to fully buy into the tortured artist trope, because you can be happy. I want to believe in that for us. But I kind of don’t trust anyone who says that it’s easy. The dread… I do think that maybe it’s just part of the process. I feel like I’ve practiced a lot, and every time I have to write something, I will do anything to avoid it. I just feel such a deep pit in my stomach, thinking, “This is gonna be the thing that is bad.” I don’t even know if I can fully untangle what that feeling of anxiety is.

But nothing feels better than having written. Nothing feels better than having made something, even if it’s not great. Just having put words down, I can breathe out a little bit. You know? It’s like exercising. My brain is like one of those herding dogs that needs a job to do. And if you don’t take it out and give it a job, it’s just gonna chew up all the furniture. You need to do it, and also [you need] free fucking time. I guess it’s part of the process. And I’m trying to be kinder about that, and accept that everything is just gonna take three times as long as I think it will. Procrastination is actually an ideation process. I just started transcendental meditation, so I’m trying to get into quieting that part, assimilating that part—being like, okay, dread is there. It’s part of it. That means the process is working.

I don’t believe in laziness anymore. I just don’t think it’s a thing. You’re tired, or you’re feeling avoidant, or you have a very good reason for not wanting to do something, or you’re just weighed down by how sad the world is.

Yes! We’re allowed to be lazy. We’re allowed to take time to rest and figure it out… I read somewhere that to write well you have to be in a lucid state. Does that resonate with you?

I think so? I write emotionally and edit rationally. I tend to write twice as much, if not more, than I actually publish. It’s always a really nice compliment when someone is like, “Oh, your writing is so restrained—a light touch.” And I’m like, “Yes, that’s because I deleted half of it.” It never starts that way. I feel really lucky, working with a book editor for the first time who’s very hands on… She gave me this huge gift where she just deleted every time I started to sound like I was explaining myself, or apologizing for something.

What drew you to memes as an art form?

I started making memes when I was working as a TV assistant. It was a very large bummer, a thankless job. Your time doesn’t matter. Your body doesn’t matter. Your agency doesn’t matter. Especially in that environment, when you have low self esteem, the idea of ever creating anything that other people are going to see feels galactically out of reach. I have this impulse to say that I just fell into it. No, actually—I really, really, really wanted people to like it. I really wanted people to think that I was funny. I had a deep desperation to be seen and liked. And I think acknowledging that is important. People always talk about attention seeking as shameful. I’m human. Is it attention seeking, or is it maybe connection seeking?

What makes a good meme?

The meme itself is this weird folk art subversion of popular culture. It’s like, wait, does anyone else have this kind of strange, ugly response to this? Does anyone have the same fear or hope or anxiety? That’s the crazy magic of relatability. The meme is a balance between relatability and abstraction, because you have to be able to disseminate it… I don’t even think it has to have a very strong visual component or a very strong literary component, as long as those two things are in balance.

Is the meme an essay?

I think that it’s much closer to poetry than it is an essay, because it’s very much about playing with the signifier and the signified, and how those things are connected, and how they’re dissident. That little gap is where the humor is. I love that. I think that’s what makes it good.

I’ve actually been thinking a lot more about long-form writing. I think that what I make on the internet is kind of like a meta commentary on making things. My writing gets to the heart of it. That’s the work. And then [content] is this work that’s about the work. I need to see it that way. Because—and I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this—I feel like people who are very into growth, and engagement for engagement’s sake, are deeply mentally ill. Like, how can you not feel like a fraud? I’ve been in a tailspin the last two weeks. I don’t know if you saw this, but the official White House account posted this ASMR video of someone getting deported. It is so horrible. And as someone who specifically creates wellness content, I’m just like, how do you do this anymore? What are we doing here? That’s not a reason not to, I guess. But I need to take a beat, because this is evil.

You write about your struggles with mental health and how social media often exacerbates these issues. How do you stay off your phone and off “the narcissism app” (Instagram)?

Read a book. Get an analog alarm clock. Have your phone in another room. I like to keep my phone on Do Not Disturb all day. I’m always really upfront with people. As soon as I exchange numbers with someone, I’m like, “I will not text you back.” If it’s a logistics thing, for sure. But if someone texts, “How are you?” I’m never texting you back. I don’t have the bandwidth. We can talk about it in person, or not. I actually love the Instagram Story, because it’s just a really quick way to let everyone know how you’re doing. I love to check in with other people and see them at the state fair or somewhere like that…

I really appreciated that you wanted to meet in person. I wasn’t expecting that. I normally don’t do these in person. It does change the dynamic… In your book, You Have a New Memory, you write that we live in a world of a million conveniences. Do you think that this type of ease breeds bad art?

I think it’s incredibly important for people to make art. Typing shit into ChatGPT or whatever is not inherently “bad,” but it can be destructive. We live in a very sick society in that way, where anything that isn’t commodifiable is not viable. It brings us back to the conversation of laziness.

Is using ChatGPT lazy?

Laziness is a prism. There are so many ways to look at it. A million conveniences doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to be making bad art. It just means that we’re going to be making art in different ways, or reacting to different things.

I know you lost your childhood home in the devastating Los Angeles fires. How are you doing?

It still feels very unreal to me. It feels a little bit like I haven’t visited my parents’ house in a long time. I haven’t been back, but there’s nothing there. It’s very much a traumatic event. I lost all my childhood stuffed animals. Sentimentality is what makes us human.

I’m so sorry. What makes you wake up each morning and keep writing? Keep making art?

I’m one of those people who has never woken up refreshed. So sorry to answer that literally, but mornings are crazy. I went to a hypnotherapist to try and become a morning person, and it just didn’t take.

We’re swirling around in an ontological vertex. Is there meaning in this app? Is there meaning in being part of the internet? Is there meaning in writing? There’s commodified content and conservative propaganda everywhere. It’s fucked up and it’s depressing. Why keep doing things? I think violence is dehumanizing. Art is humanizing. So when you are making things in a real and authentic way, that’s humanizing. When you insist on community—that’s the difference. I think you can say something with honesty in a million different ways. I think you can say it very honestly in fiction. I think we can also say it with a silly little image of an animal.

What’s your take on the concept of creative process?

I don’t have a creative process or a schedule. When people talk about their process, they’re always sort of like, “Well, I rise at dawn every day and I write for two hours.” There’s so much discipline. And I do think that’s important. But I also think a discipline is anything we can do that requires personal accountability.

I feel like the people that create more sporadically never talk about it because it’s seen as shameful. It feels very important for me to say that I do not adhere to any schedule. Sometimes I wake up and write in bed on my laptop, and sometimes I won’t write until 5 PM, and some days I don’t write at all. I don’t believe you have to write every day to be a writer. Sometimes I make things while I’m watching The Bachelor, and I’m sitting on my laptop Photoshopping. Sometimes I’ll work for 16 hours straight, whispering to myself, because I’m editing a video that I’m really into. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. I used to feel like a failure because I couldn’t adhere to a strict schedule of creation. But at some point it’s like, why are you fighting yourself?

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Ruzova.

A thousand percent, there’s comic inspiration behind it. It’s a loaded question, because there’s always the Donner Superman, which is like—I was reading comic books as a kid, but then seeing Donner’s Superman, it just crystallized everything in my mind because it jumps off the page and it’s so different seeing a real person, like real Superman. And I remember as a kid, it enhanced my love for the medium.

And then for me personally, I think it’s like it’s Nolan’s Batman, when they asked him why Bats and he’s like, “Bats scare me.” Right? I think for me, I’m a big chicken when it comes to flying. I don’t love to fly because turbulence and because who loves turbulence? But I think that there’s something profoundly powerful and almost spiritual at times with the idea of flight. And I don’t mean to sound like it’s corny or anything, but I just think it’s a real thing.

Again, it’s constantly a motif that I play with in my fine art due to the fact that there’s a freedom in it when you’re so high up and you can see the world and how small it really is. And it puts things in perspective, at least for me, of how small certain problems are. And just again, there’s a freeness to it. So yeah, I think again, that’s how flying correlates. It’s that question, too, if you could have any superpower, and my corny ass always would pick flight first over everything.

I mean, embracing the impossible and putting yourself in an uncomfortable situation can yield really interesting results. I think with flight, especially in comics, there’s always a bit of that learning curve.

With some of these characters, especially with my main character, FLYBOY, I try to infuse a bit of myself or a bit of the familiar in them so that they can feel relatable. I think that in the golden age, or the silver age of comics, there was thought given to some of these abilities or powers, but not … It didn’t go as in depth as it could or should in terms of what these powers really could mean for that bearer, the person that has to learn how to manipulate these things. And it’s the great power, great responsibility, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what if there is a person that can fly but is afraid of heights? Again, trying to get a little deeper than just the wish fulfillment aspect of it.

Your bio says that you’ve been on a quest with some of your art to readdress modern mythology. What other parts of our culture or history do you want to explore through your art, either through more sculpture or paintings or comics?

Comics are a great way to explore more because it’s always narrative first. And I think within the world of FLYBOY that I’ve created, there is a lot of revisionist history. This world isn’t necessarily ours, one for one, but it sort of parallels and I appreciate history, but also just this opportunity to re-contextualize certain moments and certain ideas.

In my work early on, I had this series, it was called the Negro Mythos, Black Mythos series. The simplest form of explanation was that it was me appropriating all of these white superheroes that I grew up with loving that were archetypal males and making them people of color. And when you do that, I think you reframe a lot. You change that story inherently.

I mean, think about, shit, a few years ago, the outrage that happened when Warner Brothers at one point was talking about Michael B. Jordan being the Black Superman or the next Superman, not the Black Superman, but he is Black and he was going to be Superman and what that means, but even how that changes from a historical context and then just a narrative context.

And so I think with comics you can obviously do a lot more directly, whereas in fine art, it’s a lot more subjective and you leave the audience to add in their own things within the work or the piece. And so again, I appreciate both paths, but I think having been on the path of fine art for so long, now being able to really just tell a story and be very direct with the narrative is something that I’m looking forward to.

Are there particular pieces of history or any stories or mythos that you have a direct change you want to make or a direct thing you want to say or explore? I know that FLYBOY draws a lot from the Tuskegee Airmen.

I won’t give too much up because hopefully we’ll create a new fan base and have some readers that are interested in following the journey. But yeah, I think it does start there. I don’t want anything that I do to feel like medicine. I don’t want it to feel like I’m trying to teach someone something. I want to entertain, I want to inform, but I don’t want to have it feel medicinal. And so in looking at this story and creating this story, I did look at the Tuskegee trials and things within American history and more specifically Black American history and pull from certain moments and elevate certain moments or change certain moments to benefit a character, whether negatively or positively as just this form of observation of history.

This is a history that we can never escape, and it’s one that continues to shape us, continues to shape our country. It’s a big part of our narrative, so just really leaning into it, I think in a way to, as a point of pride almost, right? What we are able to endure, what we’ve survived as a people, as Black Americans, as Americans. So yeah, just again, finding opportunities to explore these moments.

I think it’s not dissimilar to, excuse me, when you look at Hellboy in the context of using Nazi Germany, using the history of this character and infusing it with, again, the real big bads, which were Nazis and this war with America and all of the history that we share, but the embellishment of…. yeah, there was a double human hybrid that came down, and within this time, these things and these events happened around that. That’s always fun when you can mix history with a new narrative and a new twist.

I’m glad you brought up the directness of comics. It’s a great way to just either take a stance or follow a specific path and really have a point of view and a fun narrative on it. Congrats on taking this dive into the world of comics with the FLYBOY Kickstarter campaign. We touched on the impact Superman had on you earlier, but if you had your pick of the litter, say if DC or Marvel or Dark Horse even came to you and said, “Hebru, do whatever you want,” is there an existing character you would want to create for?

Oh man, this is the question that you have the conversation with your nerd homies over and over again. And then, of course, you ask me and I’m like, my mind goes blank, and it’s like, I don’t want to say the wrong thing because there’s so many. But I mean, my two favorites … Man, this is tough. Let me try and make this as hard as it needs to be. Yeah, dude, I think I’m going to throw a curve-ball here…

What’s that?

I’m going to go away from the Marvel cannons, the DC cannons. I’m going to say Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

When you look at stories like Ronin and where that arc goes and goes, I feel like there’s still so much to do with those characters, and that was a big part of my childhood. I was more of a Marvel fan because I fell in love with X-Men heavy duty, and then all of their offshoots, X-Factor, et cetera. But Turtles were something special. And I think that it sort of melded all of that because I found the black and white comics when I was a kid and I really liked them. That led me to Daredevil and then back to Turtles. They had the cartoon, they had the figures, the collectible just started that insatiable collecting thing for me.

But it’s always been like Turtles… It’s something about those guys. I think it’s the brotherhood, the camaraderie. It’s this idea of them not being wanted by society because of how they look, who they are, what they are, what they can do. It’s just a fun world, and it’s a world within worlds. There’s Dimension X, there’s different planes, and it’s so many different rich characters to play with. I would say definitely Turtles. Long-winded answer, but I would say Turtles first.

The worlds within worlds comment is great. Right now they have a crossover series with Naruto. I think there was a TV special where multiple versions of the characters across television met each other. Of the core four, do you have a favorite between Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, or Michelangelo?

Oh, it’s Raph all day, baby. It’s Raph all day. It’s funny because I like Mikey. I like Don. Leo’s probably my least, just because I think he is most likely the Cyclops, like the leader who doesn’t get the credit. But I think with Donatello and Mikey, it’s all dependent upon which version of them. There’s some versions that are way stronger and way better than others, but I think that’s the beauty of the books and the series, the different series and the different writers that take on the challenge of writing for these characters. So yeah, Raph is pretty consistently an asshole, mean, tough, rough, and love it, love it, love it.

He’s a lovable asshole, though. We love to be frustrated by him.

Yes, 100 percent. 100 percent. With this process, it feels like a pinching moment. I’m really hopeful that we can hit our mark and this can be successful because this is really a childhood dream that I’ve had for a long time and everything in due time. It’s been a long road to this point, and I’m super, super, super excited and put in a ton of work in crafting this long form story that just has a lot of twists and turns and ways to go, and this being sort of the entry into that world. I’m just really excited for people to dig in and find it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Kusek.

It’s been really nice. The first day I just sat in the chair in the studio and stared out the window because I couldn’t believe that this exists—that you are allowed to just come here for three weeks and have all your meals taken care of. All you have to do is sit here and do whatever you want. You honestly don’t even have to write. Of course you’re going to write or make art because that’s why you’re here, but there’s no expectation, really. And it’s all for free. I was like, “Why didn’t I apply to [residencies] earlier?” And then I was like, “Oh, right, because I was working.” You can’t take off three weeks of your life like that with a full-time job, usually. I’m trying to read a lot for sure, because when I was in New York recently, I didn’t have that much time to. I’ve also been trying to finish the first draft of my fourth book here.

How did you first identify as an artist and how has that identity evolved since then?

I was always making art, since I was young, but it was just my own paintings or these silly little art projects that my friends would support. I think in 2020, I was like, “It would be nice to try something new. I’ve always loved reading, so let me try writing.” I wrote my first short story and it got published, and it was a nice feeling to create this whole world through words. Then I just kept going.

Do you think about going back to painting?

I feel like my writing is interdisciplinary because I am inspired by different forms of art, from film to paintings. In an ideal world, in 10 or 20 years I can have my own studio in New York where I’m just painting and I don’t have to worry about money or anything like that. because it gives you plenty of time to experiment and try new things. But I’m not at that point yet, so we’ll see.

You were a very accomplished swimmer growing up, which has obviously influenced your writing. I imagine that you spend the same amount of time writing now as you did training as a teenager.

I think growing up being such a serious swimmer, and spending three to five hours a day in swim practice while being in school and just trying to be a teenager, really makes you better at organizing your time and structuring your life so that you can get everything done. I think that helped me a lot when I was working full time—knowing how to structure my day-to-day so I was able to get some writing in while not getting fired at my day job, and also having a life. Even though it would be really easy for me to just be super depressive and introverted, I’m like, “No, I have to go see my friends.” Friends are what keep you human.

You’re in a transitional phase right now, no longer working full-time in art direction. Are you planning to write full-time or are you open to other avenues?

I’d love to write full-time as long as it’s financially feasible. I have been freelancing for a friend who’s a creative director at a startup. Book advances and the random foreign sale have been keeping me afloat. I’ll do it for as long as it’s financially feasible. I can do this because I don’t have kids and my parents don’t need a caretaker yet. There’s a lot that contributes to me being able to do this that’s not just money-based.

You know how a lot of people say, “I’m nervous to make the art that I love my main source of income”? I think that when I was working full-time, I was like, “I don’t believe that. That sounds really nice because you don’t have to work full-time and you get to do what you love.” After I got laid off and writing became my main source of income, I was like, “Okay, I get what people mean now.” Before, I didn’t have to think about [if the project was] going to get sold or going to be read. I was purely writing for myself and my friends and because it was fun. Now I do [worry], “Okay, shit, do I want to work on this or do I want to work on this?” I want to work on both, but I’m going to choose the one that I think has the most viability of getting sold or earning me some form of income. I think part of me resents the fact that I do have to think about capital in this way. But I also think it’s irrational to pretend that I don’t have to think about things like this, especially because I don’t have family wealth or anything. I am a working artist. I think I struggle a lot with talking about capital and thinking about it, while also wanting to make art that’s not soiled by that thought. I still haven’t figured out the right balance or the way to do that yet. I don’t know if any working artist has, to be honest.

Do you know where a project is going to end up? Or do you allow yourself to follow an idea and trust that an ending will come?

It depends on the project. For my first two novels, I got these visions in my head and then was like, “Okay, how did they get there?” That’s what I’m writing to figure out. So I really don’t know what’s happening when I write the first draft. Then I started writing screenplays. Because they’re a lot more plot-based and there’s less interiority, I have to outline them out in a way that I don’t for my books.

The fourth book I’m working on now I’m calling “an involuntary memoir” after [Proust’s concept] of involuntary memory, but I think it’s definitely more autofiction… I wanted to try writing it because it’s based on my everyday, in a way. I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’m going to write about it. It’s completely switching the way that I’ve been writing books, which is always knowing the ending and figuring out how we got there. I don’t know the ending of this book. I don’t know where it’s going, but that’s the whole point.

You’ve written a lot about being a voracious reader and writer, which I can attest to—you’re one of the most widely read people I know. How are you with revision? Are you gentle with yourself or hard on yourself, or both?

I’m not a perfectionist, which I think is how I’m able to write so much. I do kind of wish I was more of a perfectionist, but at the same time, I recognize that that’s impossible. Your writing is never going to be perfect, but the point is to get as close as you can. Perfect is subjective. Re-visualize. I recognize that that’s where the real writing is. That’s where the real story comes out. And I think revising is a pleasure because that’s when you realize, “Oh, this is what I’m trying to say. This is where the story is.” It’s just so much harder than vomiting out your first draft that I resent it, but I do know it’s probably the best part of writing.

You’ve talked about forming an artistic lineage for your first novel, Chlorine. You made an incredible Instagram for it, as well as for your upcoming books. Can you talk about your connection to writing and the internet? You were on Tumblr, right?

I never made that connection, but maybe it is true that the Instagrams I make for my books to hold all the inspirations [for them] really are based from that Tumblr era. I was on Tumblr, but I’m not anymore. It’s really joyful and fun to be able to scroll through and remember all the inspirations.

The internet was the first place where I met my writing friends, through online groups. At that time, I didn’t have community in the way that I do now, so I think it was really helpful and useful for meeting people. But I think that transitioning from online to offline is what really changed my life, so I guess that [the internet] was more like a tool for me to use to meet people. Real-life community has been offering me a lot of sustenance and joy. I am trying to not use social media as much… I think that there are pros and cons. Social media and the internet are really great for staying aware about the world and what’s going on and sharing how you feel. But I also think proximity to community is really important, and the best way to nourish that is to be there in person.

You recently adapted your novel into a screenplay that got you into the Black List Writers Lab last year. What was it like to adapt your own work into a new medium?

I actually think the screenplay for Chlorine is better than the novel because I was so inspired by the body horror movies of Julia Ducournau, David Cronenberg, and Ginger Snaps. Now I’ve written a few other feature-length screenplays and I’m able to recognize in my head what’s a better story for a novel and what’s a better story for a screenplay. After concentrating on one form for a really long time, I think that screenplays feel very mechanical. You have to follow a certain structure and you don’t put as much emotion into it. It’s a lot more concise than a novel, where you have a lot of room and freedom to play with structure, with language, with a character’s point of view. I think it’s just been fun to bounce back and forth.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Ruth Minah Buchwald.

It’s been really nice. The first day I just sat in the chair in the studio and stared out the window because I couldn’t believe that this exists—that you are allowed to just come here for three weeks and have all your meals taken care of. All you have to do is sit here and do whatever you want. You honestly don’t even have to write. Of course you’re going to write or make art because that’s why you’re here, but there’s no expectation, really. And it’s all for free. I was like, “Why didn’t I apply to [residencies] earlier?” And then I was like, “Oh, right, because I was working.” You can’t take off three weeks of your life like that with a full-time job, usually. I’m trying to read a lot for sure, because when I was in New York recently, I didn’t have that much time to. I’ve also been trying to finish the first draft of my fourth book here.

How did you first identify as an artist and how has that identity evolved since then?

I was always making art, since I was young, but it was just my own paintings or these silly little art projects that my friends would support. I think in 2020, I was like, “It would be nice to try something new. I’ve always loved reading, so let me try writing.” I wrote my first short story and it got published, and it was a nice feeling to create this whole world through words. Then I just kept going.

Do you think about going back to painting?

I feel like my writing is interdisciplinary because I am inspired by different forms of art, from film to paintings. In an ideal world, in 10 or 20 years I can have my own studio in New York where I’m just painting and I don’t have to worry about money or anything like that. because it gives you plenty of time to experiment and try new things. But I’m not at that point yet, so we’ll see.

You were a very accomplished swimmer growing up, which has obviously influenced your writing. I imagine that you spend the same amount of time writing now as you did training as a teenager.

I think growing up being such a serious swimmer, and spending three to five hours a day in swim practice while being in school and just trying to be a teenager, really makes you better at organizing your time and structuring your life so that you can get everything done. I think that helped me a lot when I was working full time—knowing how to structure my day-to-day so I was able to get some writing in while not getting fired at my day job, and also having a life. Even though it would be really easy for me to just be super depressive and introverted, I’m like, “No, I have to go see my friends.” Friends are what keep you human.

You’re in a transitional phase right now, no longer working full-time in art direction. Are you planning to write full-time or are you open to other avenues?

I’d love to write full-time as long as it’s financially feasible. I have been freelancing for a friend who’s a creative director at a startup. Book advances and the random foreign sale have been keeping me afloat. I’ll do it for as long as it’s financially feasible. I can do this because I don’t have kids and my parents don’t need a caretaker yet. There’s a lot that contributes to me being able to do this that’s not just money-based.

You know how a lot of people say, “I’m nervous to make the art that I love my main source of income”? I think that when I was working full-time, I was like, “I don’t believe that. That sounds really nice because you don’t have to work full-time and you get to do what you love.” After I got laid off and writing became my main source of income, I was like, “Okay, I get what people mean now.” Before, I didn’t have to think about [if the project was] going to get sold or going to be read. I was purely writing for myself and my friends and because it was fun. Now I do [worry], “Okay, shit, do I want to work on this or do I want to work on this?” I want to work on both, but I’m going to choose the one that I think has the most viability of getting sold or earning me some form of income. I think part of me resents the fact that I do have to think about capital in this way. But I also think it’s irrational to pretend that I don’t have to think about things like this, especially because I don’t have family wealth or anything. I am a working artist. I think I struggle a lot with talking about capital and thinking about it, while also wanting to make art that’s not soiled by that thought. I still haven’t figured out the right balance or the way to do that yet. I don’t know if any working artist has, to be honest.

Do you know where a project is going to end up? Or do you allow yourself to follow an idea and trust that an ending will come?

It depends on the project. For my first two novels, I got these visions in my head and then was like, “Okay, how did they get there?” That’s what I’m writing to figure out. So I really don’t know what’s happening when I write the first draft. Then I started writing screenplays. Because they’re a lot more plot-based and there’s less interiority, I have to outline them out in a way that I don’t for my books.

The fourth book I’m working on now I’m calling “an involuntary memoir” after [Proust’s concept] of involuntary memory, but I think it’s definitely more autofiction… I wanted to try writing it because it’s based on my everyday, in a way. I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I’m going to write about it. It’s completely switching the way that I’ve been writing books, which is always knowing the ending and figuring out how we got there. I don’t know the ending of this book. I don’t know where it’s going, but that’s the whole point.

You’ve written a lot about being a voracious reader and writer, which I can attest to—you’re one of the most widely read people I know. How are you with revision? Are you gentle with yourself or hard on yourself, or both?

I’m not a perfectionist, which I think is how I’m able to write so much. I do kind of wish I was more of a perfectionist, but at the same time, I recognize that that’s impossible. Your writing is never going to be perfect, but the point is to get as close as you can. Perfect is subjective. Re-visualize. I recognize that that’s where the real writing is. That’s where the real story comes out. And I think revising is a pleasure because that’s when you realize, “Oh, this is what I’m trying to say. This is where the story is.” It’s just so much harder than vomiting out your first draft that I resent it, but I do know it’s probably the best part of writing.

You’ve talked about forming an artistic lineage for your first novel, Chlorine. You made an incredible Instagram for it, as well as for your upcoming books. Can you talk about your connection to writing and the internet? You were on Tumblr, right?

I never made that connection, but maybe it is true that the Instagrams I make for my books to hold all the inspirations [for them] really are based from that Tumblr era. I was on Tumblr, but I’m not anymore. It’s really joyful and fun to be able to scroll through and remember all the inspirations.

The internet was the first place where I met my writing friends, through online groups. At that time, I didn’t have community in the way that I do now, so I think it was really helpful and useful for meeting people. But I think that transitioning from online to offline is what really changed my life, so I guess that [the internet] was more like a tool for me to use to meet people. Real-life community has been offering me a lot of sustenance and joy. I am trying to not use social media as much… I think that there are pros and cons. Social media and the internet are really great for staying aware about the world and what’s going on and sharing how you feel. But I also think proximity to community is really important, and the best way to nourish that is to be there in person.

You recently adapted your novel into a screenplay that got you into the Black List Writers Lab last year. What was it like to adapt your own work into a new medium?

I actually think the screenplay for Chlorine is better than the novel because I was so inspired by the body horror movies of Julia Ducournau, David Cronenberg, and Ginger Snaps. Now I’ve written a few other feature-length screenplays and I’m able to recognize in my head what’s a better story for a novel and what’s a better story for a screenplay. After concentrating on one form for a really long time, I think that screenplays feel very mechanical. You have to follow a certain structure and you don’t put as much emotion into it. It’s a lot more concise than a novel, where you have a lot of room and freedom to play with structure, with language, with a character’s point of view. I think it’s just been fun to bounce back and forth.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Ruth Minah Buchwald.

Well, I think the idea is the easy part. I come up with ideas daily, but really it depends on where the destination is, if it’s for an exhibition or if it’s just for my own investigation. And if I have the space and time to develop an idea, I guess. For years I had a very big studio, when I was ranching, I had basically two studios. One was just a workshop, so that afforded me a lot of space and I was able to try out a lot of things there.

Sometimes I get invited for thematic exhibitions. I did that a lot when I was young and getting started in my art career. I just dove into these things and I would work with the curator and curatorial team on their theme and try to come up with work around it. I don’t really do that anymore because I’ve never really enjoyed that. A lot of times for that I would make the work on-site. So that’s a young man’s game. It’s stressful, but it’s exciting, too, because it’s very immediate.

We met through Compound. a project we did together at Matthew Barney’s studio. From my understanding, you had an idea, but in order to make this happen, you needed the space to bring it to fruition.

Yeah.

The piece involved shooting hundreds of arrows into a full-sized play piano. This is not a thing that takes up a small amount of space.

Right. And I don’t have a studio right now, I haven’t had a studio since my ranch burned down. I’ve been living in a cabin in Northern BC [British Columbia] where I grew up. I enjoy archery, but there’s no real indoor place for me to actually use that skill to make art with it. There’s archery ranges here, but I can’t just go and set up a bunch of furniture in there, fire into it.

I did the first archery stuff at the Walla Walla Foundry while I was working with them to develop the first of this archery work for Prospect in New Orleans [in 2024]. That was the start of it. Then Matthew came to visit BC last year. I showed him the work I was doing at the Foundry. He thought it was great, so I suggested that maybe this should be something that’s live. He really liked that. But he comes from a performance and art video background.

That was new for me. I’ve never been part of a performance or done live performance like that before. So it was exciting and it was a great way to meet you, but I didn’t know if a lot of it would work. Although it can be very scary, having that unknown is also very exciting.

I remember when Matthew and I first started doing those events fifteen years ago or so, one thing he told me was that he liked that you could fail with live performance. He was saying to me that, with film, everything could be edited and it could appear perfect. Doing something live, though, meant that it might not always work. You’re operating without a safety net.

One of the early pieces in the studio involved trying to get a bull to mount a car, and the bull just wouldn’t do it. Everyone’s watching, and it failed—but even though it didn’t work, the people in the space were still so engaged by this performance. Plus, they didn’t know what the plan was, and it definitely succeeded on another level.

I come from an agriculture background, so I know that bulls are very difficult to work with. It’s more human in a way, it’s more real because it’s live and there’s small mistakes.

I was working with a bunch of archers I’d never met before and there were some issues with some of the arrows because they’re all handmade and the archers had never really fired arrows like that before, so there was a bit of a learning curve for them to figure it out while it’s happening live. We had a loose script that started to go out the window pretty quickly—you just have to think on your feet. Even though it was scary at the time, it worked out. But even if it didn’t work out, like you say, it’s pretty cool seeing the audience react to just the environment. I never had people watching me in my studio, so it was unusual in some ways. We were very much in a workspace.

That’s something funny. [My son] Jake [who who was in the performance] was saying, “Man, people really like watching me and analyzing what I was doing.” I said, “Well I think part of it is, it’s just an unfamiliar space for them,” and they’re watching a kid shoot clay pigeons into a wall. Even if they don’t know what it means, they’re like, “All right, this is interesting. We left work and now we’re here.” It feels like they’re in this magic space, something different.

Since the ranch burned down and moved into the cabin, has it been harder to make work? Do you have ideas that you can’t do at this point in the smaller space? Has it changed the way you’re thinking of making art?

The first little while I was just dealing with practical things, insurance claims and whatnot. And then I realized I needed a bit of a sabbatical from my art practice, so I took time out. I got recruited to be on the volunteer fire department here, which I was very reluctant to do at first. Eventually I agreed to go and it was very therapeutic, actually.

That took my interest in a very different direction. It’s very different from anything I’ve done before. And it really gave me a sense of community involvement but also this appreciation for the elements of water and fire. That’s all you’re really doing, is putting out fires. That occupied a lot of my time because really this is a very small cabin and I had to refocus how I wanted to make art after having a very big ranch and a huge studio. My footprint became way smaller. When you lose a lot of stuff to catastrophe like that, including artwork and all of your archive, you have to look at it as a rebirth to keep going.

So I thought, “What could I do here?”

I was doing a little bit of drawing and I took on some public art projects, then just turned my attention to thinking about where I wanted to relocate to and what studio set up I’d like to have in the future. I am largely a studio-based artist, I would like to have a studio again. It was really great to see how Matthew works and see his space, but I’m a country guy at heart.

Was it therapeutic learning how to put out fires after you lost so many things due to fire?

Yeah, just learning about hydraulics and how fires behave and differences between wild land fires and structural fires, and also the chain of command and systems… It’s so different from anything art related. There’s people that I would never necessarily hang out with who I’m working with. So we may disagree on things politically, or whatever, but we’re all working together for the community and I think that’s very important.

We also respond to traffic accidents and stuff, too. It’s hard work and I have immense respect for people who choose this as a career. I just volunteer.

I’m not sure if something I’m going to continue with, because it’s a very small community here, and there’s very basic training to get people involved. Which is what I’ve done. Anything that’s beyond that you have to really get involved in terms of going in more of a career direction.

I’m also not sure I want to have a giant place anymore. Especially the way the climate is going, it’s just becoming drier and drier. Having to worry about fires every summer, especially out west and north, it’s not necessarily something I enjoy.

You’ve done drawings and other more traditional work. How did you move into using objects and mass-produced things, transforming them and shifting them around?

Growing up and in art school and even after art school, I mainly was interested in drawing and painting. I never really started making objects until I did a residency at the Banff Center, in Alberta in 1998. I was also in New York City that summer. I went to a Nike Town store and I saw all their Air Jordan shoes that they had in vitrines and museum-like displays.

That’s where I noticed a resemblance to Northwest Coast indigenous art. So that’s where all that started. I decided to buy some for my residency at the Banff Center and I cut them up and pinned them together and took photographs of them. I thought that the final work would actually just be a photograph. I did that the first week and there were six more weeks to go in the residency. So I decided to take them apart properly and reassemble them. I got way more of a charge out of doing that than I did with just making an image of the work. That was very important to me, not even necessarily the object itself, but what happened to my thinking in terms of moving away from 2D and going into more of a 3D direction.

Then I stopped drawing for a while. I was making objects and became much more known as a sculptor. Like I was saying earlier, I started getting invited to do these site-specific projects where I would make everything else, like all the whale skeleton I made with the stacking chairs, those were all made for exhibitions on location because those chairs you could buy anywhere. It was really something I could make universally. I like making objects more than drawing images.

How many ideas do you come up with that just don’t turn into anything? Do you abandon ideas or do you try to follow through and make them happen?

You kind of archive them. I’ve talked with musician friends about this, too, who they know might be strumming a song or tune or something that they like, but it never goes anywhere. But they remember it, they remember a part of it. I think with me it’s very similar. I look at something, I see something in the world… a lot of the times I’ll see some things that are broken and then they’re liberated from their use.

You usually see people throw them out or try to fix them. I find it fascinating when I see things that aren’t being used for what they’re supposed to be. I’m more interested in how things don’t work than how they’re supposed to work. I’ll see stuff that might spark me to investigate that material or look at how these two things aren’t working and how they might go together with something else.

Sometimes different things in my life come into play with that. Whether it be my interest in modernism, or my background as an indigenous person, or my life in agriculture. I’m not always coming at it from the same place. Now because I hang out with all these firefighters, there’s things I see in that realm that I find very fascinating. Or stuff that I learned when I was doing a lot of irrigation when I was ranching.

What is success to you? It feels like a project is successful if you get that charge you’d mentioned and follow the idea through to completion. Is success, at all, you make something and someone buys it?

Maybe if I feel like I’ve reached some closure with the material. I try not to look at the commercial side of art production. I’ve never really been entirely comfortable with that world. I’m very truant in the commercial art world, but I’m tangled up in it, it pays the bills. But I don’t like being put in a position where I’m having to make art to pay bills. I try to keep my interests very wide so I’m not doing the same thing over and over and over again. But no, if I’ve resolved a use for a material, then I feel like that’s success.

I tried making other things with the white plastic stacking chairs I wasn’t entirely satisfied with. I made these really odd, very ’60s geodesic domes with them at first. And it was fun at the time, but it wasn’t until I developed a use for them as whale bones that I felt like that was more the direction that they belong. But again, having a studio is very important for making objects.

Do you ever work on multiple projects at the same time?

I love working on multiple things at the same time. That’s my favorite way of working, where there’s no real destination for the object. Because I was ranching and funding this ranch from a lot of art production, I thought when I moved to the ranch that it would be more freeing, but it was the opposite. I wound up making a lot of stuff that was just going immediately out to the commercial art world. It was my other work that was more investigative, and experimental, that was getting smaller and smaller.

Actually one of the last things I did at the ranch before the fire was start on the archery stuff. I set up a course inside the studio and was shooting arrows into pieces of furniture that I had leftover from this giant bronze piece I’d made. That was several months before the fire.

I’m probably going to have a new studio within the next several months back down in southern BC just lining all that up now. I’m really excited.

Have you been storing up ideas for when you get into this new space? It’s going to be like when they have a bucking bronco behind the gate and the cowboy opens up the gate and it just runs out the chute and into the ring…

I’m going to be running faster. I have notebooks and I write things down, but I edit them fairly regularly. So we’ll see. I do like to have some structure with things in terms of whether it be a material that I’m interested in that has some limitations that I have to work with, that I find a good challenge. What I find most difficult is when I’m given complete freedom of things or when I have to build something from scratch. I can’t just take clay and make something. I find it boring. I need some challenge or limitations added to it to make it more of a challenge, let’s say.

Do you get creative blocks, or because you’re doing enough stuff, can you move on from one thing to the next if something’s not working?

You can move on, or if something gets overworked and you can put it down, cover it up, or something, and then come back to it and take it back to a place where you were still excited about it. I’m excited about having that opportunity again. I’m probably going to buy some land, but I don’t want to have agriculture be such a huge part of my life. As much as I believe in agriculture—and I think it’s very important that people know how to grow their own food—it’s another thing to take it on as another business and try do that at the same time as having an art career. I would not recommend it.

I get that. It wasn’t your decision, but you’ve had to whittle everything down to the barest essentials. Has this intense scaling back been at all helpful?

I think so. There’s expansion and contraction in everyone’s life. I went through this quite big period of expansion and then now it’s reducing that. It’s also been good for me to move back north where I grew up. Initially I bought this place before the fire as a summer place, and I never intended to live here year round. Because it’s very small, it changed my thinking in terms of what I wanted to do. I spend a lot of time out in the bush, too. I like being out on the land, so it’s very important to me. I’m alone a lot and I’ve always been comfortable with that, even as a kid. So when I lived at the ranch, that was during Covid and I didn’t even really notice that there was a pandemic because I was already living way out there and it wasn’t that much of a change for me.

Artists and creative people spend a lot of time in our heads, so we drop out of the physical world in a lot of ways. I think that’s why I really enjoyed the fire department because it’s the complete opposite of that. All your attention is out in front of you. You have to deal with the crisis.

So, in a way, it was a really good exercise for me, because it pulled me out of my head. As an artist in the world today, especially with things like Instagram, the idea of self-promotion is becoming so dominant and it’s changing the way we interact with our own art. For artists who are more introverted, or their process is more about thought, that place of having to promote yourself on social media is daunting.

I’ve enjoyed this bit of a sabbatical. One year turned into four, but a lot of that was because I had been looking for the right space to relocate to, and I did start working again last year, technically. It was nice to get invited to the Prospect in New Orleans because I hadn’t made work for an art Biennale in years. It was nice to get back in the saddle there.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Brandon Stosuy.

My inner child, she is always with me. I may have this experience now, and all these years behind me, but ultimately I’m the same vulnerable, sensitive, curious, wondrous, exalted little being that first wandered this earth 36 years ago. And every time I am moved by music or by what someone says—like what you just said about alkalizing density—I’m the same child who’s feeling just as grateful and excited for the sensory experience of that revelation.

When it comes to music, every time I play my guitar or piano or sing with someone else, it feels as magical as the first time that I knew music existed. And it offers the same access point as it did when I was a child… Music really does connect all those dots for me.

In my experience of listening to your music, you invite in this medicinal, raw catharsis. Instrumentally, you bring in beautiful percussions from a very particular part of the world, then I’m taken to a whole other part of the world through strings. There are melodies that feel very nostalgic, and lyrics that reorient me towards the future. How do you channel this vastness in your music and how do you approach creating a multi-layered landscape?

Thank you so much for those beautiful affirmations and reflections. I’m struck by this whole conversation so far. I’ve been tearing up because I feel very seen by you, so I really appreciate it.

I think being a dynamic being is something we can all relate to. We all have so many layers, and a spectrum of emotions and aspects of ourselves that are brought out by different people, different environments. In terms of my music, the rhythms, tones, frequencies, and even the underlying lyrics and textures are portraits of different times in my life as well as different emotional containers. Some songs are meant to help you access and be with joy, and some are meant to help you cry and help you release those tears. I love creating across that spectrum because, thankfully, my life has given me those multitudes and those many different emotions to channel… Being a conduit in the sense of being open to being a channel for art, or whatever else might come through. We must be deep listeners. We must listen deeply to the earth. We must listen deeply to the people around us. We must also listen to our own thoughts and idiosyncrasies. When I’m receiving melodies and then crafting songs, it’s often like I’m seeing this higher perspective. It’s from having listened deeply to something, and then distilling it into a shareable medicine of sorts.

I always give credit and thanks to Spirit no matter what I’m doing. If it’s waking up and having air in my lungs, thank you for that. Especially for something as magical as writing a song or creating something from this physical realm—how could I not be so grateful for that and not give reverence to something bigger than myself for being able to do that? Even if it’s just to soothe myself; even if I’m not necessarily sharing it. The fact that I’m able to do that, I feel that is certainly a gift. Also, so much of my music feels like it comes through me when I’m around water. Water is a big one, actually.

I was just thinking about water at this very moment.

Really? Being near the ocean, it feels like songs flow right into me. Similarly, if I’m near the river, songs are flowing in. Even with a human-made shower or a bathtub—because the water is there, songs will so often come to me that way.

Water came up for me when you described this process of essentially surrendering to what wants to be channeled through you. Being in bodies of water requires so much surrender and trust, as does the process of being an artist. Within my own practice, surrender and trust are cultivated practices, which I am always ebbing and flowing between. There are times where I’m utterly depleted and then there are times where I’m oozing with openness and connection. What tools do you use in order to hold both ends?

That’s such a beautiful thing to think about. I do believe surrender is one of the first connection points of creating. When you think back to being a child, children are so good at that. They’re so good at coloring what they want, saying what they want, singing when they want, moving like [how we moved] before we learned how to walk a certain way down the sidewalk. Children are skipping and they’re doing twirls and they’re dancing.

I think that trust and surrender are natural modes of curiosity and faith that we’re born into this world with. Some of our systems strip them from us, whether it’s our education systems or in many of our familial lines, with this intergenerational passing down of certain colonial values or social customs. As artists, trust and surrender are the first step. It’s the first step to believing that something you have to sing or say or paint is worth materializing, even for oneself. Having an idea and then saying, “I want that to be not just in here, but out there,” takes trust and surrender to be able to do.

I’m thinking about those artists who are on the precipice of wanting to share their art with the world but are moving through that thick blockage of fear over how their art will be received, or are moving past any of the limitations that capitalism confines us to. Capitalism tries to tell us that artistry is only valid when consumed, whereas so many of the creative prophets of our time and beyond show us that we’re not meant to be palatable. And if we try to be, we’ll lose the plot. The plot being the core essence of who we are, our authentic coding. So how do you keep to the plot? How do you stay in your integrity as an artist, even when you feel blocked and even when it feels unsafe to share with the world?

I do believe that some of the funniest people you’ve ever met might not ever be on a stage. Similarly, some of the most talented musicians you will ever hear are playing in a little house somewhere across the world. Some of the most profound exchanges of words happen between two people who are channeling an intimacy and depth of humanity which not all of us will hear.

When it comes to sharing, especially in this world that is so capitalistic, it’s important for artists who feel like their art is part of a deeper mission to remember that what you’re creating and putting out there will impact the collective in any small or big way. I think we know when we’ve created something that we want to share—when we believe that it’s for the collective, when it’s messaging that we genuinely feel strongly about.

In terms of moving past that initial blockage, we have to remember that we’re not alone. There are artists all over the world who want to share what they’re creating because they feel that it can have some kind of a ripple effect… I think as artists, we’re just wearing a giant sign that says, “I’m a sensitive human being.” To be a bleeding heart artist who says, “I feel a lot and I want to share”—I just think it’s cool.

I studied herbalism for a while and some plants act as sort of a panacea. They help with a lot of things, but so many of them actually are for certain things and for certain people. And I think that of art, too. I think your art is going to reach the people it needs to because that’s how wise and intelligent that greater energy is that makes us want to create in the first place. It might not be that all 8 billion humans on this earth will necessarily resonate with what you’re creating. But it will be that there are people out there for whom what you’re creating is going to help them on their path as a human being.

This connection between plants and artists reminds me of something Alok Vaid-Menon poignantly said in an interview: the natural world templates change, yet humans are uniquely resistant to change and to our growing edges. This brings me to queerness, because queerness offers nonlinear, wayward, fractal ways of existing. I know queerness to be an integral part of both our artistries, and so I’m curious as to how queerness, fluidity and nonlinearity has shown up in your creative process as well as in how you live your life as a creative act?

Yes, yes, exactly. I think that for me, queerness and being able to see life through this dialectical perspective has been the biggest gift I could have had, because it keeps my mind and my spirit fertile. It keeps the soil of all those spaces ready for what may come, because there are generally less preconceived notions or containers or fixed ways that things ought to be.

And so in everything—be it pre-scripted genres in music, how one might dress, the way a person might dance—queerness allows you to step outside of those prescriptions. I think it’s really important—especially now, when we live in this uniquely globalized era of human civilization where many of us are connected to people who are in many different places in the world—we have a diversity of relationships we can co-create with. The idea that we would have these fixed ways of being and relating to one another is antiquated. We are of each other. That’s how we must move. Queerness feels ancient and inevitable as a future template for our beings.

That wording felt like poetry moving through my blood. Thank you… How do you, in your creative process, give roots to all of the messaging that is moving through you?

I would say bringing it back to nature, because nature always harmonizes. If I’m kind of floating away, nature makes me feel so held… Also my conversations with artist friends. It’s the same feeling. I think knowing what elements or people or foods or things help you ground is important, especially if you are a person who’s getting those otherworldly signals often.

What about when you have to convene with technology to transfer that messaging? If I’m in front of my laptop for too long, it feels so invasive to my creative spirit. Yet it’s also the easiest way to transfer my ideas at times, and to organize myself and so on. We’re all constantly contending with the invasiveness of technology while trying to stay rooted in our bodies.

We live in this technological world and it’s ubiquitous. It’s just everywhere all the time. But I will say, I’ve also been thinking about the word itself: technology. It’s a Greek word from the 17th century, and it can be broken into two words: techno and ology. Techno just means an art or a craft. And then ology is the study of something. So technology was here before we started using computers and phones.

I’ve been thinking lately about how certain technologies are given so much credence and so much respect and admiration because they are fields that are dominated by mostly men and white people. But there are all these other technologies that exist and have been developed by so many women, trans people, non-binary people, queer people, Black and Indigenous people. And they are technologies that we can use to help us in our artistic practice as well. For example, I think cooking is a technology. Any time I need to detox myself—let’s say from what a computer or a phone will do to the body and to the brain—cooking will always move me back to all my senses. Anything can be a technology when you break that word down—from the way that you dance, the way that you put furniture together.

What you’re speaking about, it sounds like the Indigenous worldview of animism. If we are to believe that everything carries information, and that technology is, in essence, the way in which information is transmuted, then everything can be technology. Our bodies are our foremost technology, and within that, our breath is also technology.

100%.

I’ll ask one more question to close us out. When I’m listening to you speak, and when I watched your profile on CBC Arts, there is such a strong sense of liberation coming through. Not just in your own practice, but in what you hope for this world. How do you maintain being a liberated artist and human being, while also living within the confines of these colonial, narrow, violent systems? The dissonance is so often jarring.

I’ve been an artist my whole life. I’ve been creating, singing, and writing songs since I was little. But I’ve also been engaged in a more capitalist professional world of arts since I was 13 or 14. Before, I would call myself an independent artist. Sometimes it still might come out that way, as a way of differentiating myself from the machine of major labels and this big machine that exists in the music industry. But now I like to call myself an “interdependent artist.” And that is because I am in mycelial networks and relationships with other interdependent or independent artists who are now in network with me. It’s through these relationships that I’ve been able to unlearn colonial frameworks and lean into the safety of imagining and co-creating something different.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sania Khan.

My inner child, she is always with me. I may have this experience now, and all these years behind me, but ultimately I’m the same vulnerable, sensitive, curious, wondrous, exalted little being that first wandered this earth 36 years ago. And every time I am moved by music or by what someone says—like what you just said about alkalizing density—I’m the same child who’s feeling just as grateful and excited for the sensory experience of that revelation.

When it comes to music, every time I play my guitar or piano or sing with someone else, it feels as magical as the first time that I knew music existed. And it offers the same access point as it did when I was a child… Music really does connect all those dots for me.

In my experience of listening to your music, you invite in this medicinal, raw catharsis. Instrumentally, you bring in beautiful percussions from a very particular part of the world, then I’m taken to a whole other part of the world through strings. There are melodies that feel very nostalgic, and lyrics that reorient me towards the future. How do you channel this vastness in your music and how do you approach creating a multi-layered landscape?

Thank you so much for those beautiful affirmations and reflections. I’m struck by this whole conversation so far. I’ve been tearing up because I feel very seen by you, so I really appreciate it.

I think being a dynamic being is something we can all relate to. We all have so many layers, and a spectrum of emotions and aspects of ourselves that are brought out by different people, different environments. In terms of my music, the rhythms, tones, frequencies, and even the underlying lyrics and textures are portraits of different times in my life as well as different emotional containers. Some songs are meant to help you access and be with joy, and some are meant to help you cry and help you release those tears. I love creating across that spectrum because, thankfully, my life has given me those multitudes and those many different emotions to channel… Being a conduit in the sense of being open to being a channel for art, or whatever else might come through. We must be deep listeners. We must listen deeply to the earth. We must listen deeply to the people around us. We must also listen to our own thoughts and idiosyncrasies. When I’m receiving melodies and then crafting songs, it’s often like I’m seeing this higher perspective. It’s from having listened deeply to something, and then distilling it into a shareable medicine of sorts.

I always give credit and thanks to Spirit no matter what I’m doing. If it’s waking up and having air in my lungs, thank you for that. Especially for something as magical as writing a song or creating something from this physical realm—how could I not be so grateful for that and not give reverence to something bigger than myself for being able to do that? Even if it’s just to soothe myself; even if I’m not necessarily sharing it. The fact that I’m able to do that, I feel that is certainly a gift. Also, so much of my music feels like it comes through me when I’m around water. Water is a big one, actually.

I was just thinking about water at this very moment.

Really? Being near the ocean, it feels like songs flow right into me. Similarly, if I’m near the river, songs are flowing in. Even with a human-made shower or a bathtub—because the water is there, songs will so often come to me that way.

Water came up for me when you described this process of essentially surrendering to what wants to be channeled through you. Being in bodies of water requires so much surrender and trust, as does the process of being an artist. Within my own practice, surrender and trust are cultivated practices, which I am always ebbing and flowing between. There are times where I’m utterly depleted and then there are times where I’m oozing with openness and connection. What tools do you use in order to hold both ends?

That’s such a beautiful thing to think about. I do believe surrender is one of the first connection points of creating. When you think back to being a child, children are so good at that. They’re so good at coloring what they want, saying what they want, singing when they want, moving like [how we moved] before we learned how to walk a certain way down the sidewalk. Children are skipping and they’re doing twirls and they’re dancing.

I think that trust and surrender are natural modes of curiosity and faith that we’re born into this world with. Some of our systems strip them from us, whether it’s our education systems or in many of our familial lines, with this intergenerational passing down of certain colonial values or social customs. As artists, trust and surrender are the first step. It’s the first step to believing that something you have to sing or say or paint is worth materializing, even for oneself. Having an idea and then saying, “I want that to be not just in here, but out there,” takes trust and surrender to be able to do.

I’m thinking about those artists who are on the precipice of wanting to share their art with the world but are moving through that thick blockage of fear over how their art will be received, or are moving past any of the limitations that capitalism confines us to. Capitalism tries to tell us that artistry is only valid when consumed, whereas so many of the creative prophets of our time and beyond show us that we’re not meant to be palatable. And if we try to be, we’ll lose the plot. The plot being the core essence of who we are, our authentic coding. So how do you keep to the plot? How do you stay in your integrity as an artist, even when you feel blocked and even when it feels unsafe to share with the world?

I do believe that some of the funniest people you’ve ever met might not ever be on a stage. Similarly, some of the most talented musicians you will ever hear are playing in a little house somewhere across the world. Some of the most profound exchanges of words happen between two people who are channeling an intimacy and depth of humanity which not all of us will hear.

When it comes to sharing, especially in this world that is so capitalistic, it’s important for artists who feel like their art is part of a deeper mission to remember that what you’re creating and putting out there will impact the collective in any small or big way. I think we know when we’ve created something that we want to share—when we believe that it’s for the collective, when it’s messaging that we genuinely feel strongly about.

In terms of moving past that initial blockage, we have to remember that we’re not alone. There are artists all over the world who want to share what they’re creating because they feel that it can have some kind of a ripple effect… I think as artists, we’re just wearing a giant sign that says, “I’m a sensitive human being.” To be a bleeding heart artist who says, “I feel a lot and I want to share”—I just think it’s cool.

I studied herbalism for a while and some plants act as sort of a panacea. They help with a lot of things, but so many of them actually are for certain things and for certain people. And I think that of art, too. I think your art is going to reach the people it needs to because that’s how wise and intelligent that greater energy is that makes us want to create in the first place. It might not be that all 8 billion humans on this earth will necessarily resonate with what you’re creating. But it will be that there are people out there for whom what you’re creating is going to help them on their path as a human being.

This connection between plants and artists reminds me of something Alok Vaid-Menon poignantly said in an interview: the natural world templates change, yet humans are uniquely resistant to change and to our growing edges. This brings me to queerness, because queerness offers nonlinear, wayward, fractal ways of existing. I know queerness to be an integral part of both our artistries, and so I’m curious as to how queerness, fluidity and nonlinearity has shown up in your creative process as well as in how you live your life as a creative act?

Yes, yes, exactly. I think that for me, queerness and being able to see life through this dialectical perspective has been the biggest gift I could have had, because it keeps my mind and my spirit fertile. It keeps the soil of all those spaces ready for what may come, because there are generally less preconceived notions or containers or fixed ways that things ought to be.

And so in everything—be it pre-scripted genres in music, how one might dress, the way a person might dance—queerness allows you to step outside of those prescriptions. I think it’s really important—especially now, when we live in this uniquely globalized era of human civilization where many of us are connected to people who are in many different places in the world—we have a diversity of relationships we can co-create with. The idea that we would have these fixed ways of being and relating to one another is antiquated. We are of each other. That’s how we must move. Queerness feels ancient and inevitable as a future template for our beings.

That wording felt like poetry moving through my blood. Thank you… How do you, in your creative process, give roots to all of the messaging that is moving through you?

I would say bringing it back to nature, because nature always harmonizes. If I’m kind of floating away, nature makes me feel so held… Also my conversations with artist friends. It’s the same feeling. I think knowing what elements or people or foods or things help you ground is important, especially if you are a person who’s getting those otherworldly signals often.

What about when you have to convene with technology to transfer that messaging? If I’m in front of my laptop for too long, it feels so invasive to my creative spirit. Yet it’s also the easiest way to transfer my ideas at times, and to organize myself and so on. We’re all constantly contending with the invasiveness of technology while trying to stay rooted in our bodies.

We live in this technological world and it’s ubiquitous. It’s just everywhere all the time. But I will say, I’ve also been thinking about the word itself: technology. It’s a Greek word from the 17th century, and it can be broken into two words: techno and ology. Techno just means an art or a craft. And then ology is the study of something. So technology was here before we started using computers and phones.

I’ve been thinking lately about how certain technologies are given so much credence and so much respect and admiration because they are fields that are dominated by mostly men and white people. But there are all these other technologies that exist and have been developed by so many women, trans people, non-binary people, queer people, Black and Indigenous people. And they are technologies that we can use to help us in our artistic practice as well. For example, I think cooking is a technology. Any time I need to detox myself—let’s say from what a computer or a phone will do to the body and to the brain—cooking will always move me back to all my senses. Anything can be a technology when you break that word down—from the way that you dance, the way that you put furniture together.

What you’re speaking about, it sounds like the Indigenous worldview of animism. If we are to believe that everything carries information, and that technology is, in essence, the way in which information is transmuted, then everything can be technology. Our bodies are our foremost technology, and within that, our breath is also technology.

100%.

I’ll ask one more question to close us out. When I’m listening to you speak, and when I watched your profile on CBC Arts, there is such a strong sense of liberation coming through. Not just in your own practice, but in what you hope for this world. How do you maintain being a liberated artist and human being, while also living within the confines of these colonial, narrow, violent systems? The dissonance is so often jarring.

I’ve been an artist my whole life. I’ve been creating, singing, and writing songs since I was little. But I’ve also been engaged in a more capitalist professional world of arts since I was 13 or 14. Before, I would call myself an independent artist. Sometimes it still might come out that way, as a way of differentiating myself from the machine of major labels and this big machine that exists in the music industry. But now I like to call myself an “interdependent artist.” And that is because I am in mycelial networks and relationships with other interdependent or independent artists who are now in network with me. It’s through these relationships that I’ve been able to unlearn colonial frameworks and lean into the safety of imagining and co-creating something different.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sania Khan.

A Sailboat in the Moonlight at the Ogunquit Museum, is a survey show that focuses on the last four years of painting mostly in Maine. Some of the landscapes have figures in them, but they are primarily about light in the trees, the seashore. There’s a room of nocturnal paintings and pastel studies. I’ve never actually had the two of those together, in such a direct way. Then for Cheek to Cheek at the CMCA, I expanded the scale of a series of initial studies [made from life in the landscape], allowing them to grow in size. And those will be installed in a building that was designed by a wonderful architect named Toshiko Mori.

The show with Maison La Roche in Paris, includes a series of flowers—seaside roses and wild hydrangeas—in a very beautiful Corbusier building, designed with Pierre Jeanneret between 1923 and 1925. It has a modernist scale and the paintings have that kind of scale. As an architect, Corbusier had a way of bringing the outside to the inside. These flower paintings [engage with a] very different kind of space than what I was playing with before, which was much deeper andvast. I made studies last summer when I was feeling quite compressed by the world—less landscape, more interior.

How are you handling being so busy?

Honestly, I’m a little knackered, you know? I’m tired. Maine is a month behind in terms of the weather. So the blossoms that are already gone in New York, they’re just beginning to start here.

David Salle has written about your work several times. He wrote about you once again for the upcoming monograph that is being published by Moncelli, Phaidon, as did Jarrett Ernest. What is your relationship to them?

Jarrett has really become such an active voice and presence in the contemporary art world, writing about art and other themes related to writing and thinking. David is an icon, a fantastic painter, and his writing is really wonderful. I’m lucky to to be connected to these voices and to have a chance to be in conversation with them. I just reread one of Jarrett’s books, Valid Until Sunset that I recommend to people. Each story has its own identity combined with an image. They are very focused around his own experience, and feel very seen. It was important for me to read this book again recently.

Your new monograph comes out in July, and truly focuses on a variety of paintings you’ve made over the span of your career. These range from natural landscapes to the figurative. Do you approach a body in the same way, you would approach a tree as a subject?

When it comes to my subject, I’m a bit omnivorous. I don’t tend to categorize things in a kind of subject matter. What we [painters] do is constantly shifting in scale and focus.

I’ve always spent a lot of time in nature, longing to be back, to be around things that are growing and of their own volition. Being outside gives us the time and space to think and to have reflective thinking not just active thinking. It requires unscheduled time. I just planted a tree. It’s a yellow magnolia and it’s going to bloom soon.

Some landscape designers have been a very important subject matter for me. I like to spend time reflecting on Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), who was an English horticulturist and garden designer (amongst other things) and did quite a few fabulous projects [including over 400 garden designs across the United States, U.K. and Europe]. And then somebody who’s related to her in ideology, is landscape architect Beatrix Farrand (1872-1959), who was born in New York, but ended up moving and working in Bar Harbor in Maine. She’s done quite a few very famous projects, including the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Gardens, the gardens of the White House (during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson), and campuses of Yale and Princeton. I’ve been influenced by these very powerful female voices that permeated the history of landscape design. [They forever altered] how we see landscape design now, and how we have experienced nature during my lifetime.

Once the shows are actually installed, will you have a moment to rest and relax?

Well, I have some projects forthcoming and the show in New York at Acquavella opens in October. I’m also working on a large commission right now. Do you need to keep busy all the time?

To be honest, when I was younger, I would say yes. As I get older, I’m in my forties now, I actually really relish that in-between time and find that I can be more efficient when I can recharge.

I think that’s a really important aspect of living. It’s a strange thing about our time now, in our culture, there is pressure to make things, get more done more quickly, to [match] the ease of and speed of communication. But this ease and speed of consumption has not made the quality of our conversations increase and it hasn’t made the quality of our consumption increase either. It’s just increased the quantity. I think that it’s a kind of a compulsive behavior, and there’s something about making art that needs to be more obsessive.

The word purpose or purposeful comes to mind.

Exactly, because there’s a purpose behind an obsession. So, I think that is the word that defines or distinguishes the difference. I would say the paintings in my studio, aren’t really about the way something looks, but they’re more about the way something feels. The sensation is actually the narrative, and not a story per se. I’ve been thinking a lot about how art functions in our our world and in dialogue right now. There’s more visibility in our culture and in our lives now. It’s an interesting dynamic of our time, a strange commodification of culture. And it still takes a lot of time to be a painter…to learn how to be a painter. There’s the craft, or the technique of making a painting, and then there’s the thinking behind making a painting—an intellectual component to painting as well.

After years of trying to understand this while in art school, then after art school, and even as a professor, I’ve realized that art isn’t really about anything that can be described specifically and accurately in language. Perhaps art is something that can be, in its best sense, experienced. And experiences don’t always fit within the parameters of words. They go beyond or go into places where words can’t reach them. So a lot artists try to describe painting or artwork in language, and some people do it better than others. But it’s never never fully amounts to the experience of experiencing an artwork.

That’s true, especially now when so much art is shared via social media and email.

Talking about my art is an interesting exercise. Because it’s something that isn’t about my artwork, but is parallel to my artwork. Some people understand what these paintings are and what they’re about. I’m asked the question a lot, “Why do you paint?” and “What are your paintings about?” And after a lot of unclear statements and missteps with words, I think I can say that these paintings are experiences and ideally somebody can have the opportunity to experience them in person.

That makes a lot of sense to me because one of the things that I always find fascinating about artwork as an experiential entity, is the way that the body interacts with the work.Your work looks like it’s very physically involved—the marks, the drips. There’s a lot going on. Can you talk about what the experience of making is like for you?

Like you say, the paintings are very physical. They are large and [in contrast] I’m not a very big person. I started these paintings thinking about a certain feeling I had when I saw, in this case, wild flowers growing last summer in Maine. Beach roses are a kind of rose that grown by the seashore here, and they are everywhere. I make very quick drawings of them in about 15 or 20 minutes. The drawings function as visual notes about how I’m feeling [while] looking at those flowers at that time of day, on that day. They’re personal. I show them sometimes, and I make a lot of them, yet not all of them become paintings. They have a sense of scale, color and form.

They’re spontaneous enough that I don’t feel like I have to stop time to catch that time. I take all of these personal notes and think about the painting and how to translate those notes into something that’s made with a much different material. Paint is very wet, viscous, it moves around and has its own kind of tendencies of what it likes to do. I don’t really like to control paint very much. In part, I’d say these paintings are just the way the notes and my personal recollection of that moment feels, combined with changing the scale and the material. The result is the [finished] painting. In a way, the painting is also completely separate from that experience because no two things in life are ever really the same.

There is a sense of freedom and control within your canvases that I really appreciate. Being a painter, one can have a didactic or academic way of approaching art. The next level is how an artist actually creates or uses the medium to help fulfill their vision. What I really like is how your hand feels so evident, it feels uniquely you.

It’s all so personal, depending on who’s holding the brush. Any kind of painting could be a great painting or a bad painting. When you experience an artwork, we can feel the way the painter feels about what they’re doing. Anything could be a great painting, if the painter feels connected to it. Artists have their own set of values and in that way, it’s interesting because it’s incredibly personal. Not a lot of things in life fit into that [category].

Self-awareness, is really hard as an artist. I think it’s hard for everyone probably. It’s hard to know who we are through other people’s eyes.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Katy Diamond Hamer.

In high school, our history teacher asked us to write a story about a particular moment in history. He asked us to write one page. I went home that night, and I wrote 12 pages. I thought that was normal. The next day [my teacher] went around, making sure that everyone did their one page. When he saw that I had written a ton, he looked at me like, What? What is wrong with you? Why did you do this? But I think in that moment, seeing his reaction, for some reason made it click for me. This was something that I did because I enjoyed it, not because it was expected of me. I was always a big reader. I knew that I loved literature, but I didn’t know that this was something that I could do.

What does it mean to be a queer son of immigrants AND an artist? Was there any hesitation from your family about your pursuit of an artistic life?

My parents were never discouraging. They were always like, “Do what will make you happy in life.” But I don’t know that they’ve always understood what this artistic life really means and what it entails. I think now they’re starting to sort of wrap their minds around it. They came to my book launch in New York. I was on the local news in the Bronx, on a small channel. When my mom saw that, when my grandparents saw that, they were like, “Oh my God, you’re a serious person. You’re on the news.” It’s been less about them being discouraging and more about working with them to understand what this artistic life entails, what it means, what it doesn’t mean.

Just because I have a fancy fellowship here or there, just because I published a book, they think I’m rich. “You’re a writer and you’re traveling and you’re on a book tour, so you have all this money,” and I’m like, “No, no, you don’t understand….”

That tension between money and art always comes up when I’m talking to my family about what I do. Part of what helped them feel okay with me being an artist is that I always had a full time job in my 20s. I lived on my own. I moved out of my mom’s house after coming back from college. I’ve always sort of taken care of myself financially as an adult. Because they see that, they’re like, “Oh, well, we don’t care what you do, as long as you can pay for your own rent and take care of yourself.”

I would love to hear a bit about your previous work as a community organizer. So much of your writing is about community and place. And I know you yourself are very rooted in the Bronx where you grew up. How has community organizing informed your writing? Why is it important for artists to do this line of work?

I started doing community organizing in college. I went to college around the time of Trayvon Martin’s death, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement. I was organizing in college around racial justice. When I graduated, I went back home to the Bronx, and I started getting involved in efforts around responding and resisting gentrification. The first moment where I realized that art and writing has a place in community organizing was during a city council hearing with people in power. It was about the rezoning of Jerome Avenue which would change the landscape of one of the longest streets in the Bronx. During that hearing, I went up there and I read a poem. I hadn’t planned to read that poem. I just decided at the last minute to do it and I saw how much that shifted the room. I wasn’t saying anything that other people weren’t saying. [The poem] encapsulated the feeling, the frustration, the anger and the pride in being someone from the Bronx. It really moved people.

And so from then on, I spent a lot of time trying to bridge the gap between writing and community building, specifically trying to bring artists and writers to spaces where folks were already doing community organizing work. I will say it’s something that I struggle with. I wrote an essay recently about the tension that I find between community organizing and writing. I think that it is important for artists to be involved and engage with their community, to make their local community the best that it can possibly be for its residents. And I also find it a little troubling the way we talk about art and activism these days. It feels to me like we often judge a piece of writing’s value only on its political utility. What issues does it explore? What “communities” is it representing? And I think that is an important part of the conversation, but it cannot be the only way that we judge the value of a piece of art.

Isn’t all art political? Does art have to be political to be good?

I just had a three hour conversation with a friend about this yesterday, and he said the exact same thing. He was like “All art is political. Everything is political. You can’t escape it.” And I said, sure, that’s fine, but I want you to know that when I am sitting down to write a story that is not top of my mind. I am not trying to explore or expand or tease out my politics on the page. I am asking myself questions about people and their feelings and their hearts and their minds and the things that draw them together in community or in relationships, and sure that can be political or be interpreted through a political lens. The reader and the critic can do whatever they want with the work, but I am not thinking about these things first and foremost.

As immigrant writers, as queer writers, as writers of color, there is this question of what are you trying to say about your marginalized group? And sometimes I’m not trying to say anything about any group.

**You don’t want your work to be contrived. You don’t want to try to fit into some sort of immigrant queer writer box, in order to be appreciated as an artist. **

You are a recipient of the prestigious Black Mountain Institute Shearing Fellowship in Las Vegas. What have you learned about yourself as a person and an artist during your time in Sin City?

First I will say that it has been an incredible honor to be a Shearing Fellow. I have written more than I have written ever in my life in the last nine months. I always wanted to know what kind of person, what kind of writer, what kind of artist I would be if I had the privilege and time to just be a full-time artist and dedicate all my energy and time to being an artist. It’s just been pretty incredible to find that out on a very practical level. What time do I write? How do I like writing? How do I revise? Can I make time for reading while I’m writing? There are different questions [to ask] when you have a full time job, as I did for 10 years before I got this fellowship.

I forget who said this. I’m sure many writers have said this: it’s best to write about home when you are away from home, in a place very different from where you grew up.

Yes. I 100 percent agree with that. I think often our job as writers is to mystify and demystify what is familiar to us. When you’re in the place, it’s really hard to see the things that you’re not seeing. And so it has been really helpful. I have been writing about the Bronx and other projects. I’ve been writing about communities in the Bronx that are not Dominican. I spend so much time in Loca and in other projects writing about what I know, what I call a Dominican village, but it’s been such a revelation to write about all these different corners of the Bronx. For example, there’s a huge Irish population in the Bronx that I have been researching and reading about and writing about in my work. It’s been nice to have that space away from home, in order to see it better, or to see it from a different perspective.

Distance makes the heart grow fonder.

Yes, and [makes the heart] ask more complicated questions.

Your debut novel Loca came out in February 2025. The act of writing/creating is so contrary to the publicity machine of a book tour. What have been the most surprising aspects of promoting your book?

I spent so much time working on this novel, understanding it from beginning to end, backwards and forward, but it’s a totally different learning experience when you have to talk about it with other people. It is also incredibly challenging to see your work as an object that you have to sell to other people. You have to anchor your work in the theme and keywords. I have to talk about the fact that this is a queer transnational novel. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was writing the work. I was just asking myself questions about these people on the page. And so it’s incredibly challenging. And the biggest thing that I have learned is that for things to move along, you have to remain in the driver’s seat of the promotional experience as the writer, which is really hard. So if I had to give a piece of advice to a writer that is about to go do this, or will do this one day, it is to get a ton of writing done before your book comes out. Because for a little while there will be no space and time for creativity or spiritual connection to one’s work in traditional ways.

Let’s pivot to Sex and the City for a minute. You have written about your love for this show and spoken about it on book tour. I know it’s a comfort show but also deeply problematic lacking LGBTQ+ representation amongst many other pitfalls, despite all that, why is this show important to you?

The show was important to me because growing up as a queer person, I wanted to have the life that these women had; going out, dancing with friends, meeting random lovers, buying nice clothes, having artistic lives and professional lives. As a young queer person, I projected a lot of my dreams and hopes for adulthood on these white women who were not me but who I was able to connect to just on the basis of emotions. So much has changed in the culture regarding representation, and I really value seeing people who look or sound like me or whose experiences are more aligned with mine on screen or in a book. But I also really value that watching shows like Sex and the City or Buffy the Vampire Slayer attuned me to connecting to people across differences. I don’t begrudge having grown up that way. And sure, it would have been nice to see more people like me on TV or in books or whatever, but I also think that is what has made me a writer. Even when I’m writing about people who are “like me” on the page, I still feel that I’m writing across differences. It just makes me a rigorous thinker and a rigorous writer.

I think it’s such an easy cop out to be like, “That’s not for me because they’re not like me.” The whole point of why we open up a book or watch a television show or movie is to learn about other people.

It’s so true. I was just having a conversation with a young writer recently. He was like, “I don’t read these white people in the canon.” And I was like, you know, I understand the sentiment and also white people write things that slap. I would not be the writer that I am or the thinker that I am without having read Virginia Woolf for example. I follow James Baldwin’s philosophy. He used to say something like, “I’m an artist. I’m a human being. And so all of the art is available to me.” I get to read about the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and connect with those folks, as well as Virginia Woolf or Forester.

What inspires you?

The thing that inspires me the most is [the Bronx.] I’m really interested in the ways in which people share space, even when they don’t want to share space, and the kinds of beautiful things and conflicts that come out of living in an apartment building or living on a block with other people.

When I want to connect to a source bigger than myself, I go to nature. I go to the park. I go on a hike. It’s the same feeling that people get when they go to church. And so I need to do that in order to connect. Reading is a huge source of inspiration. Seeing the way that other writers do language on the page usually pushes me to think differently about what I’m trying to do on the page.

There are some writers that don’t want to get “tainted” by other people’s work. They don’t read.

I used to be one of those people when I was in my early 20s, trying to be a serious writer. I was like, “I don’t want to be influenced by anyone. I want to be my own person and my own thinker.” I appreciate that young version of me and his drive. But I also think it’s quite alright to live and write and exist within a tradition.

I would love to talk a bit about endurance. Writing a novel takes stamina and discipline. How do you convince yourself to get up every day and write; “butt in a chair” as the writer Anne Lamott likes to say?

The thing that propels me to sit down and write every day is just the fact that I’m going to die. When I tell people this, they sort of look at me like, are you okay? I’m not depressed. I’m not walking around with this huge weight of existential dread. I just read this quote by Didion, where she says, “Everyday is all there is.” I am so aware that every day is all that we have and that I am not promised tomorrow. And so while I am here, I have work to do. There are things that I would like to accomplish. There are sentences and stories that I would like to get on the page before it’s my time. Sometimes that pressure can be a lot and I need to be easy on myself and allow myself to rest and recuperate. There’s this American idea that we are endless and that we are going to remain young forever and that we’ll just keep going but I am very aware of my own mortality, and it informs my everyday life.

When I read Claude McKay, I’m able to visit Harlem in the 1920s. Or when I read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, I’m able to be in London in the 1910s and 1920s. My dream is that in 100 years (if we have a literary society, if people are still reading books) that people will be able to see how some people lived in the Bronx 100 years ago.

This goes back to your origin story. How you wrote all those pages for your history class. You’re contributing to the history of time. What advice do you have for other writers who can’t seem to stick to a writing routine?

My primary piece of advice is that it’s really important to not romanticize the writing process. Writing can be very magical and it can be very spiritually fulfilling, but when I am creating my writing routine, I am grounded in the fact that this is my work in the world. And just as I used to show up from nine to five for my organizing jobs, how I used to show up after work hours for a community meeting, I need to treat my writing work as practically as possible, so that I can build a writing life. That means that you have to get really practical figuring out, what times do I write best? How long can I write? That was a really important question for me. When I was figuring out my process. It was really important for me to figure out that the first hour is usually horrible, the second hour is okay, and then if I’m able to make it a third hour, which I’m not always able to make a third hour, but if I’m able to make a third and fourth hour, that’s when the good stuff really happens. And then after that, it just goes to shit again. But that was really important for me to figure out, and you can only figure that out by experimenting, trying new things and getting very, very practical about your writing process.

Why is it important to get serious about your art?

The world could care less if I write or not. The world will not be moved if I don’t write another book. It’s fine, but I am here in the world to write. If it is my calling in life, which I believe it is, the thing that gives my life the most meaning, then I have to say no to distractions. We are living in a time where one of the most important commodities is our attention, and people are making a lot of money out of grabbing our attention. Not only social media companies, but also our government throws a slew of things at us every single day to keep us distracted from the things that we are meant to pay attention to.

How can we avoid distractions in a world that profits off our time?

On a very practical level, turning off your phone is really helpful. I know that we like to be available to people all the time, and we like to be connected all the time, but we don’t have to be. Sometimes, turning off my phone for like, two or three hours and putting it somewhere is the best thing that I can do for my mind. I was talking to some students last year, and they were telling me, “We have a hard time getting off social media, even though we know that it’s really bad for us, it makes us really anxious, because we want to keep up with the news. We want to keep up with what’s going on. It feels like the ethical thing to do, to be connected all the time.” I hope that individually and collectively, we are able to one day divorce what we believe is our ethical responsibility to the community from being online or reading the news, especially national news, every single day.

We’re not meant to consume this much information.

It’s paralyzing. I asked my students, what would your life look like if, instead of being on social media and reading the news every day and engaging with that all the time, what if you turned off your phone a couple days a week and used that time to volunteer somewhere locally? How would your relationship to yourself and your relationship to this responsibility that you have for collective engagement be different at the speed of a human life? This is always what I go back to. I am interested in living at the speed of a single human life, and anything that demands that I move at the speed of an influencer, at the speed of being everywhere all the time, that’s just not for me. I can’t do it.

Back in the day when novels first came out, people thought that they were addicting and distracting.

The difference between a book and a phone is that you engage with a book, but the book does not change. You change. You can come back to a book 100 times and read it differently and feel differently about it 100 times, but the book is not modifying itself to capture your attention, versus the phone. Technology is constantly being upgraded and changed to capture your attention, manipulate your taste and manipulate the way that you think, how you think, and how much time you spend on these things. It’s just a different beast.

Technology is also homogenizing. It makes us all these stereotypical, algorithmic versions of whoever we’re supposed to be.

It’s boring. I feel like there’s more group think now than people are willing to accept. Everybody wants to think that they are thinking bigger and better than the next person. But if you’re on these platforms, and most of us are, you’re probably getting your information from the algorithm and falling into these niches and thinking the way that other people are thinking.

I do believe that my single job as a writer is to make up my own mind about things. And so that means that it is my responsibility to try to disengage with the group and encourage others to do so by reading about characters that they may not have encountered in their daily lives.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Rozuva.

Graphic NYC was a web project I did with a photographer named Seth Kushner. I did these interview-based critical essays with creators. They usually ran about an hour.

It was a weekly website, a new profile every week… It took me about, on average, eight to nine hours a profile, the subway, transcribing, writing the darn thing. I had to stack my prep quite a lot, so I had to just go back and forth between reading the work of different creators.

To prepare for them, I read as much of their work as I could. I never got Dan Clowes, but had I gotten Dan Clowes—and, at one point, I will get an excuse to interview Dan Clowes—I will read all of Eightball, and I will make notes as I read it. I will look at themes. I will look at stylistic development. I will look at the context in which it was created. I really wanted to get under the hood for why these creators made these decisions where they were with their work.

It depended on the creator. That differed between an author like Mike Allred with Madman, or Jim Shooter, who was editor in chief at Marvel, and a comic book writer in his own respect. It depended on who the subject was, but I would then basically come down with bullet points that I would have handy during an interview. I rarely write really straight questions because I like for it to be an organic conversation. It will be, of course, chopped up, and dispersed, and reorganized within the essay itself.

I was sick of Q&As at that point in my career. I felt like general Q&As for books were kind of lazy. When you look at magazine spotlights and feature articles, there are these fantastic essays. That’s how I started thinking about my work.

Graphic NYC really started as a book on creators. [hold ups notebook] I did these from 2008 to 2013… Peter Bagge was the first one which got printed, and Dean Haspiel was my second. These are actually notes from that. I had a flip phone, but I have all of these notes that I would go through and make as I talked with them, but I would also have these really wonderful bullet points.

It was an amazing experience, and I insisted that when possible, which turned out to be 95% of the time, these were in-person interviews, so I got to really capture the personality. I got some really cool people, like Raina Telgemeier. We had lunch, and I interviewed her. This is right before SMILE came out.

The preparation was to be prepared enough so that I knew what I was talking about, or at least sounded like it, and to know what the high points I wanted to address were. There were some instances, like Jules Feiffer, I found out the night before that we’re going to talk to him the next day. The legendary Jules Feiffer! The reason I’m here today is because the great comic book heroes were given to me by my father. That was the thing where I just had to brainstorm the best I knew, do some last minute Wikipedia-ing. I had a flip phone, so I had to use my ex-girlfriend’s laptop and hope for the best. Those things happen, too.

Would you, for somebody, like a Mike Allred, would you isolate their best known work or particular work? You obviously can’t read everything in preparation.

When I moderate for GalaxyCon, have to still do the same thing. You have to hit the big work, the high notes, but at the same time, try to dig deep enough and find the work where it feels like that artist was starting to develop.

For instance, I can’t remember if I got to talk with Frank Miller about Ronin, but Ronin, that’s where you can see him develop into being the Frank Miller we all start to know in love.

I’ve found that creators want to talk about their early work, and if you ask them about the more esoteric work, it’s good to create a connection between their earliest work with their big signature pieces of work.

Art Spiegelman did not want to talk about Maus. You can’t fault the man, but you can still find sneaky ways to get Art to talk about Maus by asking him about the graphic novel form and what qualifies as a graphic novel.

A lot of that comes from having a conversation with people, breaking the ice. You know these things, but you also have to think on your feet and figure out ways to respond and work with your interview subject as a human being.

There’s a few tricks I’ve found that have worked real well. Basically, when the interview’s done, that’s when I get the most responses. I’m like, “Well, I think this about wraps it up.” People kind of feel naturally like, “Oh, okay. I don’t have to be guarded,” and that’s when you start to get the good stuff. You keep the recorder going, you’re there with them. They know you’re still recording, and that’s when the conversation starts.

With Frank, he had the Adventures of Superman show from the 1950s. He had a box set, and I started talking about that with him. It’s just icebreakers, typical things. It’s why I look at Graphic NYC as me starting to appreciate the art of the conversation. A good interview is a conversation. Even though it wasn’t presented in a Q&A form like a conversation, I try and convey that through the prose, where I describe the creator and maybe even how they respond.

One of my favorite stories is from Joe Kubert. He started in the 40s. Had the School of Comic Art. Joe was in his eighties when I interviewed him. Bear of a guy. He was a big tough dude, and a very, very nice man. He did a graphic novel called Jew Gangster. It was about a kid who turns to a life of crime during the Great Depression, because the gangsters, the mob, they were kind of like the heroes.

We were just talking, and Joe was like, “Yeah, many of my friends were really kind of lured by the mob.” I was like, “Were you ever?” Joe just sat there for a second. His mouth was kind of open. For a millisecond, I was like, “Oh, my god, he’s going to punch me and I’m going to hit the floor.” I don’t care if he’s 80. He’s…”

You’re about to find out the hard way that he does have some pretty tough mob skills.

He just kind of laughed. He was like, “That’s a very provocative question.” It’s like, “Well…” He still never answered it. That made for a really great moment, because I was able to convey his character as this guy who, I don’t know… I just couldn’t believe I asked him that. It just kind of came out just in conversation. He thought it was funny, but he would not have hit me. He was a sweet, lovely man. For this millisecond, I panicked and I’m like, “Oh, you stepped across the line, Irving.”

You’ve mentioned a number of great creators. Looking through the list of people featured in this book, it’s obviously a very heavy emphasis on creators. I’m curious, are there other aspects of the comics industry that this book touches on, or that you feel like you would want to explore in further interviews? I often think about how these kinds of interviews can capture a real moment in time.

It’s been 15 years since the last one in this book, I think. Looking through it again, I realized what an interesting moment in time was captured in regards to comics and technology—we were on the precipice of digital. The iPad was just out [in 2010]. There’s a sense that the tablet was going to happen, but how would that affect comics? I was kind of like, “Well, do you think print issues are going to go away and it’s just going to be trade?”

I’m honestly still surprised by print, like floppies, I hate to use that term, but single issues exist. It’s a really interesting moment in how people address it. Scott McCloud, we had a really great time with him. I’ve known Scott since I was a student, so like 1997, and I’ve come to consider him a friend. Hearing him talk about that, and the missteps we make in trying to predict the flow of technology, and how it’s going to change things a little too soon as he talked about reinventing comics…

Also web comics, there’s quite a lot, because Dean Haspiel was basically the person who made this happen. Dean and a bunch of friends were doing a thing called ACT-I-VATE, which were web comics. They had some really incredible people there and we were really having discussions about, “What is the point? Where is it going? Do we offer things free on the web? How do we pay for this, or how do we sell this?”

There are 85 creators in this book, and I would say at least half of them were active young creators who were really thinking about these things. No one foresaw the subscription model.

That’s what I would say would be the real moment in time we captured.

What I think is also really fascinating, looking back at this, this collection is dedicated to the friends and storytellers we’ve lost. Seth is of course top on the list. He died from cancer about a decade ago. I miss him. I miss him still.

We’ve got Neil Adams, Gene Colan, Jules Feiffer, Irwin Hasen, Hernan Infantino, Al Jaffee, Joe Kubert, Stan Lee, Dwayne McDuffie, Denny O’Neill, Harvey Picard, like this list of creators, at least a dozen creators, maybe a little bit more, all kind of in the same space. It makes it a much more generational work from the literal beginnings of the industry. Joe Simon was 98 when I talked to him for this. Sharp as a tack, 98.

We go back to, as far as people I spoke with, Simon and Jules Feiffer, Al Jaffee… Al was there early on. I think you’re not only going to see a generational collection, a multi-generational collection, that you’re just not going to be able to make anymore, as far as in-person interviews go. I think that’s part of what makes this a distinctive collection.

Was that always part of the inspiration for wanting to do this is capturing the moment and giving historical perspective to then color where we are now? You mentioned Scott McCloud. He gave this fantastic Ted Talk about comics, and in it, uses an example of a comic that is an infinite scroll.

The way he sets it up, he talks about the influence of his father who’s blind, but he worked in Massachusetts for a missile provider, and then all of his siblings have more typical careers. He ended up being a comic artist, and even though his dad was blind, he had blind faith in him, and does a nice job illustrating, I think, some of that belief even from older generations feeding into it.

I’m curious what inspired you to write this collection of essays? What continues to inspire you to engage in the scene, and is it primarily about capturing the history in the moment of this space?

Well, I had the benefit of Seth’s photography, which is not reproduced here because this is an essay collection, and honestly, the photos were reproduced in Leaping Tall Buildings, and I could not do them justice through what I’m doing for this campaign. I really wanted to complement the work he was doing as a photographer, and he was amazing. That was a high bar for me to meet.

I couldn’t half-ass my work as a writer, because I didn’t want to feel like I want people to only go to the site to look for the pictures. Some people did, let’s be honest. I think a lot of capturing a moment in time is creating the context around it. You’re establishing where this person is through where they are now physically. Denny O’Neill met up with us in a Starbucks, and I put that in there. I don’t really wanted to show, “Hey, guess what? Denny O’Neill, legendary comics writer, editor, hangs out and gets a cup of coffee too, like anyone else.”

Peter Bagge, and I’ve done an entire book on Pete, who I love very much, and he’s one of my favorite creators and human beings. We went to this Belgian, it was like a waffle place or something, or crepes, or I can’t remember, but they had an accordion player. I’m like, “Of course, Pete Bagge is going to have an accordion player.” Pete’s funny as hell. He’s a really good guy. I really wanted to place that.

I think the one in this piece that really hit me was Dwayne McDuffie, a legendary writer. I really wanted Dwayne for this project. We were limited by geography and budget. We could only photograph people in New York. We traveled with advance money to Chicago where we got Alex Ross, Jill Thompson, Brian Azzarello, Jeffrey Brown, and Chris Ware. We got Chris Ware in his house. We got to see his really cool house, but most of it was in New York, and Dwayne lived in LA. He came through to promote the All-Star Superman animated movie.

He wrote a script, adapted it for it, whatever. I was on cloud nine, because I’ve always loved Dwayne’s work. He had always been nice to me when I’d met him through conventions and his wife, Charlotte. I had a great talk with him. Seth took a great photo of Dwayne in Central Park. It was winter, and Dwayne passed away a week after, on my birthday.

I had a hard time writing that essay because I was pretty upset, and I barely knew this man. I imagine with people who really knew him and loved him and worked alongside him, but it was very important that I capture what had to be part of the narrative, the story I was trying to tell around him is, yes, this is a vibrant, brilliant creator. Like Scott McCloud, Dwayne was an actual literal genius, and he decided to do anything, and he decided to write comics, and some of the best comics.

One of the things for Comic Book Artist Magazine is for a couple of years I did straight tribute pieces. It was tough after a while, but it was capturing that moment in time. Part of the reason I stopped doing it and took the site down was again, Seth had already started to move towards some other projects he wanted to do, and once he passed away, I couldn’t do it without him. It didn’t feel right. Also, it was exhausting.

If I do go back into this and bring Graphic NYC back, which I’m debating, I think I have to see how well this campaign goes. I would probably focus on more than just people who were graphic novelists as we had for our original, because we had to narrow it down. We had so many people who wanted to be in this, and we could only do so much. I would go and include folks who are artists for the big two writers, there’s a whole new generation of creators who came up since these were originally done, folks like Scott Snyder comes to mind.

He was one we wanted, but we weren’t able to get. Jason Aaron has really blown up since then. There’s a creator, Tana Ford, who I’ve met through the cons, who I would love to [interview]. Tana’s like the greatest person to have on a panel, because they’re just so quirky, and funny, and interesting, and brilliant, and I would love to do a profile on Tana. There’s also a lot more, just in that short amount of time, I think we have an even more diverse range of creators.

It’s nice to get it out on paper, but yeah, who knows? I hope that this interview and this campaign inspires people to see the real power of interviews and conversation. There’s an element of comics that I always tell people with Kickstarter, letting the work speak for itself, but then there is letting the creators speak for themselves.

That’s a large part of what The Creative Independent interviews are about, is the person behind the work, and not necessarily always just about the work—the intention is capturing the moment and their experiences. I think it’s a really vital piece of the industry.

Larry Hama’s one of my favorite people. I did a conversations book on him for University of Mississippi, and what I love about Larry is it’s all craft. If you ask him, “Well, hey, why did you have snake eyes?,” blah, blah, blah, he might give you one or two answers, but he really likes talking about the craft of storytelling, and I love that about him. I also love, conversely, Chris Claremont will go in, and he’ll dig into the weeds, and tell you why he had Jean Grey wear a green dress instead of a blue one.

He’s still present in those books he wrote years ago. It’s like there’s so many different approaches to the work, and then you have an up-and-coming creator who’s doing their comic, they’re so invested in it, and it’s such a personal piece of work for them.

I wanted an Inside the Actor Studio-approach to creators, and that’s still my dream, to do Inside the Actor Studio for comics creators, because no one’s doing it.

I think that they deserve that level of respect.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sam Kusek.

I was younger, trying to figure out what to do with my life, and going to school for graphic design. I struggled, and during this era, I was getting into trouble. During a psychotic episode, I was afraid to go outside. But I started taking photos obsessively. Not necessarily in a good way, but just obsessively. I got really involved in shooting film, but not developing it myself. Fast forward a bit, to around age 23—I began thinking more critically about taking photos, getting more serious.

I didn’t get an education in photography. I taught myself how to print in the darkroom, and at the same time I was learning how to sew. I set up a darkroom in my parents’ basement and I started doing it there. It was a really janky set up. I saw a picture of it the other day, and I can’t believe I made anything in that place. The trays were on a washing machine. Around that time is also when LAAMS started. I had worked with Scott Selvin and Stevie Baker for a few years prior, so we did it together. The shop was an opportunity to show what I’d been working on. I had experimented so much, and things began to click. I began to understand what worked and didn’t work, whereas in the beginning, I was just trying things out, seeing if I could make something at all.

How did you find your style? It’s so easy for me to identify when something is a JOERO piece.

I wasn’t searching for it. It was a result of the process that I was doing. The style of making pictures and collaging them together with sewing was a direct result of the limitations of my materials. I wanted to make bigger pictures, so I tiled the paper together and began experimenting with ways to make my pieces larger with tape and thread. I was also learning how to sew books and zines, so it all went hand in hand.

I would say there was at least a few years, maybe more, of making pictures that were pretty generic overall. But once I started really doing it, then it happened naturally and relatively quickly, because it’s a direct result of the process and the workflow. That said, I don’t want my style to just be a cheat code. I could easily be like, “I’ll just write on this picture, sew it together, and now it’s a JOERO piece.” I’m trying to think about it more critically.

If you’re thinking more critically about what your work is saying, what does it mean to you? Not that art has to “say” anything, really.

I’m assisting this teacher at the International Center of Photography named Jim Megargee, who teaches black and white darkroom classes. He’s one of the greatest living master printers. He says, “There are a lot of people who have something good to say. But because they don’t know their craft, what they’re saying isn’t clear. They don’t have the vocabulary. And then there’s people that are really good at the craft, who don’t have anything interesting to say. You want to be somewhere in the middle.” So I want my process and the form to compliment my message.

Tell me about your creative routine. How do you structure your creative output?

I wouldn’t say that I have a particularly good routine, but it’s about the regularness of doing it every day somehow, consistently, in whatever way makes sense to you.

There’s two parts to my process. There’s picture-taking, which I try to do every day. The second part is a completely different area of my brain. It’s reflective, and I’m looking at photos I’ve already taken. For me, it’s important to dedicate the time and the space to let something happen. I try to look at my pictures often and work on prints. Even when something good isn’t happening, having the space, sitting down, and doing it is important. Then when you have an idea and need to act on it, there’s less resistance.

What advice do you have for people who are starting to make art and are scared?

This is not for the faint of heart. You can’t be a tourist. For someone to really make an impact, to make something worth saving and preserving when you’re gone, you gotta be pure. The art has got to be what you’re about. It takes a lot of courage. Make time for it every day when no one is watching, and no one cares. And that’s the most beautiful time, because it’s when you’re experimenting freely and it doesn’t matter.

The more you do, the more you’re more self-critical. You want to outdo yourself. And then you have to have the bravery of putting yourself out there to show it and put it in the world. But there is no rush.

Are you nervous when you’re showing people your art?

Usually there is enough time in between when I’m presenting something to the world and when I’m actually creating it and getting initial feedback. The self-questioning phase when you’re like, “Is this good? Do you like this?” That’s when only a trusted group of people, maybe one or two, are seeing the things as you make them. I try to really protect that phase. I don’t want unsolicited advice, because then the art becomes something I don’t want it to be.

How do you decide what you’re going to write on your images?

It’s completely performative. It’s like a journal. I just write what’s on my mind. And sometimes I’ll make it really hard to read. I write things that I wouldn’t say aloud.

How do you determine what’s worthy of being photographed?

I try to view everything equally. It’s complete instinct. If anything catches my attention, if I even thought to look at it, then it’s worth photographing. It’s different with a big camera, like my large-format camera. Everything is heavier and more expensive. I’m under a curtain, so I need to be methodical about what I’m shooting. It’s slow and it takes mad time, but I follow the same instincts.

What’s your relationship to social media? You post pretty sparingly, I’d say.

Content is soulless. It’s noise that no one needs, noise that’s meant to be consumed and then thrown away, with no lasting impact. I hate it. But sometimes, it’s a necessary evil as an artist. For me, it’s better to make something in real life and share that, rather than making “content.”

What made you start LOOK Publishing? What’s it like running your own small press?

LOOK Publishing is about making things that can exist in the world for myself, for my friends, and for people I admire. In making my own books, I learned how to lay out a book, print it, get resources, and execute a vision that felt like mine. It started with self-publishing my own stuff. I began to make small editions of 50 copies, maybe 100. Then other people I know wanted help making books. Since I already figured out how to do it myself, I was glad to help publish their ideas.

I run LOOK with Alex Barcenas. Primarily, we lean toward handmade books. We have a risograph printer, so usually some portion of an edition is risograph-printed. I want to help people that have never printed a book before, or publish projects where I know the person personally. I want to encourage them to put their work in the real world. Every time we make a new book we’re like, “I’m never using that method again.” We’re folding and binding and sewing everything ourselves. It’s good we’re not trying to make a living off of making books, because we’re able to work on only the projects we care about.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Madeline Howard.

Do what you gotta do to keep writing. That’s really it. Make sure you don’t get so sucked into a day job that it becomes more important than your writing. I know so many creative people who took their day jobs too seriously. It interfered with their work.

If you can find a job where you can phone it in a little—don’t take it home—that’s ideal. Kevin Killian used to write at his day job as a secretary. That’s the dream [laughs]. Something you can do while still feeding your art.

It’s okay to want your art to support you, but if that becomes your main focus, it can get in the way. You start creating with the market in mind instead of serving your voice. So just remember: what can you do to serve your writing? Not the other way around.

You recently started Dopamine Books and edited your second anthology, Witch, which comes out in May. When putting it together, did you solicit contributions or open submissions?

I did all solicitation. I did the same with Sluts, which was last year. The first anthology I ever did was Without a Net, and I opened submissions for that. I didn’t know what I was getting into. It was wild—so many contributions. And honestly, a lot of people clearly didn’t even read what I was looking for. Submissions that didn’t make any sense, not on theme at all. It was a learning experience.

Open calls are amazing because you get people you wouldn’t normally get, of course. But at this point, I know so many writers. I’m always learning about new writers—someone recommends someone, a young or emerging writer. I have a huge file. I’m writing down everyone’s name. I pull from people who I know will surprise me.

As someone who’s so prolific and wears so many hats, what did you learn about managing your time?

I try! [laughs] It changes day to day, month to month. It really depends on how busy Dopamine is and how busy I am. Do I have my child a lot? I share custody with my ex, so I’m way more productive when I don’t have a child around. That makes a difference.

Sometimes I try to create structure. Like, is this a day for administration? For Dopamine? For my own writing? Or is this a day off—to clean my house, see a friend? I try to structure days like that, but it often falls apart because something else needs attention and just creeps up.

This year I got into Yaddo after applying for a long time, and it was amazing. I’ve been to one other retreat, plus some I organized myself when I was doing Radar Productions. I’m working on a book right now, and I really feel like if I don’t have retreat space, I can’t get lost in it the way I need to. I came back from Yaddo and was immediately like, “When do I have a week? Where can I go? Who has a back house?” [laughs] I was like, I don’t care if it’s in LA—just get me out of my own house.

I can get in that zone and get really feral, and just work in a way that I can’t otherwise. I need that full immersion. I can be really inspired by press deadlines, but when it comes to something creative or fiction, I have to live in that world. I have to go to sleep and wake up in it.

When there are all these daily responsibilities—whether they’re to my own work or to Dopamine—it cuts into the obsession you need to really surrender to. I say no to opportunities all the time. AWP was just here on a weekend I had my kid, and I basically didn’t go to anything. It was probably the best decision ever. [laughs] Honestly, I probably got out of stuff that other people wish they could’ve used their kid as an excuse for.

You’ve been in the publishing industry a long time. How have things changed for you as an author?

Authors have to do way more now. That’s just real. But there are also tools that make it easier. I started on small presses, and even now when I’m with a bigger press, I’m the small author on a big press, so I still do a lot for myself. I hustle. I think publishers like that I hustle.

Whether it’s getting my own blurbs or booking my own tour, that’s part of it. What’s funny is, I’m supposed to be getting blurbs for a novel I have coming out this fall, but I’m too consumed with getting blurbs for Dopamine’s authors. And I’m like, why isn’t my press doing this for me? [laughs]

But I want to give our authors as much as I can. That’s our reason for existing.

Do you organize book tours and promotion for Dopamine, too? Or do the authors take the lead?

We want the authors to do as much as they can, but I do book the tours. I’ll help them find an interlocutor if they don’t know anyone. We promote on Dopamine’s Instagram and through my personal network.

It’s more successful when authors have their own vibrant networks. We’ve seen a big difference between folks who do and folks who don’t. And it’s rough, because writers shouldn’t have to be popular. I never want to put that pressure on them. But the truth is, if you have a big network, word gets out, more people come.

Do you think live events and touring still matter in a digital publishing world?

Yes! Publishers rely on the internet way more now—instead of an author tour. Author tours used to be something we had to push for, but now publishers often don’t think they make a difference. I think that’s insane. Touring is what gave me my career. You can’t replicate that online.

Zoom events kind of suck. [laughs] Every now and then I’ll do one if it’s fun—City Lights did a great event for Dopamine. There’s a great store, A Room of One’s Own, in Madison, Wisconsin I love working with. But in general, I’m like, put us on tour.

Live events keep it real—being in a room with people keeps me connected to my voice and purpose in a way the internet never can.

We can’t financially assist with our authors’ tours, so if folks don’t want to go, I get it. It’s expensive. But if you’re able—if you’ve been wanting to go to a town anyway—do an event. It makes a difference.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jennifer Lewis.

Art in the Western world has been relegated to this side thing because it challenges profit motives, colonial motives, and imperial motives. But if you look at a lot of other cultures throughout history and a lot of Indigenous cultures, life is art. Culture is art. It’s a holistic thing. I reject the notion that art is a side thing.

I went to public school in Pennsylvania, and as is the case in many American public schools—especially in small towns—art and music are side things. Like, “Okay, you don’t really have time for these; it doesn’t really matter.” I’m like, “If art, music, therapy, and all these other things that are put on the side were actually put in the center, it would drastically affect culture and how we live our daily lives.” If we’re stuck surviving, it’s because we live in a world that does not value creativity. And I value creativity, and I believe that creativity is for more than just arts and crafts, or music or dance or painting, or any of these things. Creativity is essential for being alive. It’s essential to create culture. It’s essential to being a sentient human being in community, in ecosystem with other living beings on this planet.

I want to hear you speak even more on creativity being not just music, art, dance, painting, but something greater. Can you talk more about that?

I think that creativity is survival, if we reframe it. We have always needed to be creative throughout our evolution as a species. Creativity is essential, and it’s not outside the scope of what constitutes our life. It’s this sleight of hand by people in power to make you think you don’t need creativity, when in fact creativity is the key to our freedom and flourishing.

Wealthy people who want to maintain the status quo do not want lower-class and middle-class people to be more creative. If people have education and creativity, they can influence culture. They can influence the economy with their buying power or boycotting. They can reinvent their dependence on certain products, or they can farm. Creativity challenges the elite who run the world and who harvest, exploit us.

There’s a fundamental irony that, often in certain creative spaces, the audience is entirely wealthy people.

Yeah, exactly. I do feel that limitations in creative process and curation are important. For me, it means that having a clear process or aesthetic idea is a value. It could be quite a maximal aesthetic, and I’m still into that, but I can tell when someone has put thought into the output of what they’re doing. And similarly, a thoughtful curation I find really important. It’s not like I want art to be totally democratic. I don’t think that would be better. But I think there is so much room for more people to be making art, and for creativity to be more of a holistic part of every human being’s daily life. For more people to have access to art and art education, and to bring art into their own practices in whatever they do, even if they’re not artists.

On the other hand, for me, creativity is also connected to spirituality. I consider my musical practice to be devotional. I consider that I make devotional music, and that means it’s a spiritual music. Hymnal has been a process for me to further define what is my devotion and what is my spirituality. The creative process for me is also a process of exploring mysticism, and exploring not just a technical industrial exploration of art—of “I’m making an album”—but also exploring the magical or animistic potential of technology through creativity, of tools through creativity, to try to get to some feeling of divine or cosmic consciousness through intuitive choices.

Can you walk me through the process of editing your work? How do you know you’ve reached the point where you feel a piece of music is ready to share with the world?

I feel like that’s so intuitive, and it has a lot to do with my experience of the work but also other people’s. There’s a point when I’m putting together demos where I might share some demos with a few people. I’m someone who benefits a lot from conversations and feedback. I work in a very solitary way when I’m producing or composing for a significant time, and there comes a point where I want to start sharing it with other people.

I remember the mastering engineer Emily Lazar saying, “You have to think that there are two different types of listening. There’s the listening you do in the studio in front of the speakers, and there’s the listening you do that’s less work-centric, where you just throw the music on and grab a magazine or lie on the couch somewhere else in the room and listen to it as an experience. Not so technically minded, not trying to interpret it, not approaching it with intellect.” I make changes very intuitively, but I experience my work. I try to find some kind of distance to it outside the worker’s room [as] someone who loves music—to listen to it and feel like, “Is this something I love to listen to?”

How or where in your process do collaborators come into your work?

I might frame that within a larger model of how I go about a project—and this probably doesn’t work for everyone, but I am a very meticulous person when it comes to processes and systems. I knew I wanted to collaborate with even more people on this album, but it’s also important for me to have a system for that… I’ve set out with some kind of process of steps or phases, and how they feed into each other. I like to set up these systems, and the systems have to have limitations, otherwise it would be too much.

For example, I set up two different recording sessions for Hymnal. One was a two-day recording session with the Sonar Quartett, a string quartet in Berlin. I had written a bunch of music on my laptop and then worked with Francesca Verga, a string player and arranger in Switzerland, to make arrangements. And then we recorded together, conducted the string quartet for two days—75% of that was pre-composed material with me in the studio. I had all these other strange vocal production sketches that I do in my free time. That’s my base practice. I produce with my voice. I had a few sketches I thought I might want to put on the album. We did some structured improvisation with the quartet. I would frame an improvisation like, “Okay, maybe in this style.” Or, “The two of you starting.” Or, “Can you play a minor chord?” Or, “Start with these pitches.” [I would] call changes in their in-ear monitors and work like that.

I did another recording session two and a half weeks later. I worked with demo string recordings, put together 20 or 25 demos from the string parts, and recorded with those. I knew I wanted to do a recording session that was only improvising with the voice because I wanted it to feel more folky and improvised. I didn’t write any top lines. I didn’t write any vocal parts.

That was fundamentally all the material for the album, from these two recording sessions. That was a system I set up, and I said, “Whatever I finish with, that’s what I’m going to use.” I wanted to explain that as the system, then say that there are different people involved—there was a really important collaboration that I didn’t mention as a part of this system. Can I share a bit about that too?

Of course.

I used very little, if any, English language on my debut album Fountain. I wanted to let it speak with the sound of my voice and the emotional impact of the sonics of my voice, to let that be at the center. That came primarily from being a native English speaker who really enjoys language. I was already touring in Europe for some years, and I had performed some very verbose, wordy English songs, and it felt weird doing this in Europe with many people who were speaking English as a second or third language. When I started to make music without any words, it was so freeing because I felt like I could connect organically with people without them needing to have a dictionary or a translation assistant… I loved the immediacy of it.

I think declaiming language on stage takes people out of the deep listening experience, the deep feeling with the language of music. A big process challenge for me [with Hymnal] was, I knew I wanted to bring in more language but to do it in an original, kind of fragmented way. I commissioned my dear friend Nadia Marcus to write eight poems to a prompt, which was this idea of a character who’s running around the earth in time-lapse from sunset to sunrise, through the night, guided by distant stars, exploring all the landscapes and creatures you might find on the earth, on our home.

The poems are absolutely beautiful. I’m really into astronomy and astrology. Nadia’s very into the symbology of tarot, so the poems have a lot of tarot symbols in them. They were still literally poems. But they affected the compositional process in terms of the fantasies or impressions I got to come out into music, just from reading the poems. We did this blackout technique where we only left a few of the words in each poem, key words or phrases. So most of the words were erased.

My idea was to work with a friend of mine, the Finnish artist Jenna Sutela, who had worked in the past with this single-celled organism, this yellow slime mold. She works at the intersection of post-humanism and technology, and her work is incredible. The slime mold was used in Tokyo to make a miniature map of the subway system with these little pieces of oats over all the subway stops. When they allowed the slime mold to grow over the map, consuming oats as it went along its path, it showed some paths for the subway trains to run that were more energy-efficient and faster than the existing system. Following the process strategy of one of the great American modernist composers, John Cage, I thought it would be really interesting to create a randomized environment using the collaborative intelligence of the slime mold. [We mapped out] a bingo card with words and phrases from the poems, then Jenna created an environment with the slime mold and oats for me to grow under my bed for a week.

I took pictures of it morning and night for seven days. With those pictures, I charted with arrows the path the slime mold took over the words. I used this as a visual score for my eight-day vocal improv session. Formally, what that meant was I had all these demos, and when I listened to a demo, I would find a section of the map that felt like it resonated with the musical idea, and then I would only allow myself to go to words that the slime mold had gone to. If the slime mold went forward and not backward, then I couldn’t go backward to another word. I had to only go forward. It was a really beautiful experience, and I feel that collaboration across the whole record.

I wanted to ask you about your journey of moving to Berlin, going to clubs more, and getting a new perspective on what it means to be a composer. What can experiencing club music in its loudest, most immersive setting do for a creative person’s process?

I got inspired as a teenager finding out that Björk had gone from Reykjavik to London when she was 25, and she wrote all this incredible music that was inspired [by] club culture and was working with a lot of incredible producers… I was really inspired by her courageousness. And I was always so into electronic music. When I finished studying classical music, I was like, “I need to just soak in electronic music culture.” It was this intense craving. It totally changed my approach to creativity, music, and socializing in general.

The slime mold morphs, grows into this multi-headed beast, and moves together. That’s a very good analogy for what happens to consciousness among human beings on a dance floor during a really deep set. It’s so immersive… Your breathing and heartbeat become kind of entwined with the people around you. You literally are electromagnetically charged with the energy of people around you. It’s very intoxicating and transformative. You feel like you lose your identity, and you merge into this multi-headed being that is vibrating with the music.

For me, being a raver, being a clubber in Berlin, was a big challenge to my ego, but such a gift. I was able to feel immersed in community and as a node in music, in culture. I am someone who grew up singing in choirs, so it unlocked this freedom in me to approach my music in a more choral way. There could be many voices in my music. It didn’t just have to be one. And that’s very freeing. It’s a very spiritual principle of trance, really, because dance floors are trance spaces.

I’ve been researching in the last year some different trance music coming from Sufi mysticism in North Africa, West Africa, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, and Tunisia… It’s resistance music for people to survive, build energy in their community, and overcome difficult circumstances. I was doing that as someone who was discovering she was transgender in a world where trans people don’t exist very publicly and aren’t supported very much. The histories of African-American music, blues, disco, house, Detroit techno—these are all musical cultures that started as safe havens in marginalized communities and spaces of resistance. It’s resistance music. I think that’s important to say because it’s a musical culture that’s about liberating people.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

I first started thinking about making projects through my undergrad at FIT, responding to prompts that I got from different classes and then seeing what narratives I could make from that. Post-university—it’s already been almost five years [since I graduated]—I’ve been photographing a bit more intuitively and responding to the spaces in which I [exist]. Typically, the main thing that I pull out of my archive is the work with my family, both in New York and El Salvador. I’m very much a long-term project sort of person. I’ve been working on this family project named Adelante for close to 10 years. It started as one thing called Mi Familia Immigrante, which was a 20-image photo essay of sorts, describing this departure that happened with my stepdad when he was applying to get his residency here in the US after marrying my mom. He was undocumented in the US for 18 years, give or take. [My work] grew out of that specific time period, to this idea of returning and responding to different ways in which immigration has built my family dynamic in these places: New York and parts of El Salvador like Sonsonate, Soyapango, La Capital, etc.

You’ve discussed your experience using the Lomo Pop 8 camera. It made me curious: when you’re making work, what tools do you use and how do you decide which ones?

That’s funny. The Lomo Pop 8 camera: I love those pictures. I didn’t make a ton of them, but I do still really love them. That was fully a thing of me being like, “Okay, I know that I’ll bring a medium format [camera], I know that I’ll bring a regular 35[mm], but what are different ways in which I can make an image of something with existing formats?” Sometimes my approach is purely experimental. Like the Pop 8, for example, or cyanotypes or transparencies, or even appropriations of my family album. It’ll be from a standpoint of, what are the different ways in which I haven’t engaged with the medium that could add some interesting friction? Or that could add some additional context, that a straight image made with a very specific camera or specific format couldn’t do? So far, I typically shoot film. But I’m not really the sort of person that gets stuck in one medium. It just depends on what I have available, what’s economical, and what’s consistent.

How do you edit your own work?

Edit as in sequence? Or edit as in color correct?

I think your response to the question shows me that there’s two different ways that you approach it. So what comes first and what comes second, and how do those interact with each other?

Definitely what comes first is the color correction/post process. Because I’m typically shooting a high volume of film, it takes me a while to even pay for it to get scanned and developed and printed [before I] start to work within sequences. So in that way, my practice is structured as a typical photo archive would be. The good thing about, for example, my photographs in El Salvador, is that I’m mostly using natural light. So there’s a consistent sort of balance and consistent color profile, especially with the sorts of film that I use, like Kodak Portra and Fuji Films. It does help me tie in images that have nothing to do with each other into a sequence of images that could exist in sequential or non-sequential [order], as prints or in exhibitions. I will say I’ve mostly done group shows, so I haven’t really been able to figure out how a lot of [my] work would look in just one space. That’s a little bit more abstract to my experience at the moment. But I do sometimes think in the book form—even though I haven’t made a book—to sequence or put stuff together for people to view, or for a grant application, or even for myself to really sit and live with.

I do have a little bit of ADHD, so if I get bored looking at works that I’ve made in a specific sort of timeline, I try to find different ways to scramble them or turn them into something that stands on its own… There’s a lot of pushing and pulling that happens even when I stick to a structure. That comes out of experience with other photographers much further ahead who have advised me on ways to break my own structure.

How long does a project take and how do you know when a project is done?

This is my biggest anxiety, especially now that I’ve spent 10 years working on [Adelante] and I’ve disseminated different versions of that out into the world through web formats, print formats, etc. I don’t really know when a project is done. I don’t feel like I have the wisdom or the right to say… I haven’t published a full book of a wide edit; I haven’t done an exhibition. The typical markers that I feel like I would have to say, “Okay, that’s done. I said what I need to say with that specific thing” haven’t really happened in that way. I just know that things are in progress versus I have a feeling that things are complete.

Maybe this is me being an Aquarius, but I feel like you can always return to a thing and then remix and say something else that you might have missed the first time. With a photo you can really do that because an image can exist in so many different contexts. A straightforward portrait or photograph of specific items, depending on the context, can always turn into something else. I like that malleability.

Yeah, this is something I’ve learned as a writer and artist myself. It got to a point—and this probably helped my anxiety a little bit—where I realized, “Oh, I’m going to be working on these ideas forever.” Oh, I’ll be reading and looking at images for the rest of my life, and that’s the work.

I relate to that, too. It’s hard, especially for us as creative thinkers, to pinpoint if this perspective you have will be the same in a year, or two years, or 10 years from now. There’s that openness, that is exciting to a certain degree and also anxiety inducing.

Also, when I first started seriously engaging with photography, most of the photographers I was looking at were dead or at the end of their careers. There was an ending to their work. It’s such a different experience as an active photographer, realizing there’s no ending until I can’t make work anymore.

100%. I’ve recently been working on the side as a freelance archivist for different photo places and for living artists. That experience has made me [realize] there’s a version that gets put out, but then the artist in the future is still finding ways to refresh the thing that they’ve already made. You can always return. It’s definitely been really interesting, working for somebody else in their archives and seeing how they respond to it both on a practical level and on an emotional level.

What do you do when you’re creatively stuck?

I love to get physical and also leave things alone for a while. Like, literally unplug. I need to go and live and do something else that will then inform this feeling of being stuck. Not to be a Kardashian about it, but literally we’re just living life. I think as I’m getting older and as my mentors keep reminding me, I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. When I’m feeling stuck, I’ve lately been taking more agency, like, “I’m going to leave this alone and that’s okay.” The only deadlines that I have are the ones that I make for myself and that’s all I really need to think about or compare it to, you know?

I travel and experience different things, especially in El Salvador. I’ve done trips in El Salvador where I haven’t made any pictures. Even trips to my home and with my family, I’m not photographing all the time and I’m allowing myself space between the intent of photography and the intent of living. Then I don’t feel that sort of pressure to always be on it.

The thing you said about deadlines is so funny because last week I was freaking out about some deadlines that had passed. When I was talking to a friend about it I realized, “Wait, all of these deadlines are my deadlines that I imposed on myself.”

There are real deadlines. Obviously, if you need to return something for an opportunity, or you’re being reached out to, that’s different. Post-grad I had applications to residencies, grants, etc., and as soon as I graduated I was like, “I have to apply to all these things. I need to make all these projects. It needs to all happen in a row.” But then a friend of mine who is much older than me [advised] that when you’re applying to something, you have to think about, “Do you think that it’s the right time for you to face that opportunity and potentially get it?” That was really impactful because [they] were right. There are those opportunities that are exciting and of course you want to say yes to. But there’s also that question of, “Is this the best foot that you’re standing on for that experience?” Especially with photo, there’s only so many things that you can get in the US. So figuring out a way to pace yourself in the way that works for you gave me more of a calmness and less of a hurry and rush.

When you’re talking about when the opportunity is right for you, how do you think about it? What’s the thought process for figuring that out?

I think I look at the external factors. What do all these relationships [that] exist in my life demand of me now? That goes back to the different responsibilities that I want to take on. There’s also the financial responsibility. What financial responsibility do I have right now, to myself, to set myself up for something? What does that take away? Or, what do I exchange to get that responsibility done, in a certain sense. Can I take X amount of time away from not being in a specific place and feel like I can come back to it and still find what I need, as far as work? Even when I’m traveling or making work with my family, I’m asking those questions all the time. It’s a very “immigrant guilt of my late 20s” mindset. How can I continue helping my family? What responsibility do I want to give myself? How can I set myself up with my archive and then with my commercial practice in a way that I can balance it? I don’t plan to have kids so I don’t have that weight of that responsibility on me. I do feel like I have the weight of my family on me.

Every artist has a phase of finding their voice or their point-of-view, or, in the case of image-making, their eye. Do you have an idea of what makes a Steven Molina Contreras image?

There’s a sense of atmosphere that I’m after and there’s a consistent sort of portrait structure that I have. In a more formal matter, yes. But in a more abstract matter, no—and I don’t think I know yet. I need to live another 20 or 30 years for that question to really apply in a way that I think is substantial. But there are formal qualities to my pictures. Formats like the vertical 4:5, natural light portraiture, staged non-fiction. Staged images that look like they could be [documentary] but are very much produced and very much in response to something larger than just what is immediately in front. I have those formal things that I think put me in that sort of image-making lineage, but I think right now I don’t know if I could fully answer that without some sort of humbleness.

Did you have an idea of a threshold for success when you first started making pictures?

Yeah. My first idea of threshold for success was getting images published by some sort of photo-related space.

Which you did, quite quickly. You had that feature in Aperture.

The thing that’s also a metric of success is how my family responds, and what sort of resolution or what sort of emotion comes from seeing a picture of them in a place they would not have imagined. I’m thinking of printed pages in a magazine, exhibitions, or even disseminated on the internet outside of personal social media accounts. Hearing their reactions and seeing how they feel about those things existing outside of themselves I’ve also marked as success. I would say I’d be more comfortable saying progress, you know? At first it was like, “Let’s make this thing, let’s put the PDFs together, let’s put the pitches together, let’s send it, let’s get published.” But then it’s obviously changed because that’s not all [of it].

I think the reason why I ask that question is because—at least in relation to me—you’re still very young and have had what is perceived as great early success. To your point, one threshold of success was getting into some type of publication. So I guess the second part of the question is: once you pass that threshold you’ve set for yourself, what happens next?

Aperture has been my main supporter since the beginning of me sharing my family pictures. They published an early version of the work online and then I was able to continue growing that relationship. Honestly, networking through that, I was able to go from web to print to exhibition spaces. That’s how I think about these sorts of opportunities: what are different ways in which I can grow in those spaces and also grow in conversations with other people who are aligned? With Anderson Ranch Arts Center, I was there to teach a workshop, and that was my first workshop that I ever taught. It was a week long and for people of various ages and experiences of photography. I was able to participate in that with them, and also do a talk. This year I’m returning to do more workshops for different age groups, like high school and middle school, students because of the sort of relationship that I’ve grown with [the organization]. The New Yorker is another example. When I had my work published with them, I was introduced to them as an artist, as a photographer, through their audiences. That led into me getting assignments from them every once in a while and helping them visualize their thing within the context of the style that I shoot. I think about what’s next in the sense of, “How can I grow in this specific thing and maximize?”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Daniel Sanchez-Torres.

“Gaza’s Deadly Aid Deliveries,” the title blares.

If you were among the majority of people who only skim the headline without reading the rest of the article, you would have no idea that Israel has spent the last few days massacring starving civilians at aid sites and lying about it. You would also have no idea that it is Israel who’s been starving them in the first place.

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1930322086767276353

The headline is written in such a passive, amorphous way that it sounds like the aid deliveries themselves are deadly. Like the bags of flour are picking up assault rifles and firing on desperate Palestinians queuing for food or something.

The sub-headline is no better: “Israel’s troops have repeatedly shot near food distribution sites.”

Oh? They’ve shot “near” food distribution sites, have they? Could their discharging their weapons in close proximity to the aid sites possibly have something to do with the aforementioned deadliness of the aid deliveries? Are we the readers supposed to connect these two pieces of information for ourselves, or are we meant to view them as two separate data points which may or may not have anything to do with one another?

The article itself makes it clear that Israel has admitted that IDF troops fired their weapons “near” people waiting for aid after they failed to respond to “warning shots”, so you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened here. But in mainstream publications, the headlines are written by editors, not by the journalists who write the articles. So, they get to frame the story in whatever way suits their propaganda agenda for the majority who never read past the headline.

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1925342359912685809

We saw another amazingly manipulative New York Times headline last month, “Israeli Soldiers Fire in Air to Disperse Western Diplomats in West Bank,” about the IDF firing “warning shots” at a delegation of foreign officials attempting to visit Jenin.

This was a story that provoked outcry and condemnation throughout the Western world, but look at the lengths the New York Times editor went to in order to frame the IDF’s actions in the most innocent way possible. They were firing into the air. They were firing “to disperse western diplomats”—like that’s a thing. Like diplomats are crows on a cornfield or something. Oh yeah, ya know ya get too many diplomats flockin’ around and ya gotta fire a few rounds to disperse ’em. Just normal stuff.

It’s amazing how creative these freaks get when they need to exonerate Israel and its Western allies of their crimes publicly. The IDF commits a war crime, and suddenly these stuffy mass media editors who’ve never created any art in their lives transform into poets, bending and twisting the English language to come up with lines that read more like Zen koans than reporting on an important news event.

It’s impossible to have too much disdain for these people.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caitlin Johnstone.

“Gaza’s Deadly Aid Deliveries,” the title blares.

If you were among the majority of people who only skim the headline without reading the rest of the article, you would have no idea that Israel has spent the last few days massacring starving civilians at aid sites and lying about it. You would also have no idea that it is Israel who’s been starving them in the first place.

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1930322086767276353

The headline is written in such a passive, amorphous way that it sounds like the aid deliveries themselves are deadly. Like the bags of flour are picking up assault rifles and firing on desperate Palestinians queuing for food or something.

The sub-headline is no better: “Israel’s troops have repeatedly shot near food distribution sites.”

Oh? They’ve shot “near” food distribution sites, have they? Could their discharging their weapons in close proximity to the aid sites possibly have something to do with the aforementioned deadliness of the aid deliveries? Are we the readers supposed to connect these two pieces of information for ourselves, or are we meant to view them as two separate data points which may or may not have anything to do with one another?

The article itself makes it clear that Israel has admitted that IDF troops fired their weapons “near” people waiting for aid after they failed to respond to “warning shots”, so you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened here. But in mainstream publications, the headlines are written by editors, not by the journalists who write the articles. So, they get to frame the story in whatever way suits their propaganda agenda for the majority who never read past the headline.

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1925342359912685809

We saw another amazingly manipulative New York Times headline last month, “Israeli Soldiers Fire in Air to Disperse Western Diplomats in West Bank,” about the IDF firing “warning shots” at a delegation of foreign officials attempting to visit Jenin.

This was a story that provoked outcry and condemnation throughout the Western world, but look at the lengths the New York Times editor went to in order to frame the IDF’s actions in the most innocent way possible. They were firing into the air. They were firing “to disperse western diplomats”—like that’s a thing. Like diplomats are crows on a cornfield or something. Oh yeah, ya know ya get too many diplomats flockin’ around and ya gotta fire a few rounds to disperse ’em. Just normal stuff.

It’s amazing how creative these freaks get when they need to exonerate Israel and its Western allies of their crimes publicly. The IDF commits a war crime, and suddenly these stuffy mass media editors who’ve never created any art in their lives transform into poets, bending and twisting the English language to come up with lines that read more like Zen koans than reporting on an important news event.

It’s impossible to have too much disdain for these people.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caitlin Johnstone.

I’m part of a family of scientists, engineers, and doctors. I can see how my work is a bit confusing because I’m a creative director, a designer, and an illustrator. When I was working on a magazine cover, they’d ask, “Did you photograph it?” or, “Why isn’t your name credited?” They always want to make sure I was credited. They’re kind of over it now. Sometimes they will send me screenshots of editorial illustrations that they think are clever. They’re rarely clever, but I appreciate that they’re trying. [laughs]

What are some misconceptions about the role of a creative director?

That we have full creative agency and power over a project. Any creative director—whether at a magazine or an agency—knows there are so many people involved in every decision, from the initial brief to the size of a folio. If you’re lucky, you have a creative partner [in the form of] an editor or CMO [Chief Marketing Officer]. But often you’re working with non-creatives requiring negotiation, compromise, and collaboration. You have to find solutions based on what the client or company needs, so it’s not always your singular vision. I’ve redesigned magazines that I’d approach very differently if it were for myself. There is a misconception that creative direction always reflects the person behind it, which is simply not true.

For example, when building a website with a UX team for a big corporate client, I have to consider accessibility, audience, dimensions or formats, the CMS. There are many digital requirements beyond print, and I’ve been learning all of this slowly from UX designers who probably aren’t thrilled with every decision I make. It’s kismet when you work with a collaborator who understands you perfectly, and vice versa.

Who gave you your first chance to art direct?

My first job as an art director, rather than a designer, was at The Atlantic in DC, and I was hired by David Somerville. The person who really guided me through that role was Peter Mendelsund, who joined about a year into my time at The Atlantic. He asked me to move to New York and became an invaluable mentor. He’s taught me how to speak about design work, which is half the job anyways.

What was the moment when you realized you had found your voice as a designer?

I feel that way when I design magazines. What I’ve really learned, and that I carry with me to every job, is how to work with restraint and within limitations: to take a set of tools and defined boundaries and still create something new. How do you set up ten completely different book covers with the same two typefaces? That’s one of the most important skills as a designer: solving the puzzle.

At The Atlantic, there were three of us designing, and any colleague could guess which of us designed each feature. Our styles were so different; mine was a bit more maximalist. It was about finding your own voice within the constraints of the visual identity. Although, after some years working in the industry, I’m not sure we’re always meant to find our own voice within our design work.

How else would you go about making work then?

Sometimes design can be more of a trade. We have a prompt, a problem, a brief, and we use our skills to go from point A to point B. It’s important for designers to accept this. That said, you still bring yourself to the project. Our contribution is the way we problem solve, interpret, dissect, analyze, or interrogate a brief.

What’s harder, then: adapting to a brand’s existing voice or helping them find one?

That’s tough. Every job or project comes with positives and negatives. When you’re adapting to a brand’s existing voice, you have to really believe in what already exists. Or at least pretend that you do. On the flip side, when you’re helping a brand find their voice, there are a lot of layers, people, and policies to go through. But you get to start something from scratch, which is always fun!

So looking back on your experiences across editorial design, from working in-house to designing book covers, what’s one meaningful takeaway from each that’s stuck with you?

Book covers taught me how to pay attention to detail both in terms of the story and the design. What’s different between magazine work and book design is that with a book, you’re often condensing a 300-page story into a single cover; whereas editorial work might involve an 800- or 1,000-word essay that you need to visualize. It’s so difficult to capture the essence of an entire novel in one image—something really has to stand out. I’ve learned how to identify those details that set the tone of the book. It feels a bit daunting to fit an entire novel in a 6x9-inch rectangle. Sometimes it’s the most simple answer. For example, with Salman Rushdie’s Knife, it was obvious. I try not to overcomplicate things.

In contrast, editorial work gives you more breathing room. It taught me how to work with writers and respond to words visually. The editorial work I’m most proud of always involved close collaboration with the writer. Those projects turned out best because we poured so much into them. I loved working with Chase Hall on a special package for NYT Opinion after a shooting in Minneapolis. It was a huge collaboration between the editors, writers, and team to broach such a sensitive subject.

Branding work has taught me how to transform my design skills into multiple characters and different voices. I’ve done branding work for the world’s biggest auction house and a cannabis store down DeKalb Ave. [in Brooklyn], and both companies need the same level of strategy and problem solving. I’m continuing to learn the craft of storytelling and how to explore the full 360 degrees of an idea.

What about illustration?

I’ve gone through many phases with illustration work, improving in some areas and struggling in others. I’ve realized there are limits to how much I can and am willing to learn. I’d rather play up my strengths, which are rooted in collage and mixed media, and focused on abstraction and color.

What was the first illustration you were commissioned to do and what was the first one you commissioned someone to work on?

The first illustration I was ever commissioned to do was for a deck for a nonprofit in DC. It was not sexy. One of the first illustrations I ever commissioned was by Tyler Comrie.

What are some ways that you as a creative director bring out the nuance of a story or deepen the meaning of a work?

Every creative director has their own quirks. I like to do the opposite of what’s expected. Invert something, flip it on its head, pair something loud and soft. Why not?

How do you shift gears away from work without losing your eye?

I close my laptop. I’ll do something physical, even if only for 5 minutes between projects.

Do you also have a favorite shortcut—either literal or metaphorical—in your creative process? Something to get yourself started or to help when you’ve hit a creative block?

I make so many lists while designing, especially when I hit a roadblock with an illustration or idea. I jot down words or concepts that resonate with the piece, then look for connections within the list—sort of a verbal sketch.

If you had a creative manifesto, what would be its first line?

You know that meme that’s like, “IDK though, don’t listen to me”?

I don’t have any answers for people, and I don’t take myself too seriously. But I guess I would actually say to bring back ornament and design for design’s sake. Design can be more than functionality or efficiency.

I wanted to talk abou Acacia, a new magazine for writers, thinkers, and artists of the Muslim left. What’s the process like working on Acacia? How did it start?

Acacia is so special to me, and I’m incredibly grateful to be a part of this team. It’s the work I’m most proud of because I feel deeply connected not only to the design work, but also to the mission, the people, and the words. I had a meet-cute in the elevator with the editor-in-chief, Hira Ahmed. She mentioned she was starting a Muslim literary magazine, and I asked her, “Have you asked anyone to design it yet? Because I want to.” The rest is history.

We just finished issue 3 last week, so it’s just over a year old. We started in 2023, with the first issue coming out in the fall, and it publishes twice a year. The first issue of Acacia explored themes like reproductive justice, queer Muslim identity, cultural representation, and abolition, establishing a platform for leftist Muslim voices. The second issue focused on Palestine, connecting global liberation struggles through essays on student activism, genocide discourse, and cultural resistance. I work with many fine artists, rather than just illustrators and designers, which is new for me. We use existing artwork from artist portfolios and galleries, and there’s a lot more curation. It’s about finding something that pairs well with what already exists.

I’ve worked with so many Muslim artists and the magazine is overwhelmingly made by people of color, from diverse backgrounds—whether that’s race, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. I have very few restrictions. Music to my ears.

What do you think it reveals about the future of political publishing in America?

It’s more important than ever, given the current climate, to have smaller, independent publications that push boundaries, question the status quo, and speak truth to power. These publications will leave behind the digital and material footprint that our children will learn from one day. I have so much respect for the editors leading these publications. They sacrifice so much. Running a small publication is no easy feat, and I admire editors who choose this path, when I’m sure it feels like a thankless job.

There’s this idea within journalism that we’re doing something for the greater good and that it all pays off in the end. I used to feel that way, too. But after a few years, I realized that’s not always the case, especially when it’s met with censorship, bureaucracy, and politics that don’t align with my values. I can’t accept politics I deem dangerous or unsafe for people who look like me, and so much of what we’ve seen in the past year and a half has been completely unacceptable. I’m proud to be part of something that challenges mainstream media: a publication that chooses their words and imagery carefully, fighting forces who are actively trying to suppress and silence us.

What resistance have you faced creatively and how did you navigate that pushback?

Over the years I’ve received pushback for focusing too much on race, religion, or ethnicity. It’s come up in various ways: whether it’s related to hiring practices, the art itself, or when something feels too provocative. I quickly realized that only one group is allowed to feel discomfort, while the other is protected from it.

I find myself grappling with this issue in my own work. I’ve designed many book covers for South Asians, Muslims, Black and Brown people. I love it and I’m proud. But at what point do I stop illustrating only our collective pain? How often do I get books that reflect our joy? Rarely. It’s exhausting and taxing to constantly find new ways to visually capture our community’s pain.

It’s almost like, why is there so much demand for this one kind of story.

Give me a Franzen or give me a Saunders, you know? [laughs]

What is a good way to respond when you get pushback?

It’s knowing when to pick your battles. I have pretty thick skin. I try not to take things too personally, but if I really disagree, I’ll push back with a solution.

Is there a concept or idea you feel like the design world hasn’t fully explored yet?

Mastering classic typography. We’re all trying to make something sexy or loud without a solid foundation. We all need to collectively focus on craft. Myself included! Every designer needs to sit there and typeset a 500-page book once a year. [laughs]

Do you usually listen to music when you work on projects, Arsh?

Yeah, I listen to straight-up Qawwali and zone out.

Has there been a project that you haven’t had a chance to execute yet but you can’t stop thinking about?

I’m obsessed with choking posters in restaurants. I came across this one at Zooba recently by Jessica Walsh and it is so good.

In December, I spent a month in India and worked on a design project for myself. It felt so good. It’s important for designers to push themselves outside of their daily work. I worked on a few textile projects in Jaipur, taking some of my more abstract and geometric collage work and turning it into something tangible.

I want to use my hands more, screens less. It was amazing to see something I typically create on a screen come to life as physical material. I learned a lot in the process about what worked and what didn’t. I met so many artisans. They reminded me of the importance of detail and craft. The time and energy the blockprinters put into every hand press, wash, stamp, and stitch— it was quite humbling. I sorted through fabrics for what felt like forever, picked stitches, dyes. I watched indigo being dyed in live time and dabu block prints being pressed. I saw my designs stuffed with cotton and hung to dry. The entire process was incredibly re-energizing.

People always talk about projects that are successes, but I think we should be more open about when we mess up. What was something that you messed up on and owned it?

So many of my mistakes have happened when I felt imposter syndrome, had a scarcity mindset, was overworking, or saying yes to projects when I really wanted to say no. Honestly, learning when to leave a project or when to say no has taught me major lessons. I’m still learning. But I’ve found that working through personal challenges has ultimately helped me avoid mistakes. It’s made such a big difference to question myself and ask why I’m taking on a project. That clarity is crucial. I mess up less when I follow my gut. That said, I still mess up all the time.

If you could art direct any historical movement or publication, which one would it be?

The Kama Sutra, but don’t tell my mom.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Somnath Bhatt.

Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun

“Bogland” by Seamus Heaney

A fascinating exhibition called BogSkin has just finished in the RHA (Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts) in Dublin celebrating the long relationship between the Irish people and their changing perceptions of the many bogs in Ireland.

The exhibition looked at our changing perceptions of the bogs:  as a source of fuel, as Romantic and mysterious, as a damaged and unique form of our environment, as a source of scientific knowledge about sensitive ecosystems, and as potential for recovery in the future.

The bog(n.) [“wet, soft, spongy ground with soil chiefly composed of decaying vegetable matter,” c. 1500, from Gaelic ] in Dublin slang means the W.C. but in general has been a source of fuel for centuries as locals with Turbary rights, that is, the legal entitlement to cut and collect turf or peat from a specific area of bogland for personal use, primarily as fuel. The bog is cut from banks with a slane or sleán and dried in footings whereby the long pieces of wet turf are leaned up against each other to dry out for winter fuel.

This tradition can be seen clearly in Amelia Stein’s four black and white photographs from 2015.

Amelia Stein’s four black and white photographs: Turf Drying, Turf Bags, Kilgalligan, Cut Turf, Portacloy.

Bogs are a relatively unique heritage of Ireland in Europe now, as so much bogland was destroyed in other countries. Their accompanying ecosystems have fallen under the state protection of the EU Habitats Directive which “aims to protect over a thousand species, including mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish invertebrates, and plants, and 230 characteristic habitat types.

The overall objective is to ensure that these species and habitat types are maintained, or restored, to a favourable conservation status within the EU.”

Unfortunately it is believed that just 1% of Ireland’s active raised bogs are left now after centuries of turf cutting. The bogs are mainly found “in the midlands and it is estimated they once covered almost a million acres of land.”

Last year (2024) the Irish state was criticised by the European Commission over its failure to protect the bogs and is facing legal action. Stopping the turf cutting is a sensitive issue for local politicians who are facing the wrath of the locals for ending their Turbary rights and source of free winter fuel despite the National Parks and Wildlife Service compensating “land owners and turbary right holders affected by the restriction on turf cutting on 36 raised bog Natural Heritage Areas (NHAs).”

The cutting has had other benefits over the years. Many artefacts in the National Museums that have been found in the bogs were dumped, hidden, or buried. For example:

The anaerobic environment and presence of tannic acids within bogs can result in the remarkable preservation of organic material. Finds of such material have been made in Slovenia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Some bogs have preserved bog-wood, such as ancient oak logs useful in dendrochronology. They have yielded extremely well-preserved bog bodies, with hair, organs, and skin intact, buried there thousands of years ago after apparent Germanic and Celtic human sacrifice.

The bogs have yielded up a variety of artefacts such as the Faddan More Psalter (circa AD 800),  Coggalbeg hoard (two gold (sun) discs and a gold lunula (crescent-shaped collar)) dating to the Early Bronze Age, the eight century Derrynaflan hoard (ornate chalice, silver paten, and a liturgical strainer), etc.

The mythological aspect of such old finds is represented, for example, in Barrie Cooke’s, Megaceros Hibernicus, (1983), the ancient elk bones and mysterious shapes that stand for the yet undiscovered. Maybe it also represents an anxiety about our rapid destruction of the bogs both locally and nationally.

Barrie Cooke, Megaceros Hibernicus

Veronica Bolay, Time Stole Away

Hughie O’Donoghue, The LeaveTaking

This anxiety relates to the mechanised, industrialised aspect of turf-cutting. Bord na Móna (The Peat Board) a semi-state company in Ireland, was created in 1946 by the Turf Development Act 1946. The company began developing the peatlands by the mechanised harvesting of peat, which took place primarily in the Midlands of Ireland. However in 2015, Bord na Móna announced that the harvesting of peat for power generation was to be “phased out” by 2030, and replaced with “renewable energy development, domestic fuels, biomass development, waste recovery, horticulture, eco-tourism, and community amenities.”

Shane Hynan, Derrinlough Briquette Factory

Shane Hynans, Recently Rehabilitated Esker Bog with Mount Lucas Wind Farm in the Distance

This changing attitude by the state towards the bogs can also be seen in the later artworks that emphasize scientific exploration of the bogs in terms of their ecosystems, flora, and geology.

Fiona Mc Donald, We Share the Same Air

Tina Claffey, Feathery Bog Moss (Sphagnum cuspidatum)

Nigel Rolfe’s Into the Mire demonstrates the physicality of the bog, its muddy, rich texture, and our temporary existence compared to the thousands of years of dead nature soaked up under its living green cover.

Nigel Rolfe, Into the Mire

The reclamation of the bogs in Ireland is an unacceptable level of rapid change for some as pressure comes on the state from below as well as from above (the EU). However, any movement these days away from the destruction of nature is rapidly rewarded. In the last few years Common Cranes have been seen nesting on a rewetted bog for the first time in 300 years. According to Mark McCorry, Lead Ecologist at Bord na Móna:

Pairs of Common Cranes usually take several years to successfully fledge chicks. This is why this sighting is particularly significant. Not only are we actually seeing these birds nesting in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, but we are very optimistic that this third attempt may yield the first crane born here in centuries.

The demise of these large birds is attributed to their being hunted by people and foxes alike for food, and the draining of the bogs over the centuries.
Common Cranes in a rewetted bog

The necessity for a changing attitude towards nature is made clear by the levels of Ireland’s deforestation and is symbolised by the regular finding of dead tree stumps in the bogs. It is believed that just 10% of Ireland is under forest cover and that just 1% of that is made-up of native Irish trees. According to Global Forest Watch: “From 2001 to 2023, Ireland lost 154 kha of tree cover, equivalent to a 18% decrease in tree cover since 2000.” Therefore the efforts of the state seem to be lacking in both reclamation of the bogs and afforestation of the countryside. A strange situation considering Ireland’s green image. The lackadaisical attitude of the Irish government on these issues has provoked a frustrated European Commission to take action:

While the European Commission noted that some restoration work has been undertaken on raised bog sites, it said no action has been taken “regarding blanket bog sites where Ireland has failed to put in place an effective regulatory regime to protect these unique bog sites”. As a result, the Commission sent an additional “reasoned opinion” to Ireland September 2022. A reasoned opinion outlines why the Commission considers a country is breaching EU law and requests that the country informs the Commission of the measures taken to rectify the issue. The Commission today said that it doesn’t deem Irish efforts to date to be sufficient and is therefore referring Ireland to the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Taking strong action on issues of reclamation and afforestation will have many benefits in the future in the same way that whale-watching has had many benefits over whale-killing. Trees and wetlands are a perfect combination for the growth of ecosystems. By providing shelter and water we will create the best environment for natural complexity, from the most basic plant life to the renewed prevalence of birds of prey that were hunted out of existence in the last century.

Photos by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin unless otherwise linked.

The post Getting Bogged Down: The State and the Natural Environment in Art first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/23/getting-bogged-down-the-state-and-the-natural-environment-in-art/feed/ 0 534509 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/21/writer-and-illustrator-a-kendra-greene-on-becoming-an-artist-by-listening-rather-than-having-something-to-say/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/21/writer-and-illustrator-a-kendra-greene-on-becoming-an-artist-by-listening-rather-than-having-something-to-say/#respond Wed, 21 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-and-illustator-a-kendra-greene-on-becoming-an-artist-by-listening-rather-than-having-something-to-say In your bio you write: “She became an essayist during a Fulbright in South Korea while she was supposed to be making photographs.” Could you tell me more about how you started writing essays?

I’m not one of those writers that always knew this was the thing. I knew early on that I loved conversation, and I’ve always been fascinated by the mail. I mean, it’s really sort of a miracle, the entire postal system. I was writing letters home, both on the coolest stationery I could find and over email in internet cafes or at work—trying to keep up with everyone I knew. The copying and pasting, the gradual organic expansion of how I was thinking about audience and telling stories, meant that by the time I got back home again, I was an essayist.

At what point did you start thinking of those letters as essays?

I think by the end. I mean, the photographs were in trouble for all sorts of reasons. It was hard to get darkroom space, it was hard to order the right supplies. I felt very earnestly like I could not be confident that I had permission to take pictures. There’s something about photographs—I know other photographers can do this, but I couldn’t see how to make them shake off the authority of document. It felt like they inevitably said, “This is how it is.” And I did not have the authority to say “This is how it is.” It always felt like hearsay and a tenuous grip on what I was encountering. But the letters had all the space for nuance and caveat and doubt.

When you look at the history of documentary or the history of photography, when photographs or films were put in front of people and they didn’t really understand them as well as modes of representation, they were taken as authoritative. People were like, “This is objective truth.”

Getting to illustrate my first book, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, sent me on a deep dive in thinking about what nonfiction text and image could possibly mean. I’ve got a background in photography, of course, but at this point I feel like the Japanese fish print art of gyotaku is maybe the best metaphor for the essay. You have to encounter the world in order to make this art, but that art also has the imprint and the artifact of all of the choices you made to try to record that encounter.

Your second collection, No Less Strange or Wonderful, also contains your illustrations, as well as archival art. At what point in writing do you start to think about the role of the image?

The language is usually first. For this book, I spent a month in special collections understanding, how have we been doing this for centuries? How have we been thinking about the natural world in text and image? A bunch of books, I couldn’t read because of the language of origin or how archaic the text was—but I could still read how the text and the image interact on the page, how you encounter them, how you present them.

A poet asked me to illustrate a book, and I realized I don’t think I’m an illustrator—I think I’m a bookmaker. I didn’t know how to approach making the images until we knew something about our options for page size and text block and the type of paper. The materiality of it mattered. I’m convinced that part of what makes literature so magical is that it inherits two of the most remarkable human capacities and expressions there are: It sits in the oral tradition and in mark-making. Writing is always embodied, either in a body — through the storyteller — or on the page, on the screen. So I think there’s a very natural extension from the characters that render text to other forms of mark making.

In an interview in 2020, you described essaying, kind of like visiting a museum, as an exercise in paying attention. Do you still feel that way? How do you train that kind of attention?

Amen. I think attending is one of the most beautiful, important, necessary things that we do—giving our presence of mind to something and staying with it. I think a lot of what I do is paying attention to something for longer than it’s normally paid attention to. You start taking seriously things that often aren’t. It’s not hard; anyone can do this. There is so much in the world and a finite amount of time in which to examine it. You start researching, and you go from knowing nothing to kind of being an expert in this shockingly short amount of time. Most of the world, most people, most things, most everything is not paid enough attention. I think I got to become an artist because I finally found something that had a way of thinking about art as a matter of listening and not a matter of having something to say.

One of the things that really struck me in the book is it does seem very attuned to the strangeness, weirdness, wonder of very mundane situations. Do you start to recognize in the moment, “oh, this might be an essay,” or does it start to come together later? How does that influence your process of documenting those encounters?

I think what I noticed first is what I love, what resonates, what I’m fascinated by. And you just keep collecting those things and they start to talk to each other. They start to be in conversation. I think about all of the gifts that are just waiting in the research, all of the parallels and connections and resonances. Part of that is obviously coincidence, but part of it isn’t. Language is always a tool of trying to map, and we will use the language to talk about a bunch of different things that have some relationship.

No Less Strange is coming out five years after your first collection. How do you sustain your attention on one project over five years? What else are you doing to complement that work?

When I’d finished the manuscript for the Icelandic book, but before it sold, I’d started work on the next project, The Poison Cabinet. Then the Icelandic book got picked up, and we did the things for that. It was getting ready to come out in the world. I had all my research appointments set up for March of 2020. I was going to the National Library of Medicine, for a project that’s very much about what we hold in collections. It was a bunch of site-specific research; the materiality was inescapable.

And suddenly, I was a travel writer that was grounded. It gave room for this project to start asserting itself. I’d been thinking from there about bestiaries and how they function, the way they allow for a kind of wild, motley, experimental collaging of knowledge and fact and maybe-fact. Virginia Woolf, in a letter about Orlando, describes it as shoving everything aside to come into existence. She talks about the idea of a writer’s holiday: That after a big project, you have this space—not to stop writing, but to make a thing for no purpose, that no one wants, that no one is asking for, because it’s the thing you want to do. And so it was actually the first time in my life where I’d really consciously been working on two projects. There’s sort of a nice procrastination effect; one of them is always easier than the other, so there’s always something to do. Did you know that if you have a really nervous racehorse, you can give it a goat buddy? So I was thinking about this big thing I thought I was concentrating on, and this sort of wilder thing showed up.

That’s your goat buddy.

The bestiary is obviously the goat buddy, keeping the horse company and maybe making it better and evening it out.

What does your day-to-day writing routine look like?

I love the idea of routine, and it doesn’t capture what my writing needs to do, is the short answer. Probably because it makes you start to have to define, what is the writing? Does the research count? Does reading stuff that you don’t know if it’s related count? Do the long walks count? Does talking to a friend to work things out, or they say something really smart or you get new purchase on it? I actually find it really hard to define what the writing is, in part because I built it into my life so that it is part of how I do everything. The paying attention, the being curious. When I got out of grad school, I thought, “all right, I’m going to be one of those write-first-thing-in-the-morning writers,” and I would fall asleep at my desk. It was not the answer. I also know that there is a particular sort of grumpiness, which is a sign that I need to actually be on the page—that there’s something that needs to be tapped or I will continue to be a little bit agitated.

One of the things that I found really exciting about No Less Strange is that it seems like your own interest in things that maybe go unnoticed in everyday life is the engine of some of the essays. These essays end up revealing how much strangeness there is in the world, if we could only be attuned to that—to get back to your point about attention. How do you approach animating things that don’t immediately lend themselves immediately to narrative?

I remember as a philosophy major really falling for Heraclitus and the idea of fragments. They’re sort of marvelous. The section break is one of my favorite friends, right up there with “and” and the comma. You can start again and again; you can introduce white space or a pause that breathes its own meaning into things. The world is not linear or causal or built on hierarchy. We tend to encounter writing as a linear form, and how to negotiate that, how to keep it from asserting something that isn’t true, is a real issue. I sometimes feel like a plate-spinner: I need you to know 12 things, but I need you to know them all at the same time. It’s not about the domino of one to the next. It is about how they sing when they’re all together—that’s what I am trying to give you.

I think about the writing advice to “murder your darlings.” For the people for whom considering preciousness is useful, whatever tools let you do the work you need to do, power to you. But I feel like my approach is very much “smuggle in all the darlings you can.” In The Nutcracker, there’s the dancer on stilts who has the giant skirt full of children. I feel like there’s a sort of scooping in: “Come with me if you want to live; we’ve got room for you too, probably.” I think, if it matters to me, if I keep thinking about it, it means something, and I should probably work harder to give it a home.

That’s the collector’s instinct too, I think.

Mm-hmm. “You have a place, let’s figure out what it is, and what happens because you are together with things that are or are not obviously similar, because it’s going to be great both ways.” The amassing, the amplification is powerful, and the discord, the disjunctures — my goodness, there’s power in that too. Everything good happens because of friction or flow.

A. Kendra Greene recommends five chance encounters:

The possibility, at best now remote, of that perfect Blommer’s chocolate smell taking you fully by surprise, at any time, somewhere in Chicago, independent of geography or weather or time of day.

The cardamom pistachio morning bun that The Beet Box had the first time I went there, on Friday, so good I saved the last bite to share with another witness, and already gone when we went back the next day, out of rotation again for who knows how long.

The sea monsters in the gift shop of the Icelandic Center for Sea Monster Studies, knit by someone in town who doesn’t leave her signature on these marvels, stopped making them a few years ago in fact, the thick yarn not rough but so textured in the hand, little amber disks on tiny loops jauntily invoking the clatter of seashells one might find on the sides of the shore laddie.

The sight of all these mantises! A gift of the algorithm I pass on to my dearest observer friends, the shock of nature in such exquisite fancy dress still a kind of disappearing act, more stunning than the thing it might have meant to mimic.

The speculative soundscape of what the disputedly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker and its sweet little toy trumpet eeepmight have sounded like in context of other living things. And on its heels, to sneak one more darling in, the only document I can point to of one of my favorite things: the not-poem essay “Things I Have Done While Singing on Stage” by Lisa Huffaker, which exists here, podcast as field recording, starting at 51:29.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Katie Cusumano.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/21/writer-and-illustrator-a-kendra-greene-on-becoming-an-artist-by-listening-rather-than-having-something-to-say/feed/ 0 534084 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/21/writer-and-illustrator-a-kendra-greene-on-becoming-an-artist-by-listening/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/21/writer-and-illustrator-a-kendra-greene-on-becoming-an-artist-by-listening/#respond Wed, 21 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-and-illustator-a-kendra-greene-on-becoming-an-artist-by-listening In your bio you write: “She became an essayist during a Fulbright in South Korea while she was supposed to be making photographs.” Could you tell me more about how you started writing essays?

I’m not one of those writers that always knew this was the thing. I knew early on that I loved conversation, and I’ve always been fascinated by the mail. I mean, it’s really sort of a miracle, the entire postal system. I was writing letters home, both on the coolest stationery I could find and over email in internet cafes or at work—trying to keep up with everyone I knew. The copying and pasting, the gradual organic expansion of how I was thinking about audience and telling stories, meant that by the time I got back home again, I was an essayist.

At what point did you start thinking of those letters as essays?

I think by the end. I mean, the photographs were in trouble for all sorts of reasons. It was hard to get darkroom space, it was hard to order the right supplies. I felt very earnestly like I could not be confident that I had permission to take pictures. There’s something about photographs—I know other photographers can do this, but I couldn’t see how to make them shake off the authority of document. It felt like they inevitably said, “This is how it is.” And I did not have the authority to say “This is how it is.” It always felt like hearsay and a tenuous grip on what I was encountering. But the letters had all the space for nuance and caveat and doubt.

When you look at the history of documentary or the history of photography, when photographs or films were put in front of people and they didn’t really understand them as well as modes of representation, they were taken as authoritative. People were like, “This is objective truth.”

Getting to illustrate my first book, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, sent me on a deep dive in thinking about what nonfiction text and image could possibly mean. I’ve got a background in photography, of course, but at this point I feel like the Japanese fish print art of gyotaku is maybe the best metaphor for the essay. You have to encounter the world in order to make this art, but that art also has the imprint and the artifact of all of the choices you made to try to record that encounter.

Your second collection, No Less Strange or Wonderful, also contains your illustrations, as well as archival art. At what point in writing do you start to think about the role of the image?

The language is usually first. For this book, I spent a month in special collections understanding, how have we been doing this for centuries? How have we been thinking about the natural world in text and image? A bunch of books, I couldn’t read because of the language of origin or how archaic the text was—but I could still read how the text and the image interact on the page, how you encounter them, how you present them.

A poet asked me to illustrate a book, and I realized I don’t think I’m an illustrator—I think I’m a bookmaker. I didn’t know how to approach making the images until we knew something about our options for page size and text block and the type of paper. The materiality of it mattered. I’m convinced that part of what makes literature so magical is that it inherits two of the most remarkable human capacities and expressions there are: It sits in the oral tradition and in mark-making. Writing is always embodied, either in a body — through the storyteller — or on the page, on the screen. So I think there’s a very natural extension from the characters that render text to other forms of mark making.

In an interview in 2020, you described essaying, kind of like visiting a museum, as an exercise in paying attention. Do you still feel that way? How do you train that kind of attention?

Amen. I think attending is one of the most beautiful, important, necessary things that we do—giving our presence of mind to something and staying with it. I think a lot of what I do is paying attention to something for longer than it’s normally paid attention to. You start taking seriously things that often aren’t. It’s not hard; anyone can do this. There is so much in the world and a finite amount of time in which to examine it. You start researching, and you go from knowing nothing to kind of being an expert in this shockingly short amount of time. Most of the world, most people, most things, most everything is not paid enough attention. I think I got to become an artist because I finally found something that had a way of thinking about art as a matter of listening and not a matter of having something to say.

One of the things that really struck me in the book is it does seem very attuned to the strangeness, weirdness, wonder of very mundane situations. Do you start to recognize in the moment, “oh, this might be an essay,” or does it start to come together later? How does that influence your process of documenting those encounters?

I think what I noticed first is what I love, what resonates, what I’m fascinated by. And you just keep collecting those things and they start to talk to each other. They start to be in conversation. I think about all of the gifts that are just waiting in the research, all of the parallels and connections and resonances. Part of that is obviously coincidence, but part of it isn’t. Language is always a tool of trying to map, and we will use the language to talk about a bunch of different things that have some relationship.

No Less Strange is coming out five years after your first collection. How do you sustain your attention on one project over five years? What else are you doing to complement that work?

When I’d finished the manuscript for the Icelandic book, but before it sold, I’d started work on the next project, The Poison Cabinet. Then the Icelandic book got picked up, and we did the things for that. It was getting ready to come out in the world. I had all my research appointments set up for March of 2020. I was going to the National Library of Medicine, for a project that’s very much about what we hold in collections. It was a bunch of site-specific research; the materiality was inescapable.

And suddenly, I was a travel writer that was grounded. It gave room for this project to start asserting itself. I’d been thinking from there about bestiaries and how they function, the way they allow for a kind of wild, motley, experimental collaging of knowledge and fact and maybe-fact. Virginia Woolf, in a letter about Orlando, describes it as shoving everything aside to come into existence. She talks about the idea of a writer’s holiday: That after a big project, you have this space—not to stop writing, but to make a thing for no purpose, that no one wants, that no one is asking for, because it’s the thing you want to do. And so it was actually the first time in my life where I’d really consciously been working on two projects. There’s sort of a nice procrastination effect; one of them is always easier than the other, so there’s always something to do. Did you know that if you have a really nervous racehorse, you can give it a goat buddy? So I was thinking about this big thing I thought I was concentrating on, and this sort of wilder thing showed up.

That’s your goat buddy.

The bestiary is obviously the goat buddy, keeping the horse company and maybe making it better and evening it out.

What does your day-to-day writing routine look like?

I love the idea of routine, and it doesn’t capture what my writing needs to do, is the short answer. Probably because it makes you start to have to define, what is the writing? Does the research count? Does reading stuff that you don’t know if it’s related count? Do the long walks count? Does talking to a friend to work things out, or they say something really smart or you get new purchase on it? I actually find it really hard to define what the writing is, in part because I built it into my life so that it is part of how I do everything. The paying attention, the being curious. When I got out of grad school, I thought, “all right, I’m going to be one of those write-first-thing-in-the-morning writers,” and I would fall asleep at my desk. It was not the answer. I also know that there is a particular sort of grumpiness, which is a sign that I need to actually be on the page—that there’s something that needs to be tapped or I will continue to be a little bit agitated.

One of the things that I found really exciting about No Less Strange is that it seems like your own interest in things that maybe go unnoticed in everyday life is the engine of some of the essays. These essays end up revealing how much strangeness there is in the world, if we could only be attuned to that—to get back to your point about attention. How do you approach animating things that don’t immediately lend themselves immediately to narrative?

I remember as a philosophy major really falling for Heraclitus and the idea of fragments. They’re sort of marvelous. The section break is one of my favorite friends, right up there with “and” and the comma. You can start again and again; you can introduce white space or a pause that breathes its own meaning into things. The world is not linear or causal or built on hierarchy. We tend to encounter writing as a linear form, and how to negotiate that, how to keep it from asserting something that isn’t true, is a real issue. I sometimes feel like a plate-spinner: I need you to know 12 things, but I need you to know them all at the same time. It’s not about the domino of one to the next. It is about how they sing when they’re all together—that’s what I am trying to give you.

I think about the writing advice to “murder your darlings.” For the people for whom considering preciousness is useful, whatever tools let you do the work you need to do, power to you. But I feel like my approach is very much “smuggle in all the darlings you can.” In The Nutcracker, there’s the dancer on stilts who has the giant skirt full of children. I feel like there’s a sort of scooping in: “Come with me if you want to live; we’ve got room for you too, probably.” I think, if it matters to me, if I keep thinking about it, it means something, and I should probably work harder to give it a home.

That’s the collector’s instinct too, I think.

Mm-hmm. “You have a place, let’s figure out what it is, and what happens because you are together with things that are or are not obviously similar, because it’s going to be great both ways.” The amassing, the amplification is powerful, and the discord, the disjunctures — my goodness, there’s power in that too. Everything good happens because of friction or flow.

A. Kendra Greene recommends five chance encounters:

The possibility, at best now remote, of that perfect Blommer’s chocolate smell taking you fully by surprise, at any time, somewhere in Chicago, independent of geography or weather or time of day.

The cardamom pistachio morning bun that The Beet Box had the first time I went there, on Friday, so good I saved the last bite to share with another witness, and already gone when we went back the next day, out of rotation again for who knows how long.

The sea monsters in the gift shop of the Icelandic Center for Sea Monster Studies, knit by someone in town who doesn’t leave her signature on these marvels, stopped making them a few years ago in fact, the thick yarn not rough but so textured in the hand, little amber disks on tiny loops jauntily invoking the clatter of seashells one might find on the sides of the shore laddie.

The sight of all these mantises! A gift of the algorithm I pass on to my dearest observer friends, the shock of nature in such exquisite fancy dress still a kind of disappearing act, more stunning than the thing it might have meant to mimic.

The speculative soundscape of what the disputedly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker and its sweet little toy trumpet eeepmight have sounded like in context of other living things. And on its heels, to sneak one more darling in, the only document I can point to of one of my favorite things: the not-poem essay “Things I Have Done While Singing on Stage” by Lisa Huffaker, which exists here, podcast as field recording, starting at 51:29.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Katie Cusumano.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/21/writer-and-illustrator-a-kendra-greene-on-becoming-an-artist-by-listening/feed/ 0 534096 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/21/musician-actor-and-visual-artist-tunde-adebimpe-on-having-a-master-plan/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/21/musician-actor-and-visual-artist-tunde-adebimpe-on-having-a-master-plan/#respond Wed, 21 May 2025 07:00:00 +0000 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/musician-actor-and-visual-artist-tunde-adebimpe-on-having-a-master-plan The Black Bolts served as a guiding theme as this record came together. How did that theme make itself known?

The Black Bolts came out of some free writing I was doing. It was a pretty heavy time while I was making it as far as grief and subsequent depression kicked in. Working on art or music is a good way to organize the messier or abstract feelings, it’s a place you can put those so you’re not just a person in the world swimming in all these thoughts.

The Black Bolts is a metaphor viewing that depression or grief as storm clouds, when they coalesce, whatever positive or negative electrons or neutrons that smash together can yield lightning, which can illuminate a path forward that also shows you the beauty in all of that darkness, which to me is the other side of grief. You only feel so bad when you lose something because you loved them so much, or you may lose someone because it’s directly proportional to the amount of love and unspoken love that you had for this person.

Maybe the black bolts are these songs, or the impetus for these songs is just jotting down or documenting those flashes of inspiration that helped me go forward. This record is a way to honor those people that I’ve lost who really helped me along the way. It is strange when it’s the people who directly inspired me to want to make art or music, many of those people are the ones who passed. This was a good way to keep them in the world for myself. And also the songs are multi-purpose, whoever needs to use them, that’s the way I hope it lands in the world.

You’ve said the importance of making art is that when you walk away, you’ve altered, gotten rid of, or imported something. I’m assuming that was the case with this one.

Absolutely. If you live long enough you’re going to lose someone, you’re going to experience, I hope it’s not clinical depression, but you’ll experience extreme periods of sadness or things not going your way. Even just looking at the world and wondering, is this it? All we got is just being fucking hateful, murderous people, that’s it? It’s just life, but I feel as someone who’s making art or has this mechanism to process, and when I say process, it can be therapeutic. The act of someone throwing a bunch of dust at you and you’re just like, “Okay, I’m going to turn this into little mud balls and place them over here so they make some kind of sense and I’m not swimming in this mist.”

How does seeing your ideas through as a solo artist differ from operating with a band?

I have no problem telling people what to do now. I also want to make it as easy for them as possible. I want to help them out by saying, “Here’s the storyboards, here’s the map that we can all collaborate on.” Much in the same way as it goes with a band. You find people who are better than you at what they do and say, “I would love for you to have fun with this because I know that you’re great at what you do, and I want to see what that yields.”

In terms of demo writing and going from 80 to 100 percent, it was good, because it was the way I started making music on a four-track, just beatboxing, a cappella and a little bit of keyboard. Back then I would make demos and burn a CD of them and give it to a friend or make copies. We’d trade stuff, without having the idea they would be more realized. I didn’t have any idea I would be in a band.

It was going back to that, making a strong enough demo for people to get ideas and springboard off of instead of, as I would with the band, knowing that I’m going to get to here, but I know for sure that Jaleel’s going to have a great idea here, Dave’s going to have a great idea, or Kyp will do something awesome here. That part was exciting, the uncertainty, not knowing who I was going to collaborate with and how.

You used a “dry paint/wet paint” framework for deciding which ideas needed elaboration and which to leave as is. How did that play out?

The wet paint, dry paint shorthand developed between Wilder Zoby and I. l have a tendency, if something doesn’t feel exactly right, I can go back to the point of obsessing. Lyrically or with harmony. Since that’s my department on the song, I’ll just be like, “That’s not right. I don’t know what’s not right about it.” It’s almost like a painting, sometimes you get to a point and you think that area over there, something’s not sitting right with me so I’m going to keep working on it. Then you realize you’ve completely fucked it up and it’s a mess. Maybe if you’d just gone for a walk or something, you would’ve come back and not even noticed it. So we had a shorthand with the songs where we’d get them to a certain point and just feel like, okay, that’s done. We’ve taken that to a point where we both looked at each other and gone, “This feels right, this feels good in the moment.” When we were doing a final review of all of the songs there were some things that were obvious, where it was just like, “I’m going to go in and fix that because this sounds weird,” or there was a technical thing wrong with it. There were other things that were more feelings-based or lyrics I was unsure about. You get in your head about lyrics more than anybody who hears the final will, because they have no idea what the 20 versions of this thing were before they hear it.

I forget that every time I’m making a record.

We do forget it. There’s songs in the past with TV on the Radio, where as soon as it’s out in the world, I hear it and I’m just like, “Why didn’t I change that?” No one cares or knows. So the wet paint, dry paint thing showed up. It’s great to have a collaborator or somebody who’s aware of what you’re doing that you can use as a sounding board. Even while we were mastering it, I was like, “I think I want to add that thing that I’ve been thinking of.” And Wilder would go, “I’m going to say it’s dry paint.”

Then we’d take a little survey with whoever else was in the room, and they’re like, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I think that’s fine.” Even if I felt uncomfortable about it, on this record more than anything else I shrugged and said, “You know what? I feel weird about that.” But also I love things that are kind of awkward, I like the handmade nature of things. Increasingly I like to see a human hand in something, imperfections.

How long have you had your journaling practice?

I am not as disciplined about it as I would like to be every day. I don’t remember when the first edition came out, but The Artist’s Way, the Julia Cameron book. Someone gave it to me, and the first thing I thought was, come on, this is a workbook. It was like, no, I get up and I’m bummed out. I go to my job at The Angelika and I’m sad, I come home and I do what I’m going to do. You just fuck around wonder where the time is going.

So they gave it to me and I was like, “I’ll try it out for a week.” I ended up going through the whole thing and doing the morning pages where she encourages you to write three notebook pages a day, to free-write and not look back at it. You don’t look at it for maybe a month as a way to clear everything out of your head in the morning and put it in a place, put all your messy and serious thoughts in one place and then don’t look at it.

It’s almost like going for a run in the morning. You’re like, I’m going into the world and getting ready to go and be a person without having all of these little knots tied up. I’ve tried to do that since I got that book, which was probably in the late 90s. I have gone back to some of those journals, I’ve got a box of them over there for ideas. I also draw in the margins of some of those. Some of those little dumb sketches can end up as drawings or a painting. I took that idea and did a lot of free writing and drawing in this book, specifically for this record. This started May 16th, 2021 as a way to reorganize my thoughts and have a master plan to go into this record.

About a week after I signed to Sub Pop, there was another part of this whole, what do I like about making music? I had gone to all these labels and no one cared. Then I thought, what about Sub Pop? Maybe they’d be interested. They’re definitely in that pantheon of labels that put out music that made me realize I could probably make music, and influenced the way I thought about music, scenes ,and who I wanted to be around. I brought the demos to them and they were super on board immediately, which was a big lift for me. A week after that, my sister passed away suddenly.

I’m the only immediate family in the country. My mom’s in Nigeria, it was just me. I had to go and deal with all of that, doing a ceremony, everything. I came back and just essentially was like, “I don’t want to do anything ever again. This is the closest person in my life.” It was mid-pandemic, so it was all of that stuff you have to do when somebody passes, in masks, you set up a Zoom funeral. It was a pretty heavy time. That was in March, and this says, May 16th, 2021.

Three months after, I was like, “You know what, not only do I owe someone a record.” Sub Pop was just like, “Take as much time as you want.” And I was like, “I don’t want to hear that because I’d like to get it done, and I feel like it’s the best use of my time in the middle of this grief and everything surrounding it.” It’s good to have a place to land. I had the record title already, and here in my journal it says, “Bolts Master Plan, May 16th.” Then it said, “May 17th to June 4th, demo and organize. June, July, August, work. Turn the record in in September.

I wrote, “cohesion, a strict schedule, unplug everything to work, make a sonic bed. The sonic bed is where you rest now until the years end, all other projects get turned off.” That starts, then I have a page here that essentially says, “Focus on demos first, new batches every week. I want violins, some digital, mostly organic sounds. Look it up, make a mixtape of how you’d like things to go.”

This record has the feeling of a mixtape that a friend would’ve given to me in high school, and of a mixtape that friends did give to me in high school. There are all these inspirations, and this was just on one day. The first tier of inspiration–Fever Ray, Little Dragon, Bjork, Homogenic. Gary Newman, Stooges, Raw Power, Rain Dogs, Odelay, Mellow Gold, Nation of Ulysses, Nick Drake. Second layer, Tinariwen, Howlin’ Wolf, Choirs, bones in a stone room, which is not a band, it’s just a feeling and sound.

Organic, Super Onze, which is a Malian Griot band. Listen to Bahia, Manu Chao, Congotronics. Then the third layer, words, sound, spoken word, glitch. There are sketches for what the album art might look like. Then it says for dance tracks, listen to some house, footwork, techno. Apply that to Conga and Calypso, mix and match. Eight songs, three interludes. That was the first deal of this is what I want to fucking do.

What are some creative throughlines that allow you to stay engaged in your work?

When I started out, I thought I would be a comic artist, specifically an underground cartoonist. Then I wanted to make films, short films and music videos, and acting came out of that. Then making stop motion was also sort of a, “I can do this,” just make the thing that I want to see.

Which by the way, it never turns out exactly the way I want to see it. But also accepting that. It’s going to be something close to the idea or completely different, which is also totally fine. It’s in collaboration, finding people who are in a lot of ways better than you at what they’re doing. Bringing them in and getting to a place of play. Everybody tries to be their best selves creatively when you bring people in who are very good at what they do, and you encourage them to go in a direction that makes the most sense for them. And push it to be like, “If we all get down on this one mural,” whatever, the technical mural, whether it’s a record or a video or something, and we’re all excited to see it, then that’s the best place we can possibly be.

It’s also trusting this mechanism of processing the world. As long as I’m still in the world and as long as I’m moving forward. A friend of min, a sculptor named Jenny Beck, we’re thinking about life in terms of you get born then you’re shoved along by this invisible hand, all of these things come at you and you have to figure out a way to reconfigure them so they get out of your way. Or reconfigure them so that they become a part of you, or so that you can use them to help other people.

Mostly it’s realizing that you’re going to be pushed forward, and that time is here and we’ve got to spend it. We don’t have anything, there’s nothing we can do but spend that time. The throughline is that it all feels like a doable collage. All of these separate elements of your outside life and your inner life and the events of the wordl. It’s all stuff to pull from and turn into something else. Sometimes that’s a job and you get paid for it, and sometimes it’s just what you do.

TCI founder Brandon Stosuy’s essential Tunde Adebimpe:

In no particular order, mostly

TV On The Radio performing “Wolf Like Me” on David Letterman in 2006. Tunde’s singing here is mind-blowing. The band meets him at that level.

As they always did…TV On The Radio is maybe one of the best live bands I’ve seen. I’ve seen them dozens of times, in the same era as the Letterman performance (and earlier and later) at places like Black Betty, Northsix, at the Siren Festival (RIP), etc. There was nobody like them (still isn’t). I think the first time I saw them was at the Mercury Lounge and my eyes teared up from pure excitement.

I liked all their albums, but I come back to these most often: Young Liars EP (2003), Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (2004), Return to Cookie Mountain (2006), and Dear Science (2008). I don’t say many things are perfect, but Young Liars is, for sure. I still remember hearing it for the first time and being so excited about it. If you don’t know the band, start with these early records, in order of when they came out—it’s so cool to see what shifts and expands and what essential parts stay the same.

Tunde’s voice work on shows like Celebrity Deathmatch, Lazer Wulf, Tuca & Bertie, Pantheon, etc. Those… and his acting work as well, where you do get to see him—like his “scene stealing” performance in Twisters.

I think it’s worth following Tunde’s smart, thoughtful Instagram. He keeps updating it, as one does with social media, and its worth keeping up with his takes. For instance, his thoughts on comfortable silence and eye contact on the subway.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jeffrey.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/21/musician-actor-and-visual-artist-tunde-adebimpe-on-having-a-master-plan/feed/ 0 534098 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/01/painter-dylan-rose-rheingold-on-locating-your-inspiration/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/01/painter-dylan-rose-rheingold-on-locating-your-inspiration/#respond Thu, 01 May 2025 04:00:00 +0000 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/painter-dylan-rose-rheingold-on-locating-your-inspiration What have you learned about yourself through painting as a mirror?

I feel like the answer to that is also in your question. The act of painting does force you to look in the mirror, even when you don’t want to or when you’re trying to avoid that parallel. I think with my practice, especially the start of all my bodies of work, I really gravitate towards this surrealist exercise that’s called automatic drawing. Most people aren’t familiar with it, but they’re more familiar with automatic writing. Automatic writing is really just trying to clear your mind of anything preconceived—like the opposite of an underpainting sort of mindset—and letting your hand work in a way where you have no plan.

For me, I’ll make a bunch of drawings like that, and paintings on paper, all different sorts of mixed mediums. Then I’ll hang them all up on my wall or lay them out on the floor. I try to connect the dots a bit and see what objects or symbolism are repeating and why. Most of the time, there is always some form of repetition. It’s always very interesting because they’re ideas or objects that I wasn’t thinking about prior, or I didn’t think were so impactful. The more I start working with them and taking them apart, the more I realize there are connections to childhood experiences—ways in which certain objects represent something that feels half tapped into my adolescence and half tapped into problems or experiences I’m thinking about today. A lot of that has subconsciously led me into the bulk of where my practice is at now, which really teeters on the in-between space between child and adult, or girl and woman. Finding the gaps in time and space that sort of represent those feelings.

When you’re engaging in automatic drawing or writing, does it feel like you’re having a conversation with your subconscious?

Sort of. I think that’s why, when I start a new series or body of work, I’ve gotten into the routine of always starting off by doing a bunch of those drawings. I don’t find them to be effective if you only have a couple of them. What makes that process so special for me comes into play after the drawings are done. The drawings become activated in a setting that is nonlinear, and all of the works on paper are in conversation with each other—they act or react based on one another. If they were just singular pieces, they wouldn’t have the same impact at all.

How would you say nostalgia plays a role in your paintings as you uncover childhood memories and capture mundane moments?

Most of the experiences or settings I’m exploring are intentionally super mundane or banal. I’m not trying to make a spectacle of any sort of experience or setting. I realized that formally, or stylistically, my line work can come across as if I’m representing figures in a way that’s a bit more “grotesque,” which is unintentional—it’s just a little bit more raw. I have to be cautious of nostalgia, with the little details I include and with the color palettes I use, to make it clear to the viewer that the people, ideas, and moments I’m depicting are coming from a positive, reflective point. I’m not exploiting anyone or anything. It’s more of a reminiscence or a point of reflection… I don’t want to say an “uplifting” canon, but yeah. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Do you feel like nostalgia, or representing nostalgic memories, softens what you were describing as your more “grotesque” figuration?

That definitely helps. The pairing, or the duality of it, is a little unusual. But it helps bring all different types of people back to a very specific moment in time. It’s really special to me. I feel like my biggest takeaway about success—and how I view other people’s art and my own artistic practice—is that if it makes you feel something, regardless if that’s a positive or negative feeling, and evokes some sort of genuine emotion, then that is the magic of it all. So I think nostalgia is a funny thing. It’s definitely a root of my practice, and it goes a long way with my audience. Most people can understand that it’s coming from that source. It just leads down many different paths.

Do you have any symbols or themes that have stood out to you as your favorites? Or the most shocking or most confronting in your work?

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that one of the symbols I include quite often—which wasn’t pointed out until somewhat recently during a studio visit—is this bunny rabbit character. I was gifted a bunny rabbit stuffed animal after my mom gave birth to me, from one of her best friends: this really skinny, lanky, long-legged bunny rabbit that I called Hop Hop. I still have him at my house on display. Hop Hop kind of appears in many of my paintings. It’s interesting because he is a good example of something that’s a direct link to adolescence, or youth, in a way that makes you do a double take and think.

A lot of your motifs are centered around play as a kid. Does painting feel like play, or does it feel like work?

Painting still feels like play, but in a way that holds more weight—a heavier type of play. As I get older, I realize that because this is my job—even if I didn’t view it as a job in my eyes—I feel like it’s something that I have to do. I have to get these ideas and thoughts out. It’s almost like my responsibility or moral duty to do so. When I don’t, I feel clogged. So, yes it does feel like play, but it feels like I have way more of a responsibility now to my practice.

In reference to feeling clogged, I guess you’re talking about it in a positive sense, where you’re a channel for something larger. But have you ever felt stuck without an idea to work with? How do you nurture your inner artist and help the idea to come out?

I don’t ever feel stuck without an idea because I’m always working on multiple projects at once. If I’m feeling stuck formally with painting, or if I’m in a bit of a rut, I know myself well enough to take a break and seek inspiration in other art forms. I love to read, so I’ll pick up a book. I love to go to galleries and museums—I’ll learn something through that. I’ll see a movie… Just because you come to the studio every day, we’re not robots. It doesn’t mean you’re going to generate things consistently. It’s really important to be self-aware and know where you find inspiration.

After most shows, I do take a break from painting. I’ll go on a little hiatus where I’ll get really into writing, then drawing, and then I’ll go back to painting. It just depends. For this show [at T293 in Rome], the works are so big. That was a really big challenge, using my whole body. After this, working very small will be even more challenging, so I’m going to be working on these 10-by-10-inch wooden cube paintings. I think the duality of that will be a nice push for me. We’ll see what comes out of it.

How do you navigate the balance between art and commerce? How do you approach putting a dollar value behind your work?

I try not to think about those things while I’m in here [the studio]. Every artist is different, but I like to stick to a pretty consistent formula that my mentor in grad school advised me on. I pretty much price things consistently on their scale, and I try not to let emotional attachment steer or disrupt any pricing.

You mentioned grad school—during your MFA, you did a lot of archival work using photographs. I’m curious about your relationship between your various mediums of painting, drawing, illustration, etc.?

My biggest takeaway from graduate school came from a critique class I had with Marilyn Minter, who’s an amazing painter and photographer, and who also went to Syracuse. She really instilled in me that anything you put on a canvas, or anything you portray as a painting, is a painting. When I first started grad school, I thought that to be a painter, or to be taken seriously as a painter, I had to become more painterly: get super thick, only use oil paints, and focus on my form, brushstrokes, and the heaviness of that. Honestly, I’m way better at drawing than I am at painting. I enjoy drawing way more. That really serves me. I’ve fully embraced that self-awareness and openly state how drawing is the root of my painting practice, but it is a painting practice. Anyone who uses paint is a painter. It’s all just up to you how you want to portray yourself. I don’t think about the word “illustration” anymore. Illustrating is like catering to someone else’s voice, idea, or needs, whereas drawing is more tied to myself… But it’s all just verbiage.

You previously described your use of materials as “an intuitive act.” Have you always felt intuitive?

I have always considered myself to be an intuitive artist. I read this book while I was in grad school written by the philosopher John Dewey, Art as Experience. The book talks about how he favors the experience of making something over the final product. That really resonated with me. Going off that basis or guideline, I should be making work that really feeds me and makes me feel best. It’s different for everyone. For me, that’s definitely being intuitive and mixing these types of materials that wouldn’t typically be layered or used together. Were the works I was making before grad school more technically advanced or complete? Yes, but that wasn’t fueling me. So this is where I feel more comfortable—in this sort of process.

How has your personal experience of moving through the world as a woman with intersecting identities informed your work?

Given the mixed cultural and religious background I grew up in—which was never really forced upon me—it has had way more of an impact on my practice than I’ve come to realize. I’m so focused on the mundane and simple things, and not making a spectacle out of anything. The viewer can engage if they want to, and once they do, they’ll find out more.

On a formalist level, the way that I layer and mix these nontraditional materials together, merging them in a medium that is often not used, actually parallels my background pretty synchronistically. It’s funny because, again, going back to the subconscious, that’s not something I was doing intentionally. It’s just something that intuitively felt right. When I take a step back, it makes so much sense. The result of the different things that make me who I am—and this feeling or idea of otherness—inherently seeps into my work in a way that’s digestible and relatable. I think a lot of people can connect to it in that way, even if it’s not coming from their specific cultural or religious background. The duality of things in an untraditional manner, or just feeling like you’re seeping in between the cracks, is a universal experience for most women.

You’re following threads and making sense of your work kind of in reverse.

My work is so connected to my personal identity in a way that’s almost diaristic. It’s dealing with motifs, ideas, and thoughts of everyday life given that specific period of time. A lot of it is just me trying to make sense of the world, or my world, in really mundane, small ways. I’m such a curious person. I’m just trying to understand things, and this is my way of understanding or exploring certain ideas or narratives and seeing what comes of it. I feel like I don’t have the answers to anything, but I’m just trying to work them out.

What’s the moment like when a work is finished? Is it a knowing?

That’s tough. For me, the worst feeling in the world is overworking a painting, and is something that I used to struggle with a lot. That was also when I wasn’t valuing art as an experience over the final product. I thought, the more detail and the more you buff something out [the better]. I couldn’t be farther from that side of the spectrum now. When I think that a work is done, I will flip it over and start working on something else in tandem. I’ll take a break before going back to it. I’ll give it a week, a couple of weeks, a month, whatever it is, and just let it marinate and see how I feel. My preference, for most of the paintings that I’m a fan of, always teeters more towards looking almost unfinished… Most of the time, for me, less is more and I don’t need to overpack something to get my message across.

What are you excited about?

I’m super excited about a popup exhibition at 40 Crosby Street in Soho at w/ Ward Community Arts Program opening May 16th, and my next solo show in Rome at the end of April at T293 gallery. This body of work is called Shadow Talk. I was thinking a lot about spotlights in a physical sense. Flashlights, people looking for things under beds, dancers or performers kind of being forced on a platform in one way or another. Some of the drawings weren’t metaphorical and they were [literal] performers, and then others were people in everyday life who feel like they have to sort of perform or put on an act to be taken seriously. It got me thinking about the different versions of ourselves that exist—sort of like skeletons in the closet or in relation to grieving—and how those different versions of yourself can sort of come and go, but are still with you in everyday life.

Dylan Rose Rheingold recommends:

A book of silly little poems, perhaps Do Angels Need Haircuts? by Lou Reed or The Flame by Leonard Cohen

A set of Danish egg cups

The film Birth by Jonathan Glazer

A pair of satin or lace evening gloves

May the Circle Remain Unbroken, a photography book by Corinne Day

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sammy Steiner.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/05/01/painter-dylan-rose-rheingold-on-locating-your-inspiration/feed/ 0 530510 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/28/art-to-awaken-and-inform/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/28/art-to-awaken-and-inform/#respond Mon, 28 Apr 2025 21:16:30 +0000 https://progressive.org/magazine/art-to-awaken-and-inform-stockwell-20250428/
This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Norman Stockwell.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/28/art-to-awaken-and-inform/feed/ 0 529976 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/28/artist-evelyn-tan-on-seeing-what-sticks/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/28/artist-evelyn-tan-on-seeing-what-sticks/#respond Mon, 28 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/artist-evelyn-tan-on-seeing-what-sticks How did you get to where you are?

I was always very interested in art growing up. My first introductions to it were pretty early. My mom and my dad read me children’s books and they’re all very visual and very tactile. There was Klimt’s “The Kiss” print hanging in the living room, and I would copy my dad when he drew Woody Woodpecker and things like that, like Looney Tunes.

I took some local art classes as a kid, so I was really lucky there as well. Growing up, I never really thought I’d pursue it as a career and really felt more like this fun thing that I would never actually truly go into. I was really thinking I’d go into STEM or law or something like that, and I realized I have no talent for that either.

I got lucky and went to an art magnet high school, and I think that was when I started learning that it was something more viable. I was really lucky too, to have really good teachers there. From there, I went to the Rhode Island School of Design and I majored in illustration. I think at that time, I really started experimenting with what exactly I wanted to do with my artwork. When I initially entered the school, I thought I was going to go in for game design or something like that, like League of Legends vibe, which is funny because I don’t even play video games! I just thought that was the move. I play Animal Crossing and that’s about it. I tried everything out. I did internships in graphic design, like typography. I did these avocado toasts, social media, boba vibe illustrations for this alarm clock company. I took courses in children’s book drawing. I did some editorial design, also came designs of 3D modeling. I got to explore the full gamut.

But I was always very stubborn about what I wanted to draw and what I wanted to express. That was really only conveyed through a personal practice. I ultimately ended up pivoting back to painting. But even now, I think my painting is like a cross between illustration and painting. I still love everything, but I am not really trying to do one thing only. I’d love to continue experimenting. But that’s how I’ve arrived at the present moment, just trying out a bunch of different things and seeing what stuck.

Your paintings are universes—they could be video games, they could be children’s books. That’s what’s so lovely about it —it’s so clear you have such a rich inner world, even if it’s not primarily in the subconscious, even if it’s just you experiencing the everyday, I think it’s very clear in your art. You grew up in Vancouver, right?

Yes. I’m actually still here. I grew up in Greater Vancouver, then I moved to Rhode Island for college. After Rhode Island, I went to LA because my old roommate was there. I figured, “Yeah, try it out.” It’s a big frenetic city compared to what I’m used to. I mean, Rhode Island is beautiful and lovely, but it’s small. It’s very much a bubble. The part of Vancouver I’m from is also a very small town. Hopefully, I will be back in LA soon. That’s the goal.

What was it like going from living in these small places to a bigger city? Do you feel like the reason your painting and your art was so imaginative was because you were in these smaller places, and then you’d imagine more of a hustle-bustle, in-dream world thing? How did it inform living in a small city versus living in a bigger city inform your art, if it did at all?

I like that question. I haven’t thought about that yet. I always felt very outcast and very loser-ish as a kid. A lot of the things that I wanted to express ended up being expressed through artwork, which is why I clung onto it so much. It was really my therapy in the world. My style really started to evolve in college. It continues to evolve, of course. But I don’t know if it’s so much about the city. I do know that my environments do affect me though because I notice that in the winter time, they get more dark and grungy, and in Spring it’s all color.

I don’t know if LA has influenced me so much in terms of my style, but there is a very lovely, creative, frenetic energy that I really love about the city that I think is sometimes harder to find in smaller cities. Everyone just wants to chat with each other. For me, coming from the smaller town situation, there’s a shamelessness I felt in terms of approaching people.

I read in a previous interview of yours too that even your own perceptions change over time in terms of looking at your own art. A “death of the author” element. How do you reflect on that?

At RISD I had really amazing professors and peers, but I got stuck at certain points. Because my work was always a little too opaque, too metaphorical for illustration, and a little too illustrative for painting.

I look back on my work and it’s so different. But I understand it was one of those things where it’s like, “I needed to try it to see if I could like it.” Again, just seeing what stuck.

It’s interesting to see the tendencies that I’ve carried with me. Graphite is a big one. I love graphite, and I love detail and I love texture. Color was a big thing that I had to develop that wasn’t super inherent in my earlier work, but I think I always had an inclination to more pastel colors. So there’s definitely some constant.

It makes a lot of sense too, when you think about how you were literally playing and forming your identity during that time and finding your style. There’s a lot of joy to that too. I’ve talked to a lot of people where once you develop your style, once you have a brand, then it becomes a lot more restrictive, and then you’re like, “Ooh, people expect this from me now.” Are you at that point yet, or are you still finding a lot of play and wonder?

I definitely think I hit that roadblock. Now it’s so unpredictable being online. I feel a greater sense of fear posting my work than I did. It’s like, I should be posting once a week. I need to make reels. My reels maybe need to have my face in it. I don’t know.

There is a different pressure that I feel I didn’t have in school where I was just playing and playing. But recently, I finally started to allow myself to experiment more again. As much as I still love social media and want to continue posting my work, I’ve hit a point where the algorithm can be unpredictable and unforgiving. More than anything, it’s a disservice to yourself to try and follow a trend. Constantly trying to achieve something will never make you ahead of that curve.

At the same time, it gave me this new freedom to just experiment. I’m at this point where I’ve done some stuff and want to continue building up real life connections, I want to experiment and expand. In that way, it’s been nice. I feel like I have a lot more freedom to grow and experiment. Spending time at home too has also given me that space to really just play around and make ugly things.

I mean, I think that’s awesome to hear that you went through that entire journey. The algorithm is such a black box, nobody knows what works. At some point, creatives find they’re spending more time marketing than creating and giving into that chaos. It’s awesome it’s a journey that you’ve reached the other side of. What does the experimentation look like for you?

Right now, I’ve been going back down the nostalgia rabbit hole. I think it’s a byproduct of living at home. But I’ve started these childlike drawings. It’s one of those things that I just wanted to do and get it out of my system. I’m also experimenting with Shrinky Dinks as of late.

Part of my little frolicking experimenting journey so far has also included writing. I do not consider myself a writer by any means, but I do my little Notes app poetry. I wrote my first really short story based off childhood, but also tying in other themes that I’m grappling with. That has been serving as a launchpad for the series that I’m working on, and it involves crows and towers. I’m hoping it’ll resemble a comic book a little.

I feel like everybody in every medium expresses something like that. Like, when do you consider yourself a real anything? Is it when you’re published, is it when you have your own solo show? Is it when you make your own album if you’re a musician? There’s no metric for this… There’s no clear ladder.

Art is just this amorphous thing. The term artist is so vague. Anyone can be an artist. There’s no parameter, and yet we built them.

Totally. It’s a hard thing, I think, for any creative to unlearn, especially if you don’t grow up with those role models or those examples when you’re a child. I certainly didn’t. I just didn’t know that you could be an artist, and that was a career.

Art is such a strange thing to navigate. There’s a lot of facade happening. It’s hard.

Network and luck too.

I got lucky in LA because I knew a couple of people that I could reach out to, and I got to meet a bunch of different primarily creative, really awesome people who aren’t necessarily in the creative space too but do fun cool things.

I was literally talking with my friend the other day. Her name’s Rozie, and she’s a musician. We were talking about this Andy Warhol house that was being developed in his prime, with his artist friends. It was this beautiful space where everyone was bouncing all of these things off of each other. I’ve been thinking about community cultivation and things like that. Recently, I was invited to this online space actually called MEs market. I think the easiest way to explain it is like a metaverse, but just frolic with friends and see the beautiful creative things. A virtual space away from social media, but also just very socially generative.

What are your dream collaborations? What makes a good collaboration?

My favorite collaborations always have to do with clothing. I love fashion, but I’m so terrible at sewing. I couldn’t do it, but I could collaborate with someone who can do it. I really like those collaborations because I get to dip my toes into a different medium. I also really enjoy album covers. I love music.

My favorite things are where I can learn from other people and what they’re thinking about and we can connect on different things. I guess my dream collabs would involve things where I can experiment and make things that are more immersive.

I love Yoshitomo Nara. There’s this exhibition, I think he did at the LACMA where he built these little houses for his little big-headed girls, and it’s like you’re literally in their room. I would love to do something like that where it’s very immersed in that reality. I would love to do a fashion show or something like that. Those are my dreams at the moment.

Evelyn Tan recommends:

Alyce Yang
Rozie Ramati
Nhi
Maggie
Sahara Clemons

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jun Chou.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/28/artist-evelyn-tan-on-seeing-what-sticks/feed/ 0 529843 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/25/harry-belafonte-using-art-for-good/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/25/harry-belafonte-using-art-for-good/#respond Fri, 25 Apr 2025 19:37:10 +0000 https://therealnews.com/?p=333734 Harry Belafonte was the “King of Calypso.” Singer, actor, and above all, an activist who fought racism and oppression throughout his life. This is episode 25 of Stories of Resistance.]]>

A smooth velvet voice.

A voice that sang folk songs 

From the shores of the Caribbean.

But Harry Belafonte was so much more than that. 

He was born in Harlem, New York. 1927.

To parents from Jamaica. 

Growing up, he lived in Jamaica with his grandparents for several years before returning to the US and joining the Navy to fight in World War II.

When he returned, he worked as a janitor.

Got into theater. 

And began to sing to pay the bills. 

The Black activist and singer Paul Robeson took him under his wing. 

And Belafonte’s career took off. 

You know this song. It was the top track on Belafonte’s hit debut record, Calypso. 

That topped the charts for half a year.

And Harry Belafonte was transformed into the “King of Calypso,” a style of music which originated in Trinidad and Tobago in the late 1800s. 

He sang folk songs. Caribbean songs. Pop songs. Spiritual songs. And songs of resistance. 

His last studio album, in 1988, was a compilation of 10 protest songs against South African apartheid. 

He acted, performing in more than a dozen movies throughout his career. 

“I’m not a politician, I’m an artist, and if my art is done well, that in itself is a contribution.”

A contribution for change.

See, though Harry Belafonte was a great musician and actor, he was also, more than anything else, an activist. 

A fighter against racism and oppression, in the United States and around the world.

“As long as there is racism, I’m gonna be on fire,” he once said.

“Racismo in its subtlest and its most evil sense has worked its way into the fiber and the hearts and minds of many men and women. And with this going on, it’s had an incredible influence on my own life. I was born in the ghetto. My mother was a domestic worker. My father was a seaman. And I grew up in the West Indies. My uncles and aunts were farmers. Under British exploitation.”

He joined the civil rights movement. He marched alongside Martin Luther King. 

“To be a part of the movement that Dr. King led was the greatest moment of my life.”

He helped to fund civil rights organizing and groups. 

He helped organize the 1963 March on Washington.

When Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders were jailed,

Harry Belafonte helped to bail them out. 

When he had a hard time renting an apartment in Manhattan, because he was Black.

He bought the building and helped other Black artists move in and find a home. 

He was a true American patriot. Ever fighting for justice and equality. 

Ever fighting to make the United States better. 

He also denounced the US abroad. He demanded an end to the endless wars, apartheid, and the US blockade on Cuba.

Here’s just one clip from an interview he did with the CBC in 1967:

“I fought in the Second World War. I was told then and I fought with the knowledge that this was the war to end all wars and we were going to defeat fascism and mankind could turn its attention to the best of us in man. And now I come and my son is 10 years old, and I will arm him with everything I can, so he can be free of any primitive medieval concepts about false patriotism, about boundaries and the meaning of flags. Mankind is much bigger than all these primitive symbols. And I don’t want to see my boy with his face stuck in some rice paddy off in Vietnam, or off in some other land, protecting the interests of the establishment and trying to reward their greed with his life. I’m opposed to it.”

Harry Belafonte stood up for justice and against oppression throughout his life. 

And he remained active into his ’90s, working for prison reform, denouncing the Iraq War, George W. Bush, Trump, and so much more.

Harry Belafonte passed away on April 25, 2023.

His work and his melodies sing on.

###

Hi folks. Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Michael Fox. Like so many others I am grateful to my parents to have raised me listening to Harry Belafonte. And I was even more grateful when I learned what an incredible person and activist he was…. Using his music and his success for good.

This is episode 25 of Stories of Resistance — a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow my reporting and support at www.patreon.com/mfox.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.

---

This is episode 25 of Stories of Resistance — a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. You can also follow Michael’s reporting and support at patreon.com/mfox.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

Links for some old clips of Harry Belafonte:

Harry Belafonte Interview on Activism Through Art (1958)

Harry Belafonte on racism, patriotism & war, 1967: CBC Archives | CBC

Harry Belafonte’s Best Crime Thriller? Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) | BlackTree TV

Harry Belafonte in Concert (Japan, 1960)

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/25/harry-belafonte-using-art-for-good/feed/ 0 529545 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/25/ryan-coogler-on-sinners-delta-blues-music-and-questioning-genre-in-art/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/25/ryan-coogler-on-sinners-delta-blues-music-and-questioning-genre-in-art/#respond Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:25:27 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=07fa08fa081ac39ee15f0b074351f240
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/25/ryan-coogler-on-sinners-delta-blues-music-and-questioning-genre-in-art/feed/ 0 529511 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/24/visual-artist-bethany-collins-on-the-power-of-saying-no/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/24/visual-artist-bethany-collins-on-the-power-of-saying-no/#respond Thu, 24 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/visual-artist-bethany-collins-on-the-power-of-saying-no I love the texts that you use in your work. I’m curious to hear how you developed that as part of your practice. What does that process look like?

I was making representational work in grad school, and the critiques that I got in response to the work I didn’t know how to respond to. All of the work had been about American history and racial identity for a while. And so the critiques I got were personal questions versus actually being about the work and I wasn’t sure how to respond to them. So I actually started taking that language from those critiques and writing it obsessively, repeating it, and that’s how I uncovered the formal threads that still exist in the work today. They come from that attempt at figuring out, what are you really asking me? And where’s the problem in the language that I can feel it, but I can’t pinpoint, I can’t name it yet?

And then if I repeat it long enough and obsess on it, can I transform the language into something more for me, beautiful? Beauty is often what I’m aiming for. I want to go from problem to beauty.

And this continues into my work with The Odyssey, something that feels unwieldy and not mine, by the end of it, can I make it mine too? I’ve stopped using personal language because I’m less interested in sharing biography. I look for much more historical documents.

It’s so hard to connect to The Odyssey in a personal way.

I enjoy the series because I’m still interested in why other artists are so in love with this text. And maybe by the end of the series I’ll get there too. Not so far. It’s not my fave.

Interesting. I assumed that you were working with texts that you enjoyed specifically… I guess that there’s some emotional response or attachment there, but can you articulate what that response is?

I came to the The Odyssey after the 2016 election, and I’d been reading all that apocalyptic literature, a lot of which I enjoy reading. Then I read an interview by Emily Wilson because her translation came out in 2017 of The Odyssey, and she was the first woman to translate it. What caught me first was her articulating why she felt like a new translation of The Odyssey was necessary. She mentions that the first line of the text has already been translated 36 different ways. And from one word we’ve gotten 36 often opposing, contradictory translations. The word has been translated to mean that he’s adventurous or cunning or shifty or restless or mysterious, tossed to and fro by fate. It’s positive and negative.

And she finally translates it to say he’s just a complicated man. And in that one word, she manages to encircle all the other translations that have come before her. So that caught me.

And then in Book 13, Odysseus finally reaches his homeland after 10 years of war. He finally stands on his own shoreline, looks around and doesn’t recognize where he is. And that felt like a metaphor for America post-2016. That your homeland can feel really familiar and also deeply estranging simultaneously.

Definitely.

So when I say I’m not enamored by the text, I mean that the reading of it is not like a pleasure read. But that metaphor felt like a bomb in that moment. It gave language to what that feeling was like.

Since 2016, how has your relationship to Book 13 shifted?

When I first started working with The Odyssey, and especially in the aftermath of that election, every time I would talk about the series, it would catch in my throat. But by the time it stopped catching in my throat, I knew that the series was ending. Each series has a natural death embedded in it. They will not last forever because language is always changing.

So I actually thought it was almost over. But in this era, the second Trump administration, I’ve been thinking about Book 13 again. He’s just rambling at Athena and he says, “Are the people here, are they cruel and lawless or unjust? Are they wild? Are they barbarous? Are they arrogant? Or do they love strangers?”

He set this paradigm: you can be all of these horrible things but the only other parameter to be a good person in the world is how you treat the stranger. I think I’m going to return to it for those because it feels unfortunately apt for the moment.

Have you felt people push back against your mode, which feels like it isn’t about self-expression, and is interested in these historical texts?

My work is a balance of form and concept. It’s not satisfying unless both of them are palpable. So I usually have some sort of limitation that involves the body. And to me, that’s the self-expressive part. Whether it looks like it or not, it’s still in there. And it requires some sort of obsessive endurance test of the body on my part. And it may or may not be visible by the end.

In my Southern Review series, I kept getting this question about, oh, what does it mean to be a Southern artist? I had never thought of myself as Southern until then. So I found the Southern Review Journal, started taking out the pages and filling in the body of each page’s text with this really sooty, deep charcoal.

And I was trying to keep them super clean and precise until I realized the good shit was my fingerprints all over the surface, all the mistakes, the human part of it. So my body is literally part of the work by the end. And all of that, to me, feels like it’s about a kind of mastery of language that felt unwieldy and outside of my control. It didn’t involve me. It felt like something else. And by the end of it feels like mine. I am at least part of the story.

Has it been hard to get people to understand what you’re trying to do?

I feel like it’s been a slow burn. I teach at the University of Chicago too, and sometimes students have a material or a process that they’re wedded to and it means everything for them. And sometimes no one knows what it means yet, so either you can alter it to get your meaning across, or you’ve got to just stick with it for 10 years until people catch up to your language. And either is a route. I think by now I’ve got a body of language that is more easily decipherable. It’s my glossary. It’s more easily understood, but it’s taken a while.

How do you structure work and your art life? How do you balance it?

I slam my classes that I teach on one day a week back to back, so it’s really long day and then the rest of the week is studio time. But I try to say “no” more.

That’s hard to do.

I’m 40 now and it’s been easier to say no every year. This didn’t use to be the case, but these days I have more ideas than I have time. I want to do what I want to do as much as possible.

Well, there are worse places to be in artistically.

Yeah. When I was in residence at Studio Museum, I went to dinner at a really good Sichuan place and Greta Gerwig was sitting next to me and I kept eavesdropping on her conversation. The interviewer was like, “You’re really hitting your stride. How’s that feel?” And she was like, “Am I ever going to not feel like this is the last thing I’ll ever do? Everything feels like it might slip away from me.” I don’t know that for creative people that feeling ever goes away.

Do you have a support system of artists that help with those moments?

Yeah. I know people who are at different places, some who are overwhelmingly busy and others who are in a really quiet spot and waiting for the next opportunity.

I grew up in Alabama and I got my BA in Alabama and then my MFA in Atlanta. When I got to Studio Museum in Harlem, I remember feeling like everybody already knew each other and I was the odd person out. And so I did a couple years of residencies just to fill the gap. I was meeting everybody, curators and artists, collectors. But I had to travel around the country to do it. It felt like my other MFA program. And then I picked Chicago because there was a really nice group of Black artists who were here. That was seven years ago. Chicago has been really good to me.

But I also feel really envious of artists who can live and work from home. When you leave, there’s such a dearth of a different kind of resource. Knowing that you can call on a community that is your home base. You don’t have that when you’re the new person in town. It has other advantages, big cities. I feel jealous sometimes of artists who can make it back where they’re from.

What are you working on right now?

I think I’m going to do a new suite of circular scores. I’ve been working with different versions of these patriotic anthems in order to do that. There are certain songs where the melody stays consistent, but then the lyrics have been rewritten over time for different political causes.

“Star Spangled Banner” has been rewritten for native sovereignty, revolution, temperance. There are suffrage and confederate versions. There’s abolitionist versions of the song. Versions for labor movements. There are Klan versions as well. And so they track American history, as the lyrics shift and different authors are rewriting it.

I started this series by researching a hundred versions of the Star Spangled Banner, binding them together in the same hymnal body and then burning the musical notation away, because that’s the thing that holds all these different versions together. Then only the declensions remain.

I think I want to do one for “Stars Fell on Alabama” next. The song comes from a meteorite shower that spread across North America in the 1830s. It was in the southeast, and then highly concentrated in Alabama. And a lot of people who witnessed it thought that it was the end of the world, the apocalypse. People started to fervently pray, to make confessions. So a lot of plantation owners told enslaved people on the plantation where they had sold all of their family to. They confessed all of their sins. And then the next day, everything is fine, the world goes on, and the song eventually becomes this little romantic ditty.

Wow. That is fascinating.

Isn’t that weird? I don’t know what I want to do with it yet. But it encapsulates the beauty and horror of the South and now the rest of the nation too. It feels apt.

I think there is something oddly hopeful in your work. It’s an act of faith to me to return to these texts and see commonalities, even when it feels like they might be so alien to us now.

I think so. It’s as hopeful as I can get—that maybe it’ll turn out better this time.

Bethany Collins recommends:

The Odyssey, Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

The Nature Book, Tom Comitta

The Broken Earth trilogy, N.K. Jemisin

The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men, Catherine Lord

Alice Coltrane, “Going Home,” Lord of Lords

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Claudia Ross.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/24/visual-artist-bethany-collins-on-the-power-of-saying-no/feed/ 0 529102 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/16/a-comparison-trumps-the-art-of-the-deal-and-sun-tzus-the-art-of-war/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/16/a-comparison-trumps-the-art-of-the-deal-and-sun-tzus-the-art-of-war/#respond Wed, 16 Apr 2025 05:57:43 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=360558 Donald J. Trump’s The Art of the Deal (1987) and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (5th century BCE) outline winning strategies. The Art of War is a Chinese classic read worldwide in military colleges to appreciate the battlefield. The Art of the Deal is gaining importance because its author is now the U.S. President. More

The post A Comparison: Trump’s The Art of the Deal and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Trump The Art of The Deal, cover, first edition – Fair Use

Donald J. Trump’s The Art of the Deal (1987) and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (5th century BCE) outline winning strategies. The Art of War is a Chinese classic read worldwide in military colleges to appreciate the battlefield. The Art of the Deal is gaining importance because its author is now the U.S. President.  Trump wrote the book as a realtor, but as the president, he is extending its lessons to reshape the global markets, with the central engagement being with China, the second most powerful world economy after the U.S.

To some readers, these two books share little except “Art” in their titles. Digging deep into these texts reveals fantastic insights about how Trump and Sun Tzu think about conflicts and their solutions. In this article, I draw central commonalities and differences between these texts.

Riskophilia

The Art of the Deal opens with the author saying, “I do it to do it. Deals are my art form.” Just as painters “paint beautifully on canvas” and poets write “wonderful poetry,” Trump says, “I like making deals, preferably big deals. That is how I get my kicks.” Trump’s mindset is searching for massive conflicts to get a big kick out of the deals. Trump imposed trade tariffs on friends and foes alike, almost on the entire world, and then boasted that countries are “kissing my ass” to make deals. Trump is doing exactly what he said in The Deal.

The Art of War opens on a cautionary note, warning that “war is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin.” Therefore, Tzu says a conflict, when it surfaces, is “a subject of inquiry” that requires deliberations “to determine the conditions obtaining in the field.” The decision to go to war is never easy because the probability of ruin “can on no account be neglected.”

The two mindsets are opposite. Trump is riskophile, Tzu is not. Trump generates ventures for potential deals, whereas Tzu is indisposed to go to war. For Tzu, the excitement, drama, commotion, and adrenaline rush of entering a combat zone are undesirable, if not unfortunate, collaterals of conflicts. For Trump, a battlefield without a thrill is tiresome. In 2017, President Trump dropped the GBU-43/B, the mother of all bombs, in Afghanistan, the only time this bomb has been used in combat. This bombing made no strategic difference to the war in Afghanistan. Tzu values restraint and preservation, even in using force, urging rulers to avoid unnecessary combats that drain resources and morale.

Improvisation

Trump believes in instincts as the foundation of making lucrative deals. In explaining the element of the deal, Trump says: “You can take the smartest kid at Wharton, the one who gets straight As and has a 170 IQ, and if he doesn’t have the instincts, he’ll never be successful entrepreneur.” This element may have some validity; what it does is it relies on nature over nurture, instincts over deliberations, and improvisation over careful planning.

Consequently, the visceral art of making a deal leads to chaos and confusion, as we notice with Trump’s tariff policy, where in some cases he is improvising by imposing and pausing tariffs, and in other cases “pushing and pushing to get what I am after.” Hopefully, the economists on Trump’s team will be vigilant about Trump’s actions because an instinct-based trade policy can damage the world economic order built over decades of bilateral and multilateral negotiations. The World Trade Organization has been reasonably practical, if not perfect, in managing international trade. A thrill-seeking dealmaker cannot be allowed to dismantle the world economic order by improvisation.

By contrast, Tzu advocates strategic wisdom in dealing with conflicts. He suggests that a comparative data-based study of conflict dynamics mandates that rulers assess their strengths and weaknesses and those of the enemy. Tzu asks which rulers going to war have superior popular support, which generals on the opposite sides command more ability, and “on which side is discipline most rigorously enforced?” These knowledge-based parameters are the direct opposite of instinct-based improvisation. In response to Trump’s imposition of the most tariffs on China, the Chinese vow to “fight to the end,” indicating preparation in sync with The Art of War.

Winning Without Fighting

Perhaps the most significant difference between Trump and Tzu in resolving disputes hinges on the decision to go to war. Trump says you must fight to win; Tzu suggests winning without fighting. Tzu is not a pacifist; otherwise, he would have written a book on The Art of Peacemaking. His teachings emphasize that the battlefield wastes assets and life, and what else can beat a victory obtained without wasting resources?  “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill,” says Tzu.

Tzu recommends psychological warfare in winning without fighting: “If the enemy is in superior strength, avoid him.” Pretend as if you are incompetent. If the enemy has a combustible temper, seek to irritate him. “Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.” Vice President Vance berated the Chinese, saying, “We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.” This putdown would work well if the Chinese had a “choleric temper.” But they don’t, and therefore, the logic of irritation as the art of the deal might not work against the Chinese.

Trump says he hates war, and perhaps he does. However, in The Art of the Deal, Trump invites the fight and presumes that fighting is optimal for making a deal. A deal without a fight does not produce the best outcomes. Trump is more like those lawyers who see trial and litigation as prerequisites for resolving disputes. Show your force before you settle. This approach to winning increases the transaction cost of conflict resolution as parties expend vast amounts of resources on litigation and harassing each other.

Fighting back is one of Trump’s prime strategies. “When people take advantage of me, I fight back very hard,” Trump says. However, fighting back is not a winning strategy if the opponent is superior in strength, cleverer, or more patient to absorb the losses before hitting the knockout. Thus, fighting back even for “something you believe in” is an impulse but not a smart strategy. “All warfare is based on deception” is the most central principle of The Art of War. Accordingly, one could infer that per Tzu, if you are weak, do not fight back, for they will annihilate you. If you are strong, you can still forge a victory without fighting.

Conclusion

It is rare in history that books written centuries apart directly compete in a battlefield, like The Art of the Dealand The Art of War. One author is the current president of the U.S., the largest superpower in the world, and the other author, dead for centuries, does not even know that his book offers insights into commercial warfare as well. Observers contrast the behaviors of Trump and his counterparts in China.  The world is not interested in which strategy between instincts and data-based preparation will finally succeed. It wishes to restore and amend the badly wounded world economic order. The people witness the drama while markets breathe heavily, in and out, to register the effects of riskophilia, improvisation, and winning without fighting.

The post A Comparison: Trump’s The Art of the Deal and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by L. Ali Khan.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/16/a-comparison-trumps-the-art-of-the-deal-and-sun-tzus-the-art-of-war/feed/ 0 525997 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/the-art-of-the-schlemiel-the-grayzone-live/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/the-art-of-the-schlemiel-the-grayzone-live/#respond Fri, 11 Apr 2025 16:28:55 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=fa920a1186e82f0d782bdcece4720b9c
This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/the-art-of-the-schlemiel-the-grayzone-live/feed/ 0 525222 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/the-art-of-the-schlemiel-the-grayzone-live-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/the-art-of-the-schlemiel-the-grayzone-live-2/#respond Fri, 11 Apr 2025 16:28:55 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=fa920a1186e82f0d782bdcece4720b9c
This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/11/the-art-of-the-schlemiel-the-grayzone-live-2/feed/ 0 525223 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/10/artist-and-naturalist-rosie-brand-on-choosing-to-collaborate-instead-of-compete/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/10/artist-and-naturalist-rosie-brand-on-choosing-to-collaborate-instead-of-compete/#respond Thu, 10 Apr 2025 07:00:00 +0000 https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/artist-and-naturalist-rosie-brand-on-choosing-to-collaborate-instead-of-compete I read somewhere that you grew up in a rural part of the UK. I would love to learn a bit more about your origin story. How did you first fall in love with the natural world?

I’ve had a relationship with the natural world since I can remember. I grew up in the countryside between Oxford and London. The first place my family lived was really out there, down unlit, unmade roads, a cottage on a common with farms all around. It was very idyllic in my memory and I had a lot of freedom to roam around the shared common. We later moved, closer to London, into “the commuter belt” and it felt less free and wild. But still, my teens were spent getting up to no good in a field in the middle of nowhere.

My mum always loved long walks in the woods and fields. I really came to naturalism after I spent a year living with her in adulthood, caring for her when she was dying. Walking around the country paths, staying connected to the seasonal changes through plants like blackberry and bulrushes and wildflowers, helped me through that time. In the aftermath of her death, back in Los Angeles, I really tried to root myself to the land by learning the names of plants, like chaparral yucca, penstemon, wild cucumber, mugwort and mulefat. I learned to recognise them as individuals, as neighbors. That’s how I put myself back together after I lost her.

When did you know you wanted to be an artist? And did you always know these two interests would find a way to merge together?

I don’t know if I ever really decided to be an artist. I was always making something. Often I chose to slack off other responsibilities and play in my own world. The rest is just luck, that I’ve found ways to continue doing that. I hope it doesn’t run out, I don’t want to grow up.

As for Naturalism, it was therapeutic and if anything complimentary. When I went through difficult times, I turned to the living world around me. Whenever I am stuck, or I haven’t got a project going on, I go out and and hike and draw and it’s as if I don’t have to worry about deciding what I’m going to do and how I’m going to make something happen that seems impossible, because there is life all around, I just have to listen and it will be ok somehow.

I know you are a certified CA Naturalist. What is that exactly?

A naturalist is somebody who is actively interested in the natural world, using their senses to directly engage with the environment as a way of learning about it. You can keep a field journal, make notes of the specimens you see on your walks or in your neighborhood, look up the names, notice how they change seasonally, and figure out who makes up the plant and animal communities around you.

I like to think of myself as an amateur naturalist, even though I have this certification. I like the idea that anyone can do it. The only tools that you need are your senses, your imagination and curiosity. You can even be a naturalist inside and be studying the bacteria in your own body. It’s just about taking your cues from other-than-human teachers around you and having that inquisitiveness.

It sounds very similar to the curiosity that is required to be an artist. You’re also an interdisciplinary artist, sculptor, writer, and teacher. In your opinion what is the intersection between art making and the natural world? How do they complement one another? Do they ever get in each other’s way?

Having been an assistant for lots of different artists I’ve noticed that the materials being used and the effect they have on the world around us is not always considered. Being an artist or craftsperson within capitalism, there’s so much waste. There’s such a rush to get things made. There’s a carelessness in some aspects of art making. I think art can be impactful without the use of toxic materials. I’m not pointing fingers. It’s very ubiquitous and accepted in capitalism. There’s this pressure and tightness around people to make stuff at such a pace that is suffocating, and makes you feel like choices are limited.

After seeing that modelled everywhere, I was hoping to find another way. I gravitated towards people and projects that were trying to think about things differently, to work alongside the natural world and its processes in ways that were less extractive, to resist the demands of productivity and change our mindset.

In terms of intersections, I love to work collaboratively across disciplines. I’m not a scientist. But I love to find botanists and ecologists who have a very specific niche interest. I was working recently with the seed botanists at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, who have been studying incredibly rare native seeds and have such a fine tuned microscopic focal point. Talking to them, speculating into their research from a sculptor’s point of view, I could tell they were so excited to share and imagine new possibilities. It was energizing for all of us.

What and who inspires you?

I’m a massive book worm and I love science fiction. I love Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler. And more recently, I’ve been very inspired by contemporary horror writers like Brian Evenson and Marianna Enriquez, who put words to some of the darkness of our world. Donna Haraway and adrienne maree brown have been hugely important in affecting my thinking. My favorite artist right now is Ithell Colquhoun, a queer occult surrealist who painted the Cornish landscape from an esoteric spiritual perspective.

What’s your take on competition?

I don’t think competing with your peers is especially helpful. Filtered through the algorithm, or through the bubbles you find yourself in, it might seem like so many people are making similar work right now. I think Laurie Anderson once said (excuse my paraphrasing) that this idea of competition is useless, the world needs changing and it needs new perspectives. Instead of thinking of yourself in competition with those other voices, why not join a flock of birds? Because we need an upswell to change things.

In capitalism and Western society, we’re so focused on the individual, the solo artist, and it becomes this obsession with being the only one saying something the loudest, and that doesn’t ever work, right?

The problem with that idea of “genius” is that it’s implied that an idea is going to be bestowed on you from above, and you’re going to be the voice of a generation. But actually, it comes from the ground. It comes up from the roots. The mycelial network that connects all of us. It’s in the bacteria. It’s not something that one person can ‘discover’. It’s all around us all the time. We can’t do any of this on our own, we have to work together to remember how to live right with the world.

I would love to hear a bit about worm school. Why is community so important?

Community is everything. Finding peers helps you keep going. worm school is like a collectively held grass-roots grad school. Or maybe it’s the complete opposite, because it lacks the characteristics of an institution, the grades and competition and jumping through somebody else’s hoops. The worms are a kind of cohort, we are five artists, who work in clay. We found each other online during the pandemic, and we started to meet regularly to discuss research that intersected with our practices, the relationships between soil and craft.

The name comes from one of the first texts we studied together, Donna Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble. She proposes the need for humans to align themselves with other-than-human beings. To learn from them and look after them as kin. We decided we were earthworm symbionts. Worms are thought of as lowly, but they digest our waste and turn it into fertile soil, breaking down big things into tiny workable components. They work collectively, iteratively, outside the linear timeframes imposed on us by capitalism.

The worm is also a reference to coiling, a ceramic handbuilding technique where you roll long worms and build forms up in their spirals. We talk and make together, often combining the digestion of research with crafting something with our hands- advocating for a different way of processing, embodied thinking, beyond intellectual.

Where do you get your ideas from?

I don’t know if I have ideas. Maybe it’s so cheesy to think “ideas have you,” haha. But they do!

We talk about this with worm school, how there’s patterns at play in very old craft traditions. Like there’s a way of doing things that repeat, sometimes because it’s intrinsically related to the material’s essential nature, like clay. Or in fiber arts, when there’s literally a pattern you are translating. You are one pair of hands in a long chain. I like to think of those patterns, ideas almost like the bacterial communities in our guts that are said to control our desires for food, like symbionts who inhabit a host and organise them. The pattern possesses you, it leads the way and you just follow through.

What do you find to be the most rewarding part of making art?

When I’m really in the thick of making something, I get sucked in, I lose myself. There’s such a buzz in bringing something into being. Nothing else matters, I don’t feel self-conscious or anxious. Time just disappears.

What is the least rewarding part of making art?

How much you really have to fight for the right to be an artist. There have been times in my life where certain people, family, acquaintances, my dentist, are so disbelieving that I would choose this life path, that anyone would be able to survive doing it. It is true that it’s so difficult, at times exhausting. But in no other line of work is the second question after “What do you do?…And do you make money doing that? Do you make a living?” That can be really trying, demeaning even. You tell somebody that this is how you make your life, and you have to prove your worth every single time.

Maybe I’m just mad at the context, I feel like making art has been simultaneously undervalued and yet cordoned off as a luxury activity. You are expected to do so much work for free in the arts, there are times when I can’t pay the bills, I have to scramble, ask for help, do some side thing, compromise. And every time I have to do that, I doubt that my art is real, that I can even call myself an artist.

How can the essence of human culture—art, song, dance, story, what we do to express ourselves, to communicate, to understand our world be considered a luxury only available to a privileged few? That makes me angry. Art belongs to all of us. It’s a language. It’s worth supporting the people who make it.

Some of your sculptures take seemingly mundane seed pods and blow them up into larger scale ceramic objects. Why is it important to see things at different scales?

I have had various projects where I’ve been inspired by something that seems maybe mundane, but when you focus on something that is often overlooked, there is a whole universe there. There’s so much complexity around us.

When I first began studying local ecology, I gathered seed pods on walks around the neighborhood and hikes in the foothills near my studio. They’re such intricate alien structures. Like extraterrestrial spaceships, but in fact they are earthly. I realized they were such a good analogy for the vessel, which is so important to ceramics. They are these vessels that contain seeds, and are intended to disintegrate, they are essentially compost. After my mum died, I was thinking alot about what it means to carry, to care for and protect, and what it means to release. To hold space and also to let go. Seed pods were these unexpected teachers.

What do you do when you get stuck? Or hyper-fixated on something?

Sometimes, when I’m stuck and I don’t know what to do, I remind myself that feeling often happens right before something starts to flow. Maybe it’s just growing pains. Maybe it’s part of the whole process. You are percolating. I think all of the stages are part of the process.

When I get stuck on something, It can help to spend some time doing something completely different. Go learn something new. It can be a breath of fresh air when you start thinking about something in a totally different way.

Take a writing class, or take a botany class at a community college, or you just get really into cooking for a bit, or fermentation or something. And then you come back and you realize that you’ve been digesting and working over that thing that you were stuck on. And quite often, the area that you’ve been playing in, that you think is totally unrelated, has something to say about that thing that you were stuck on.

You are a multidisciplinary artist. How do you balance your many skill sets and interests? Do you ever get overwhelmed?

My studio mate said to me once, having too many ideas is the same as having no ideas, because you get overstimulated. It’s almost like being ADHD, like you can’t concentrate on one thing long enough to get anything really underway. Very recently, I’ve had to have that conversation with myself. How do I decide which direction to go? You’ve got to follow what draws you in, on a very intuitive gut feeling level. “This thing needs my attention right now and I’m going to ride it out.” And hopefully that works long enough that the thing that needs to happen, does. It’s a little bit woo-woo. You are not in control, you go to what draws you, you’re along for the ride.

Rosie Brand recommends:

Vesper, 2022, a French-Lithuanian-Belgian sci-fi film directed by Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper.

Always Coming Home / Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, both by Ursula K. Le Guin (cheating here with the double whammy but I think it’s so helpful to read these together, Carrier Bag is the theory and ACH is the practice.)

Phenomena, 1985 horror film directed by Dario Argento.

Immobility, Brian Evenson

Xenogenesis series by Octavia Butler

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diane Ruzova.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/10/artist-and-naturalist-rosie-brand-on-choosing-to-collaborate-instead-of-compete/feed/ 0 524860 https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/04/acknowledging-art/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/04/acknowledging-art/#respond Fri, 04 Apr 2025 05:55:02 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=359581 In American academic institutions it is now common practice, though by no means universal, to begin conferences, convocations, and even the occasional concert—though not yet, in my experience, sporting events—with land acknowledgements. These lay out in broadest terms the original residency of indigenous people and their displacement. Plans for restitution to the dispossessed or of More

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Fazioli Concert Grand (F-308).

In American academic institutions it is now common practice, though by no means universal, to begin conferences, convocations, and even the occasional concert—though not yet, in my experience, sporting events—with land acknowledgements. These lay out in broadest terms the original residency of indigenous people and their displacement. Plans for restitution to the dispossessed or of the often disfigured land itself do not figure in these utterances.

Increasingly, emails, even those conveying the most banal administrative info like when the next faculty meeting is to take place, contain a link to the university’s official land acknowledgment. These declarations often include vague gestures towards engagement with the issues raised by the profession of guilt. Even if a few faculty members are working vigorously to help right some of these myriad wrongs, one can bet that the president and trustees are much more concerned with the state of the endowment than with the rights of real people long since removed from their lands.

It is not only the theft of the land that deserves, indeed demands, acknowledgment, but also what it brings forth, whether locally or from distant regions. Where do the precious metals for this laptop or that EV come from? A QR code affixed to every Tesla and MacBook Pro should link to a website that accurately catalogs the elements inside, their geographic origins and environmental consequences, like a surgeon general’s warning for the health of the planet. Companies would opportunistically describe their sourcing and supply chains in egregiously green terms, but at least these might foster a greater awareness of globalization’s insatiable and destructive reach.

The composition of our cars and computers would rightly be followed by an account of their decomposition—where they end up and what becomes of them, from the plastic dumping grounds of Turkey to the electronics graveyards of Ghana.

Many in the upper classes assume that they have the right to know where their wine is from, and also if those pre-Trump tariff blueberries consumed in winter came from Mexico or points farther south? Labels inform us of the select ingredients listed on that box of artisanal crackers, but also comprehensively catalog the contents in Doritos Cool Ranch Tortilla Chips in a litany that begins benignly enough with corn, but before the benediction of disodium guanylate runs through such miracles of science as monosodium glutamate, maltodextrin, corn syrup solids, sodium acetate, disodium inosinate, and the Holy Trinity of Artificial Colors—Red 40, Blue 1, and Yellow 5.

Thus art improves on nature. Deaf to the truth that birds were the first singers, and remain the best, many people hold that human-made instruments produce superior music. Yet in eloquent mottoes that adorned their instruments, makers often acknowledged their debt to the materials they used. A favorite of mine describes the transformation of wood: “Dum vixi tacui: mortua dulce cano” (While living I was silent; dead, I sing sweetly).

Industrial production put an end to such rhetorical and ethical niceties. For more than a century the piano served as the middle-class entertainment center, felling elephants and ebony in vast numbers. According to National Association of Piano Dealers 261,197 pianos were sold in 1904, compared to 22,000 cars. Five years later annual sales of pianos had climbed to 364,545.

We are long past the piano’s zenith as a cultural commodity. Units sold has now dipped below 30,000 annually, yet upper-end firms like Steinway still tout their exotic veneers in Mahogany, Walnut, Kewazinga Bubinga, East Indian Rosewood, and Macassar Ebony. Many of these are threatened woods.

The Italian virtuoso, Maurizio Pollini, who died a year ago last week, was a Steinway Artist. His endorsement helped to sell pianos, and he was richly rewarded by the firm in kind and in cash. The company signed him on in 1960 after he won the Warsaw International Chopin Competition at the age of eighteen. That year he affirmed that “Steinway grand pianos are the best in the world.” In a storied career across six decades he appeared in the world’s most famous concert halls on pianos with “Steinway & Sons” stenciled in gold letters on the cheek of the instruments so that the audience couldn’t help but see the brand name.

Higher up the luxury ladder than even Steinway, and costing three times as much, latecomers Fazioli want nearly $300,000 for their 10-foot concert grands. Their advertising touts their soundboards taken from trees in the “Valley of Violins” in the mountains of northern Italy a hundred miles from their factory. It is from these same carefully managed forests that Antonio Stradivari drew the wood for his famed creations, by far the most expensive musical instruments by weight ever made.

Yet can these fragile valley hillsides sustain the nearly two hundred giant instruments that the Fazioli company makes each year?

Instead of only a brand name on the side of the piano, a QR code would tell audiences of the sources of the precious materials used in its fabrication and also remind us of the condition of the ecosystems where the woods for the soundboard and veneers came from.

Other necessary news would also be imparted. In October of 2018, a devastating storm, nicknamed Vaia, laid waste to much of the red spruce forest of the Val die Fiemme, home to the “Forest of Violins.” Yet Fazioli’s production schedule continued undeterred.

Aftermath of Tempesta Vaia, October, 2023, Vale.

People generally come to concerts for a mix of uplift and distraction. In the ritual of the concert, art not only improves on nature, but helps escape it. Musical evocations of alpine vistas, woodland walks, cathartic thunderstorms, goodly shepherds and their goodly sheep, and oracular birds are better than the real thing—less dirty, less taxing, less violent, and seemingly less perishable. A trip to the concert hall is not meant to be a guilt trip, though charity performances of Handel’s Messiah in the mid-18th century to BandAid in the late 20^th play on the feeling of music lovers for those in distress.

In dutifully listing their products’ ingredients, companies like Fazioli would capitalize on kindred sensibilities, doubtless asking audiences to pay into environmental funds that would probably do little to combat threats to the ecosystems their business relies on. Even in museums, institutions not so exposed to commercial considerations, the sourcing of materials for antique instruments is still rarely acknowledged. This must change. We need to know what environmental costs and crimes make possible those captivating musical strains, the very ones so intent on soothing our spirits and our consciences.

The post Acknowledging Art appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Yearsley.

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The Art Institute of Chicago announced recently that it had returned to Nepal a sculpture that had been in its collection for at least a quarter century. Conspicuously left out of the press release: that the sculpture had been a gift from a wealthy Chicago donor.

That omission obscured a simmering controversy about whether Chicago philanthropists Marilynn Alsdorf and her husband, James, both of whom are dead, improperly built their collection of hundreds of South Asian works and why the Art Institute, which houses some of that collection in its Alsdorf Galleries, has been reluctant to return those works to countries with compelling claims for them.

The 12th-century sculpture the museum returned to Nepal is called “Buddha Sheltered by the Serpent King Muchalinda” and is about 17.5 inches tall. The Art Institute said it was stolen from the Kathmandu Valley, although it’s unclear when the theft occurred or how or when the Alsdorfs acquired the piece.

It was among more than a dozen pieces identified by ProPublica and Crain’s Chicago Business in 2023 as having claims on them by other countries, including Nepal. At one time, each piece had belonged to the Alsdorfs, the investigation found.

The Art Institute devotes a page online to works that have been removed from its collection, a process museums call deaccessioning. But unlike other pages on its site about artwork or pieces on display, pages for deaccessioned items don’t include ownership information and, in this case, the listing doesn’t mention the Alsdorfs.

Melissa Kerin, the director of the Mudd Center for Ethics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and a professor of art history who specializes in South Asian and Tibetan art and architecture, said the Art Institute is trying to have it both ways with the Buddha’s repatriation. It is seeking credit for having a provenance division and returning the Buddha, she said, but is not disclosing the involvement of its own donors.

“It looks proactive. They’re getting rid of a problematic object,” said Kerin. “But people will never know the full details of it. They are face-saving the Alsdorfs and their relationship with them and with all donors. They have a lot to lose.”

The Alsdorfs, who lived in Chicago, were influential in the city’s art world, donating more than $20 million to the Art Institute over the course of their lives. James Alsdorf, the son of a Dutch diplomat and the owner of a business that manufactured glass coffee-making equipment, was chair of the museum’s board from 1975 to 1978. He died in 1990.

Marilynn Alsdorf was a trustee of the museum and president of its Woman’s Board. She exhibited her and her husband’s collection at the museum in 1997, and the Alsdorf Galleries opened in 2008. She died in 2019.

Controversy has surrounded the Alsdorfs’ vast collection for decades. In the 1970s, the Thai government sought the return of a stone carving, and, after a protest outside the museum, it was given back.

In 2002, a California man sued Marilynn Alsdorf to recover a Picasso painting called “Femme en Blanc,” or “Lady in White,” that he alleged had belonged to his grandmother before it was looted by the Nazis during World War II. Marilynn Alsdorf eventually paid the man $6.5 million in exchange for keeping the painting. She said she did nothing wrong in obtaining it.

Alsdorf’s son, Jeffrey, is listed in tax forms as the president of the Alsdorf Foundation, which gave the Art Institute a $40,000 educational grant or contribution as recently as 2023. Asked about the repatriation of the Buddha, he said, “I hope the deal goes through and everyone is happy with it.” Then he hung up on the reporter.

An official at the Embassy of Nepal in Washington said the deal had gone through and that she was present at a ceremony where the Buddha was handed over to Nepali officials. Several museum representatives took part in the ceremony and spoke about continuing to work with the Nepali officials.

The Art Institute spokesperson said in a statement that the museum is “committed to prioritizing provenance research across departments, which includes our Arts of Asia collection.” Over the last five years, the statement continued, the museum has created positions dedicated primarily to issues of provenance, including the role of executive director of provenance. The museum has previously said that many of the pieces the Alsdorfs donated were accepted and vetted under standards in place at the time.

The spokesperson said in the statement that the museum has returned two pieces in the past year from its permanent collection to their countries of origin and, over the past several years, has returned additional works that were on loan. The spokesperson didn’t provide details on those repatriations.

The Buddha, according to the statement, had been a “research priority” for the museum for several years. After obtaining new information about the sculpture, the Art Institute reached out to the government of Nepal in 2024 to begin the process of returning it to the country.

The museum appeared to draw a distinction between the return of the Buddha and the request from Nepal for the Taleju necklace’s return, saying: “The provenance of this object is separate from and not comparable to other objects in our collection.”

The spokesperson said in the statement that the museum had sent a letter to the government of Nepal in May 2022 asking for additional information about the necklace but that it was still waiting for a reply. Nonetheless, the museum said it has an “ongoing dialogue” with Nepali officials and will continue working with them. The embassy official did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the necklace or the museum’s request for additional information.

Adhikari, of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, said the Art Institute was intentionally making the process difficult for Nepal.

“I believe the burden of proof should be on the Art Institute of Chicago to prove that it belongs to them,” he said of the Taleju necklace. “This is a violation of our cultural rights.”

Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the Art Institute’s policy about objects it returns — the Buddha, for example — can make it harder for researchers to track an object’s provenance. It can also cast doubt on other objects in a collection.

“You don’t erase that history to save somebody a little embarrassment,” she said.

The Art Institute declined a request for an interview, but in response to written questions, a spokesperson said that it had followed a museum-wide policy on disclosing the history and ownership of deaccessioned objects. Once an object is no longer in the museum’s collections, it does not include the item’s provenance on its website — a practice some art historians criticize.

The investigation by the news organizations focused on an ornate piece called the Taleju necklace, an inscribed gilt-copper work embellished with semiprecious stones and intricate designs. A 17th-century Nepali king offered the necklace to the Hindu goddess Taleju.

Officials with the government in Nepal as well as activists have centered much of their attention on the necklace, which they believe was stolen during a period of political upheaval in the country. It remains prominently featured in the Alsdorf Galleries even though some say it is offensive to display such a sacred work in public.

Activists said that their frustration with the Art Institute applies to other pieces as well.

“It’s not only about the necklace,” said Sanjay Adhikari, a lawyer and secretary of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, an organization that seeks the return of a number of pieces taken from the country. “It’s about many other cultural properties out there. There’s a big frustration with the Art Institute of Chicago.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Steve Mills.

This will touch on something that is unusual about how I use programming languages in general. The common practice in the industry is one that involves very slow feedback loops, these things we call compile-test cycles: edit, compile, test. I tend to use programming languages that are much more interactive. This is the family of programming languages that come down to us from the communities of LISP and SmallTalk, primarily. In these languages, you’re engaged in a conversation with the computer — your program is running the whole time, you’re modifying it while it’s running, and you can inspect the state within the program to see what’s happening.

This is particularly good for exploratory programming, but also for art making. I can have a sketch running that is using a generative system I’ve created to produce some kind of visual effect. I could think, “What if this parameter were slightly different?” and instead of building a bespoke control panel to do that, I can execute a tiny snippet of code inside my editor that changes what’s happening in the program, so I’m still working in the same medium and I don’t need to switch to a different tool.

I might start with a blank canvas with a loop running that is redrawing something, but it doesn’t know what it’s redrawing yet. Then I will gradually add elements, and those elements may have some innate structure. They may be drawn from nature in some way. Often, in my work, I will start with some natural system I found intriguing, and I’ll think, “What would have to happen geometrically to create a thing that has a form like that?” Then I’ll try to build a system where I’m planting the seed, but the growth happens within the simulation.

I also do a lot of work that is inspired by different periods of art. Maybe there will be something Bauhaus-inspired; I’ll look at a pattern Kandinsky drew by hand and think, “What if I wanted an infinite number of those that were all as good as the one he did by hand? What would I need to tell the computer for it to know [how to do that]?” In that sense, my artwork is often at that meta level. I’m less interested in the single-object output than I am interested in the underlying system that makes things of that nature possible.

Your background is traditionally technical. How has that influenced your identity or your sense of aesthetics as an artist?

I don’t regard scientists and artists as fundamentally different kinds of people. In fact, I regard them as more alike than they are different.

The sort of division you see among people in modern American culture is, to me, a cultural artifact; it’s just an accident of education. I would say the same thing about athletics. The jocks versus geeks division is an entirely synthetic thing that arose in post-1950s America and spread in a diseased way to other parts of the world. There’s nothing about being good at using your nervous system to move your body through space that would make you bad at using your nervous system to reason about geometry.

Based on some early tests that show an aptitude or a proficiency, we’ve narrowly focused people into what we think is going to be the box in which they will perform, when we should be spending more time cultivating what people are innately and immediately good at but also filling in the rest of the profile. So if you’re somebody who finds mathematics easy but is intimidated by the idea of drawing classes, then you should be doing that. These things are all aspects of humanity, and it’s a mistake to leave any of them behind.

In your 2019 ClojuTRE talk on computational creativity, you gave a brief survey of historical definitions of creativity. After absorbing all of those, where do you net out? What grand unified theory of creativity do you subscribe to?

I think it’s the fundamental aspect that makes us human beings. Creative problem-solving is the thing that we do better [than any other species]. Communication is the other thing that we do better, which allows us to do creative problem-solving in groups. If you want to know why we’ve spread over the entire world and lived in every kind of ecosystem successfully, it’s because we’ve been able to creatively solve problems along the way. Without that, I don’t think we’re really people. Leaving aside your creative drives as an individual is a mistake, because it’s leaving aside your birthright as a human.

A question in the AI discourse right now is whether AI will ever be able to create the way a human does. Large language models can create reasonable facsimiles of mediocre writing and drawing, but that sort of path-breaking creative synthesis still seems to be uniquely human. As someone who has been in this field for a long time, what do you think is coming in terms of the influence of AI?

To touch on the first part of what you said, about mediocrity: when you have a big statistical model that is essentially taking the sum and then the average of the internet, whether it’s in words or pictures, then you can expect the output to be [average] by definition. Now, you can steer these models to get you somewhat surprising outputs, and that’s cool. I have some friends who train their own models and build complex workflows to come up with things that are very nice in terms of the outputs they achieve. For me, mostly, if I’m using a prompt to an LLM to generate an image, I can get an output that looks okay to good, because I word good and I have enough taste to pick the images that I think are okay. But after I’ve done that, I don’t feel like I’ve done anything, because I don’t feel like there’s any of me in the output.

I think a lot of where our good stuff comes from is actually from how the act of making the art changes us as individuals. Ages ago, I went to art school at night while I was doing a startup in Silicon Valley. I’d been a lifelong musician, and playing music my whole life meant that I heard everything differently. When I hear the leaves rustling, I hear the rhythm of the leaves rolling along the ground. When I hear the whistle on my kettle, I know what pitch it is. So I thought, “I’ll go to art school, and maybe it will change the way I see.” And of course it did. There’s no way you can learn to draw in charcoal and capture light and shadow without it changing the way you see everything for the rest of your life.

What if we take away the need to do any of those things to produce those outputs? Then we get an entire generation of people who do not transform themselves into having a higher level of perception. What does that do for our ability to discriminate between what is just AI slop and what is actually something amazing and beautiful? It’s leaving behind part of our birthright as humans, to outsource some of the best stuff we have going to the machines, even if the machines can do it.

Also, the more stuff there is, the more sifting has to be done to find the good stuff. Making a machine for the unlimited production of mediocre junk means that the signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse all the time, and I dislike this vigorously.

On the other hand, I think these technologies can become the components of amazing engineering solutions later on. An example of this, not in the artistic context, is that I took some LLMs and I attached them to a query apparatus for WikiData, the database version of Wikipedia. I was able to use the LLM to get the data into the system from natural language. Then I do a query against this fact database, and then I take the series of dry facts that it returns and have it reformatted as nice, flowing prose. So I get something that you can get into and out of with human language that doesn’t hallucinate any details, and this is actually immediately useful.

I think many things of that nature are coming. Artistic tools where the trained model is more like a paintbrush and less like an outsourced cheap artist are going to be extremely powerful. In cinema, I think we’ll see the cost of making movies drop to one-one-hundredth of the time and one-one-hundredth of the cost using these kinds of tools, because CGI is such an important part of film production already. In this sense, when the good tools come out of it, you will see actual artists be able to do more and better.

Have you been able to find a balance between the things you do to pay the bills and the things you do to satisfy an artistic impulse? Do you find the same amount of creativity and joy in your work at Applied Sciences as you do in the art you make?

Here, I have to start by saying that I’m in a position of ridiculous privilege. I came of age at a time when the things I liked to do for fun were among the most lucrative things you could do for a living.

Throughout my career, I have been able to work on only things I’m interested in and be paid very well for them, both on the science and programming side and also on the art side. Obviously, I make more money from the tech stuff than the art stuff. But in years when I’m more active, like in 2020, I made enough that I could have made a living in Berlin just from the art side. This is possible. It’s difficult and it requires a lot of luck, but it is possible. So I’m in the weird position where I don’t have to choose between the things I love and the things that pay the bills because everything I get paid for is also something I love. And I recognize the tremendous privilege of that statement.

What do you think it takes to do that, beyond luck? Are there things a person can do to be more likely to have that kind of outcome?

Having a very active daily practice, and never letting it get away from you, is incredibly important. Björk has a fantastic quote about not letting yourself get gummed up and only releasing something every seven years because it puts you out of the flow of creating: “Don’t hold your breath for five or seven years and not release anything, and then you’ve just got clogged up with way too much stuff… You lose contact to the part of you, your subconscious, that’s writing songs all the time, and the part of you that’s showing it to the world… That’s more important, to sustain that flow, than to wait until things are perfect.”

Whatever it is that you do, you have to really do it. If you have a choice between doing it for three hours on Sunday or doing it for 15 minutes a day for the rest of the week, do it 15 minutes a day, because what you do every day is what your brain is working on when you’re not paying attention. Your subconscious is making progress on the things you do constantly. There’s a bowdlerization of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that gets quoted a lot, which is that excellence is just a function of habit. It’s what you do repeatedly. Lean into it. Do the work.

And — this is the bad news, because many programmers or artists are not necessarily interested in standing up on a chair and shouting about themselves in public—if you do beautiful work and nobody sees it, you’re not going to have a good career. You have to find a way to surface what you’re doing.

If it were five to 10 years ago, I would say to get a Twitter account, communicate with the kinds of people who are interested in the kind of thing you do, post all of this work that you’re doing as your daily practice, and you will be noticed. Today, it’s a more complicated situation. Some arsonists have set fire to Twitter and it’s now full of smoke and dead bodies, so very few people you would want to find your work will go to that place. I think we’re in an interregnum where there isn’t a good public space to demonstrate excellence for most arts. But it is important that you find a way to do that, or you will likely go unnoticed.

I also wanted to ask you about your time AT&T Research, formerly Bell Labs. Bell Labs has a mythical place in tech lore. It was a hotbed of innovation and a Schelling point for practically every computer science pioneer you’ve ever heard of. Did that still penetrate the company’s DNA when you were there?

It was definitely a unique environment. First, as in any such situation, it was the people. You had a large concentration of brilliant people all in one place. That’s always a good thing.

The facility where I worked, the Claude Shannon Lab, was in a leafy suburb in New Jersey. We would go down to eat in the cafeteria, and there were floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and we would see deer outside. In my wing, the people in the other offices were Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++, and David Korn, who created KornShell. I used to ride in his minivan from downtown Manhattan, because there were a bunch of us who preferred to live in the city. So the vibe had mostly to do with the people, and then the facility itself being the perfect leafy campus environment, but tuned for grown-ups — well, eternally Peter Pan grown-ups.

We did some great work there, even though when I worked there it was after the heyday. Unix was invented around the time I was born, so I missed out on all those great things. But I know most of those people because I was very young when I got started in the industry, and they weren’t dead yet. Some of them are still walking around. So I have all the stories, I’m happy to report. The vibe, I think, was still similar, but obviously the level of work, while good, wasn’t as world-shaking as it was earlier in the 20th century.

Why do you think that was? Was it a function of something changing in the way the work was supported?

There were a couple of things. One is that the way research was supported changed. Here we come back to that idea of patronage. Both artists and scientists have in common that they do their best work when they are left alone and allowed to chase their own curiosity and their own aesthetics and their own feelings. The appetite and the surplus to allow that has decreased year on year since the middle of the 20th century.

There was a period where this was really celebrated, and it was considered a good use of funds to have people do things that may pay you back nothing but also may give you a whole different world. You would fund it with some faith in the fact that if the people are talented enough, something good will come out of it.

After the Reagan–Thatcher revolution, that became less of a thing. Ideologically, everything shifted to this idea that you should have a return-on-investment angle on what happens. And because you can’t predict the outcome of research, it is effectively impossible to have a return on investment attitude towards it.

A great example of this is the iPhone. The capacitive touch display was invented 25 years before that at Bell Labs by somebody who was just chasing their own interest. If that person hadn’t had the opportunity to plant those seeds, then Apple could not have reaped the benefits later. Right now, I feel like we’ve really shifted towards reaping, and left sowing to be somebody else’s problem. This will continue to harm us in the future, because if we keep doing basically the same things over and over again, we won’t have any new seed corn.

There are certainly little pockets where that focus on something other than ROI still exists. But I agree. It feels like everyone recognizes the value of something like Bell Labs, yet very few people have the risk appetite or long-term thinking to fund that anymore.

It’s not just the absence of a Bell Labs sort of thing. There are other social opportunities available that are not followed. For example, I was talking to some people who will remain nameless but who are very high in an organization that makes a popular search engine and browser. I wanted them to fund some improvements to a text editor called Emacs that I’ve been using for nearly 40 years. With a good team working on it and with some actual financial support, a lot could be improved. Around half of their employees use Emacs, so it seemed like it would even pay them back, in some sense. But they told me that the most their enormous, many-billions-a-year company could possibly [contribute] was funding for some student [project].

This kind of thing is insane. These are public goods that they consume, but they don’t see it as their responsibility to help support that commons. This is a problem with open-source software in general — it is insufficiently supported. It’s shared infrastructure, and shared infrastructure requires shared support.

If you could reshape the way the internet has evolved, where would you start?

I would try to prioritize [changing] some of the infantilizing drives of current products. It is very fashionable at the moment to believe that if a person can’t use something immediately on first seeing it, then it should be thrown away, because people are stupid and have no patience. This is a prevalent way of thinking about user interfaces. But if you look at the user interface of the violin, it’s terrible for quite a while. You have to put in some effort before you can do anything useful with the violin. But then you can do something that you simply cannot do with a tiny children’s xylophone. There are effects you can achieve if you’re willing to put in the work.

I feel like there’s a large area to explore of slightly more difficult things that have a higher ceiling. I believe you should raise the floor as much as you can, but you shouldn’t do it by lowering the ceiling.

I would like to make it more possible for people to, for example, automate things on their own; end user programming is the technical term for this. In a system like HyperCard, this was very effective. People could build systems to run their entire business inside of this very cool piece of software that you ran on a Macintosh. I don’t see a modern thing that is as good. There’s more we can do to democratize the programmatic aspects of owning a computer so that people have more power as individuals.

There have to be these open-box systems where you can play with the parts. Otherwise, you’re strictly a consumer. On Instagram, that’s exactly how I feel. I post my artwork there, but that’s the limit of what I can do. Someone else has decided the limits of my world. And I resent that.

At the end of your talk on creative computation, you give some recommendations for programmers who want to get in touch with their creative side: take an art course, meditate, take psychedelic mushrooms. I assume those recommendations still hold, but what else would you recommend to anybody who wants to connect with their creativity?

The important thing, and I tried to stress it in that talk, is that you can approach things as a reasoning and reasonable agent who is putting one fact in front of another and trying to be very orderly and systematic. That is an important way of being. But there’s another way of approaching things, which is to open yourself up to your own intuition and to feel your way through things. That’s no less important a way of being. You have to have both to be a complete human being. So whether a person is a programmer who isn’t as in touch with their intuition, or they’re an artist who is not as in touch with their ability to be analytical, I feel that whichever side you’re coming from, you should be trying to fill in the part at which you are the weakest so that you can be a more complete person.

For a lot of people, getting in touch with the intuitive side also has to do with the body itself, because many people are very disembodied. So, going to a yoga class, taking up meditation, doing things that allow you to realize that you are an embodied creature, and then starting to listen to how your body is feeling. Having a daily practice of checking in with yourself can automatically and immediately start to open you up to being able to do creative things. If you combine that with the daily practice of journaling or drawing or something else that allows you to focus those feelings and externalize them in some way, very quickly you’ll discover you have an artistic side you never knew was there.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Rebecca Hiscott.

I really like hacking the system, making space where there isn’t space for marginalized voices. I’ve noticed how we have to exist [in multitudes], and the digital space allows that. It’s [where] more femme, or queer, and even neurodivergent perspectives intersect.

Something that I’ve been trying to encapsulate through HERVISIONS is the outsider, the underdog. People that are undermined. I feel like I am constantly undermined in my ability because I’m a woman of color from a low socioeconomic background. My lived experience informs my practice. I want to be able to help other people like me. I’ve been doing HERVISIONS for nearly 10 years now.

Wow, congratulations.

Thank you. [*laughs*] Yeah, it’s still not sustainable. I really want to become more…

Self-sufficient? Would that mean that you’re bringing in another voice?

I guess it’s more about the infrastructure. I’ve been working project to project.

A lot of creatives, in order to carve out space for themselves in an inaccessible industry, start up their own platforms, and they start with a lot of vim and energy. But then you realize that monetary support is few and far between.

Exactly.

It runs you down. It’s one of those things where, when you don’t have the building blocks, you start getting insular. But it’s still a living archive of the process that you went through to get where you are now.

You’re right. You start to become insular, and you start to equate success with your own value, and that becomes really problematic… It’s not conducive to any sustainability, personally or as a business model. So I don’t want to keep doing HERVISIONS the way that I have been. I’ve been thinking, “What can I do that’s manageable and that I enjoy?”

You don’t do this full time, right?

I’m teaching now, associate lecturing at Camberwell University of The Arts, for their Computational Arts MA.

What is it like passing that knowledge down?

You always surprise yourself on what comes out. What if a student comes to me and I don’t know what to say?

I think it’s okay to say you don’t know.

Exactly. There’s always something you can connect to. There’s different styles of teaching. Sometimes it is critique-based, other times it’s workshopping… I’m still finding my teaching practice. Alternative education is really, really important.

Alt Ed is the most important, to be honest. You have to be adaptable and elastic. Do you teach anything practical in that class?

Good question. Because I’m coming from a more curatorial background—even though I’ve worked with digital tools for world-building with live-action, post-animation, or post-internet aesthetic effects—tools move so quickly. My curatorial practice has been one of collaboration, and intersecting with artistic mediums and practices that are still being developed. In Computational Arts there’s a lot of gaming engines, creative coding…

What’s creative coding?

Using Python or JavaScript, or p5.js. Anything digital is going to have some sort of code. If you can get into the backend and hack it, you can adapt [and] be creative with how you’re coding it. Now you can also use AI tools like ChatGPT to tell you the code. But you get into this really tricky area of ethics versus creativity versus accessibility versus resources… I feel like I’m constantly ping-ponging between that.

Are you talking about AI when you’re talking about ethics?

Well, all of it. If you’re using things like Spark AR, which is now closed and which was owned by Meta—Meta are just trying to capitalize on the way that we use the tool, our data, the artworks, the work that’s produced. The production of that work is still owned by them. They want to be able to have access to the collective consciousness, ultimately, and then teach AI how to replicate.

There is a lot of anxiety about phasing out anything organic. I definitely want to talk about the environmental impact of tech, but I wanted to go back to the queering of tech, and neurodivergence. How can tech can be made ready for people with learning disabilities, given that they are pushed to the peripheries in a lot of standard education contexts?

My theory is that the tech actually feeds into neurodivergence through the attention economy. So, how do we move away from that? You have to foster these tools to be able to create offline environments for people to connect in real time, in real life. Legacy Russell talks in Glitch Feminism about AFK: Away From Keyboard reality. There is this hybridity of having to exist offline… Artists Caroline Sinders and Romy Gad el Rab are doing a residency at the Delfina Foundation about mental health and how we can create digital interfaces to be more supportive of different needs and abilities.

For me, I have dyslexia and I get very anxious when I see something and the interface doesn’t match how my brain can read it.

Exactly. You’re like, “Oh my god. Where do I even look?”

When I was at university and I did the dyslexic test, at the end they tested filters to see what color I read best in. I read best in pink, actually.

[*laughs*] That is cool!

I think most people respond to color, but hyper-capitalist cities just pull all the color out of everything, and when you go to somewhere like Mexico, or Cuba, and there’s color everywhere, you are automatically more jubilant and excited… A lot of coding spaces are black background and white text, or yellow text, or whatever.

That’s why the integration of NLP, Natural Language Programs, [are important]. Technology is developing now beyond just the formulas of binary codes. Romy Gad, the psychologist and artist, works with people that have addictions to technology. People can know the standard thing—”It’s bad for your mental health because you’re going to get addicted to dopamine”—but we don’t know the actual ins and outs of that, in [our] buzzword culture.

We simplify down to, “A + B = bad.” But we don’t actually know how to tackle or move past it. So artists, social thinkers, and psychologists are important to collaborate with. What have you learned about collaborating? What makes for a harmonious environment for positive collaboration?

Collaboration is a practice in itself. You have to play to your strengths. And by practice, I mean there needs to be an understanding that it has to be a mutual benefit for everyone involved. Also, being realistic of the outcomes is so important.

I think being realistic is [about] making manageable phases and not seeing everything as a finite outcome. You can try to have more bite-sized approaches to things. You can say, “We’re just going to prototype this, and then if it works, then we can develop it further.”

Is there anything that you would avoid when collaborating? Something you’ve maybe learned that’s gone wrong?

My expectations. It’s what you impose on yourself, and the people that you’re working with. Also I think the parameters, or the frameworks of what the collaborations are, or what everyone’s role is should be, should be clear from the beginning.

Things can just run away with themselves. I really try to impose some sort of structure of what’s important, or the expectations within roles, and making sure that everyone understands their roles. But also openness around how those roles can shift; allowing for a little bit of that is also part of the magic. It’s like creative contingency, knowing that that’s what happens. Things don’t go the way you started. So being able to foresee that contingency, but seeing it as a positive.

I’ve definitely learned that when I’m under pressure, I’m not always the nicest person. I try to face that in myself and be honest with other people.

I think it’s hard when you’re coming from a place of having to drive these things. When you’re like, “But if I don’t do this, no one else is going to do it. It’s my responsibility to do this, to get this done, and I have to pull people in.” If you’re the project lead, it comes from wanting everything to be perfect. But what I’ve learned is expecting a “no,” or expecting things to not be as you want, is a practice as well. Having that discipline to be able to step back. That is really learning about yourself.

Do you have a favorite digital work or physical piece of yours?

The project I did with the William Morris Gallery, “Wild Wired!,” felt very much like, “Ah, everything makes sense.” It was a site-specific digital intervention about rethinking the future of Langthorne Park in Leytonstone. It was a way to activate the local communities and introduce some sort of artwork connected to the William Morris Gallery’s Radical Landscapes exhibition. It was a project that combined community engagement, artist-led workshops, and digital technologies. We produced a site-specific, mobile-friendly game that you could access right in the park. It was accessible through scanning banners in the park. We were thinking about the park as a body—which was inspired by Taoism—and thinking about the medicinal properties of the plants in the park, and how they would impact our speculative future organs. We had different workshops where we asked artists, the community, and local residents to think about speculative organs. They did collages and we did writing and photography exercises.

These methods of world-building were then intertwined into a narrative, which then was produced into a body of work—which was the game, a 3D-printed artwork, an interactive website, and a moving image piece. That was really a huge amount of work.

It felt like everything clicked together for me. There were a lot of milestones within that project and there were a lot of production difficulties in terms of things not working the way we wanted, and that’s always what happens in technology. So it was just constantly problem solving.

That’s also a good skill you have to be able to hone whenever you’re doing these types of things: being a problem solver. My last point is about the environment. I think and hope that more people are coppin’ onto the environmental cost of tech, in terms of how much water usage there is to cool all these database storage centers down… Basically, without water, there wouldn’t be any tech. But how can we care more for the environment? What are your feelings about that?

I think this idea of reclaiming space and rewilding is an interesting way to think about it. The thing is, technical devices use a lot of mined minerals and components from the earth that we need for our smartphones. There’s a lot of reliance on nature, and how do we manage that? Gosh, I wish I had the answer.

AI is really, really, really environmentally unfriendly, but then also crypto, blockchain… There was a lot of fuss about NFTs not being ethical or environmentally friendly—which, yes, there is a massive usage of energy that blockchain takes. But the proportion of that which the creative industries use, in relation to other industries that use blockchain, is also a very small amount. I feel like there needs to be more transparency [from larger] capitalist companies.

I feel like artists, or creatives are just such little cogs in the system.

I think, though, that 10,000 small cogs make up a ton. We do have a part to play.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Georgina Johnson.

On this episode of CounterPunch Radio, Erik Wallenberg and Joshua Frank welcome Roger Peet to discuss art and resistance, the 60th anniversary of the US-backed genocide in Indonesia, and the conflicts in the Congo. Roger Peet is an artist, printmaker, muralist, and writer living in Portland, Oregon. He is a founding member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and helps run the cooperative Flight 64 print studio in Portland.

The post Imperialism, Art, and Resistance with Roger Peet appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by CounterPunch Radio.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Josh Frank.

You’re a fifth-generation San Franciscan and a Chinese and Japanese American. How does your identity shape the work you produce as an artist? Is there any separation between the art and the artist? What drives you to make art?

I’m about to sound like an art teacher: everyone’s an artist. Life is art. Everything we create is art. But I really do feel that even just our choices, our decisions, the way we look at the world, the way we interact with one another are forms of art in some way. Growing up as a fifth-generation San Franciscan with deep roots in San Francisco and deep roots in California, I have always felt this deeper inner body of knowing—a deeper connection to self, but also to others, and to existence, and to the place that not only raised me but raised my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my great-great-grandparents. The place that has been stewarded by generations of the Ohlone and Ramaytush-Ohlone ancestors.

I’ve always had this deep fascination with walking in San Francisco and feeling that I am in a portal, like timeline jumping. I would walk through the city as a kid and my grandma would be like, “Eryn, this is where we used to go for really good pork chops, the Pork Chop House. They were really cheap, $2.75 a plate.” And then I’d be imagining my grandma there, imagining my mom there, and then just feeling this deep connection to the place and people.

My identity is the lens through which I see the world, and also the lens through which so many others probably see me. I feel like my identity is how I get to express myself. It’s also me trying to figure things out and alchemize these pasts that I didn’t have any words or visuals or pictures for. Audre Lorde says, “Name the nameless.” I felt all these unsung songs, these deep hymns and feelings. Creating and expressing was a way for me to dig all of these things up and to make them more tangible. I’m so deeply intertwined. The art and the artist are one and the same.

You’re predominantly a collage artist. You pull from a vast personal collection of vintage magazine clippings and handmade Japanese paper, amongst other materials. What is the value of repurposing found and archival materials?

Collage allows me to look at the collective memory. I love going through these magazines and publications that were a part of mass media during my parents’, my grandparents’, my great-grandparents’ time. It’s like understanding the hegemony of the time. You see these large cultural currents that were the exact currents and discourses my ancestors were traversing and navigating, but also actively questioning. I feel a lot of those discourses throughout my body. I feel those lineages of generational trauma through the ways in which those discourses still play out today. Collage and the act of going through papers and touching the ephemera and looking at it, it’s so tactile. I just fucking love that. This is the shit that people were being inundated with at the time.

Like racist shit?

Yeah, very racist shit. It’s just a trip because these articles and prints were very supremacist and very patriarchal. Collage allows me to literally tear shit out and rip it apart and crumble it and then create something totally new and different. The act of cutting things up, dissecting—it’s almost turning hegemony on its head. What did these things actually mean? What brings me joy and beauty from looking at it? I think a lot of it also has to do with de-contextualizing and reimagining. There’s a magical element, but there’s also a deep, nostalgic element to everything I do.

My mom is a musician. My parents met at the height of 1969 at a school dance. They’re high school sweethearts. When they met, my mom was in a daisy chain and her own homemade dress, maybe tripping on acid. When my parents tell me these stories, I already have these visuals and these feelings, and I’m able to transcribe them and reconfigure them. It’s satisfying. There’s a deep pleasure that comes from all of it.

I would love to hear a little more about your creative process.

When I was living in Japan, I really felt the gender dynamics, the sexual and patriarchal trauma. I know the queens that came before me have dealt with so much shit. All the femmes that I grew up with, all the aunties, my mom, my grandma—fierce-ass warrior femmes. I’ve always felt this lack of safety in my body, whether in America or in Japan or anywhere. So I found all these old 1950s publications with “demure” Asian American women and took them out of these contexts, reimagining them as these revered figures who are also complicated and yet powerful in their bodies. I’m so deeply nostalgic for San Francisco, the village that raised me and that is so at risk. So I include those pieces of Frisco in the collage. Whether that’s through the cars that I grew up seeing, that my parents and my grandparents used to drive; or the foods that we all grew up with; or the streets we were raised on. I have certain threads and motifs that I always put in all my work.

I am so obsessive about cutting little things. I literally just take stacks of magazines, newspapers, ephemera that I find at estate sales, like at the Japanese American Buddhist temple garage sales where everyone’s just giving away their shit. I have days where I just cut things. I organize them because I’m a Capricorn. And I cut big pieces and really small ones. I have those Altoid mini cans [for storage]. And then I put things together. I always start with the big and then go small.

I revisit things a lot. Oftentimes when I’m creating something through collage, I know that I may not love the first few sketches, but I try to just keep going. I try to just remember creativity is like a muscle. Sometimes you make some shit things.

What do you do when you feel like something is not working?

It’s really hard to just stop. Sometimes I let go and step away and do other shit. I put time limits on myself because I’m incredibly obsessive. I like to go for a walk or listen to music or get really, really high and just see what happens.

How does ancestral wisdom guide your creative practice?

I’m one of those people that needed a manual or a book to tell me how the fuck to make it in this world. But instead I have been given morsels from all my family members, all the elders in my life, and even from nature and interactions with the universe. I’ve been given these little grains, these little snacks, and now it’s my job to synthesize them. It’s my job to take these threads from all these different records—places that I’ve been to, people that I’ve met—and quilt them all together. My collage art and my art process is me synthesizing this ancestral wisdom that I feel and that I’ve been collecting over time. I see myself as a legacy worker. I feel so lucky to be doing this legacy work and to be a part of this continuum of care, abundance, and infinite possibility. Now that I have all my niblings—my eight nieces and nephews—it’s never been about me. It’s always been about the “we.” I exist in this village.

You were born and raised in San Francisco and live in Oakland now, though you also lived in France and Japan. Due to the tech industry, COVID, and other things, San Francisco looks different from the city you were raised in. From a local’s perspective, how has it changed?

First of all, I needed to fucking leave San Francisco because I was just popping off on everyone in my 20s. I was like, “This place is awful.” But I don’t want to live in this doom loop anymore. What I see now is the deterioration and the active dismantling of the intergenerational village, of the poly-cultural village. The village is upheld by the mom and pop stores that have been there for a while, the pillars of the community. I firmly believe that people are places, and that places are people. When you don’t have the people, you don’t have the place. The people in the community that create that place are actively being pushed out. It happens so quickly in San Francisco because there is a tremendous amount of wealth here.

In addition to making art, you are a community organizer. I would love to hear about how one informs the other. What is the intersection between community organizing and art making? How do these two things coexist?

One of my strengths is connecting with people. How can I continue to be a steward of the village? I work for this 105-year-old Black-led institution that has been embedded in the Fillmore and has a really deep history with Japantown. My preschool is in that building. When Japanese Americans were incarcerated, this community center held on to everyone’s stuff and helped people find housing when they came back from the camps.

I haven’t been doing a lot of collage lately, but my current work, my 9-to-5 work, is very much in alignment with my principles and my values and my art. I’m dedicating a lot of time in life to creating an intergenerational village: one that is culturally responsive, one that is dignified, one where people want to be there, one where joy is centralized. How do we ensure that all of these OGs like Fillmore Black Frisconians can age with utmost dignity and joy, in community, in the place that they helped steward and create?

Your day job feels like it’s a human tapestry, like a collage in physical form.

That’s what I hope. I want all the babies to remember that they exist in this beautiful collective ecosystem with rich histories, with incredible stories, and people that are just pure love.

How have you maintained your art practice for over a decade? I know you have taken breaks and picked up other interests along the way, like baking. What do you think an artistic life looks like?

I’ve taken many capitalist and anti-capitalist sabbaticals, aka my whole time in fucking France, where I had all these odd jobs and was just scrounging around for money. Japan was my art sabbatical. I literally can’t help but think that every choice and everything that I do is an artistic practice. For example, I like saying hi to everyone on the street. I like smiling at people. I love doing really mundane things. I love walking outside. Have you ever read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki? The beauty is in the shadows. I love looking at the way light hits the walls, and the changing of the day. I think a lot of living an artistic life is just being incredibly present. To exist: what a fucking miracle. What are the odds that we’re all here, that we’re all here together, in this skin and with all these birds and these trees and everything? An artistic life also looks like taking my time, really making sure that in every moment I carve out corners and crevices of joy and of stillness and awe. Awe is really important to me.

What inspires you?

Walking in early morning light through Chinatown or on Clement Street and seeing the shadows hit the mounds of oranges on display. Seeing the way the sun shines through the gates throughout the Richmond District and throughout the Mission. Jenny Odell’s books really inspire me, especially How to Do Nothing. There is just so much in the seemingly mundane. Going to the Tilden Park Botanical Gardens, because it’s fucking free. Smelling fresh earth. Redwoods post-rain. Watching babies and kids running the streets—they make me remember who I’m fighting for and what we have to fight for. Whale watching in April or May off of Fort Funston gives me all the good feels. Berkeley farmers markets. The literal fruits of people’s labor. I love looking at people’s grocery lists, seeing the cursive. They tell you so much about a person and what stage they are at in life. That’s their everyday practice, right? What a gorgeous art form, just their printed cursive and their little notes. The Museum of the African Diaspora curator Key Jo Lee really inspires me. San Francisco is not worthy. Octavia Butler. LaRussell. Risographs. Betye Saar.

Things have been bleak in the world lately (maybe always?) and it’s been a particularly rough start to the year in California with the devastating wildfires. What brings you hope these days?

My imagination. Everyone’s imagination. The first thing to be colonized is our imagination. They don’t want us to dream. They don’t want us to have hope. They don’t want us to imagine a new world, but we have no choice but to imagine a better world. I love the quantum universe. These new worlds exist. We have no idea why we’re here, why our skin grows back when it gets cut, but we’re all miraculously here. We do some really fucked up things together. But the fact that we’re here, and the fact of the movements that have come before us, and the love that has been transmitted before us… that shit really helps.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Ruzova.

I found some paints in a waste-basket when I was on my way to the beach, me and another kid. Wow. It looked like the artist had gotten disgusted, threw the shit in there. And so, I picked it up. I don’t even know how long I had it, probably a couple of years, a year. And then one day I started playing with it, and it was probably on from that point on that I was trying to discover, figure it out. So, that led me to step in. But, always, I was afraid of letting other people see it because I didn’t have what you call visible talents. I wasn’t a great draftsman. I knew nothing about paint. So, everything was pretty awful that I did. I had to keep it away from other people. I worked in secret for a long time, I worked in secret for a few years at least. And then I started showing people around trying to find other artists who could help me, because by that time, I was a married man. I had no time for going to school. So, I tried some of the local artists, “I’m trying to paint now. Can you help me?” And I sort of went from there.

Visiting the Art Institute of Chicago was sort of my training. As well as The Harry Who, they were a big influence. They were figurative artists, all of them, and at that time, the New York art scene was all Abstract Expressionists. But Chicago really had… I think it was a real intention to bark back at New York, like “So you do it abstract, we’re doing figurative,” and stay with it, and it really remained part of the culture. And so, I absorbed some of that, not consciously, but figurative work was more in my lane.

And you spent some time looking at art in Europe?

As a young man I quit my job and I went to Europe. I thought that’s what you had to do to be an artist. [laughs] You know what I mean? You got to go to Europe. Europe is where it’s at—Picasso, all that stuff. But in fact, by that time, which was the early ’60s, the art scene had shifted to New York. It was no longer, Europe was a powerhouse. Pollock and those guys were major.

I went there for the first time because I had an informal letter from an art school in Munich. This person said, “Contact these people.” I never really followed up. Well, I did, but I didn’t like Munich. It turned me off in a day, and so that was over. And then I traveled to other places. I went with my young wife, young kids. I didn’t know what I was doing. Just out there. And so, I met artists. I worked with a couple of artists, but I wasn’t there that long to get what I call an education. Only thing I found out was it was all happening in the United States.

In your backyard, essentially.

In my backyard. I went to Peggy Guggenheim’s house in Venice. And wow, there were all these great Jackson Pollocks. And then other places, major museums would be Andy Warhol. They were red-hot at that time.

Back to Chicago, Hyde Park. What were your earliest art influences growing up?

I guess I was first really influenced by people, artists. I was more influenced by artists because I knew nothing. There were no artists or art being practiced in my family, so it was never a focus. But in our neighborhood, there was an overflow of aspiring artists, musicians, writers. And I just thought they were the hippest, coolest people on earth. Oh, yeah, that’s me. And that got me first interested to paying attention to art. My following experiences that got me to act on it were sort of serendipitous accidents of life. So, there was no strong hankering at first. I just found myself down with it and so on. Thereafter, I got the bug and it just stuck. And I knew, that’s what I wanted to do.

What was it like to work in Chicago during the Black Arts Movement?

There was a cultural movement of Black artists, mostly working in a more political way. The times were pretty volatile, the Civil Rights Movement. It was a volatile time and so, the work often was reflective of that. It had messages, and images and so on, that was fully grown. I was rejecting that early on. These guys did this already. They’ve been doing this for centuries. But I didn’t know how to replace that. I just decided I didn’t want to do what I would think of as propaganda. Art as propaganda. I’m trying to learn how to paint, how to be an artist. The message has to come later. But anyway, it took years for that to evolve.

But yes, there was a strong movement of mural artists. Now I’m talking early ’60s, late ’60s into ’70s. That was prevalent. There was a group called the AfriCOBRA. Very strongly leaning toward political messaging, political identity, Black identity, and so on. I struggled a bit with the confines of that, and I had other artists, older artists, telling me that it boxed you in. That meant you could be a great Black artist, you couldn’t be a great artist. It’s like saying, you’re a great woman artist, but you’ll never be what Pollock is or what Picasso is. And that was part of my rejection. I had been told by other guys, “They’re going to put you in this box.” The politics was always there. But my end of politics has always been more practical, more realistic. I’d rather throw a rock, break a window than paint a picture of something. It’s significant. At least it says something, where this other thing says nothing for me.

A few fantastic paintings in your last show were started in 2006 and finished 2024. Tell me about that process—where were you when they started, where were you when they ended, and what happened in the middle?

I started those things in ‘06. I had a studio in Athens, New York. Those were certainly the biggest paintings, still some of the biggest paintings ever. I thought, “I got plenty of space,” just a gigantic, beautiful studio right on the Hudson river. It was fabulous. I ultimately had many floods because that was right on the river, and I lost a lot of work from the floods through moisture and so on. And so, I started those paintings and never finished because in between, I had to pack everything up, get it out of the flood zone. Over the years, it’s been in storage and actually I had rolled them up. I didn’t know what they were, I thought it was something else. And then when I looked. Oh, wow, I remember these. So, I sort of finished them accordingly. I pretty much stayed true to the figures, to the subject. I changed the colors quite a bit.

It’s like collaboration with a nearly 20 years younger self.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s like that. Or I also look at it that many years later, as found objects. I just found these things and now I moved from there. Just like I do with materials. I get materials and they dictate something on their own. They dictate their own story.

That was a good discovery. Have there been times when you’ve looked back on previous works and thought they were shit?

Absolutely, absolutely. I am very critical. My paintings now, I realize often only get made after over painting, and painting, and over painting out. It’s just, much of that is how I paint. Leaving things from the past, taking things away. I am accepting that’s how I actually make paintings. Over painting, over painting, under painting, take it out, put it in. And because of poverty and years of not making a living as an artist, I couldn’t afford to buy materials a lot of times. So, if a painting wasn’t quite good, I just painted over it. Primed it out, and painted over it. So, yeah, I’ve done that over and over again. Probably made many mistakes. I’ve had experiences with [gallerist] Kristen [Dodge]. I think I look at something and say, “Yeah, I’m going to get rid of that one. I’m going to paint over there.” And she said, “No, no, don’t do it” And we had that conversation. And she’s been right several times. We are often too close to our own work, don’t you think?

Absolutely. And I like what you said, “I’ve come to accept that that’s how I make things.” That push-pull and tension within its creation—I relate to that way of making.

Yeah, something of a struggle. It’s important to at least satisfy your own eye about what you do.

That’s also something I really respond to in your work. The built-up mark making, your sense of color and material. They’re usually matte—

They’re always matte.

They’re always matte. You don’t like the shine.

I hate the shine. I hate the shine. Years ago I used to add varnish and so on. And then I felt, I don’t know, I got in my head that it was like store-bought, and sealing in or out the truth with that surface. Sort of, okay, here the painting is, okay, now put this gloss on.

What’s a good day in your studio?

Well, it could probably have a thousand faces. One day is one thing, one day is another. I guess I’m a big believer in good energy in the space. I feel like I work hard at filling the place up with good juice. And [my assistant, artist] Rick [Letendre] and I talk about it. It was very difficult for me even to have him here because I work alone. If you got any bullshit, please don’t bring it here. I don’t need it. A good day is just being productive and getting it done. That’s it. Now, a good day comes out all kinds of ways. I don’t know. I couldn’t prepare the day to happen. I really am very much by the moment. Experience, spontaneous, improvise. I very much live with that. And so, I don’t have a formula for anything. I wish I did. I wish I knew how to make magic.

You do.

Yeah, but I don’t know how it happened. My favorite thing to say is the magic happens when the magician disappears.

Oh, I love that.

Yeah, and it does. Once I get out of the way, the magic happens. It’s so infinite until you label it, and then it has a ceiling, a defined ceiling. But it’s infinite when you leave it wide open.

What do you do when you feel stuck?

I’m not sure that I have a method or formula to deal with that. Sometimes you wait it out, sometimes you just make shit until it turns into something else. That’s a possibility. I don’t know how to approach this thing as formula as, this is how you do it. It just is always different.

A mark you’ve used in your work is your handprint. I love that choice. When I see it, I think this is what it’s all about—making art, existence–and it reminds me of the caves.

Yes, yes, yes. The hand for me was part of a thought. And some of that thought was, if I take this hand, and dip it in paint, and put it on the surface, that’s okay. It’s not a drawing of a hand. It’s a hand as a tool for me. It’s a hand as a tool. So, I still consider that abstract because I didn’t draw a hand. I just used my hand to apply the paint. And that’s what I started out with. I put on one color with my hand, and right over that, put another. So, it was almost Pollock-esque, except I left the hand intact.

Interesting, you’re using it like you would a rag or a brush.

Exactly. It’s my tool. See those hands? Look how messed up they are.

Those are beautiful hands! How did they get like that?

Look at those hands. They’ve been beat. I’ve broken them and broken them. I used to do hard work. I was in the house demolition business. I was selling antiques. And what I preferred to collect was doors, windows, iron gates, fencing, slate roofs, house parts. So, that’s what that is, taking houses apart. So, I always consider my hands as tools. These are my tools. And I use them that way.

What wisdom would you share with your younger self, or younger artists out there?

That experience is a real one in me right now. I’ve had a lot of experience with at least sharing it with younger artists, which is the equivalent of myself. That’s how I see it, about how to proceed making art. So, I got to go deep on that one.

You know if it’s for you, if you stay with it. If you don’t, it wasn’t for you. That really has been my stay to it statement because now I’ve had other young artists who come to me and that’s what I say to them. Let’s see what you’re doing in four years. And if you’re still painting, now we can talk. But before that, I can’t tell you anything because I don’t know how you feel.

What happened to me was, in my neighborhood when I was asking older artists about painting. You know the answer I got? Come back to me after a couple years or after you’ve been painting. It was good advice. It was great advice. But it broke my heart at the time. I thought, “They could help me. Why won’t you help me?” And they’re saying, “If it’s for you, it’ll stay with you.” And it’s true. It’s true. So, I guess that’s my number one thing I would say is keep at it. If it’s for you, you’ll make a way with it. And otherwise you won’t. I’ll admit it, but I probably shouldn’t admit it, I don’t have what I’d call skills or talent. I don’t have any of that shit. Nothing signified that I should have gone in this direction. I do have passion and that has been my thrust all along. I’ve always been passionate about it, struggling with it. And for me, passion runs right through skill and talent. Any of those things without passion is flat. Passion is the thing. It’s what makes you go. It fills it up. Otherwise, you’re just making marks.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Annie Bielski.

Colony was founded out of the destruction of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The New York City community was struggling in the wake of the storm and many makers and designers were affected. There was a sense that everyone wanted to do something to help, but nobody knew what. My friend and I organized a charity exhibit called Reclaim NYC and invited designers to contribute to work made from debris from the storm. Over the short course of a month, we were overwhelmed by the design community’s contributions. The pace that they worked at shows how energized everyone was.

Before that, I was a writer, an editor, and a fashion designer. This project was my first time in a curatorial/organizer role. It sparked something. I stumbled upon this amazing outlet of creativity that was based on community and [it was] just energizing and purposeful. I thought of Colony between the first and second Reclaim shows. I realized all these creatives had the same challenges, and there was an opportunity to face those challenges together.

There must have been many challenges to take on.

One of the biggest was margins with showrooms and galleries. A traditional showroom charges 40 to 60% commission. For the independent maker, that’s just not viable. People have made it work, but it’s not ideal. Colony operates in the spirit of a cooperative. We charge a monthly fee, like an inexpensive rent, and a much lower commission. The idea is that designers can make sales and grow, rather than chasing margins. Even if they sell at volume in the traditional model, they still have a lot of trouble making money because of those very tight margins.

The other challenge was real estate and building an actual physical brick-and-mortar space in Manhattan. I was adamant about that. We were at a tipping point, when it felt like design was all happening online and you didn’t need to leave your house. You could learn about it from Instagram or other platforms. But I felt this business had to be experiential. But it was scary because I knew nothing about commercial real estate.

Rent in New York City is truly terrifying.

I got lucky. The space I found, on Canal Street, was owned by a Chinese family. Usually, you need financial documentation if you’re a new business, but they leased it to me and took a chance. They wanted me to succeed. They cheered when I signed and gave them my security deposit. It felt like kinship. It was the right space for the business and the only space I could imagine those first 10 years ever happening. It was idealistic, and we turned it into a legitimate business somewhere in there. When I tell the story, I note it started as an “idealistic business…” with an ellipsis, but it truly began with community focus and was mission-driven, and has since turned into my livelihood.

New York has become so expensive, with many event spaces underwritten by corporations or “mystery money.” You are a regular person who came from a normal background. Could Colony be created in 2025?

I’m not wealthy, but I’m certainly more fortunate than many. At the end of the day, I am just “normal.” I used to say, “Normal people like me can’t make a significant impact without huge risks.” And this was a huge personal risk. I remember signing my lease for the first phase; I had to guarantee it personally, which meant if the business didn’t work, I would be on the hook. Not everyone is willing to take that kind of risk. Can what we built happen now? Absolutely. But it would take more. It’s a question of being comfortable with risk.

You just went for it.

I had worked for a long time and saved money… I used my own money, but it was all of my money. I had worked a regular job and made a good salary for at least two or three years before starting Colony. I wasn’t a big spender, and just saved. Then I spent it all in one go. It was wild. And I still needed to borrow and convince my brother to front that little extra.

Some might look at your career and assume you’ve always been in cruise control. Was there a moment when you realized it was actually working out?

I started a consultancy about a year and a half in [to starting Colony], and that work gave me and the co-op a safety net. We do interior design work, marketing and art direction, and content creation. There was a point, maybe four or five years in, when sales were doing well. We were hitting our stride with the gallery, and the consultancy was also growing. The margins on the gallery are tiny because of the model, but on the consultancy side, the margins are much better. I realized I had a business where I couldn’t have one without the other. But the two businesses can run side-by-side and protect each other in a diversified stream of revenue.

The reality is that everything is tricky, even with financial backing—especially if you’re trying to do something that’s never been done. That’s just the nature of doing something new. There’s the hard work that is universal to anyone who’s trying to put something out into the world. But the risk is particularly relevant when it’s personal, or you don’t have as wide a safety net as you would like.

It can be intimidating to go it alone.

I wasn’t the only one taking risks. All the designers were on board with the idea—just an idea, that wasn’t proven at all. Our model was a collective risk, but it paid off. We closed our eyes and jumped. Someone once said that perceived risk is often greater than perceived success. This keeps people from taking significant risks because they perceive any risk as massive. That resonated with me because it puts us in two categories: risk-averse or risk-tolerant. I knew what my upside of the risk was: I wanted to write my own script for my life, and to care about where I was working every day. I feel lucky that this has manifested into reality. It was never about getting super rich. But the upside is a life I feel passionate about.

How did you convince designers to do this together?

I saw Colony as filling a hole. There weren’t a lot of platforms—if any—solely dedicated to the independent American maker or designer. There were even fewer that were brick and mortar. There were some e-commerce options, but brick-and-mortar is an essential part of what we do. To experience the work in person is something special. It was a lot of going far with ambition and a lot of dreaming. The creators realized this was a big risk. But I pushed back and said, “Imagine what we can do.”

I started with 12 designers, over long conversations, mostly in person. Meg Callahan, who does quilts—I was a fan and wanted her to be part of Colony. She lived in Providence, and I asked to meet for coffee. She was leaving for a one-way road trip on Monday, and I drove there on Sunday. I met her, discussed Colony, and she said, “Okay, let’s do it!” I had a lot of those types of conversations, meeting wherever the person or studio was, sharing who I was and showing them my passion around the project. Some dropped off, and some weren’t sure and joined later, but it was a lot of conversations.

So much of building anything involves just reaching out and asking, “Hey, want to grab coffee?”

[There is] a big pitfall people make when they’re in their “networking era.” Out of urgency, they are feeling like, “I need to network, I need to go to this event, I need to get this many business cards or this many connections!” There’s nothing wrong with that, but from experience, the most fruitful relationships are genuine. When you go out with an open mind and find other people who are open as well. Then, later, you’re in this great community where people are super generous and get what you’re doing, and open to helping out.

How could someone get more involved with what you’re doing?

We have events on a semi-regular basis. Come chat with anyone here, the team or myself. Feel out the vibe of the space. Get to know us online and in-person. We have our residency program. We do interior design. There’s a lot of opportunity to work with makers and furniture designers. We can’t fit everyone into our space. Often, if there’s work we love that we can’t necessarily represent, we try to work them into our interior projects. That’s another way we build community within our little pocket of the industry.

Can you discuss your residency?

Our residency program is an incubator that runs for eight months, depending on scheduling and shows. The curriculum is focused on launching nascent designers’ first collections and bringing their studios to the market. We work closely on identity development and how they represent themselves. We subsidize studio space, and expenses around starting their collection. They work part-time at Colony and see the ins and outs of what we do. Then, it culminates in a show where they launch. After that, they are represented by Colony for two years, with the collection exclusive to Colony. It’s a holistic mentorship.

You have met so many creators through your life and work. How did you choose who (and what) made it into your book, What We Keep: Advice from Artists and Designers on Living with the Things You Love?

I always secretly wanted to write books, but the opportunity presented itself three years ago. It came with a little bit of a caveat, which was that my editor had the idea of a book about collections. My proposal was my version of what a book about collections could be and the reality of what that was; it was actually about people. My whole ethos is that the connection between space and objects is made whole by the people who use them.

When I started thinking about who would be in [the book], I cast a wide net, which turned out to be quite broad and like a puzzle. First, you ask people if they’re collectors, but many of the most interesting collectors don’t think of themselves that way. So the puzzle was finding engaging creative professionals with beautiful homes or spaces that felt photographable but also had an approach to objects that was soulful, interesting, and worth retelling. The book found itself in my network of people. The people profiled each have an interesting story, and the objects in their lives support those stories. Then there was a lot of hard thinking about organization. I used the five traditional Chinese elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.

So it became a very personal book.

I was passionate about including studio visits. Each section has several, where you get to see how these items are made and who makes them. If you understand the creators who make the work, then you know the actual value of the work. We would shoot three projects in one day. I didn’t want a book of existing photography; I wanted everything fresh with fresh eyes.

At first, I felt it should have a through line, or that each section should speak to the other. But my editor felt, “This is not how people read these books. They will open a random page.” And I was like, “Thank god.” Once I realized that, I wrote each section individually and it went a lot faster and less painfully. I could treat each profile or essay as a standalone piece. My editor is good at bringing me down to earth. My writing can be a little bit dreamy and esoteric. But I didn’t want the book to be alienating. She made sure the end product felt artful and commercial, which I’m grateful for.

Would you ever do it again?

Colony just hit its 10th anniversary and I realized that the version of me now was so different from the version of me that started Colony. And the version of me now looking into the future is also different… But I still feel there’s this sweet spot where design can serve the greater good, and that is around education and the space that we inhabit. That work not only affects our lives but also shapes what we consume and what we keep.

Design is a big part of our lives, and there is a way to live in that world without breaking the bank. If you look at a design object as something you use forever rather than use and throw away, that investment means something. I believe in education about the value of things. This book was my best attempt at reaching that audience in a way that meets them where they are. I would absolutely do it again.

What would you say to someone who has an idea but is scared to jump?

If you have an idea, it’s all about being present. When you’re at your job and daydreaming, you’re not serving your job or your daydream because you’re in both worlds. It is about making time for the dream in your life every day. Making space for it to germinate and become the real idea. Daydreaming about not being at that job is also not serving you. There are so many things to be done; try not to worry about the other things you have to do while in the middle of something. Be present. So don’t necessarily quit that job, but permit yourself to leave it when it’s time. Carve out space in your schedule to plan and dream for that thing, because that is when the actionable ideas are going to come.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Laura Feinstein.

Colony was founded out of the destruction of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The New York City community was struggling in the wake of the storm and many makers and designers were affected. There was a sense that everyone wanted to do something to help, but nobody knew what. My friend and I organized a charity exhibit called Reclaim NYC and invited designers to contribute to work made from debris from the storm. Over the short course of a month, we were overwhelmed by the design community’s contributions. The pace that they worked at shows how energized everyone was.

Before that, I was a writer, an editor, and a fashion designer. This project was my first time in a curatorial/organizer role. It sparked something. I stumbled upon this amazing outlet of creativity that was based on community and [it was] just energizing and purposeful. I thought of Colony between the first and second Reclaim shows. I realized all these creatives had the same challenges, and there was an opportunity to face those challenges together.

There must have been many challenges to take on.

One of the biggest was margins with showrooms and galleries. A traditional showroom charges 40 to 60% commission. For the independent maker, that’s just not viable. People have made it work, but it’s not ideal. Colony operates in the spirit of a cooperative. We charge a monthly fee, like an inexpensive rent, and a much lower commission. The idea is that designers can make sales and grow, rather than chasing margins. Even if they sell at volume in the traditional model, they still have a lot of trouble making money because of those very tight margins.

The other challenge was real estate and building an actual physical brick-and-mortar space in Manhattan. I was adamant about that. We were at a tipping point, when it felt like design was all happening online and you didn’t need to leave your house. You could learn about it from Instagram or other platforms. But I felt this business had to be experiential. But it was scary because I knew nothing about commercial real estate.

Rent in New York City is truly terrifying.

I got lucky. The space I found, on Canal Street, was owned by a Chinese family. Usually, you need financial documentation if you’re a new business, but they leased it to me and took a chance. They wanted me to succeed. They cheered when I signed and gave them my security deposit. It felt like kinship. It was the right space for the business and the only space I could imagine those first 10 years ever happening. It was idealistic, and we turned it into a legitimate business somewhere in there. When I tell the story, I note it started as an “idealistic business…” with an ellipsis, but it truly began with community focus and was mission-driven, and has since turned into my livelihood.

New York has become so expensive, with many event spaces underwritten by corporations or “mystery money.” You are a regular person who came from a normal background. Could Colony be created in 2025?

I’m not wealthy, but I’m certainly more fortunate than many. At the end of the day, I am just “normal.” I used to say, “Normal people like me can’t make a significant impact without huge risks.” And this was a huge personal risk. I remember signing my lease for the first phase; I had to guarantee it personally, which meant if the business didn’t work, I would be on the hook. Not everyone is willing to take that kind of risk. Can what we built happen now? Absolutely. But it would take more. It’s a question of being comfortable with risk.

You just went for it.

I had worked for a long time and saved money… I used my own money, but it was all of my money. I had worked a regular job and made a good salary for at least two or three years before starting Colony. I wasn’t a big spender, and just saved. Then I spent it all in one go. It was wild. And I still needed to borrow and convince my brother to front that little extra.

Some might look at your career and assume you’ve always been in cruise control. Was there a moment when you realized it was actually working out?

I started a consultancy about a year and a half in [to starting Colony], and that work gave me and the co-op a safety net. We do interior design work, marketing and art direction, and content creation. There was a point, maybe four or five years in, when sales were doing well. We were hitting our stride with the gallery, and the consultancy was also growing. The margins on the gallery are tiny because of the model, but on the consultancy side, the margins are much better. I realized I had a business where I couldn’t have one without the other. But the two businesses can run side-by-side and protect each other in a diversified stream of revenue.

The reality is that everything is tricky, even with financial backing—especially if you’re trying to do something that’s never been done. That’s just the nature of doing something new. There’s the hard work that is universal to anyone who’s trying to put something out into the world. But the risk is particularly relevant when it’s personal, or you don’t have as wide a safety net as you would like.

It can be intimidating to go it alone.

I wasn’t the only one taking risks. All the designers were on board with the idea—just an idea, that wasn’t proven at all. Our model was a collective risk, but it paid off. We closed our eyes and jumped. Someone once said that perceived risk is often greater than perceived success. This keeps people from taking significant risks because they perceive any risk as massive. That resonated with me because it puts us in two categories: risk-averse or risk-tolerant. I knew what my upside of the risk was: I wanted to write my own script for my life, and to care about where I was working every day. I feel lucky that this has manifested into reality. It was never about getting super rich. But the upside is a life I feel passionate about.

How did you convince designers to do this together?

I saw Colony as filling a hole. There weren’t a lot of platforms—if any—solely dedicated to the independent American maker or designer. There were even fewer that were brick and mortar. There were some e-commerce options, but brick-and-mortar is an essential part of what we do. To experience the work in person is something special. It was a lot of going far with ambition and a lot of dreaming. The creators realized this was a big risk. But I pushed back and said, “Imagine what we can do.”

I started with 12 designers, over long conversations, mostly in person. Meg Callahan, who does quilts—I was a fan and wanted her to be part of Colony. She lived in Providence, and I asked to meet for coffee. She was leaving for a one-way road trip on Monday, and I drove there on Sunday. I met her, discussed Colony, and she said, “Okay, let’s do it!” I had a lot of those types of conversations, meeting wherever the person or studio was, sharing who I was and showing them my passion around the project. Some dropped off, and some weren’t sure and joined later, but it was a lot of conversations.

So much of building anything involves just reaching out and asking, “Hey, want to grab coffee?”

[There is] a big pitfall people make when they’re in their “networking era.” Out of urgency, they are feeling like, “I need to network, I need to go to this event, I need to get this many business cards or this many connections!” There’s nothing wrong with that, but from experience, the most fruitful relationships are genuine. When you go out with an open mind and find other people who are open as well. Then, later, you’re in this great community where people are super generous and get what you’re doing, and open to helping out.

How could someone get more involved with what you’re doing?

We have events on a semi-regular basis. Come chat with anyone here, the team or myself. Feel out the vibe of the space. Get to know us online and in-person. We have our residency program. We do interior design. There’s a lot of opportunity to work with makers and furniture designers. We can’t fit everyone into our space. Often, if there’s work we love that we can’t necessarily represent, we try to work them into our interior projects. That’s another way we build community within our little pocket of the industry.

Can you discuss your residency?

Our residency program is an incubator that runs for eight months, depending on scheduling and shows. The curriculum is focused on launching nascent designers’ first collections and bringing their studios to the market. We work closely on identity development and how they represent themselves. We subsidize studio space, and expenses around starting their collection. They work part-time at Colony and see the ins and outs of what we do. Then, it culminates in a show where they launch. After that, they are represented by Colony for two years, with the collection exclusive to Colony. It’s a holistic mentorship.

You have met so many creators through your life and work. How did you choose who (and what) made it into your book, What We Keep: Advice from Artists and Designers on Living with the Things You Love?

I always secretly wanted to write books, but the opportunity presented itself three years ago. It came with a little bit of a caveat, which was that my editor had the idea of a book about collections. My proposal was my version of what a book about collections could be and the reality of what that was; it was actually about people. My whole ethos is that the connection between space and objects is made whole by the people who use them.

When I started thinking about who would be in [the book], I cast a wide net, which turned out to be quite broad and like a puzzle. First, you ask people if they’re collectors, but many of the most interesting collectors don’t think of themselves that way. So the puzzle was finding engaging creative professionals with beautiful homes or spaces that felt photographable but also had an approach to objects that was soulful, interesting, and worth retelling. The book found itself in my network of people. The people profiled each have an interesting story, and the objects in their lives support those stories. Then there was a lot of hard thinking about organization. I used the five traditional Chinese elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.

So it became a very personal book.

I was passionate about including studio visits. Each section has several, where you get to see how these items are made and who makes them. If you understand the creators who make the work, then you know the actual value of the work. We would shoot three projects in one day. I didn’t want a book of existing photography; I wanted everything fresh with fresh eyes.

At first, I felt it should have a through line, or that each section should speak to the other. But my editor felt, “This is not how people read these books. They will open a random page.” And I was like, “Thank god.” Once I realized that, I wrote each section individually and it went a lot faster and less painfully. I could treat each profile or essay as a standalone piece. My editor is good at bringing me down to earth. My writing can be a little bit dreamy and esoteric. But I didn’t want the book to be alienating. She made sure the end product felt artful and commercial, which I’m grateful for.

Would you ever do it again?

Colony just hit its 10th anniversary and I realized that the version of me now was so different from the version of me that started Colony. And the version of me now looking into the future is also different… But I still feel there’s this sweet spot where design can serve the greater good, and that is around education and the space that we inhabit. That work not only affects our lives but also shapes what we consume and what we keep.

Design is a big part of our lives, and there is a way to live in that world without breaking the bank. If you look at a design object as something you use forever rather than use and throw away, that investment means something. I believe in education about the value of things. This book was my best attempt at reaching that audience in a way that meets them where they are. I would absolutely do it again.

What would you say to someone who has an idea but is scared to jump?

If you have an idea, it’s all about being present. When you’re at your job and daydreaming, you’re not serving your job or your daydream because you’re in both worlds. It is about making time for the dream in your life every day. Making space for it to germinate and become the real idea. Daydreaming about not being at that job is also not serving you. There are so many things to be done; try not to worry about the other things you have to do while in the middle of something. Be present. So don’t necessarily quit that job, but permit yourself to leave it when it’s time. Carve out space in your schedule to plan and dream for that thing, because that is when the actionable ideas are going to come.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Laura Feinstein.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

President Trump continues to brag about his ability to make deals. Whether with tariffs, gaining mineral rights or even ending conflicts, he always comes back to his particular expertise. “I’ve spoken to President Putin, and my people are dealing with him constantly, and his people in particular, and they want to do something,” he said. “I mean, that’s what I do. I do deals. My whole life is deals. That’s all I know, is deals. And I know when somebody wants to make it and when somebody doesn’t,” he boasted at his joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron.

His assumption, and the foundation of transactional politics, is that business deals and diplomatic deals are similar. As Fintan O’Toole recounted in The New Yorker: “Speaking of Greenland after the end of his first term, Trump recalled, ‘I said, Why didn’t we have that? You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, I’ve got to get that store for the building I’m building,’ etc.” So if it’s Greenland, Canada, Panama or even Gaza, Donald Trump looks at the world from the same perspective, as a real estate developer.

But business deals and diplomatic negotiations are not the same. Business deals involve dollars and cents. Diplomatic negotiations involve countries and citizens. Business deals are often one-off transactions. Diplomatic negotiations are based on historic relationships with international ramifications. Business deals involve results on a spread sheet. Diplomatic negotiations include unquantifiable national prestige.

Let’s look at current U.S. Russian relations. Trump is looking to make business deals with Russia and Ukraine over rare earth minerals. In order to do that, he is ignoring historic American political, military and financial support for Ukraine and the obvious fact that Russia violated international law when it invaded Ukraine. One startling example of twisting the diplomatic into mere deal-making is that the United States voted with Russia on a resolution in the U.N. General Assembly, a dramatic reversal of United States foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War. Trump prefers making business deals to supporting historic diplomatic alliances.

How is this tectonic shift in U.S./Russia relations playing out? Militarily, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a halt to offensive cyberoperations against Russia. This is reported to be part of a deeper re-evaluation of all U.S. operations against what is now considered a former adversary. Politically, some traditional anti-Russian G.O.P. politicians like Senator Lindsay Graham from South Carolina are changing their tune to follow Trump’s pro-Russian position.

In terms of running a government bureaucracy like a business, Trump has also given power to tech billionaire Elon Musk to interfere in the public domain as if he were dealing with employees in his companies. (It is noteworthy that Musk was the first person to speak after Trump at the recent Cabinet meeting.) When Musk asks federal employees what they did the week before, he is using private, corporate criteria for public service. A peace negotiation, for example, may require years of confidence-building measures before representatives of both sides sign a final agreement. The blow-up in the Oval Office between Trump, J.D. Vance and Zelensky happened because the final arrangements about minerals and security guarantees had not been reached before the cameras started rolling, a flagrant example of ad hoc, amateur diplomacy.

How to build diplomatic confidence? For many years I attended a series of meetings in an upscale Zurich hotel. Under the tutelage of a brilliant Swiss diplomat, Theodor Winkler, high-ranking representatives from the United States, Russia and Europe spent time together getting to know each other and presenting their countries’ positions. No treaty was signed. No memorandum of understanding was agreed upon. Yet confidence was established among the participants. One cannot measure what the confidence led to. It certainly led to improved personal relations and better understandings of each country’s position.

The gatherings were discontinued, I assume, by some Swiss bureaucrat who saw no direct result of how the Swiss taxpayer’s money was being spent. Without a necessary cause and effect, it is noteworthy that the first meeting between Americans and Russians since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine took place in Saudi Arabia. Why not Geneva where the 2021 Biden/Putin summit took place and the historic 1985 Reagan/Gorbachev meeting? How can one measure in centimes and francs the value of building confidence and trust between people and countries over time?

Donald Trump’s deal making has nothing to do with confidence and trust. It’s all about power and fear. Trump is “shaking down” President Zelensky to sign a mineral deal. Just like a mafia boss, he is threatening NATO partners to pay more money out of fear the U.S. will withdraw.

There are significant differences between making deals out of fear and diplomatic negotiated settlements built on confidence and trust. Fear is a temporary state. What one fears one day can lead to vengeance or reprisals the next. Confidence is more long lasting. Trump may get Zelensky to sign some deal, but whatever confidence between the two existed has been broken.

And that will have consequences for traditional American allies as well. How can one have confidence in a president who votes with Russia and North Korea in the U.N. against his European allies? If Trump continues to be transactional, he risks losing the trust of those who have historically been with the United States. Contrary to Trump’s enthusiasm towards Russia, President Macron was right to point out that “In 2014, we had a ceasefire with Russia … it was violated every time,” Macron said, adding that any truce agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin should be backed by security guarantees. The vote in the U.N. and suspending aid to Ukraine are the latest reasons why historic U.S. allies and partners are wary of Trump.

When Ronald Reagan used to say “Trust, but verify” in the context of nuclear disarmament discussions with the Soviet Union now applies to American allies and Donald Trump. Trump is the self-declared master of the art of the deal, but he still has a lot to learn about diplomacy and negotiations. In a very short time, he has been able to put in doubt years of shared values and cooperation. No small accomplishment. A very big deal.

The post The Art of the Deal is Not a Diplomatic Negotiation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Daniel Warner.

I lost my job last January. But it’s funny, I had been thinking about leaving that job literally the beginning of that month. I was finally ready to pursue freelance and tattooing more and dive into investing in myself and my art more, because I was able to grow following, or my art account, a lot over the last three years. In and out of tech and full-time jobs, jumping in and out of tattooing part-time, doing freelance gigs part-time—it felt like my brain was splitting. It felt like I was doing a disservice to my art to not do it full time.

I wasn’t going to leave [my job] until the spring because I had just come out of the holiday season. I had my birthday in the second week of January. At my birthday party, I remember having this moment… I was pretty drunk, but I felt like, “This year is going to change a lot for me. I don’t know what the fuck is going to happen, but I feel like my life is going to look super different in a year.” Two weeks later I got laid off and I was like, “Okay, well, I’m going to jump into freelance earlier than I expected.”

I was also moving at the time. My partner and I were living together for seven years and we decided to move apart for our own personal relationship growth. It’s been the best decision ever. Neither of us have lived alone before. We’re still together but it was a huge [task of] uncoupling, detangling all of our personal items. It was a lot of change at once. Then I went to Asia last September; I hadn’t been home in eight years. That also fundamentally changed how I felt about my identity. My grandpa passed during that trip.

Overall, even though the whole year was very chaotic, I would say that it’s been my best year yet in terms of what I’ve been able to create. I was right about the fact that if I just invested my full ass into making and thinking deeply about my artwork, it would pay back tenfold. It’s been nothing but amazing to be able to just do whatever I want.

Not having one foot in a creative career and one foot in a more corporate career, you have the mind space cleared to return to your roots of why you started your creative practice.

Definitely. Because I’ve had more clarity on myself, I’ve had a lot more clarity on my artwork or what I want to be doing with it. And the ideas come flowing in a lot easier than they were. I was dealing with some major burnout in 2022 and 2023. That was the worst period creatively for me. I feel like I finally came out the other end of it. People don’t know, but burnout can last years.

The weight of being burned out and the account growth being very quick… I buckled under that pressure. Learning to create under many eyes was hard. Before I was such a small account, like 800 followers, and I would just post whatever the fuck. I feel like I can’t do that anymore. At certain points I was like, “People have expectations for what Gentle Oriental is going to post.” I feel like I still work through that every day.

Pressure under perception is huge and you’ve been really open about that on your social media—your love-hate relationship with Instagram and the ways the algorithms have shifted.

Oh, yeah. I have written about that a few times. I think [Instagram] is dying right now. I also think people are really burnt out by social media. I know more people than not now who are like, “ I haven’t checked my Instagram in a few days.” Then that’s stressful for artists who like to thrive on social media. If the people are not on social media anymore, then what do we do? That’s the problem that I’m dealing with right now. My Substack is always better. I think people are more reliably checking email. I feel like that’s always been a very stable method of communication and digesting information at a healthy distance.

I don’t really have hopes anymore for things to go viral on Instagram the way it used to for me. I do feel like there’s over-saturation in the market right now. When I first started posting, there was this Asian American art renaissance happening. It was really cool. There was so much newness. I don’t think people are tired of artists or art or any of it at face value, I think they’re just probably tired of the way that it’s being consumed and the way they’re being forced to consume it.

I still have pockets of joy when I run into people in real life who are like, “Oh, I love your art.” That means a lot more to me than seeing 100 likes on a post… So this year I’m optimizing for what I can do to meet people in real life or have my work appear in physical locations instead of always being confined to the ‘gram. Maybe there’s a move back to traditional media in terms of showing art. I’m trying to make more prints this year. Objects would help me feel like my art is more tethered to this world [rather] than just being on a screen. Tattooing has also always helped me feel that way, because it’s physically tethered.

I’m trying to push myself to go to events and be not afraid of meeting people. I know people are out there trying to host things. We all say we want community and then we’re too baby to leave the house. I just need to deal with that. Just go to the thing.

Especially in a city like New York, everyone is so busy. Community for me over the past few years has been defined as showing your face as often as you can, just going and going until your absence is noticeable when you’re not there. But that’s very high effort.

Yeah, it is super high effort. I’m trying to meet more people for sure, but that’s so unquantifiable. I try to go for coffee with randos from Instagram more often these days. I feel like when I was really burnt out, I was getting a lot of requests like that, and I would be [say] no… When you’re really burnt out, it’s easy to feel that way because you barely have enough energy for yourself.

You were saying your burnout lasted a few years. What was your process of getting out of it? Was it conscious or was it just time?

It was time. It was time and it was unconscious… There was a period where I just didn’t have any idea what to make. I didn’t even know what to draw for flash. I was feeling so jaded. I don’t even know how to explain how depressed I was about my art. I was just like, “Does this matter? Is this anything?” It was hitting a rock and trying to chisel out something recognizable.

I think also for artists, if you’re personally going through a lot in your own life, it can get really in the way. I think there’s two ways: one way is you can channel that pain or difficulty into your art. Another way is if your art is so much a part of you that you feel like you having issues is making your art have issues. It’s hard being an artist, man. It’s a lot of working through your own stuff so that you can also work through your art. It’s so personally informed, especially my art. Anyone who is making very identity-based art, if you’re having an identity crisis, your art is going to be a little fucked for a little bit.

If I had one message for any artist going through burnout, it’s that you will get through it. There will be a day that comes when creating doesn’t feel so difficult anymore. I would say that I’m at that place now.

Would you say that it was a palpable shift? Or was it just like, one day you woke up and didn’t feel that way anymore?

[It happened over] a few months, I think. It was probably during 2024 while I was getting out of my job… When I was in the worst of my burnout, I would dissociate completely from my art. I would try to draw something and be like, “Who’s drawing this right now? I’m not drawing this right now. I don’t even know what this is.” It was just the weirdest feeling. Me and my art were very far apart during that period of burnout, and slowly they shift back together until they’re one cohesive blob. So now we’ve re-coupled.

That makes a lot of sense. At that point you had already built up a brand, so you knew “This is what Gentle Oriental would make,” but then you felt so detached from it.

Yeah, maybe it was that. And then I realized towards the end of it, “Gentle Oriental is just going to make whatever the fuck I want.” People will like it as long as I’m being more genuine to myself. I do find that the most genuine artifacts that I’ve made are the stuff that people gravitate towards the most. I can usually feel when something’s going to be good while I’m trying it or when I’m drawing a thing and I’m finishing it; there’s this euphoria that happens at the end of a piece where I finish it and I look at it and I’m like… I’m not religious, but in the Bible, when they say “God looked at his creations and said, ‘This is good’“—I feel that way. [It’s] that feeling where you’re like, “Yeah, I kind of cooked.”

God popped off when he made humans.

Exactly. He was like, “Damn I did that.”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jun Chou.

It’s hard to answer because generally being an artist versus being the artist that I am now, or what people understand of my work, is a shifty timeline.

I studied art all throughout college but never really made the commitment mentally or emotionally because I just didn’t know how it was going to pan out. The truth is that there is no answer to how it’s going to pan out. What happened was that my final semester of senior year, I thought, “Well, they can’t stop me from graduating. I did all my credits. They might not like my work I do now, but it’s too late.” And something about that took the pressure off and I made the work I wanted to and really got to deep dive into my interests, develop a quote, unquote, “studio practice.” And then in my exit critique, I was like, “Yeah, you know what? I think I do want to be an artist.” At that point I was 22. That should have been obvious, but I think I really just couldn’t commit until then.

How did you first find your love for kinetics? When did you start working with moving sculptures?

I was doing some soft sculpture stuff in my final year of school, and that was the work that I was like, “I feel free to make this. I don’t give a fuck anymore.” I was making these furniture pieces that were constructed out of soft upholstery foam, and then I surfaced them to look like marble because that was just this huge trend—everything was just marble everything. And I was really interested in that faux kind of sheen stuff. I was playing around with the sculptures and they just flopped over. They couldn’t stand. The point was that they were all surface and no structure. And they always had this animated quality to them. And there was just something so great about identifying emotions with an object. Like how can you have sympathy for something that’s not alive? After that, I just wanted to get things to start moving and see what motion could create. Because when I started, I loved seeing signs that spin around on the street; they kind of feel like they’re trying to perform like, “Come here! Come to the store!” Something about the movement just captures your attention.

Movement could be as simple as spinning, or things could be really chaotic or truly destroying themselves in the process of moving. Starting to show that work, I learned that people also felt that identification. Which I thought was really wonderful. And I’ve told myself, “You need to start making not-moving things, because you’re going to be broke because who’s going to buy shit that their cat wants to fight with in their home?” But I never really could go back to inert work. I never intended to be labeled a kinetic artist. And I think there’s a huge spectrum to even that term. But I like when a thing moves because that thing feels alive, like it has a personality.

It’s a little uncanny. Taste, the piece you just made for Art Basel with the little roller skates and everything…it was literally a person. Is that something that you strive for, giving your sculptures personalities?

A year ago I was just like, “This sculpture needs dog Crocs.” And since then I have ordered a weird amount of American Doll shoes and dog shoes because it’s funny how a little touch can make something just feel figurative.

I’m really cautious about giving something what looks like a face. But it’s a real phenomenon people experience, pareidolia—being able to find faces or identifiably human qualities in objects. I actually learned later that this happens to religious people more. Looking for signs or for Jesus in toast or something.

So yeah, they feel like characters. But it’s fun in the process of making them because I don’t always feel like I’m in total control of what that character is. And it’s really interesting to feel like the sculpture has some sort of agency. Obviously I’m the one making it; whatever weird 3:00 AM decisions in the studio are mine. But I’m often surprised by the work, and that keeps things fresh in the studio.

When I did my Berlin show, there were just so many roller skates and then somebody was like, “So why roller skates?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I think they dream of mobility or something.”

When we were on Fishers Island for the Lighthouse Works Residency, you salvaged sculpture parts from the town dump. I know you work with scrapped, used motors for your kinetic sculptures. Does this process of searching and reusing speak to the overall mission or vision of your work?

Getting to Fishers Island, I knew I was going to be limited. Of course, I mix found materials with ordering parts online; I have to. But it really was an extension of a practice I started for Gather. When I started sourcing massagers, I did so locally because I could shop online for massagers, but I can’t figure out how they work until I have the real thing in front of me and have taken it apart with a screwdriver. Then I was just driving around and going to the suburbs because the suburbs are where massager machines, exercise machines, and treadmills go to die.

And it became this fun way to get to talk to people too, those who were willing to. It also helps me to establish this weird knowledge of a place. Because I’ve moved around so much, I’ve never really felt ownership over calling somewhere a “hometown.” So this was my weird speckled visitation way of getting to know a place by just taking the things people didn’t want anymore.

I loved getting to see, even just on this small island that has a really kind of set population of people, the kind of stuff that gets regurgitated through people’s homes, what goes into the dump, what’s brought in, and what gets sent back to the mainland. It’s like digestion. The island is digesting stuff in this weird way.

Your bio says you source materials that have a history of aspiration and failure, which I think is a beautiful way to put it. Would you mind elaborating?

It extends from this basic idea of what you buy is a form of self-expression. I started thinking about that in the domestic space or like when you host people and what you want your home or lawn to virtue signal basically. It also came from my dad. We would go to Hobby Lobby together when I was a kid. I would go run off to the art supplies while he was in home decor. I don’t know what it was, but he just was buying a lot of replicas of famous art like the Venus de Milo, the David, etc. Hobby Lobby manufactures all these small plastic and plaster copies. I think it was his local and economic way to feel worldly, in the way people will travel abroad and bring back some souvenir that feels like an authentic slice of that place. But it was just not possible for us growing up, to travel and to bring back the spoils of those travels.

But they were all these things that were trying to point to higher culture. For me, thinking about my immigrant family, the American Dream, it was like: that’s aspiration. And I don’t necessarily work with that stuff symbolically, but in terms of the machines, the aspiration comes from comfort and from care and intimacy. A massager is a replacement for masseuse, a baby swing is a replacement for a nanny. It’s like there are these distilled functions that are just powered by cheap motors that perform one repetitive task over and over again. You’re just outsourcing that slice of labor to a machine. It’s very middle class.

I remember talking to a faculty member in grad school who pointed that out, where it was like, “Yeah, if you’re really wealthy, you hire the person. If you’re really poor, you do it yourself. And then if you’re in this weird middle-class zone, you find an appliance.” I thought that was so interesting. But the whole ability for me to source this stuff comes from the fact that somebody doesn’t want it anymore. And that’s the failure. It’s supposed to do a job, it somehow doesn’t meet the expectation, or it just falls out of use. A lot of people who sold me massagers say, “This is great. You press this button, it turns on this heating function. It’s really comforting, it’s really good.” And then I’m like, “So why are you getting rid of it?” And they reply, “I haven’t used it in five years.”

It has this promise it’s trying to deliver and it can’t. And I think that’s really sweet and endearing, something a lot of people can relate to. And that’s a part of the sympathy too; the object is not only what it’s expressing physically, but also through its emotional history. And I’m interested in how that connects to people’s relationships.

Your bio also mentions being haunted by your Korean immigrant father’s pursuit of the American Dream. How else does that show up in your work?

It’s being in America and how much of that is driven by commerce and by capitalism. And that’s why a lot of these things are failures, is because they’re also produced as dirt cheap as possible and they’re not fixable. And there’s kind of this distinction maybe, this is super simplistic, but of an America where things are well made and you know how to fix it and it’s very masculine. It’s like, “I’m going to change this, I’m going to fix this. I know how to work on my car.” And then there’s the other side of America, which is like, “Something’s wrong. I’m just going to buy a new one because it’s cheaper to do that or it’s too much effort to learn how something works.”

And I think for my family, they fell on that latter side of this American Dream that is about ease and shelling out the money to just buy a cheap replacement. And I’m having fun in my own scrappy way of figuring out how things work and how those translate to larger processes in engineering or manufacturing. There are so many products driven by motors, and a lot of them have similar mechanisms all across. And it’s so cool to see how even just something as simple as a motor mechanism extends to every part of our lives. But again, that’s really different from the American Dream that the rest of my family has.

Yeah, totally. Your lifestyle is like the opposite of the American Dream. You’re not married, you don’t have kids, you don’t have a chunk of land with a picket fence-

Lay it on me.

I mean, same. Anyway, part of this is that you’re living at residencies while waiting to hear back from others, and it sometimes takes months or even up to a year to know what’s next. How do you deal with all this uncertainty of where you’ll be next, this almost opposite of the American Dream?

It’s funny because I left the supposed promise of that security living in St. Louis. I really thought for a second it was going to be so easy to settle down there. But then while I was working full time, I once took all of my vacation days for the year to go to a one-month residency. And I don’t know, it’s this classic existential question, it’s like, “Is this what life is for? Am I going to work so I can do this?” I mean, of course the way that I’m living now is not super stable. It relies on a lot of generosity of others and vulnerability to ask people to crash with them or for a residency to accept me and be willing to lodge me and give me a studio and food and stuff like that, which is so amazing. Every day at the Lighthouse Works, I was just like, “How the hell did I make this happen for myself?”

This is also different from this kind of American-suburban, “I take care of just myself or my family, my own kind of nuclear family unit and behind my closed doors of my suburban home, this is my world” attitude. Again, I’m simplifying. But I also think that with massagers or just the machines, they’re also meant to replicate the experience of intimacy or the relationship of working with other people, but privately because you don’t have to talk to your machine when you run it or whatever; you don’t have to be touched by another person in a massage or have that kind of brush up with humanity. So living this way and relying on other people is constantly forcing me to work against that I-take-care-of-me-and-only-me mentality.

I’m not totally denouncing suburban life. It’s really not about that. I remember my friend telling me that being an artist is the ultimate form of assimilation. And I had to really think about that one because, to me, assimilation was always something I had a complex relationship to by growing up in America because I was like, “Do I want to blend in or do I not? Do I have to kill parts of my identity or culture to do that?”

But the way he talked about it was that there’s this classic immigrant narrative of: your family comes over, they work really hard, they send you to school and you go be a doctor and a lawyer, a professor, you build up from there. And there’s something about being an artist where it’s not like you’re throwing that sacrifice away, but it’s like you’re living to be free and to not have a plan and to have that privilege, I think, is really cool.

I don’t know if I agree with that necessarily, but it’s just a thought I’ve been chewing on where it’s like because it is such a privilege to be able to move around and experience these places and get to really for, not a long time, but at least a few months, get to know places like Fishers Island and then leave before things become really monotonous…it allows me to exercise being an aimless, American boy or something. But yeah, it’s chaotic as hell. It’s a lot of work to put together. And it will not be forever. But for now it’s been cool. I got to meet you so it’s worth it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

It’s okay. I met my friend who’s here from out of town for coffee, but there was nowhere to sit at the coffee shop, so we sat outside. It was so cold that it completely zapped my life force.

Winter has arrived in Montreal. It reminds me of that photo series you did for Editorial Magazine a while ago called “Miss Winter.” I feel like you perfectly personified the season:

Can you talk about your relationship with this magazine?

It was originally my friend Claire Milbrath’s project. She was really into photography at that time and doing mini fashion editorials and wanted a place to share her work and the work of friends and other artists. Eventually, it evolved from an online publication into a print publication. Olivia Whittick stepped into the editor role, and I supported in that area as needed. I took on more photography work for editorial projects, handled assignments from Claire, and developed and pitched my own creative stories.

A number of years ago, you had a photo series that documented the “filth in your life.” In response to this collection, you said, “I think struggling financially and mentally was a big catalyst for me to start documenting things that caused me stress in an attempt to control them.” Do you bring this same mentality to the work you’re creating now?

I was really into flash photography of shitty Montreal apartment landlord fixes and filth. That’s an interesting question because I probably still do that to some extent. In terms of painting, much of the work I’ve been doing lately has been more centered on grappling with existential crises and grief. Grief feels very out of control to me.

I know you’ve always been a painter, but you seem to have really taken off in that medium over the past couple of years.

I was working as an editor and photographer for a tech company for a few years, and at the end of 2017, I had two pretty severe concussions back to back. At the time, I was like, “Well, that’s shitty luck.” But from a practical standpoint, I found it hard to look through a camera or focus my eyes, so photography became uncomfortable. Having a concussion is such a trippy experience—the weirdest things are excruciating, like tying my shoes or sometimes even making eye contact with people. I had to take quite a few months off.

At that point, I hit a wall and thought, “Well, this is it. You got your degree, you have the salary job, you’re paying off your student loans. What more to life is there?” I thought, “There has to be something else because this isn’t it for me.” During the pandemic, I decided to give painting another try, and since then, I have just kept at it.

You referenced one painting you did during the curfews in Montreal. Can you talk about this painting and what was going on for you around then?

I had recently gone through a breakup with a really long-term partner, moved out on my own, and then had another breakup, so during the curfew I was doing a lot of processing around being alone, independence, loneliness, and feeling very disempowered. I think we had to be home by 8 p.m. I was watching a lot of movies and got really into Krzysztof Kieslowski and was moved by Three Colours: Blue. Though I can’t totally remember the plot, a woman is navigating some big changes and dealing with loss and grief and I remember relating to the wish to be floating in water. It was the first film still I ever painted, but I try to avoid that now.

In this painting, you don’t see the figure’s face. I’ve noticed in many of your paintings you depict someone either wearing a mask or covering their face. Can you explain the significance of this recurring motif?

I’ve been thinking a lot about disconnection from self or loss of identity, not necessarily with others but through yourself—not feeling recognizable to yourself or not wanting to be perceived. There’s a certain quality to a disguise or anonymity that is more relatable in a way.

In an interview, you mentioned, “I think objects provide a more compelling narrative about people than a portrait does.” That idea really comes through in your painting Wait, where the imagery paired with the title is deeply evocative. Do you envision the story behind the painting before you start, or does the title come to you after it’s finished?

Sometimes, I sit there for hours, thinking, “What will I paint? Why am I painting this? What’s my reason? What’s my concept?” That must come from being art school-pilled and needing to have a little bit of a speech prepared for when the teacher calls on me in class. When I talk to other friends who are painters, I realize it’s actually okay to just start painting something because you want to, and then the answers come. The title just comes to me intuitively now. If I’m thinking too hard about it, it doesn’t feel right.

Can you talk about the title Eldest?

I was just thinking about being the eldest, the stereotype of having to hold it all together and be responsible. Sometimes, that means being burdened with a bag of trash that isn’t yours.

The dress is so beautifully painted. I’ve noticed your attention to texture across your photography and your painting. A while back, you created a series focused on photographing slime, and now, in one of your recent paintings, you’ve depicted velvet. Could you share more about your fascination with texture and how it shapes your creative process?

I think what it is about those things is their luminosity and just the way the light catches and plays. Maybe it’s overly pathologizing my work, but I feel like a part of me is searching for spiritual significance and trying to find the light. I’m also a physically sensitive person and I love smooth, silky things and exploring textures. I am drawn to those things because it’s comforting.

Do you feel like you are comforting yourself in the images you create?

Yeah, maybe, definitely. Painting is pretty cathartic for me, it makes me feel good. Even in moments of frustration it helps me to feel connected to myself and to my body.

Many of your paintings capture fleeting moments, like ice melting or a flower in bloom, evoking the symbolism often seen in still-life art. Memento mori, a Latin phrase meaning “remember that you will die,” comes to mind. Do themes of impermanence, death, or grief intentionally influence your work?

I feel like I can’t get away from thinking about that. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to get more comfortable with the idea of impermanence. I think I used to be really, really afraid of death, and I still am. I guess to cope with that fear in the context of my own life, I’ve just started to remind myself that nothing lasts forever and slowly that’s become comforting in a way as well.

I think when you’re going through a pretty dark time or you can’t get out of it, there’s some reassurance in reminding yourself, “Well, this isn’t going to last forever and I don’t know how it’s going to unfold, but it could get better.” I feel like it’s helpful for me to really try and stay present and grateful for times of bliss as well. It’s pretty haunting, or just a nasty feeling to look back on something and feel like you took it for granted. My work has been returning to that a lot, trying to create an appreciation for impermanence or trying to understand or just respect the fact that endings have to happen, and something new will always begin.

For me, the egg paintings Violet and Choose symbolize new beginnings. Is Violet named after your cat?

Violet is named after my cat. She sits on the window while I paint, and sometimes, when the light’s coming in, her ears and fur have a pink glow. When I finished the painting, I was like, “Oh, maybe I’ve just painted you.” I’ve been painting eggs a lot and they represent choice to me and the burden of decision. When faced with an egg, you have to be deliberate with what you want to happen to it. Do you want to eat it? Then you’re going to have to crack it open. Do you want to let it rot? Do you want it to grow into something entirely different? It’s about both the burden of indecision and the burden of choice.

Being in my mid-30s now, I feel my biological clock ticking which is such an intense feeling to normalize every day. It’s not really so cut and dry to be like, “I want to have kids,” or “I don’t want to have kids.” There’s so much surrounding it that I don’t feel like we are really socialized to understand or talk about. It feel like there’s also a pressure to choose either career, love or family, and I’m like, “Well, can I have everything? What’s going on here?” I was thinking a lot about those things, and Violet, my current roommate, is my everyday family. I love her, and I like the idea of creating the type of home life you want to have.

You said some of your paintings are going to Miami. How do you feel when your work travels without you and when you sell a painting, and it lives in somebody else’s home?

I think it’s really cool to sell a painting, well, for obvious reasons, but also, there’s a part of me that’s so finished with it that I’m shocked and delighted that it resonates with someone enough for them to want to have it around. Because painting can be really humiliating and frustrating, sometimes you get to a point where you’re like, “I hate you.” I am usually on good, or at the very least peaceful terms with all the work I exhibit, and at that point we usually have nothing more to say to each other and they’re onto a new adventure with someone else.

What are you working on right now?

All the work I sent to Miami was mostly still life. I was thinking a lot about how the material world seems feeble in the context of grief. I wanted to focus on that feeling when you’re going through it, and if you look around you at all of your possessions, it can feel almost disgusting. When you’re like, “Why do I have all these little things that I bought when I was feeling peaceful or joyful or that I thought would improve my life in some way?” All your little objects reflecting you and staring back at you. The material world can feel so meaningless when your internal world feels overwhelming. But it’s a nice way to reassess your attachment to your external surroundings, and remind yourself that there can still be comfort there, too.

Right now I’m working on a series for a group show in Madrid. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I’m trying to hack an existence that falls outside the traditional heteronormative markers of success, and I feel lucky to be able to explore that creatively, in a more fantastical way. Part of me wants to be a painter who can be visually frank about documenting their lived experience and surroundings, but I’m always pulled back to elements of fantasy, which I guess in some ways is still illustrative of my lived experience, just not the part anyone else can see. I think fantasy is a helpful vehicle for grappling with everyday emotional experiences that I don’t necessarily know how to visually isolate otherwise. Almost like an optical euphemism. I guess you could argue that’s what art-making is, but maybe because of my photography brain it feels newer to me.

Have you ever abandoned a painting?

Oh yeah, definitely. Sometimes I have to paint over something and I’m just like, “You are a curse, but thanks.” I don’t feel sentimental about that because it always teaches me something, and I see it more as me abandoning my execution of something, or being able to accept that I failed. Then I get to try again.

Will you ever open the egg?

Maybe. I was considering painting a cracked egg, and I’m like, “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” Too much.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lauren Spear.

The dropping by Creative Australia of Lebanese-born artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative for the 2026 Venice Biennale, along with the curator of the pavilion’s artistic team, Michael Dagostino, shows that true artistic subversion is not the game, and uncontroversial subservience the form.  If an arts body fears that the milch cow will be starved, if not killed altogether, they will slight, blight and drop the artist in question and prostrate before Mammon’s moneyed throne.

In Australia’s febrile, philistine and increasingly hysterical atmosphere on matters controversial, debate that supposedly tests what is tepidly termed social cohesion has been cut and mauled to the point of non-recognition.  Journalists are given to following strict talking points on matters of international interest, from President Donald Trump (criticism of all his moves, marvellous) to the issue of Israel (criticism, not quite so marvellous, entailing avoidance of such words as “massacre”, “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”).

Criticism of Israel’s policies in levelling Gaza and creating an open-air theatre of massacre in real time have led agitating voices in both Israel and Australia to claim that the demon of antisemitism is more virulent than usual.  Threats have been inflated and the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, inspired to secure votes in the months leading up to the federal election.  A pathology has taken root, from art circles to universities.

It began with an intervention by the Australian newspaper, an outlet that Israel can rely on as its pro bono propagandistic emissary down under.  The paper’s sympathetic correspondent, Yoni Bashan, had been embedded with Israeli forces in Gaza.  After receiving a number of messages, Bashan took an interest in Creative Australia’s choice for the biennale, thinking he had scored a coup by going through Sabsabi’s previous work.  This preschool hackwork found a 2007 video installation titled You, which features Hassan Nasrallah, the former leader of the Lebanese Shiite militia group Hezbollah.

Nasrallah, whose voice and image appears in the montage, was slain in the latest conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.  The buffoonish, hatchet assessment (“I’m not an arts reporter,” Bashan conceded in a podcast, calling the art industry “a bit too fluty for me”) claimed that Creative Australia’s selection of Sabsabi was a “creative form of racism”.  Instead of understanding the broader context of the horrors of war which Sabsabi has been preoccupied with, himself a refugee from the Lebanese civil war, the paper was thrilled to have uncovered a terrorist sympathiser.

The falsely revelatory nature of the Australian’s intervention, coupled with a discussion in the Australian Parliament that also scorned a 2006 video titled Thank you very much showing the 9/11 attacks and then US President George W. Bush, was pitifully juvenile.  Tony Burke’s expression of shock was craven, a capitulation that necessitates his immediate resignation as Minister for the Arts.  Within hours of the parliamentary exchange – one could hardly call it a debate – Creative Australia convened an emergency board meeting that unanimously endorsed cancelling the contract regarding the Venice Biennale representation featuring Sabsabi and Dagostino.  It had taken all but six days from the announcement that praised the artist’s work for exploring “human collectiveness” and questioning “identity politics and ideology, inviting audiences to do the same.”

Thankfully, this indecent chapter did provoke resignations and stinging criticism.  Mikala Tai, an important figure in Creative Australia’s visual arts departments over the last four years, wrote to Chief Executive Adrian Collette stating that she had resigned “in support of the artist.”

To the list of resignations can be added artist and board member, Lindy Lee and Simon Mordant, twice commissioner at the Venice Biennale, who told ABC Arts that he “immediately resigned” his role and terminated financial support. “There was a question asked in parliament [on Thursday, February 13] and that subsequently resulted in an unprecedented move by Creative Australia to rescind the contract.”  For Mordant, he could not think of any other situation “in any country in the world” where something of this nature had happened, and “certainly” not in Australia.

To its credit, Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), which accepted You and exhibited it in 2009, rightly wondered how the decision was reached.  In a statement to the Australian Financial Review on February 21, the gallery expressed concern with “the lack of transparency in Creative Australia’s process.”  The decision had “major ramifications for the arts in Australia and the reputation of Australia in the world at a time when creating space for diverse artist voices and ideas has never been more important.”

Other galleries have been committedly cowardly and silent on the decision, even those whose funding does not depend on Creative Australia.  The Art Gallery of NSW, which ran Sabsabi’s solo show in 2019, is a case in point, merely stating that it was “not commenting on this matter at this time”.  Liz Ann Macgregor, who ran the MCA for over two decades till 2021, offers a cast iron reason for the cringeworthy reticence.  “I think people are second-guessing that they might upset some of their donors if they say something.”

The teams shortlisted to join the biennale pavilion were also keen to express their views in an open letter addressed to the Creative Australia board.  “We believe that revoking support for the current Australian artist and curator representatives for Venice Biennale 2026 is antithetical to the goodwill and hard-fought artistic independence, freedom of speech and moral courage that is at the core of arts in Australia, which plays a crucial role in our thriving and democratic nation.”

The letter goes on to ask the salient question.  “If Creative Australia cannot even stand by its expert-led selection for a matter of hours, abandoning its own process at the first sign of pressure, then what does that say about its commitment to artistic excellence and freedom of expression?”  The answer: everything.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

I’m good! We’ve been busier than ever, but all good things. A lot of exciting projects in the works. Honestly, the last couple of years have been wild in the best way. We’ve grown the team, pushed into new mediums outside of photo and video, and added a more physical side to my practice.

I see that—there’s furniture, sculptures, even food in your studio right now. Anything else you’ve worked on that was fun?

Yeah! I’ve always had a thing for objects and materials, but we also worked with dogs recently, for a calendar, which was cool. It was a different challenge working with live, non-human subjects, and just rolling with the dog’s mood that day.

You’re an Instagram sensation—I think you’re probably the most internet-famous person I know. A lot of people know your work, but they don’t necessarily know you. What is it like to be famous?

That’s funny because it doesn’t feel that way. I’m just living my life. That’s always been my mindset: I make what I want, and if people connect, great. But I also have the benefit of being relatively faceless. I show my face sometimes, but my platform is so global that I don’t really get recognized locally. It’s an audience of around 700,000 people, but they’re spread across the world—mostly digitally. So it doesn’t really translate to real life, which I actually appreciate.

How has having a wide global audience changed your practice?

It’s shaped some of the partnerships we get, for sure. It’s opened up opportunities I wouldn’t have had otherwise. But in terms of how we work—me, my team—it hasn’t changed. We still go off intuition and personal taste. That’s always been the core.

When I first met you, you were a one-woman show. Now you have a team. What’s that like, and why did you build one?

It’s been great. I hired my first studio assistant a little over three years ago, and from there, it just grew. Everyone has different roles. Some tasks are daily, and others are more fluid. We have a thoughtful, complementary team where everyone knows what they bring to the creative vision.

It’s more collaborative now. I still lead the creative—that’s the essence of my practice—but the execution is a bigger conversation. We work with a huge network of vendors because so many of our ideas require specialized skills or materials. That collaboration is key to bringing things to life. Never in a million years would I be able to do the scope of what I do today if it wasn’t for my team.

Your work transforms the everyday into something unexpected. What drives your fascination with re-contextualizing objects? What’s your creative process like?

It all comes from childhood. I was an only child, always making things with my hands. What I do now is just an extension of what I loved doing as a kid. It’s a blessing—every day is fun. As for the process, it’s hard to define because it changes. If we’re working on commissions, one week we might be doing a photo series, and the next producing an event. It’s fluid; we start with the idea and work backward, troubleshooting how to bring it to life.

Do you do sketches or mockups?

Depends on the project. Some don’t need them, but others do, especially if we need 3D renders or have to involve architects or engineers for safety. It’s all about the end goal. If it’s an installation, it’s technical. If it’s just a photo for Instagram, it’s a whole different approach.

When you hit a creative block, how do you get through it? Do you have any rituals?

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever hit one. I have slower moments, but it’s usually about my environment. If my mind is overloaded, I won’t have space for ideas. But I don’t see that as a rut. I know how to fix it: I just step away. As long as I have enough space and quiet, the ideas always come.

So you never get bored.

Never. I never got bored as a kid, and I don’t now. My parents always told me, “You never asked for a sibling. You were always playing, by yourself or with kids on our street.” My mind moves fast and I need constant stimulation. Even at home, I can’t sit still. I’ll think, “Oh, I could clean this cabinet or rearrange my photo wall.” There’s always something.

I read that your dad was a painter. How did that shape your creative process?

My dad was a receptionist for most of his professional life—he’s retired now—but he loved painting. It wasn’t a career, just a passion. That made art feel accessible to me. My parents helped with that, too. They took me to museums and let me go at my own pace. If I wanted to skip something, fine. If I didn’t understand something, no big deal. They gave me audio guides so I could follow along. It never felt intimidating.

Do you remember the first piece of art that hit you?

Yeah, super vividly. It was a painting of strawberries by Renoir. It was super textured, and something about it just hit me. It was at the art museum in Quebec City. I was 13, way too cool to cry over a painting, but I teared up. I have no idea why, but it stuck with me. I bought the postcard of that particular painting at the museum gift shop after going through the exhibit as a way to hold on to that moment.

What are your inspirations outside of art?

I draw a lot of inspiration from objects, especially things that make you do a double take. It could be an unexpected design detail, a surreal landscape, someone’s haircut, or even the way something moves. I love anything that challenges perception or feels slightly off in a way that makes you look twice. Beyond art and design, my boyfriend is an actor, and he’s really expanded my perspective on cinema and theatre. He’s introduced me to films I wouldn’t have sought out on my own, and it’s been incredible to explore storytelling from that angle. Lately, a few cultural moments that have really excited me include The Substance, Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakopia, and Matthieu Blazy’s appointment as Chanel’s creative director.

You constantly push creative boundaries. Have you ever surprised yourself with a project?

Definitely. There are always moments where an idea just clicks, sometimes even more than I expected. One example is the lasagna hair bow. Initially, it was meant to be just a fun closing image in a carousel of other pasta-related photos. But when I saw the final result, it completely exceeded my expectations. It looked so much better than I had imagined and, ironically, ended up being one of my most successful posts online. The best part isn’t just having an idea but seeing it come to life. When the result matches or exceeds what I imagined, that’s the best. But it happens just as often in the opposite direction, which keeps things interesting. What’s so cool about this is it doesn’t exist until we make it.

Okay, fun question: if you had to give up one sense for a year, which would it be?

Smell. Easy.

But you need smell to taste!

True… But I’m not giving up sight, touch, or hearing. So yeah, smell.

If you had to create a piece of art using only hospital items, what would you do?

Funny you ask—I was at the dentist recently, and I kept thinking about how medical trays and tools feel like food trays and utensils. I’d probably play with that parallel.

What’s next for you?

So much. We have a bunch of new products coming out, plus some really exciting brand partnerships. I also want to direct more video work. We’ve been dabbling in it, but I want this to be a big video year.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Yang Shi.

The span of the work humbles. From the early 1900s (Picasso moved to Paris in 1904, keeping an address at the Washhouse Boat in Montmartre), we find the almost shocking A Frugal Meal, where the much diminished couple sit together in strained impoverishment, their minds abstracted by distance from each other. Struck by malnutrition, we see the sagging bodies, the skeletal fingers, the piece of bread on the side of an empty plate, wine partially filling one glass. Made with a salvaged copper plate, the work also heralds Picasso’s first serious attempt at printmaking.

In 1905, the print Salomé announces a serious yet teasing effort by Picasso to depict the body of the naked dancer before Herod much “like a blind man who pictures an arse by the way it feels”. The outstretched leg suggests the Moulin Rouge.

To the end, we get a sampling of the 347 Suite of etchings from 1968, where the playful, irreverent artist is in full, zesty swing.  Along the way, we find Picasso the cubist (Still Life with a Bottle of Marc [1911]), where he keeps fused company with Georges Braque, and the choice morsels from the Vollard Suite (1930-7), where the lure of classical art, animal sexuality and playful mythology is most evident.

The Minotaur is a randy villain governed by instinct, the masculine, beast hybrid that galvanises the work throughout.  He connives in the bacchanalian excesses that artist-man-Picasso also engages in. Ignobly, the Minotaur ravishes or suggests it, evident in Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman (1933).

In the lubricious mix are other creatures of Greek mythology.  The intentions of the faun in Faun Uncovering a Woman (1936), with a nod to Rembrandt’s depiction of Jupiter and Antiope, are unambiguous.  Here, Picasso plays with lust, longing and discomforting moments of predatory assumption.  But then comes the masterful 1934 Blind Minotaur being led by a Little Girl in the Night, its aquatint with scraper effect producing a moving work: a sightless minotaur vulnerable, punished for its misdeeds, holding a dove, walking under a sky carpeted with stars.

This theme of visited punishment and regret is also found in The Little Artist (1954), a colour crayon transfer lithograph made after the end of Picasso’s relationship with Françoise Gilot.  Three figures dominate: the two children he shares with her, flat and downcast, and Gilot, protectively shadowing them in forbidding form.

The 347 sequence is schoolboy randy and remorselessly mocking.  The sublime Renaissance painter Raphael, who the biographer and rumour tiller Giorgio Vasari claimed expired after too much over vigorous intercourse with his lover, La Fornarina, keeps company with unmatched voyeurism, including the Pope’s leering antics.  The shift to the contemporary scene is evident in giving the French war hero and President Charles de Gaulle a noticeable member as he consults the female form.

Violence, ever present in the Picasso oeuvre, finds expression in the gladiatorial, ceremonial form of the bullfight.  Looking at the displayed prints brings Ernest Hemingway to mind, whose perspective on such a brutal spectacle in Death in the Afternoon (1932) is fine stuffing for Picasso’s moral universe.  “So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after”.  The bullfight was “very normal” to Papa Hemingway, with its messages on life, death, mortality and immortality.  At the conclusion of the battle between bull and man, “I feel very sad but also very fine.”

Much about Picasso tends to get absorbed into the outsized man’s legacy. The lovers, the infidelities, his preoccupation with violent themes, and the “woman” question.  But this exhibition is exhilarating for offering the viewer the sources that moved Picasso while also providing offerings that do, inevitably, show the man at his throbbing, priapic best (and worst).  Two young ladies were utterly captivated by the generously erotic depictions, with one squealing in delight, “Now she does have a cunt!”

Beyond the land that is purely mired in cunt and cock, however, we see a delicious lithographic tribute to Lucas Cranach the Elder with its variations, focusing on King David’s lusty longing for the woman he sees bathing, Bathsheba.  Picasso renders the king menacing in intention, his head expansive, his harp disproportionately large.  One senses sympathy for Bathsheba at the inevitable dishonouring.

There are also reverential tributes to the masters of Spanish painting.  El Greco, Velázquez and Goya tower.  The latter links the two in terms of a shared interest in the bullfight and their subversion of conventional forms of beauty.

By the time one reaches the end, where the master offers the viewer his own reflection in Picasso, His Work and His Audience (1968) it behoves the spectator to wonder whether feeling fine is, in fact, the sentiment to entertain.  For many, it is bound to be.  Others, bothered by the desecrations, the defiling, and more besides, are bound to be troubled.  But most are unlikely to have even wanted to see Picasso in the first place.

British Museum, November 7, 2024 to March 30, 2025

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

No. Never. I still don’t. It’s one book at a time.

Do you ever have ideas for the next book while you’re working on the current one?

I want to say no. It goes a book at a time. When I finish a book, then I say, “Oh. I wonder what to write next.”

How much time usually passes between books? Do you ever find yourself closing one and then starting right again on another, or do you have these periods between books?

Right now, I’m in a period between books, but ordinarily, I go pretty much book to book. I would say it takes me the better part of the year per book.

I’m 76. I’ve been writing full-time since I was 18.

Do you think that’s why you work in so many mediums, then?

Yes. I think I find myself getting an itch to write something which may not be in the same genre as what I have just finished writing.

I think part of what makes The Artist’s Way so attractive to people is the very clear and seemingly simple actions you prescribe: the morning pages and artist dates. How did you arrive at the system of daily actions that have become The Artist’s Way?

I would say through practice. I found myself just leading from one book to the next and from one tool to the next. I think they were exciting to me.

What excited you about this framework initially?

The fact that I could keep going.

I notice, when I talk with friends about the practice of writing morning pages, people love to talk about the size of the notebook. Have folks come to you with a lot of questions about that too?

Yes. The often-asked question is, “What size paper should I use?” And I say, “8 1/2 x 11.” If you use something smaller, you miniaturize your thoughts. If you use something larger, you’ll be daunted.

Did you have trial and error with the size of the notebook as you were thinking about how to synthesize this toolkit into what it is today?

I just used the paper that I had on hand, which happens to be 8 1/2 x 11.

I want to talk about the spirituality of The Artist’s Way. It’s a creative program, but it’s also a spiritual program, and I’ve known more artists than I can count who say they’ve picked up the book but almost immediately dropped it because they found that foundation of a higher power to be off-putting. I’ve noticed that many people say the same thing about 12-step programs. But you even address this issue in the book’s introduction, and I think you handle it so well: you say it can simply be an exercise in open mindedness. And yet many readers still find the higher power element to be off-putting. What do you say to those readers?

I don’t have anything to say to those readers.

Why is that?

Well, I just think if they find it off-putting, that is their business.

I think that feeds into something I’ve noticed in your new book, The Artist’s Way Toolkit: you have so much to say about protecting ourselves from the dangers of codependency by utilizing morning pages, artist dates, solo walks, and writing for guidance. Can you say more about that?

I think that the tools lead the way to autonomy. When you write morning pages, you’re saying particularly, “This is what I like. This is what I don’t like.” And it’s particular to the person who is writing. I think when you write out of that state, you are opening yourself up to a spiritual source. That, too, is an exercise in autonomy.

And the same would be true of walking. Walking opens you to a higher source and gives you a sense of benevolence. And guidance is something that we need to try in order to feel that it’s worthy. All four tools are exercises In independence.

Have you written for guidance today at all?

Yes, I did.

Would you be willing to tell me a little bit about what you asked for?

I said, “Dear God, please guide me. Give me faith and optimism. Give me everything I need to make me alert and make me lively. Give me grace and eloquence, give me humor, and let me like Hurley.”

[laughs] I really hope that God is giving you that last one. Do you find yourself repeating questions when you write for guidance?

Yes.

What are some things you repeat?

I ask, “What’s next?” And then I listen. I often find that what’s next is something very simple. And so sometimes I think, “Are you listening to me?”

Does it seem like it can take a while sometimes to be delivered the answers?

I think the answers come pretty quickly. But my belief in them comes more slowly.

In your writing, I love how you express how very gentle the voice of guidance is with you. Do you find that that’s consistent? Or has guidance ever been a little more firm than that?

I think guidance is habitually gentle. And habitually also firm. And so if you are asking for guidance and saying, “Please guide me,” then you are open to the way guidance comes to you. And I think the guidance is, frequently, I want to say, surprising.

In the same way that guidance is habitually gentle, how do you remain habitually open to it?

Well, I use guidance often. And when I do, I am asking to hear what path to take next. And I have found over time that the path, and the suggestion, is fruitful.

And so I think that what we’re doing is asking for openness. And when we are granted openness, we are given a desire to go forward.

You’re the creator of The Artist’s Way, but you’ve also written and directed films in addition to writing plays and musicals and fiction and children’s books and collections of poetry. But you clearly relish both sides of your work. In fact, in your book Living the Artist’s Way, you write, “I love it when I am a building block in someone’s dream.”

It doesn’t seem to bother you that the rest of your tremendous body of work may often be overlooked in favor of one book. Do you have advice for artists who help fellow artists and perhaps struggle to find that balance between pursuing their own work and helping others with theirs?

It’s important to pursue your own work first. When you pursue your own work, you are given what to teach. And I think that it’s an important facet of my work, that I keep moving in many different genres. I think that it’s important for anyone trying to help to teach from creative practice, not from theory.

What does your own writing practice look like these days?

I tend to write several times a day. First thing in the morning, I write morning pages. They sort of give me a trajectory for my day. And then later in the day, I turned my hand to whatever creative project I’m working on, and I write on that for a while. And then I wrap my day up with writing for guidance.

Has your writing routine changed at all through the years, or have you maintained this process of waking up, writing morning pages, working on the creative project later in the day, and writing for guidance to end the day?

It’s pretty steadfast.

How many of your ideas for your books arrive to you during your morning pages?

I think they arise more when I am setting out on them as a creative project. I don’t think that they come to me through morning pages very often.

What other parts of the day do you find yourself being struck with ideas for your work?

I think walking helps.

How long do each of your writing sessions typically last for you?

Morning pages can take quite a little while. And by that I mean, maybe an hour and a half. And when I’m working on a project, I go until I run out of gas.

How do you know when you’ve run out of gas?

When it becomes difficult to find what comes next.

Do you ever feel that you’re wrestling your writing to the ground, trying to get it right? Or do you have a strong sense of when to step away and let your subconscious do its work on it?

I hope to say I have the wisdom to walk away.

How do you know when to walk away from the writing?

I say it takes practice.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

No. Never. I still don’t. It’s one book at a time.

Do you ever have ideas for the next book while you’re working on the current one?

I want to say no. It goes a book at a time. When I finish a book, then I say, “Oh. I wonder what to write next.”

How much time usually passes between books? Do you ever find yourself closing one and then starting right again on another, or do you have these periods between books?

Right now, I’m in a period between books, but ordinarily, I go pretty much book to book. I would say it takes me the better part of the year per book.

I’m 76. I’ve been writing full-time since I was 18.

Do you think that’s why you work in so many mediums, then?

Yes. I think I find myself getting an itch to write something which may not be in the same genre as what I have just finished writing.

I think part of what makes The Artist’s Way so attractive to people is the very clear and seemingly simple actions you prescribe: the morning pages and artist dates. How did you arrive at the system of daily actions that have become The Artist’s Way?

I would say through practice. I found myself just leading from one book to the next and from one tool to the next. I think they were exciting to me.

What excited you about this framework initially?

The fact that I could keep going.

I notice, when I talk with friends about the practice of writing morning pages, people love to talk about the size of the notebook. Have folks come to you with a lot of questions about that too?

Yes. The often-asked question is, “What size paper should I use?” And I say, “8 1/2 x 11.” If you use something smaller, you miniaturize your thoughts. If you use something larger, you’ll be daunted.

Did you have trial and error with the size of the notebook as you were thinking about how to synthesize this toolkit into what it is today?

I just used the paper that I had on hand, which happens to be 8 1/2 x 11.

I want to talk about the spirituality of The Artist’s Way. It’s a creative program, but it’s also a spiritual program, and I’ve known more artists than I can count who say they’ve picked up the book but almost immediately dropped it because they found that foundation of a higher power to be off-putting. I’ve noticed that many people say the same thing about 12-step programs. But you even address this issue in the book’s introduction, and I think you handle it so well: you say it can simply be an exercise in open mindedness. And yet many readers still find the higher power element to be off-putting. What do you say to those readers?

I don’t have anything to say to those readers.

Why is that?

Well, I just think if they find it off-putting, that is their business.

I think that feeds into something I’ve noticed in your new book, The Artist’s Way Toolkit: you have so much to say about protecting ourselves from the dangers of codependency by utilizing morning pages, artist dates, solo walks, and writing for guidance. Can you say more about that?

I think that the tools lead the way to autonomy. When you write morning pages, you’re saying particularly, “This is what I like. This is what I don’t like.” And it’s particular to the person who is writing. I think when you write out of that state, you are opening yourself up to a spiritual source. That, too, is an exercise in autonomy.

And the same would be true of walking. Walking opens you to a higher source and gives you a sense of benevolence. And guidance is something that we need to try in order to feel that it’s worthy. All four tools are exercises In independence.

Have you written for guidance today at all?

Yes, I did.

Would you be willing to tell me a little bit about what you asked for?

I said, “Dear God, please guide me. Give me faith and optimism. Give me everything I need to make me alert and make me lively. Give me grace and eloquence, give me humor, and let me like Hurley.”

[laughs] I really hope that God is giving you that last one. Do you find yourself repeating questions when you write for guidance?

Yes.

What are some things you repeat?

I ask, “What’s next?” And then I listen. I often find that what’s next is something very simple. And so sometimes I think, “Are you listening to me?”

Does it seem like it can take a while sometimes to be delivered the answers?

I think the answers come pretty quickly. But my belief in them comes more slowly.

In your writing, I love how you express how very gentle the voice of guidance is with you. Do you find that that’s consistent? Or has guidance ever been a little more firm than that?

I think guidance is habitually gentle. And habitually also firm. And so if you are asking for guidance and saying, “Please guide me,” then you are open to the way guidance comes to you. And I think the guidance is, frequently, I want to say, surprising.

In the same way that guidance is habitually gentle, how do you remain habitually open to it?

Well, I use guidance often. And when I do, I am asking to hear what path to take next. And I have found over time that the path, and the suggestion, is fruitful.

And so I think that what we’re doing is asking for openness. And when we are granted openness, we are given a desire to go forward.

You’re the creator of The Artist’s Way, but you’ve also written and directed films in addition to writing plays and musicals and fiction and children’s books and collections of poetry. But you clearly relish both sides of your work. In fact, in your book Living the Artist’s Way, you write, “I love it when I am a building block in someone’s dream.”

It doesn’t seem to bother you that the rest of your tremendous body of work may often be overlooked in favor of one book. Do you have advice for artists who help fellow artists and perhaps struggle to find that balance between pursuing their own work and helping others with theirs?

It’s important to pursue your own work first. When you pursue your own work, you are given what to teach. And I think that it’s an important facet of my work, that I keep moving in many different genres. I think that it’s important for anyone trying to help to teach from creative practice, not from theory.

What does your own writing practice look like these days?

I tend to write several times a day. First thing in the morning, I write morning pages. They sort of give me a trajectory for my day. And then later in the day, I turned my hand to whatever creative project I’m working on, and I write on that for a while. And then I wrap my day up with writing for guidance.

Has your writing routine changed at all through the years, or have you maintained this process of waking up, writing morning pages, working on the creative project later in the day, and writing for guidance to end the day?

It’s pretty steadfast.

How many of your ideas for your books arrive to you during your morning pages?

I think they arise more when I am setting out on them as a creative project. I don’t think that they come to me through morning pages very often.

What other parts of the day do you find yourself being struck with ideas for your work?

I think walking helps.

How long do each of your writing sessions typically last for you?

Morning pages can take quite a little while. And by that I mean, maybe an hour and a half. And when I’m working on a project, I go until I run out of gas.

How do you know when you’ve run out of gas?

When it becomes difficult to find what comes next.

Do you ever feel that you’re wrestling your writing to the ground, trying to get it right? Or do you have a strong sense of when to step away and let your subconscious do its work on it?

I hope to say I have the wisdom to walk away.

How do you know when to walk away from the writing?

I say it takes practice.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Hurley Winkler.

I’m interested in his strange, discombobulated doll sculptures, which he’s most famous for. They’re gross and disturbing; some say he saw them as a reaction against the Nazi regime and the idea of the perfect body. I wanted to create this alternate universe around that. I’m also very interested in the uncanny, so the notion that this real artist would be in the book, but also that he would have this alternative existence felt appropriate. I wanted people to be able to read [the book] and then deep-dive into his work, but at the same time, not necessarily have to know who the hell he is or who any of the artists that I mentioned are in order to have fun reading.

I thought it was interesting that you decided to invent a fictional art world controversy that tangentially involved a real artist rather than creating a totally fictional scenario—or, alternatively, focusing on a real controversy.

I wanted to anchor the story, but at the same time, deform it—almost like Bellmer’s dolls—because I think of Vivienne as being set a little to the side of this world.

Passages of the novel are composed of social media posts and comments sections. I noticed that many of the comments, even though they take on typical internet lingo, abandon traditional syntax and structures of meaning and start to sound almost poetic. I was reading your interview with Margaret Welsh, where you described poetry as an “alternative language.” In giving these passages a sense of disarray or discombobulation, were you intending to highlight social media speak as an alternative language as well?

Yes—I was trying to highlight social media speak as an alternative language that can be deadening and repetitive and awful, but also have this potential for poetry or a dreamlike, otherworldly quality. It’s kind of absurdist because there are, I think, very realistic “comments” or social media lingo, and then there’s some that are straight-up poetry. But when you cruise around in comments sections long enough, there are some really poetic comments.

I read Internet comments a lot, but [while researching this book] specifically, [I sought out] comments on “controversial” female figures, because Vivienne needed to be this icon that people had a lot to say about and had conflicting views on. I looked at comments on [posts] of people like Kate Moss, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and Camille Paglia—canceled or controversial people—and video tributes to dead icons.

Do you remember any comments that stood out to you as particularly striking or weird?

I don’t know if there’s a specific one, but when a comment opens up into its own world—when you get a sense for what’s going on in that person’s life, and it gets very personal or sad—that can be quite moving. There are a few places in the novel where people are expressing their torment with the world [through social media comments], and then they find these intimate connections with other commenters.

What’s your own relationship with social media, both as an artist and as a consumer of art?

It’s tormented. I think social media is a pharmakon—it can be both healing and poisonous. I try to be pretty distanced from it. I don’t post a lot about my personal life, but I use it for research and I like to know what’s going on, so I don’t like to divorce myself from it entirely. It can be evil and it can be good, and I tried to explore that in the book. I’m addicted to it like everyone, I guess. I don’t have Twitter, but I do haunt it.

Twitter can be a total time suck. I had to delete the app from my phone.

I feel like everything is becoming social media now. There’s a social media-fication of life, in the sense that we’re in constant conversation with other people. Whether that’s actually a way for us to be more intimate and to know more about each other, or whether that’s a cover or a distraction [remains uncertain]. It could be both.

Your character Vesta is super precocious for her age; she cites famous artists and watches Ingmar Bergman films, even though she’s just in grade school. Were you similarly surrounded by art from a young age?

No, I was not. Vesta’s annoyingly precocious at times. I feel tenderly towards her, but I didn’t grow up around art myself.

I was endlessly curious as a child. My mother says I was a 20-year-old five-year-old, so I think I based a little bit of her demeanor on mine. She’s a bit of an alien and a worrier. But I didn’t come to people like Hans Bellmer until much later—I would say, late teens or twenties. Still, it was very fun to imagine a child growing up surrounded by these berserk images and this family lineage.

How did you eventually gravitate toward those areas of interest?

My parents and the people I grew up with, even though they’re not artists, per se, are interesting and strange. I started to write because I was curious about the world and wanted a way to try to understand what was happening. I don’t have an origin story in that way; [Vivienne isn’t] autofiction at all.

You do have a background in the art world—you’ve been an art critic before, and you’ve taught courses at different universities. I’d love to hear about how your study of art has influenced your practice as a writer—not just in terms of subject matter, but also whether it’s shaped your artistic philosophy in any way.

I think there’s something very visual and cinematic about the way I write. When I was writing Vivienne specifically, I was looking at a lot of different images, trying to saturate myself in as much text and image as possible to have it feel illusory or dream-like. I like to travel between different worlds. I don’t think I’m fully in any one of them, but I’ve worked with different art magazines, publishing houses, and gallerists, and Vivienne certainly parodies that arena.

On the note of bouncing between different worlds—before Vivienne, you published several volumes of poetry. What was it like making the shift from verse to more traditional, narrative prose?

Well, I don’t think I would have if this story hadn’t come to me. Vivienne and her story came to me and I realized, “The proper form for this is not poetry or visual art; it has to be a novel.” Crafting a narrative arc feels like a totally different thing than writing a poem. Writing a poem feels closer to making a piece of visual art—[you’re capturing] a moment or a burst of energy. [Writing a novel] was quite a change and it felt rather trippy. I think the only reason I was able to do it is because I used the unit of the line as a touchstone [via] the social media poetry and Vivienne’s poetry.

In terms of plotting, do you create an outline or follow any routine, or do you just dive in?

No. I’m a bit of a chaotic writer—but I will say because Vivienne came to me so quickly, I had a sense of where the story was going to go. I did create a very loose outline so I knew what I was writing towards, although the end came after everything was done. I didn’t know that would be the end—and then I had a lightbulb moment and crafted it later.

Vivienne deals with themes of cancellation and how people in the art world decide who they want to associate with or work with. Your poetry book Magenta was pulled from a small press because of supposed associations you had. [Note: Emmalea Russo had written several articles on film for Compact Magazine, which had published conservative op-eds by other writers.] I’m curious—amidst all the noise, how do you decide who to trust with your work and who to collaborate with?

That’s a really good question. How do I decide who to trust with my work and collaborate with? I think it’s trial and error, but typically I would rather take the risk. If someone reaches out and wants to collaborate or wants to talk to me about my work, I usually will say yes because I’m a very curious person. My problem with the association phobia we have now is that I think artists, just like any other human being, should talk to absolutely anyone, in public or not. Maybe that is kind of risky or dangerous, but I don’t understand how else to relate to the world.

In another poetry book, Confetti, you write about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There’s this pull toward the uncanny, like you mentioned before. Some of the surreal images described in Vivienne also have an uncanny or potentially disturbing quality—for example, Dorothea Tanning’s Tableau Vivant. What’s your fascination with these kinds of images?

I love horror movies. I think that because horror images take us to an edge or an extreme, there can be something almost sacred about them. Because they’re so disquieting, they’re almost like barometers. And I think I am most interested in the uncanny moments, which are often not the straight-up gory, disgusting, in-your-face horror, but something that is slightly tilted or a different version of itself. And with Vivienne, I focused on that because a lot of it takes place in the home, so I wanted there to be a feeling of familiar and home-like comforts alongside strange occurrences like the weird sculpture in the basement or even eerie resonances in the internet comments. Those things, to me, are the “scary” things that open into a whole other way of thinking.

**I like what you said about certain images taking on this almost sacred quality. Fear of the unfamiliar is a very pure emotion, and that’s what makes these images so universally resonant. **

You teach a course called Psycho Cosmos, which draws connections between astrology and artistic discovery. How has your work as an astrologer and researcher of the occult intersected with your creative process?

Astrology is built on the idea of synchronicity or meaningful coincidences. It’s not that the planets are causing something to happen, but rather that there is a relationship between something that’s going on on earth and something that’s happening in the stars. This idea of correspondence between times and places heavily influenced Vivienne because a lot of scenes are happening in simultaneity. I’m really interested in things that are happening at the same time, and how those events might tell us something about the quality or the atmosphere of a certain moment.

Last but not least: the exhibition that Vivienne’s work appears in is called “Forgotten Women Surrealists,” Who are some forgotten artists, regardless of gender or discipline, who have inspired you?

I don’t know if she’s really forgotten, but one of the artists that Vivienne was partially inspired by, [the poet and visual artist] Unica Zürn, is really interesting. She was a lover and a long-term partner of Hans Bellmer, and she committed suicide by jumping out a window. A lot of Vivienne’s story is based on this question of, “What if there was this woman who came after her and was with Hans Bellmer in those final weird days of his life?”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Brittany Menjivar.

ARTPOWER is making a tool called TORTOISE. TORTOISE launched in December (2024). It is a personal finance tool for artists, to help artists determine what their needs are financially and have a really good understanding of what the true cost of making a project happen are, how to take really overwhelming tasks, like planning for a big purchase, or a big move, or a big life change, and how to approach those tasks in small chunks, small bites.

It’s named TORTOISE intentionally. It is about… Of course, I think it’s going to be obvious to people, the slow and steady. It’s about realizing that we’ve got all the tools we need in our toolbox, and applying those tools every day to our financial lives will make our financial lives better, will make our practice better.

Right, and tortoises also live for a long time, too, so hopefully you’ll be helping artists sustain their practice for a long time.

They live for a long time…I’m so glad you said that. This is about sustaining your artistic life over time, so we can all age beautifully, gracefully as artists, and have the things that we need. I encourage everyone to go to the ARTPOWER website, download, and try it out. And we’re looking for feedback, too. There’s been three years of planning on this, Brandon, so there’s been a lot of thought, a lot of thinking, but we know there’s more to learn. We’re excited for people to actually get in there and start using it, and tell us what’s missing, and also what works.

It can be difficult to start something new. What made you decide to start ARTPOWER, and once it was an idea, or a spark, how did you get going on it?

This began as a research project, looking at the ways that artists and arts organizations were supporting each other, recovering from a pandemic and coming back to, how do we prepare ourselves to be more resilient for the future? Sadly, people were surprised how poorly artists were doing financially, even artists that they thought were doing very well professionally.

I can’t tell you the number of folks who’ve said to me, “I’m just not good with money, I’m just not good with finances. I’m creative, I don’t do math.” I have this fundamental belief that, as artists, we’re creative people. We make things happen. We have ability, we have resilience, we have creativity. Why should we feel less capable than anybody else when it comes to taking charge of our financial lives? I would like to see us come to it with a sense of manifestation — the same power we bring to our art practice, when we’re writing a poem or making music, bring that same sense of creativity and commitment.

People sometimes assume if you’re creative, that’s all you can do. Like, if you’re an artist, you can’t do anything outside of that. I’m like, “Hey, you can also walk around the block and get a gallon of milk, right? You know how to do a lot of non-artistic things…”

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It empowers creative people to take control. I truly do believe a lot of people can do more than they think they can.

We can all definitely do more than we think. I think it’s not our fault, as artists, that we necessarily feel that way because we get a lot of reinforcing messages that tell us that. When you’re a kid and someone notices you’re creative, they start to put you in this box of left brain, right brain, smart, creative. They put the two opposite. I’m talking about just thinking about your future and saying, “You know what? Here’s what I would like for my future. I would like to own a home. I would like to take six months out of the year to travel. I would like to go back to school,” whatever that is.

Taking the time and feeling like you deserve that time, to name what your desires are or what your needs are, and then making a plan for how you’re going to get there. You might think you get many chances to live it, and maybe you do, but this is the one you have right now.

It’s important as an artist. We’re in such an attention economy now, where you really have to grab that moment and make the most of it. If you don’t, it’s going to just pass. A week later, people will be onto something else.

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, it would be nice to be lucky for sure, and have things happen that you didn’t expect, and it’s like, “Oh, wow.” So we want that, if that happens. For most of us, though, it’s like, it’s everyday work and attention you’re bringing to your future goals, to your desires. And I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s definitely not. And it’s not easy to have your head and your heart in your practice, and then also in your finance. It’s very hard. And we have all kinds of relationships to money, right? Some people are ashamed to think about money, to talk about money. Some people feel like their value is tied up in how much money they have or don’t have. So there are a lot of emotions attached to money and our relationship to it.

Do you find it difficult as someone who is an artist, whose focus is also helping other artists, to balance the time for you to make your own creative work?

Yes. I was an executive director for a little bit more than a decade, a little bit before I started ARTPOWER. And as executive director, my job was to run this community arts organization that provided opportunities for other artists, for artists to make things. During that period, I think I did one gig as a musician, maybe. I wrote some poems, but really loosely. It didn’t even occur to me that I could really do both of those things, the energy wasn’t there. I also became a mother during that time period. I made the choice to put those things aside and focus on the community-based work I was doing. I think I’ve learned some lessons about that.

I’m coming to ARTPOWER very differently, Brandon. I write every day. It’s on my calendar, I make time for it, I do it. So now, it’s different. Now, I am as equally committed to myself and my own creative practice as I am to ARTPOWER and to the work we’re doing to help other artists.

If you have a thing called ARTPOWER, but you’re frustrated in your own work, then it’s not a good balance, you know?

No, and then, I don’t feel like I would be a good example, either. It’s hard starting something new. I mean, like a new entity. There are moments that are overwhelming and frustrating, disappointing, or just complicated, hard. In those moments, I’m really glad I have some poems I can turn to, and poems I can write, and music I can try to make.

What have been some of the biggest hurdles in getting this going?

Any kind of technology tool, that’s already hard. One of the biggest challenges with big ideas and ideas that have lots of parts is that you want to try to do them all, so the hurdles have been staying focused on what we’re trying to do, which is to make something that people can use and want to use, being clear that we can’t do everything all at the same time. And then, I don’t even know if I want to say this, but it’s hard working with people. I mean, I’m a writer, I like to be by myself.

You know, you can doubt yourself and start to question, “Well, can I even do this? Can we even do this?” So it’s a hurdle not staying in that place for too long.

Sometimes, you have to make the concept so simplified in order to sell it, or to get someone to get behind it. And they often want comps, like things that are similar to it, but maybe you don’t know of anything that is quite like it.

There’s a difference between making your art and selling it. I do all right selling ideas, I guess. But I recognize that, I can keep it simple in the doing, but the simple in the explaining is hard. And so you find other people who can do what you can’t do.

How do you avoid burning out, when you’re pushing against things that don’t necessarily come natural?

I don’t know that I’ve been burnt out yet. I mean, I’ve definitely had moments where I’m like, “Okay, I need to pause on this.” I try to read myself or be aware of when my energy meter is going in the red zone, where it’s like, “Oh, I am angry. I am frustrated. I am not being nice to people.” When it’s edging there, I pause, take walks, read, and it feels better. I know all the things that we should do—eat well, hang out with good friends, stay in community with people, help other people. I just need to do them!

When I was younger, and had moments where I was a really anxious child, I talked to my father about it. His advice to me was, “In that moment where you’re feeling very afraid, very scared of something, there’s probably at least one other person near you that feels even more afraid than you do. Maybe you can say something to that person or help them in some way.” That advice helped a lot. I still do it even now in the moments where I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I am so overwhelmed. I’m afraid. I don’t think I can do this. I don’t know if this is going to work.”

When I am afraid, I pause and ask myself, “Is there someone who could use my positive energy in this moment?” Then, I make a phone call, I send a text, I go see people. Give a little bit of care and compassion to yourself every day and try to be aware when that’s going out of whack.

People will come to you with their deadlines and their needs, and next thing you know, your workday has been sucked up in like five Zooms and whatever.

I agree. And, where you’re saying you write every day, no matter how busy I get, I do the same thing. I found that if I write just a little bit every day, it also, it becomes this… I always say to my kids, “Slow and steady.” When I was younger, I would make the mistake of thinking, “I’m going to write the great American novel,” and sit down for this planned week-long writing jag, then get myself all psyched up, and never actually work on it.

I’ve had that. I went to graduate school during COVID for creative writing, and I was like, “Oh, I’m going to write a marriage memoir.” That was my big project I came up with, and I started to do research, and it was this big thing in my head. And then, for like a year, I made no progress. No progress, like nothing, nothing. I was like, “Why am I having a hard time with this?” Well, first of all, I’m writing about my own marriage and my relationship to marriage, so that’s already difficult.

But then, I think it’s that I was making it so big—something about that made it seem impossible. So I said, “Let’s just write a little bit every day, or many days.” I gave myself certain time checks, where I would take a pause and see, “Okay, what have I got?” And so far, I mean, that feels much better. You know, like, “When is it forthcoming? Not quite sure, but at least it’s happening.”

It works, though, and then you’ll stop, and you’ll be surprised at how much you have. That’s what I’ve done, where I’ll be working on something, then I go back, “Oh, wow, I have all this stuff that I now have completed with this thing.” I think, too, it’s important that the person running a project like your has the experience of being an artist and working with finances. You were telling me before this that you had a band with your sisters, and that’s how you paid for college, right?

Yes.

There’s this quote by Emma Copley Eisenberg from a recent interview that says, “You have to talk about class if you’re going to talk about art, because making art is not rewarded under capitalism. If what you make isn’t helping you live, where does the support come from? Where does the ability to imagine yourself as an artist come from?” I was thinking about how for so many people, so much time is spent just figuring out how to live, you don’t have time to make your work.

No. And almost now, it’s become this vibe of like, “How educated are you?” before you can even talk about being an artist. Like, “Well, where’d you get your MFA? Where’d you go to school?” In my young days, there were all kinds of artists, all types. Some went to fancy schools, some didn’t. Some studied with their mentors or favorite artists. Yeah, I paid for myself to go to college, playing in a band, and it didn’t seem strange to me to do that. I had the skill, we had the gigs, and I got the tuition bill, so I had to do it.

I think now, that’s definitely something I want to encourage for everybody, we all can live artists’ lives. We deserve to if we want to. And I don’t like the fact that some people are getting the message that if they can’t go to the right schools and get the right MFAs, or they can’t live in a certain part of the country or have a certain amount of money, then they can’t look forward to an artistic life. I think that’s not okay. We all can, we all should. I’m not coming to ARTPOWER with stuff that I’ve just theorized. It’s been my lived experience to think about money, make art, be an artist, be a teaching artist. I was a teaching artist for like a decade. All of that’s part of how I come to being a producer, come to be an organizer, come to be an executive director, coming to being a CEO.

When you were just saying everyone could live an artistic life, for you, what would be success with ARTPOWER?

I think for me, what would feel successful is that we’ve got a product that artists are using and they feel like it gets them. It doesn’t feel like it was cobbled together by people who didn’t understand that artistic experience. I’ll also feel good if we’ve got a great team of folks working with ARTPOWER and for ARTPOWER. If everybody comes to work every day pretty excited, that will feel like success for me.

And I think if artists are using this and feeling more powerful, and we’re hearing stories about how, “Oh, I felt good. I know what rates I should charge now, and I feel good charging those rates,” or, “I have a better understanding of my value, so when I negotiate this contract, I’m going to fight for these things that matter to me.” If we’re hearing those stories, Brandon, then I feel like that will feel very successful for me. My focus right now is, “Let’s make something that when people do start to use it, they feel like it was made for them.”

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Brandon Stosuy.

Usually one of two ways. Either I see something in the world and I’m like, “I want to make that picture,” or I see a picture and I’m like, “I want to make that painting.” And then I look for a way to make it out of stuff in my world. So I guess the first process is more, like, self-explanatory; you make some sketches, take pictures. I usually make notes about color, particularly try to get one color relationship true in the sense that the distance in terms of value or temperature of those two colors is true. Not necessarily the colors themselves, but the way they relate to each other. Make notes about that. Then come back to the studio, and maybe 10 percent of the time I just start working on a painting. And then maybe 30 percent of the time I make drawings and start that way. And then the other…is from looking at a painting and seeing a question and a solution posed by someone else, and trying to pose the same question and find the same answer, or a similar answer. And my way in that is to find a subject in my surroundings that seems structurally suitable, I guess.

One thing I’m really interested in is that color relationship notion – I’m curious about how you arrived at not merely recreating what you’re seeing exactly. Trying not to get the colors you saw exactly, but to get the emotion you felt exactly.

Yeah, and that’s based on the distance I think value-wise, and temperature-wise that two colors exist at. I think that’s the way into emotional charge.

Did it strike you early on that finding that interchange, that energy between the two? Did you find that early or was that a consequence of trying to do it one way and it not really being satisfying?

I just think that’s the hardest thing to do, so it requires the most attention. When did I realize that? Yeah, I would say pretty early on in my painting. I guess I’ve been painting seriously now for 15 years. Early on, yeah.

Winter Morning Coffee, 2023, oil on wood panel with artist frame, 16.5x10.75 inches

Were you inspired early by painters who didn’t necessarily go for the photorealistic image?

I’ve always liked the same painting since I was young–expressionistic, figurative painting, I guess. Not figurative in terms of there needing to be a figure, but figurative in terms of there being a figure-ground relationship that is spatially sound, even graphic. And yes, the painters I like are Van Gogh and Boyarde and Japanese artists and people that all seem to approach the same question, which is getting an object to have a beautifully designed, crafted surface that leads to an interesting picture. It recedes at some point to a scene after being a beautiful object.

It’s like you need to get someone’s time, their sense of time, to change. I think it’s the same in music, you’re doing someone’s movement through time in terms of the speed at which your eye reads an image. And with a beautiful object you move across, it’s kind of fast, but with a picture or a photo, you move into the depth of it slower, you move back in space at a slower pace. And so if you can do both those things and somebody’s looking at it, you feel that push and pull and that bounce between the surface and the picturesque part of it. That’s what’s interesting.

I’m curious how you feel about the changes that occur in the reality of being a painter once you start making a living off of it, once it starts being a profession, with the expectations that come with that.

I guess the biggest shift is in the fact that I never knew that anybody was ever going to see anything I made before. And so that was never even in the ether.

I try to still keep it private, still try to make it feel private in terms of making it for me first, you know? And even keeping stuff that’s only mine, not necessarily putting everything I make out there.

I think it’s an inherently private act–visualizing something on the back of my eyeballs and then trying to translate that into a picture. That feels unknowable to myself, let alone anybody else. And so it’s crazy. Yeah, there’s some solitude in it. It’s really nice. And in all things private, there’s a solitude and in knowing that something’s only for you and it’s yours, there’s so much security in that. I think for me at least, there’s joy in being the only one that knows something. So I guess making a picture is an expression of that, and so yeah, a lot of my drawings are just mine. I make paintings that are just mine and all, to keep satisfying my own want for the paintings, too. I need to want them.

In that sense, it’s not different to compare between not having an audience and having an audience, because fundamentally you’re starting from a place of–

Me being the audience?

Yeah, you being your own audience.

Yeah, that’s right.

I’m curious if you’ve had to navigate any difficulties or challenges with it shifting, trying to maintain that privacy.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, I guess there’s definitely just a shift. I don’t even know if it’s good or bad, but yeah, there’s a shift.

If you can live off something, then yeah, you start to worry about that a little bit. Just like you worry about your job, just like you worry about–

Now you’re depending on it.

Yeah. So that shift, that’s a real thing. But I try to remind myself very often that the primary shift in my relationship to painting is that now I can do it all the time, and my goal has always just been to learn how to make nice paintings and now I have all that time to learn how to do that and get better at it. So yeah, just trying to still approach it… the positive of that is profound. It’s kind of cool. I’m trying to just keep learning.

It sounds like you try not to be too precious about it, where if you have to kill your darlings along the way, like, “Oh, I like this, but I have to change it to make it better.”

Yeah. I do generally try to stay true to the design, the initial structural design, the drawing. I try to stick to the drawing, which means not moving forms and shapes or stuff too much, trying to deal with what’s there and change the colors of them.

By the Wood Stove, 2022, oil on panel in artist’s frame, 19x16 inches

One thing that’s going on with the paintings is that they’re small, generally. They’re an object that you can hold in your hands, with full intention behind it, you’ve worked on every millimeter of it. What are you imparting or intending behind these decisions, these limitations?

Well, I don’t think they have to be [small]. They happen to be, and have for a while, I think because it’s just in all the different ways I tried to make paintings, which were numerous. I didn’t feel comfortable in the material until it was those things, until it was small and primarily a hard surface, wood or canvas panel. Yeah. And then it felt more akin to the way I approach drawing or prints or the monotypes. It felt much closer to that. And yeah, I just think [that’s] the way I found to best do it.

It probably just comes down to body mechanics. I spent so much time drawing as a child and through my whole life before I started painting… the making of a big painting on canvas with big loose wet brushes and moving your whole arm, I don’t know–

Yeah, you’re dangling on a ladder.

[Laughs] Yeah, like that. It’s harder for my body to do, I suppose. I don’t have the muscle memory for it. Maybe I should try to break out of it at some point and do some exercising [laughs]…it’s an intuitive way to control the stuff, to control the medium that way.

Yeah, I think that’s one thing that is sort of compelling about the work too, to me, is that there is a feeling that it was pleasurable to make it, you know what I mean?

I like that. That’s a wonderful thing to hear.

I mean, you make the painting so you have a real sense memory of even the physical process of making it, and I wonder if, do you look at other paintings that are older, thinking, “That one was a pain in the ass”? [laughs]

Oh, absolutely.

“I didn’t enjoy a second of that.”

The ones that I end up probably liking the most, if there’s a general pattern, once I am removed from the painting or the making of the painting, that memory that’s left is a little fuzzy. And so the ones I end up liking the most are the ones that usually were, like, “I don’t know how I made that!” Probably because it was really hard and I probably hated making it.

Those are the ones you like the most?

[Laughs] There’s a few that I have that are like that, and I’m like… Yeah, because it’s just at some point they get funny or something.

Right.

Like, “How did I get away with that?”

I don’t remember where you said this, that sometimes you go to bed with the image in your head–

Oh, I try to always go to bed thinking about what I’m going to do the next day. It’s how I fall asleep. You can, I don’t know what the word is… When you’re falling asleep you can practice stuff. Your dreams are these weird little–

Rehearsals, almost.

Yeah, yeah! Rehearsals is a good word. And so if I can concentrate in that weird moment when I’m falling asleep…

Right. I’m curious about this idea of the creative work that goes on when we are in almost dreamlike or delirious states, late at night before we go to sleep or early upon waking.

Yeah! I think that’s why I like starting so early in the morning, because I have the energy and the fortitude to make something, but it’s the closest time to when I fall asleep. That’s when you can have those moments you talk about that are just very crystal abstract brain moments [laughs].

You live in a pretty remote, small town in New Jersey and it seems like the things that inspire you to make images are mostly right here around you.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s where I grew up, so it is the visual landscape of my mind that when I picture things, it’s the stuff from around here, so it’s useful to be here to try to make those pictures. But there’s so much other stuff too. My family’s here and it’s a nice easy place to be. And that’s important because I think, to be able to focus, you have to keep the world small. And that doesn’t mean not be aware of what’s happening in the world or anything like that. It just means like, “Oh, that’s sort of like an assault on your brain.” You need space, some kind of barrier, a kind of safety. You got to be able to focus.

Obviously this area and living here and working here afford you that. Has it consistently been inspiring?

It just is.

It’s just an unchanging reality for you that you’re inspired by this place?

Yeah. Because ultimately the stuff’s arbitrary anyhow. Ot’s like you got to deal with what’s given in some sense.

I guess what I’m getting at is do you ever have to deal with either, “I don’t feel like making stuff right now” or “I feel like making stuff, but I don’t have any ideas, nothing’s striking.”

I honestly really have only had a couple of periods in the past 18 to 20 years of not making stuff, like one or two weeks at a time every few years. Yeah.

That’s awesome.

Yeah. I don’t know. I honestly try to approach it somewhat like a chore or a task that just needs to be done.

I just think it’s a really interesting puzzle, it’s a really interesting thing to do and it’s an interesting thing in the sense that it’s one of the few things I think that we can just continually get better at and progress through the craft of painting. Most of the great painters are getting better the whole time and that’s pretty neat.

Gadwall Beside a Pond, 2024, oil on panel in artist’s frame, 11x7.5 inches

Are there ever times where you’re like, “Oh, I know exactly how to paint this,” and it comes exactly the way you–

Definitely.

And those honestly come from when I have those nights where I’m falling asleep and I see that, it is kind of that way where it’s like every once in a while you just figured it out. You had the idea earlier in the day, you made some drawings, you thought about it, you went, did some chores, ate dinner, relaxed and then fell asleep. And there this is, you figured it out all day and you wake up and try to make it. Some of the things take months and even get worked on for a year in some cases. And then some of them are, once at the actual making of the picture stage, 45 minutes. It really can be that quick every once in a while. Every once in a while.

Yeah. When it’s that quick, are you like, “Damn, I just surprised myself”? Or are you like, “Fuck yeah, I’m the best”? [laughs]

No, it’s more just a sense of relief of, “All right, now I can make another one.”

It almost sounds like it is very related to the shape or the arc of a day.

Yeah, you earned the day. And I don’t know, it just becomes habitual, only in the most positive sense of that, where it’s like, this is how… I just think we have a lot more free time than we think.

It sounds to me that you maybe are either more naturally disposed towards that or you trained your mind to… you’ve formed these habits and you’ve been able to keep it up in a way that other people might find more difficult. To actually train the mind to look at making stuff in the way that it sounds like you do.

I mean, I think just try to be real simple about it. Stick to the initial goal. Don’t change the goalpost on yourself and stuff. What do you like to do and what about it feels good?

For me, the way to remind myself that it is supposed to be joyous is to actively continue loving it in the sense of appreciating it outside of my making. So always continuing to look at other people’s paintings and just being like, “Oh, that’s awesome. I love that. I love that painting. I want to make that painting.” If that’s there and it’s approached with that joy and love and that’s what I want to get out of it, that’s what I got to put into it. There’s no such thing as failure of any kind. It’s like you always get that out of it if that’s what you like about it. That’s why you’re starting with. So you got to give that to it. You got to keep bringing that to the table.

Definitely. So many people do end up jaded because there’s a lot to be jaded about.

Oh, you’re getting beat down. The world’s sort of beat me down about it all.

Yeah. But it’s remembering that that’s separate from the love of the work itself. The beauty of the work.

And your enjoyment of it as a viewer… It’s a feedback loop. The way it brings out joy, loving you, put it back in, and then you get it back out on the other side. And that is back to privacy, being part of maintaining that is the ultimate act of privacy. That is like, “This is my feeling, this is my joy.” And so holding onto that is also holding onto the privacy of it. So if you look to get anything else out of it, you’re introducing things out of your control, into allowing it to determine what can be reaped from what you alone sowed. I don’t know. It’s only got to be for your own pleasure of it.

There’s something you said in one interview that I thought was really interesting. You said something about how you make these things to be on people’s walls and they have to be respectful of the fact that people look at them in different emotional states.

Yeah. Something along those lines. I think you have to be respectful of the fact that a painting, it’s supposed to exist in someone’s house.

I just think that’s what paintings are for. That is their function. So it needs to exist in such a way that it can garner attention for sure, in terms of being an interesting thing to look at. But it shouldn’t be distracting. I don’t know exactly what it is either that makes something that, I guess… but it’s like there’s that… Brian Eno, right? He said something about ambient music… being like furniture in the sense that it’s there to be enjoyed, but it can also just be a part of the room at the same time. And I guess it was something along those lines, right?

But at the same time, I don’t know if I fully buy that because I’m like, “I want that painting. I want that painting in my house every day. I want to have to look at that painting every day.” So that’s not ignorable in any way.

I mean, again, it’s just about being simply that’s what they’re for. That’s what I want them for, that’s what I’m making them for. And it’s not even a question that that’s what it’s for. You need to set parameters on any creative process, you just need to set limits. It’s like, what things are here to limit what I can use? What are my tools? What’s the material thing? And what are the little funny ways I’m going to think about trying to make something out of it?

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Tyler Bussey.

It’s very hard to compartmentalize across interests and things that I need to do as part of my job, as part of my chosen career—in terms of being a public interest attorney, being an attorney who supports and works with folks who are grassroots-based. That has a natural bleed-over into the kind of art practice that I’ve been able to engage in, one that is community-based and attempts to be community-engaged as much as possible. And part of that stems from having a non-linear path to these things in life.

I didn’t go to school to be an artist. I didn’t see myself or acknowledge myself as an artist until way after I was in my career. Part of me having the space and having the awareness to engage with art, and to see myself as an artist, was because I was involved in DIY spaces in Philadelphia that had a lot of overlap with the communities that I was serving as part of being at a legal services organization. And then that had overlap with the things that I needed as a young Black, queer parent, growing up as a teen parent… Just a lot of overlap in life path and things that are non-linear and have intersected and intertwined with each other.

If I didn’t have a way of divesting from the thought process and approach that lawyers typically have to use in their work, and to be able to have an artistic practice or an Afro-Futurist community to be thinking about and challenging the frameworks that I was working within as a lawyer, I don’t think I’d be as “successful” in my fields. It’s not always easy, either. There are times when I have to be very siloed in my work, where I have to be very focused on how I’m taking an approach. But I’ve also managed to somehow get myself into places where these things can lead into each other.

How do you balance your day-to-day work and your artistic ambition with the knowledge that we can push back against dominant structures of time? Do you structure your days?

There is no balance, right? What we consider to be “balance” is a fiction, in a lot of ways. Because of the ways that time is constructed in terms of a 24-hour day in our society, and an “eight-hour work day.” The type of work that I do is not containable in an eight-hour work day. And then there’s a five-day work week. I am beholden to that structure in some ways, because I have to be in the world. I have a family. I have to have a job that is consistent and steady. But I realize that it is a construct. It is just one way of doing things… I do structure my day, generally. Again, there’s nuance around that. Although I have the awareness of what I’m doing, the fact is that I realized that it’s not healthy. It’s unnatural in a lot of ways, and it goes even beyond the structures that are set for it. My job is beyond a 9-to-5. I am often working Sundays. I am often working until 10 o’clock at night—these kinds of things. So even beyond those structures that have been set up for this, it goes beyond that. But there is fluidity at the same time, and being able to have Black Quantum Futurism, doing the sort of research that I can do—it gives me the ability to not take for granted that it is a construct.

In your book, Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time, you talk about the regimentation of time as a means of control and surveillance, as a tool for disenfranchisement for Black folks, and how time and space are not neutral in this way. How has your artistic output been a way to process all of this?

It’s been a really amazing outlet for it. Because [art] is the place where folks are more open and more willing to experiment, and where you can stretch the bounds of imagination without too much question or push back. In an art exhibit, I’m able to collaborate with someone and create a clock that runs backwards in time or is activated by sound. Or I’m able to create a large floor compass that moves in time with other people, and other people can play with sound and time and space… I can write a book that’s questioning these things, and if I were a scientist—or if I were strictly not crossing over into the realm of the speculative, like in my legal work—I wouldn’t have as much room and space to write a book like that, from that kind of context.

Reading a book is a different experience from seeing a public artwork. In the book, you also encourage readers to skip around and not necessarily feel beholden to reading in a linear way. Why was it important to translate your research about time to the written form?

I talk about this in other contexts, but for me, writing and reading is literal time manipulation. So I wanted to offer folks the opportunity to do that with the work—to put it into practice. I don’t want to just offer something and be like, “Hey, go figure out the rest on your own.” But, “Here’s actually a way to practice what I’m saying.” I realize that these are really challenging ideas to wrap around, and to figure out… It’s just offering another way to put into practice the idea that linearity is not the only model—is not even the dominant model—for how we construct or can deal with reality. Those other options, alternatives, possibilities may be healthier. They may be more aligned with how you want to walk through the world. They may be more aligned with your communal ways or your ancestral ways of being in the world, being in space-time.

Do you have any advice or insights for artists who might be curious about making their work more interdisciplinary?

Rather than advice, it’s more just an invitation to folks to not silo yourself. Or, to not shrink yourself. To find ways to bring the fullness of yourself—whatever that looks like or means—into things that you do. I know it’s easier said than done, and even for my own journey, it’s been very difficult to find ways to do that.

As I get older, it’s like, “I’m going to just do whatever I want.” I [recommend] a little bit of that bravado. Wherever you are in your career, just [saying], “This is me. These are the things that I’m interested in.” It doesn’t have to look polished, or any particular way… More and more, I have learned the value that I bring as a unique being and whatever it looks like in that moment. And even if it’s not accepted by everyone, I have learned that it is where it needs to be. It’s in the conversations that it needs to be in. It’s with the people that need it, and need to see it. I’ve gotten that validation by being in community with folks and having those conversations.

There’s a passage in your book on non-deterministic futures that I think is so interesting: the future is “not a fixed, inevitable outcome determined by past and present actions” and is actually “a realm of vast possibility.” That resonated with me in terms of thinking about this very heavy moment we’re living in right now.

One thing about being a part of the Afrofuturist community writ large, and having the opportunity to put into practice some of the ideas and strategies and ways of being that I talk about in a book, is that I literally have come to see the future differently. I even question that idea, or that construct, of being able to see the future. And going beyond our visual constructs, even, because I think that limits us in so many ways—in terms of what we expect the future to look like, versus what we expect it to feel like, what we expect it to sound like.

There are other communal, ancestral, and other civilizations’ ways of experiencing reality. [The future] is not just beholden to, for example, a four-year political construct. In terms of being able to think about a future and being able to construct a space-time that is different from the now, I can hold a lot of different things. I can hold the lessons and the space-times of the ’60s. I can hold the space-times of enslaved ancestors, in terms of thinking through what the future should be. There are different types of futures that are possible from the ones that have been constructed by Western, white supremacist, linear space-time. Those futures are actually already active, can be tapped in to, and can be integrated into this particular reality.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Eva Recinos.

It wasn’t always like that. I went to school for photography, and then I moved to New York with a dream of working in fashion. This was around 2011. I came here and I started interning, then assisting. As I got more involved with the industry and I got more of a behind-the-scenes look, I was not super inspired by the lack of community and the superficiality of it. I started transitioning more into beauty, which led me to portraits around the same time as the Black Lives Matter movement was starting to build steam [due to the murder of] Trayvon Martin and some unfortunate events that happened in 2015, 2016, when we were having public conversations around systemic racism in America. I used that conversation to examine my own contribution. I just had never—I mean, [I’m a] white person, privileged—examined that before.

I started looking at my own work and realizing that I was probably contributing to the problem of having a one-size-fits-all beauty standard because I was working a lot with the stereotypical thin, young, white, cisgender female. Around 2015, I began to take an active stance in my personal work where I said, “I’m not going to contribute to that anymore.” [You] don’t have so much flexibility with [paid work] because you’re working for a client, but at least in my personal work, I felt like I had control to exercise decisions around casting, who I was going to collaborate with, and making intentional work. Everything for us, [in] New York City as creatives, goes on Instagram, [where] you can have a small audience or a huge audience, and I think that a level of responsibility goes with that.

After Trump got elected the first time, I saw a lot of people in Brooklyn try to get involved in organizing and put their politics front and center in their work, but then they burnt out on it within a few months. You’ve had the opposite arc with politics in your work, so what advice would you give to creative folks going through a similar reckoning, who want to figure out how to prioritize more left-leaning politics in their creative work?

As someone who works commercially—and Brenna [Drury, makeup artist for Prim ’n Poppin’] does as well, [as do] a lot of my other collaborators—I think it can feel disempowering when you have other people in power dictating what you can and cannot do. In that case, I recommend having casual conversations with people in the creative force who could potentially be swayed to make a different decision when it comes to the message they’re creating with their work or the type of person they’re casting… Sometimes just giving a seed of an idea to people in the creative field who also are in corporate can be really useful.

And then, [I recommend] exercising your power as much as possible in your personal work. For me, what that’s looked like is collaborating. I’ve taken an interest in many issues that don’t necessarily affect me personally. In doing so, I’ve developed many conversations and relationships with different communities that I’m collaborating with. In that way, a lot of the work I do, I consider partner-oriented. For example, with Prim ’n Poppin’, Brenna and I came together to do this work. I would never say that I work in a vacuum and it’s all only mine. [Collaboration] can lead to important conversations about, “What messages should we be putting out? What’s important to you?”

I did a project recently around voting, and I collaborated with a queer couple who are both immigrants, and it was their first election cycle that they could vote. We had all kinds of conversations I wasn’t even thinking of, and the project took on new meaning in that context, and it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t [chosen] to collaborate with them.

How do you balance your time between paid projects and passion projects?

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve taken on [fewer] projects and, at the same time, made sure those projects are more meaningful. I used to shoot casually a lot more in the past, but those projects take a lot of time, resources, planning, and post-production—therefore, having to pay for things—but they weren’t necessarily so developed, or the message was much smaller. If I’m going to dedicate time to unpaid personal work, which is incredibly important to me—especially, again, with the political climate—I want to take the time to do something impactful and meaningful.

Whether it’s a few projects a year that you put a lot of time into, or one day a month, even, if that’s what you can do, great. It’s hard to balance it, and the more you’re doing paid work, the less you can have energy for personal work. I also think having grace around seasons of your life and your career [is] important. I don’t think it’s helpful to feel guilty.

To ask about Prim ’n Poppin’ a bit more: there was the 2021 campaign, then a 2024 campaign timed around the election cycle. Did you ever think, “Is this still worth doing depending on which way the election swings?” What questions were you asking yourself as you considered relaunching the campaign?

The project has always been based around diversity, equity, and inclusion. The reason, pre-election, that we were talking about relaunching was because we were seeing a decrease in DEI in advertising and beauty. I mean literally a decrease in terms of the jobs available to models that we know. Championing talent is the highlight of what our project is about. We were noticing and hearing—not only just visually and being on set, but also through models that we know [who] are trans or disabled, for example—that they weren’t booking as many jobs, and it was a sharp decrease from previous years. [From] 2019 to 2022, we [had] this inclusivity boom. It seems like after that, people were over it, got bored or were feeling like, “This had its moment, it’s not trending anymore, so there’s no point in us paying attention to it.”

[The campaign has] always been an excuse to have conversations regardless of which way the election would’ve gone. It wouldn’t have meant that having conversations around inclusion isn’t still extremely important. It just happens that, since the election went the way that it did, it’s even more important, timely, and urgent.

The press release that I got about Prim ’n Poppin’ relaunching describes the 2021 campaign as “massively successful.” What does success mean to you, particularly for personal projects? Is success just being a conversation starter?

We were measuring success in terms of the amount of coverage we got and, therefore, the amount of people talking about it. We were noticing that big places like the Guardian posted, and we were looking at the comments coming in, and it was really interesting to see a certain percentage of the comments [being] really supportive, and that made us think, “This feels like it was so needed. A lot of people want to be having these conversations.” And then there was a percentage of comments that were quite negative, as I’m sure you can imagine. Troll-y people saying very mean things. Even though there’s buzz and that’s great, obviously we’re not done here.

Your artistic style is very colorful and bold. How did you land on that style?

It’s just what I’m attracted to. It’s that simple. I’m just not inspired by basic color. I like intentional color—strong, intentional contrast. I’m bored by soft, smooth, natural-feeling colors.

Is that something you’ve always known about yourself, or did you have to come to that realization?

I used to—many, many years ago—exclusively do black-and-white, and it was always high-contrast. At the time, I was resolute that I wouldn’t do color until I understood color enough to do it intentionally. This is just my personal opinion, but I think if color’s not going to contribute something to what you’re doing, what’s the point? I think color can be really distracting, particularly in photography. If you’re not going to be intentional with it, shoot it in black and white. I’ll get what I need to know without being distracted by the color.

You also work in video and create GIFs. As you’re approaching a project, how do you know which of your mediums is right?

Producing video is very cost-prohibitive. I only did my first personal project that included film recently. Two projects that I worked on within the last couple of years that had motion [were] not client-oriented, and that was the first time I could exercise my creative direction in that medium. All other video projects prior to that have been client-led because they have money for that, and producing video, at least the way I would want with strong lighting and color, you need some amount of money to do it. Photography has been a lot more accessible for me in that way, and GIFs [too]. GIFs just take longer on the backend. Photo’s been the easiest medium for me to work in. And then if I feel like it’s appropriate to do a GIF or an animation, I do.

How do you know when a photograph—meaning the post-production image—is complete?

It took me a lot of time to come to a place where I could call something done. It’s just intuitive. Through years of experience—and I have employment history of being a professional retoucher—I know when [I’ve] taken it too far. Also, [with] people’s attention spans, no one will care as much as you, the artist, cares. My “done” is already past what many other people would probably consider “done.”

One thing that’s been really nice for me as a creative is this ability to do a gut check, whether I’m on set or working on post-production. In my regular life, I don’t have that same level of intuition, just trusting my gut.

How do you go about starting a photography project?

Because I work a lot collaboratively, it usually starts with a conversation [that] will lead to a series of actions, and on my end, that next step is usually pulling an inspiration. I’ll use the Freedom Project, which was this political project I worked on recently with acrobats, as an example. Their domain is what they do with their bodies. That’s not my domain. My domain is the photo stuff. It was their job to come to me with a design of, “We want to pose people in this way.” I took that and said, “I have these references I’m really inspired by. I want the light and color to go in this direction.” I mapped out, for each one, my approach.

Is there anything else you want to share about Prim ’n Poppin’?

In terms of approaching things politically or using your artistic expression as a means of activism, I have found it much easier to engage a wider audience if you’re creating work that is beautiful, visually appealing, something that doesn’t make a viewer turn away. There’s a space for that work, and that work is important, but in my case, if your intention is to not only preach to the choir but to reach people who don’t share the same set of beliefs as you, or don’t know as much as you know about a certain topic or community but are open, you want to meet them in the middle. You want to meet them where they’re at.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.

In our ongoing discussion, Robert Schmuhl, author of Mr. Churchill in the White House, explores how painting was a profound source of solace and strength for Churchill. This personal outlet helped shape his leadership during Europe's darkest hour, influencing the fate of the free world. As we always say on Gaslit Nation, art is survival. If you have artwork you’d like to share with our community, we’d love to feature it on our socials. Email us at GaslitNation@gmail.com! For music, we’re happy to play your song on the show—just submit your work using the link in our show notes!

This Monday, during our Gaslit Nation salon on Zoom with our Patreon community, we’re thrilled to welcome disinformation researcher Dr. Emma Briant. Dr. Briant played a pivotal role in exposing the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal and is a co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of the Influence Industry, which includes a chapter on lawfare by Andrea’s sister, Alexandra Chalupa. Dr. Briant will walk us through the mechanics of influence campaigns—how they work, their effects, and, most importantly, how we can fight back. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from one of the leading experts in the field!

Show Notes:

The song featured in this week’s episode is “Free” by Aaron Espe: https://open.spotify.com/track/3M7xHMsoIeNKLkrJ2wY4i6

Submit your song to be featured on Gaslit Nation: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeS7TftV6Vfnw-iasFLepL6FpIj_KFORDLrAlZGH3nLg7i8lA/viewform

Mr. Churchill in the White House The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324093428

Clip: The Paintings of Sir Winston Churchill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exABCiPBAVE

Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

It’s weird. It’s changed so much in the 25 years that I’ve been involved with art. I won’t say it’s unrecognizable from what it was 20 years ago, but there’s definitely a professionalism that takes the soul out of work for me. And I long to see that soul return.

What does that look like to you?

Well, if you look at Leo Castelli as being somebody who was also about artwork—he basically went to people who did other things for a living, and said, “This is important. This is something you should look at, and this is why it’s important.” We used to see that more frequently in the early 2000s, late ’90s, early 2000s. After the economy crashed in 2008, art adapted to what the collectors wanted, which really isn’t the best thing for art. I also struggle about the idea of art now being only about making objects. I think art is an archive of a life.

I see a lot of artists being, like, “I’ve got my shit, I’ve got my outlet, and we’re going to sell as many of these as we can.” And if any threads are out of line, then they need to be fixed, because that’s not professional.

I came up in a much messier art world. I’m sure that it exists, and I need to look harder for it, but I think that’s, to me, the main difference. LA used to be a place where it was significantly cheaper than New York. And as a result, a lot more novelty was created, because you could talk to people that weren’t thinking about the three jobs that they have to do. Artists here don’t have boredom time.

i will stop fighting you when death stops fucking with me, 2005, mixed media; 64 x 72 x 72 inches, 162.6 x 182.9 x 182.9 cm.

How did your show this year come about? Did it come from boredom time?

No, that came from intense time. One of my closest friends, when we were in midst of the pandemic, was always making art. And we were getting charged up from this excitement, like, “This is the moment where we’re all going to change, and it doesn’t need to be the same.” And I ended up visiting my friend, and the next day, he texted me, “I think I have COVID.”

I said, “I think you’re having a heart attack.” We always ended our texts with, “I love you.” And that was the last thing that he ever texted me.

So I’m dealing with this soul-crushing loss. I ended up making all these ghosts that ended up being shown in New York. But nothing was pre-planned. I wasn’t making it for the show. But it was all, like, using his socks, and things he owned. Hats and stuff like that. I started making bronzes.

Sometimes I think the best things that I make are straight out of, like, who knows where, and I’m lucky to be a conduit. It was not unlike in the early 2000s, when a lot of the work that I made was this fear that my parents were going to die, and then they died.

That’s so hard.

My dad would have been 100 years old this year. My mom was one of the youngest in her family. Everyone was old. We were in and out of the hospital visiting people all the time. People were croaking all the time. The only way we dealt with it was through humor. Sometimes awful humor.

i’ve got love for you, 2023, mixed media installation, dimensions variable.

I can see that. Your work reminds me of the way that people actually mourn.

I remember when I was a kid, so many family members had died, and my mother had congestive heart failure and we were in the hospital. And the doctor’s like, “Do you have a sister?” To my mom. And she said, “Yeah.” And the doctor goes, “She’s one floor above you.” She had congestive heart failure on the same day. So, that was hilarious.

And I go up to her room. She’s sitting on her hospital bed. And I said, “Are you going to die? Do I have to go casket shopping?” And she’s like, “Oh my god, Jonathan. I’m not dying today.” And I’m like, “Okay.” And she says, “do me a favor. Find me an orderly, and get me a cigarette.”

That’s the kind of people my family comes from. And that was the way my young life had started—with death.

When you finished making that show did you feel a catharsis from the grief over these deaths?

It definitely was, but, unfortunately, like, too much of a catharsis in some ways. Because I am finding it hard to make new things.

l, 2023, found object rug with fake fur; 60 x 96 inches, 152.4 x 243.8 cm.

How do you handle these liminal moments where it is hard to create art?

Probably with gratitude and fear. This is the third or fourth time where I’m like, “Okay. It’s over. I’ve got to get a teaching job.”

I think that community-building is important, and I’ve been trying to do more of that. The most prolific output was during the early 2000s in Chinatown where we spent five nights a week working and talking with artists, writers, and actors. Cross-pollinating ideas. I’m sure those spaces exist for younger people, but I don’t know.

I don’t know if they do. The art students that I know seem much more commercially-minded.

I made this comment to somebody this week on Tuesday in a painting class, and this person was talking about that.

He was saying, “How do I put this work in front of this group, or should I not go for that group? Should I go for this group?” And I was like, “You named the band before you wrote any songs.” Like, write some songs, then name your band and figure out what you’re going to wear.

And I get it. If you’re paying $3000 a month for your apartment, and you’re working three jobs to be able to just do that, I imagine you’re probably going to think, “Well, how do I get out of this? I’m going to make the thing that’s going to make me the most money.” Which is not an ignoble thing to do when you’re coming out of grad school with a ton of debt.

But it seems that in ecosystems like LA or New York, the artists have a harder time making the work, and the collectors have a harder time buying the work that is harder. In other places, though, people don’t always think of collecting as accumulation. They think of it as stewardship, and then all you’re doing is saving a bit of humanity.

the pack (i will always love you), 2010, spray foam, exterior house paint, denim, metal, spray paint, resin, wood, and lightbulbs; 60 x 60 x 24 inches, 152.4 x 152.4 x 61 cm.

I completely agree. I really liked the show you curated at Megan Mulrooney. Is curating a kind of community building for you?

That was part of the idea. In 2013, a friend of mine and I opened a gallery in downtown LA. At the gallery, we didn’t have a desk, we just had a giant table. So, if anybody came in, there was a lot of conversation. You would come to see the show, and you’d go upstairs and see what everyone was doing. Collectors come in, and they’re almost ignored, but commerce gets done to make sure that the doors and lights are still open and on for the following weekend.

i have thought deep through this trouble, 2005, mixed media on panel; 60 x 48 x 2 inches, 152.4 x 121.9 x 5.1 cm.

Do you feel like there are ethical boundaries that you have as an artist?

An artist is usually either a witch or a businessperson. I fall into the witch category. The few times that I’ve tried to put myself into the businessperson category, it’s not been very satisfying. So the only ethics that I try and follow is not to be a businessperson. I try to be sincere as much as I can.

How has your approach to artmaking changed since you were starting out?

When I was having a lot of success in my early career, it was really easy to not pay attention to what I was doing. Then one day, I realized that I bought a house in Canada. And then, all of a sudden, I was like, “Oh, I’m good at this. People think I’m good at this.”

But it was in that moment of self-consciousness that I really started to disassemble anything that had brought me to that point. It was this weird struggle of getting to where I felt like I had nothing left, and then, in that despair, having this resurgence where all of that sincerity comes back. Then you realize that you’re good at it again, and then you’re like, “I’m good at this,” and then you can’t make work anymore.

You are covered sweetness, we outlast this worn out time, 2019, fabric, wood glue, watercolor,glitter,black cue balls, polyurethane, wood, on linen on panel; framed Dimensions: 63 1/2 x 93 1/2 x 3 1/4 inches, 161.3 x 237.5 x 8.3 cm.

What is the resurgence like?

I used to listen to Katy Perry’s “Firework” over and over again. As a self-help motivational, listening to “Firework” over and over again in my studio, embarrassingly dancing around to it. I almost get into, like, a trance. Thinking like, “I’m a firework. I know I’m a firework.”

And then I would look at the work after, and say, “How did I do that? I don’t know how I just did that.”

Because I was a firework.

Because I was a firework.

Untitled, 2021, six elements: High Polish Bronze; overall installed dimensions: 17 x 22 x 20 inches, 43.2 x 55.9 x 50.8 cm.

[Credit for all images: Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.]

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Claudia Ross.

That’s my driving force; thinking about the immigrant as a basis of wisdom and resilience; the idea of otherness, and the foreigner being an outsider, or not belonging. But, those being advantageous, or powerful, because of growing in hostile environments and being able to thrive in them as well.

Like a dandelion.

Exactly. Yeah. I think a lot about Vilém Flusser Flusser’s book, called the Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. Vilém Flusser as a philosopher and media critic, thinks of the migrant as this vanguard for the future, and the migrant being of multiple lands rather than just one. He argues that you can only be a philosopher if you know more than one language because you think from within multiple realms rather than one.

Unfortunately, much to my great shame, I actually only speak the one language, English, but then I think of art as another language. I pursue this idea of world building as a non-linear, non-linguistic visual language that goes beyond ideas of conventional or formal human language, but more of a non-human language.

It revolves heavily around my ideas of family and ancestry, ways of existing, ideas of belonging and not belonging. Particularly thinking about me growing up in Scotland against this white background…not belonging.

Rae-Yen Song - (T_T), 2023, drawing (ink and my father’s marker pens on my father’s paper), 297 x 420mm

I was asked by my best friend’s mum recently, they’re Kurds—because my family are Jamaican immigrants—she was asking me, if I feel more connected to being Jamaican over being British? The question was interesting because I wasn’t born in Jamaica, I have a secondary experience of that culture because it’s still funneled through a navigation of British culture as well. So there is this mesh almost, where with my family, all I’ve ever known is being Caribbean in this context, so I couldn’t apply it to being Caribbean in the Caribbean.

Exactly. That’s my thinking as well; being more in relation with the diaspora. And for me, not even the diaspora of just East, Southeast Asian, but a diaspora in Britain.

I was sent to Chinese school as a kid—I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but on reflection, there’s this community, where [you’re supposed to] belong. But in actual fact, I didn’t.

Why?

Because there were families in that Chinese community who were much more Chinese than me… they grew up speaking Cantonese or Mandarin at home. I grew up speaking English. A lot of the kids grew up in a much tighter community of aunts and uncles and extended family who were in Scotland as well. But for me, it was just me and my immediate family, and we grew up speaking English.

It was like rubbing salt in the wound. At both schools—Chinese school and Western school—I would play up, I’d be cheeky and disruptive and try to get other kids to join me. This is pop psychology, but this was probably me trying to hide. I think back to it and I wonder, “Oh, maybe that’s the basis of my whole art practice.”

Really? How so?

More recently…reading about trickster characters and how disruption can be used to create your own space. That extends into realms of world building, and thinking around family fables, mythologies, and ancestry, and how I can tell different life stories.

I want to speak about that actually, and how Daoism connects you to your ancestry, it’s link to the cosmic energy of Yin and Yang—Yin’s association with darkness, cold, wetness and the moon, and Yang’s association with light, fire, east and the dragon. How do you package all of that in your work?

My ancestors had a Daoist practice and my introduction to it was going to see family in Singapore. Just the great reverence to ancestors. You enter the home, you light your joss sticks, you do a prayer, and then you go into the temples. Then you visit the ashes of ancestors and you’re doing your prayer as well. It was this constant understanding that the ancestors are present, they’re like lively ghosts. It’s about still caring for them essentially. Bringing Daoism into my thinking process and for myself…I got into the more philosophical side through my dad. He had all these different books, like the Tao of Physics, the I Ching, lots of things around Daoism and Buddhism and the ideas of the subconscious, and then Carl Jung, of course…ideas of psychedelia, hippies, and then also video gaming.

I guess you could apply that word to your work actually, because to me, it’s kind of psychedelic. There are forms that are recognizable, then they merge into others that aren’t. A flubbery movement…I really love that.

Oh, thanks [laughs] What you reference are my ideas around abstraction, because everything that I know of my ancestry, my family, and my heritage, is also fragmented, so it’s not this verbatim retelling. I’m not interested in just a retelling of history, I’m more interested in the gaps, how you can fabulate them, and how I can use it as an opportunity to get closer to my ancestors or their stories…filling it in.

Being the trickster.

Yeah, being the trickster. [laughs]

Rae-Yen Song - ▷▥◉▻, 2021, installation (inflatables, costume, glazed ceramics, geodesic textiles, statue, animation, bronze, laser-etched perspex and woodblock, soundscape), 16m x 10m x 4.5m

So you’re giving a myth or oral history a physical vessel or space. I’m reading that more so as preservation and conservation of these stories meshed with your experience and how you interpret the gaps…what’s missing in the story becomes your work.

Yeah, it is this constellation…what you just said about preservation, I do think about ideas of the archive and records. Do you know that book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments?

Yeah.

So incredible, and the writer is who again? Oh god, I’m so bad at remembering…Saidiya Hartman. She coined the term…

Critical Fabulation.

Yes, exactly, where she has these documents that have extreme negativity, often in relation to incarceration. But then there’s such creative joy and beauty in what she does in terms of digging into and fabulating the gaps…the things that aren’t recorded or that exist either orally or through the imagination…there’s energy. That goes back to this idea of immigrant cultures and the other, their histories aren’t recorded. So i’m thinking “Okay, how do I want to tell these stories?, how do I want to record them? and who am I recording it for as well?” I don’t want to just make work and then it’s being presented to this white gaze.

Yeah, definitely.

Which ultimately the art world is. It’s essentially built on the foundations of…It is within the institutions of colonialism and the white gaze. So I’m always thinking about who is my audience?

Your ancestors?

My ancestors, exactly! Lively ghosts, energies that are still present. Then this idea of, “Okay, if I’m telling your story and you’re still present, how am I telling this? Because I don’t want to put words in your mouth…” So maybe it’s more about getting closer to them, a dance.

There’s reverence, and you’re right, this dance. In Daoism, some of the main pillars are compassion, moderation and humility, and from that, I think you land on mutualism.

Yeah, exactly!

In terms of landing on mutualism, which for me and how I read your work as well…there’s such a big nature-centered and nature-focused element. Do you feel that it’s an urgent thing to push in terms of the climate crisis; how we should be relying on nature and the learnings from nature, a mutual relationship? What’s really interesting is how you foreground our own animality. Like, “Okay, we’re all animals. Nobody is better than anybody here.” I sometimes can’t detect where a monkey begins or a human ends in some of your work. What informs those decisions for you, and do you feel that it’s important for you to push that?

Definitely. Definitely. With Daoism, the ultimate aim is to truly perceive the mutual interrelation of all things, like the sharing of atoms, water, we’re just entwined. How can we not be? That sense of the isolated individual, the human, is a total construct which could dissolve upon the identification of a greater unity. That definitely falls into dialogues around the climate crisis and ways of thinking around how we live in this increasingly hostile world. Thinking about us as nature, rather than being with nature, we are nature. It is us. If we think of nature as ourselves, then how can we care for ourselves?

Then learning from the wisdoms of other non-linguistic beings. It’s not just earthly, Daoism revolves around the ideas of the cosmos and beyond. The unknown and the abyssal powers that we can’t even comprehend, but we are a part of. We’re minute but we’re still so destructive. We’ve distanced ourselves so that we don’t feel entwined, we don’t feel those vibrations, which I think so many other organisms and other non-human beings fundamentally and powerfully feel. We’ve lost that.

Absolutely.

Maybe art is, for me, an attempt to try and get closer to those vibrations, to have a bodily embrace with it and feel ourselves as nature, and therefore care for it.

Rae-Yen Song - song dynasty ○○○, 2021, sculptural costume (inherited fabrics; papier-mâché; harness), 280 x 300 x 140cm

So you’re thinking on multiple planes here; the non-human that is physically here, the non-human that doesn’t have a body anymore but is ancestral—lively ghosts, and then us as physical beings. Your work for me is trying to re-engage and reconnect. In essence saying, “We’re all soft, we’re all pathetic, we’re all funny sometimes. We cuddle and roar, we’re animal cousins and we’re spiritual cousins, and this is what I think it looks like.”

[Laughs] Yes! With the idea of lively ghosts and life and death cycles, the circularity of things…specifically in relation to the death of many of my own ancestors. I’m imagining their decomposition giving breath to so many other organisms, creating other worlds.

I’m influenced by the origin story of “Pangu and the cosmic egg” in Chinese mythology. It is said that Pangu awoke in darkness, and he pushed and separated the Yin and Yang from each other. And over centuries, he used all his might to hold these two apart until he was reassured that they were separated. His body was so tired and fatigued that he fell and he died, but in doing that, his body became the world as we know it. His breath becoming the air, his voice becoming thunder, his eyes becoming the sun and the moon, and his limbs becoming mountains and his blood becoming the rivers and seas.

Wow.

I’ve thought a lot about these age-old mythologies, and brought that into my own ancestry, my own kind of familial stories. If my ancestors are being decomposed and are nourishment for other creatures and other beings, wouldn’t those other beings then also be my kin and part of my ancestry? I’m beginning to think of ancestry in a much broader sense now—the non-human as extended kin. How that can bring about more empathy and care towards nature in a familial sense?

Do you think that that is why you have such a dynamic practice? Because wow…ceramics, gaming, animations, drawings, prints, sculptures, it goes on and on and on. And you still have this ability to make the work ooze you, which can be hard to do when you are working across so many different mediums, but you do it so slickly. It’s incredible. What makes you choose a medium?

I choose the medium between curiosity, total ignorance, naivety and things that are tactile, things that are in the realms of craft. I don’t really see a difference between art and craft really. I know people try to separate, but I think to make something exist, I really indulge in the craft of it. I guess that’s why I fell into ceramics, textiles, drawing, and then building more architectural structures. It’s about crafting and finding beauty in it. Not in a conventional sense, but beauty in that, time and care has really been put into a material, and you’ve given your energy to this matter…you’ve imbued it with your warmth. You’ve heated it up with your hands and you’re giving it life.

How did you grow in confidence using so many different materials?

I have just an eagerness to make. I love making things, I love playing with material, and I get deep satisfaction from building things, I always have. It’s almost like this effortless strength and intuitiveness that I really find a lot of joy in.

Is there a favorite material or media?

Ooh. It’s like children. I’ve only recently gotten into it, but I do really enjoy using ceramics. I was talking to an academic, Mi Yu, and we were talking about how ceramics really encompasses all five phases of the “wuxing” in Daoism: fire, water, earth, wood, and metal. Through its processes, it goes through all of those phases. It’s a real kind of energy bound material…matter. Ceramics for me holds ideas of multi-functionality.

Rae-Yen Song - ○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○, 2024, installation (glazed ceramics, mud, sand, straw, light, fermenting tea fungus, microphones and other sensors, live evolving audio soundscapes), 190cm x 172cm x 250cm

Your ceramics are wow. If you’re saying that you’ve just gotten into it, they’re very ambitious.

Almost stupidly. [laughs]

[laughs] Is there anything super key that you’ve learned from moving across all these mediums? Working with a lot of different craftspeople in different studios? Cross-discipline collaboration? Is there anything key that you would tell other artists that want to do the same?

Be excited. I think my excitement alongside my curiousness and naivety has gone a long way. I think if you’re excited and you approach someone, and you know that they…For instance, right now, I want to talk to someone about sea worms, so I’m looking into marine biologists. And the way I approach it is like, “I am really excited to talk about sea worms and I know you love sea worms.”

[laughs]

It’s like making a friend in the playground: “I love what you do and I want to play with this as well.” Being excited I think has genuinely got me along. Where I like playing with things, I like to play with other people, too.

Being a sea sponge.

Yes, exactly. Total absorption.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Georgina Johnson.

I read a lot of memoirs. I’ve read them habitually my whole life. And one thing I found myself reacting against often was narratives that started when the writer was a child, then dug into this deep, traumatic childhood and stayed there for too long. I don’t always feel like very young children have narrative agency when it comes to trauma memoirs. It was very important to me to never have the reader be in a moment where there wasn’t real conflict as opposed to [watching] a kid have all these terrible things happen to them while their parents control their lives. There’s no story there. So it was important to me to not do that. I also never wanted to feel like I was in a position where I was boring myself just to get information across.

So anytime I started to feel bored, I just got out of that section of the story and moved into a different one. And I did have an amazing editor. She’s also a poetry editor. Her name is Jenny Xu. She acquired the book. I was her first acquisition, and she was really open to unconventional structure. She helped me break it and make it new. She took a line from the book where I talk about understanding my mom in layers and not in terms of puzzle pieces fitting together, and she was like, what if that was how we put the book together? What if it’s written in layers of understanding as opposed to that more common structure of, you know, childhood and then looking back at childhood?

I love that. And I loved the way you treated your mother. I wonder how readers are going to respond to the way you’ve written your mother and the way you treat her in the book. Obviously, it’s not easy material to write about, and it’s hard material to read, too, probably for lots of people. But as someone who has known and loved people who are very unstable and unwell, I’ve always been really frustrated by the way people will reduce someone to “just” their insanity. There’s always so much more to a person. And I also know that sometimes it’s the madman, the madwoman who’s the only truth teller. But I really loved the way…

I think I lost you…

[At this point, Sarah’s connection dropped. She signed back on a moment later.]

Hi! In The Arcades Project, there’s this whole section where Benjamin would talk about how he was dogged by bad luck his whole life and how there was this little demon that was causing it. And I feel like that’s happening to me now with all of my technology. Nothing will hold a charge. I took my laptop to the Apple Store and they couldn’t fix it. Now I’m about to go to New York for two weeks and it looks like I’m going to have a non-functional laptop.

Oh no. Maybe you can ask your little demon—or maybe you can have a little angel, not a little demon? Ask your little angel to work on the connection for you.

I do feel like the world is a projection of what’s happening to you internally. And I’m sure I’m repressing so much stress about my book that it’s just coming out in other ways.

I feel that. And the thing I was building toward when your laptop lost its charge is that I was really touched by your portrait of your mother as a very full human being. How are you feeling about that aspect of the book?

I thought about that a lot. There’s this line in the book where I’m quoting Freud—I’ll just paraphrase. He’s sort of like “all of mankind is plagued by delusions that may or may not be real.” And that really resonated with me because I’m vegan, and if you are a vegan talking to people who are otherwise completely ethical and even extremely progressive, and you bring up veganism, the kind of cognitive dissonance around talking about Big Ag and child labor in slaughterhouses and impoverished communities poisoned by toxic runoff from pig farms, is just crazy. Everybody just shuts down. So my question has always been, how is that any different? The delusions my most progressive friends have when it comes to the direct correlation between climate change and factory farming and my mom’s delusion that she lives in Ethiopia and has a husband there? They’re equally psychotic. But one delusion is accepted culturally, and one is not. I mean, I’m also not saying I’m fully sane. Nobody I know is fully sane. It’s just that there’s a collectively agreed upon conception of reality that more of us share than not and my mom’s conception of reality was not a part of that. But for her, her imagined life was real, and I knew that it was real.

Have you tried to anticipate readers’ reactions? Or to prepare or protect your mother in some way?

I don’t think she’ll ever read it. I don’t think she can. I mean, even at her best, she never really understood how to use the Internet, and now she’s living in a group home and she doesn’t have or want a phone there. I told her about the book. And I told her when I was talking to her for the book. But I don’t know that it matters, given everything. Even though she’s medicated and in treatment, she’s not 100% functional and I don’t know that she will be.

As for other readers, I started this book in 2017 and I sold it in 2021. So that’s what, like 7 years at this point? I’ve gotten feedback from everybody involved in the editing, publication, and production processes. And it happened more often than not that readers would tell me they also have a mentally ill loved one or they’ve experienced severe mental illness themselves. I definitely don’t get the sense that anyone is judging my mother or looking down on her. It seems like people are happy to have the language to have this conversation, and that’s something she’s providing and that her story is providing, and I feel like that’s important.

Absolutely. And that’s beautiful, too. It’s a real way you can give the world a gift through a book.

I have an MFA in fiction from NYU, right? And I was working there with Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith and all these huge names that, when I was growing up, I was like, “These people are gods,” right? “That’s what literature is.”

I thought that that was gonna be my path. I was trying to write stories for The New Yorker and the Paris Review. And I was gonna live in Brooklyn and do that whole thing. But I don’t know, that feels a little bit pointless to me right now in this moment. It feels like maybe right now, we need to be engaged with and in conversation with readers, and we need to do that because it just sort of feels like art is dying.

Maybe now we need a sense of collective understanding and community. It’s a conversation for me. You know what I mean? I want people to read this book and reach out to me and talk to me about it. I think I used to think of artists as needing to exist at a kind of remove from the world, but I don’t think I feel that way anymore. And I definitely don’t want to live like that.

I think it’s actually a great time to be an artist and there’s so much exciting writing happening. It’s just that there’s not much attention being paid to it because our attention is very actively, intentionally diverted—sent elsewhere. But I do think it’s an incredible time to be a writer and to be reachable. I’m moved every single time I see something in my inbox and someone is saying your book really did something for me, it broke something open for me, it frustrated me. Whatever they have to say, I can feel when it’s real and urgent and they connected with it on a deep level. And every time, I realize this is so much more important than anything else, because everything else comes and goes so quickly. We keep seeing the content of an entire site wiped out in one day and so, ok, maybe that was really important for somebody’s career to get something on there and maybe that really boosted them in the moment, but then it’s completely gone.

Yeah, I think capital destroys everything. And that’s what’s happened to the Internet. It’s just fracturing and shattering everything that made us who we are as writers. The only way I can figure out how to push back against that is to have real life connections and hopefully that’s what this book can do. There are silent reading clubs in LA now—people go to bars and read together. I try to go to events. I’m a librettist and I work in opera and I make these ephemeral shows where people have to come and sit in person. And of course opera feels obsolete, but I don’t know that it’s going to be obsolete for much longer. Everyone’s being inundated with information online constantly, and at a certain point it just becomes nonsense and you just want to go outside and talk to somebody.

Totally. I really think the book is such a durable technology. In some ways it’s a much more durable and even elegant technology than any computer ever could be. Like, it’s just it’s it’s beautiful little packet of information. I think in the long run, all of this is going to be fine. I think film will be fine too. I really really hope, because it’s also one of my favorite art forms. This is a dark night to walk through and we have to keep holding these torches. We’re doing our best.

The thing I always think is that in 10,000 years of human civilization as we know it, the Internet’s only been around for a couple of nanoseconds, comparatively. I think sometimes we get so tied up in the sense that we’re all just going to ascend to this digital nothing and everything’s gonna disappear. But it’s not true because we have physical bodies and we exist in the world. The cloud is what’s temporary. We’re still gonna be here.

This really speaks to your invocation of The Arcades Project. It’s part of this deep appreciation for the ephemera, that’s actually not ephemeral.

I love that you said that because I always think about how [in The Arcades Project, Benjamin] is writing analytically about pieces of what are basically garbage. He’s talking about fashion and clothing that’s gone out of style and objects and images and the outdated associations they hold. He’s showing us how they hold time. Because we look at them and we’re simultaneously in the past and in the present and that’s how we’re able to conceive of the past. Because we are experiencing that object right now in the present while constantly moving forward, but those objects and their associations are pulling us back. It’s like that Paul Klee painting, right, of the Angel of History? That famous metaphor Benjamin wrote about all this catastrophic stuff building up, and the Angel trying to go back and stop it, but being shoved forward by it instead. because that catastrophic stuff is history. It’s human civilization. It’s us. That’s what it feels like. It feels like we’re in that storm right now, and that will never not be true. That will never not be relevant.

I marked this page in your book, when you’re taking aim at the way so much contemporary literature is written by—I think what you say is the delicate, fragile children of aristocrats? Do you want to get into that?

Yeah, I mean, I went to Brown and I went to St. John’s [a private school in Houston]. I’ve gone to these fancy schools and been around that kind of money for my entire life, and I don’t know what to say about it, you know, because obviously it doesn’t necessarily matter who your parents are. People can come from anything and make incredible art. But I do think maybe it’s something that’s worth acknowledging.

The playing field is definitely not level and it’s not fair and nothing’s fair and you have to work from where you start. That’s fine. But I think at that moment in the book I was feeling incredibly frustrated because my mom was so sick and I was doing a reading at an art gallery and I just started to feel like what is this for? Who is this for? What are we even doing here?

I was talking to a good friend, Steph Cha, who’s an incredible novelist. We were talking about that New York Times list of the best hundred books in the past century, and we were both like, hmm, it’s weird that both of us have heard of every single book on this list. Yeah, we’re well-read, but, I mean, if someone on the selection committee for that list wanted to put a book on there that had only had six Goodreads reviews, or zero, other people [voting on the books] aren’t going to have read it and so aren’t going to vote for it, so there’s no way it could ever appear. It’s obvious these huge corporate marketing forces are collaborating to determine literary taste. You can’t say anything more obvious than that, but we kind of pretend like it’s not true.

That’s the part that drives me a little bit crazy. The collective pretending. Because if you’re in the writing world, you know it’s not level, and you know everyone else knows, and everyone is polite and doesn’t say anything about it for the most part, but everyone else outside of the writing world has no idea whatsoever. Like, they think that if something shows up on the New York Times bestsellers list, it’s because of the numbers alone, that it’s all transparent.

Yeah. I mean, I grew up reading the New York Times Book Review because my grandmother subscribed to it in Houston. She was my cultural arbiter because she traveled everywhere. And I remember I used to read it in the bathtub, and I would feel like, “One day. You know? My byline’ll be in there.” It wasn’t until I left Texas and went to Brown that I realized, “Oh, all these people’s parents work for NPR. And they all have enough money to leave college for a year and intern in New York.” And it’s not that I was poor. I had support, too. But you realize, “Wow, none of this is democratic.” At all. Which, okay, fine. But maybe use your powers in a less self indulgent way is something I would say. This is something I really am wrestling with because I love fiction. Literary fiction is my life. It’s everything. But sometimes I just want to say, it’s not the ’90s anymore. It’s not the mid 2000s. We are in a catastrophic situation. We’ve got to stop pretending like that’s not the case.

And I don’t know what role fiction plays in it, but it’s something I would like to see talked about in a more honest way.

I also don’t know what role fiction plays in addressing catastrophe, but I do have a strong sense that it plays a more important role than we’re led to believe. I’ve worked in education, I’ve taught classrooms full of kids and I know that AI cannot cannot help them understand the world like a story can. Like, we think it’s solving a problem to put a Smartboard in a classroom full of children who are actually hungry for ideas. And when you have a lot of factors in their lives preventing them from being able to focus at school, the tech just doesn’t do shit for them. It really doesn’t. What they need is an adult who cares about them and who says you’re safe here. You can read whatever you want to read and talk to me about whatever you want to talk to me about. There’s nothing that technology can do to improve that. In fact, it just gets in the way over and over and over.

But it’s making the richest people in the world richer, and that is something where I do feel like what is happening in terms of education and literacy is happening on purpose, because you can’t put an ad inside a novel. And so there’s no use for it.

So much money is being funneled to the top where people have no use for books. That what’s terrifying to me. We’re just letting it go. We’re just letting it disappear. Not to victim blame, but like, I don’t know.

Well, we’re still writing books, right? And we’re still writing the books we want to write. Like you said, you wrote the book you wanted to write. I’m writing the books I want to write, and I’m going to keep doing that. I had this realization a couple of years ago. I was like, “Oh fuck, if I abandon the playing field to the people who are, like, natural born killers or very wealthy, then what’s going to happen? It’s time for me to get in there.” And that’s not a natural or easy thing for me. But I feel like it’s just essential. That means I’m going to write in a way that speaks to the collective or that taps into the collective unconscious. And if I’m going to take myself seriously as a storyteller in the Benjamininan sense, then I’m going to really pay attention to the fact that we are just these fragile human beings in a force field of torrents and bombs.

We have to tell stories, and we have to tell them in the best possible way we can, in our moment in history. And so I was like, OK, fine. I’ll serve the gods of literature in whatever way I need to, even if that means that I produce something that I couldn’t imagine myself producing 10 years ago. But that’s good. I have to change. We have to change.

I love that. Yeah. Then maybe that’s what our social responsibility is, because I definitely don’t think it’s our responsibility as writers to show people what’s right. I don’t know that what I’m talking about is even a political responsibility. It’s not. It’s to keep writing and to write well and to be true to whatever that invisible dream force is that drives you to do it is, as opposed to the one that says, make as much money as you can and then die.

What hasn’t been asked yet, about this book, about you as a writer?

One thing that hasn’t really come up is, well, I feel like it’s very clear in this book that I’m not better. You know? I’m still broken. What happened to me as a kid and the things that happened to my mom and the things that happened to my grandmother and the things that happened to my great grandmother…writing this book about all that for me was not an act of catharsis. And I’m not saying there would be anything wrong with that if that was the case. But I went to therapy to get therapy. I wrote the book to write a book because I am a writer. It’s a story I wanted to tell. It’s for other people.

But I do think one thing I learned from writing it that maybe would be helpful to share is just that all the therapy in the world and all the medication in the world is nothing compared to allowing yourself to be loved by other people and loving other people. The reason I’m alive and functional and able to write at all—even through my mom’s abuse and her schizophrenia diagnosis and my anxiety that I was going to inherit her disorder—is because I have incredible friends. I have an amazing husband. And I allowed that to happen. I think sometimes there’s such a focus on the self when it comes to mental health and self-care. But, in the book, I quote this book by Dan Siegel called Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, about how the mind is not your brain. It’s everything your being interacts with. There’s a German word for it, right?

Maybe umwelt.

Yeah, so, it’s your immediate environment and how you perceive it and that’s influenced by the people you love. The people in your house. Your neighborhood. Your community. It’s the world. I sometimes think it’s very easy to be introspective about these topics, but maybe it’s really a question of looking outwards and seeing what you can do for other people and what you can allow them to do for you.

I really love that about the book. It beautifully resists an easy redemptive narrative arc, which I respect. But at the same time, by the end, it’s really clear—I can’t think of a less cheesy way to put it—that you begin to let love heal you. Which is all we can do ultimately.

Yeah, just tapping into that. I do ketamine therapy in the book, and one thing I came out of that fully understanding is that the universe loves us and is happy we are here. It wants us to observe it and to experience it joyfully. I try to remind myself of that every day, and I find that to be a kind of salvation, always, in the face of everything.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lindsay Lerman.

It all probably started with my love for comics and graphic novels and how they set up what’s significant. Chris Ware, for example, can set up an entire page with a faucet dripping. Huge close ups of things that feel maybe deeply insignificant, and then repeating that panel until you realize this very small detail really matters. I’m also really inspired by the work of Remy Charlip. He’s a children’s book illustrator, a dancer, a choreographer. He’s one of these artists that leaned into every interest he had. The kind of play he initiates in his stories and children’s books is really world building and world shattering. I wish adults had more access to that level of imagination.

I know you have a background in improv, stand up, and more recently clowning, how does performance art inform your visual art?

My dad is really funny. I grew up with a pretty large access to play in a family [of artists] where it was almost easier to live things through with comedy than with feelings. You know, when you kind of push aside the real conversation, but you lean into the jokes? And then sometimes, in the middle of the joke, you start taking it seriously. And then suddenly we’re crying. I think that’s really powerful.

In high school I did improv. I knew I had funny in the bag a little bit, and that was maybe out of not being able to access certain feelings. When I was in college, I had to make this choice. “Are you an artist, or are you a [comedian]?” I didn’t feel like I had the ability to be both things. And they felt very compartmentalized. They didn’t feel like something that could be married into a person. I actually bombed an art talk so badly before I left Denver, and I was kind of scared of public speaking for the first time in my life, because I was like, “Oh, I just brought the wrong thing to the wrong crowd. Maybe I’m not a performer, like I used to be?” But when I moved to LA, my sister was like, “we’re gonna get you over that hump. I’m gonna sign you up for this weird character class.” Being in a room with people spitballing at the beginning of my day is kind of heaven to me. These spaces of warm ups, automatic process, no bad ideas…We’re just throwing things out there. I always want to approach art from that place.

Molly Bounds, The Plan, 2021

The Idiot Workshop is great. It’s a clown workshop. It’s not a traditional red nose clown. It’s something else entirely. It reminded me how people who could be really commanding in a space, telling an entire story, maybe even exaggerating their experience of being on earth, witnessing a blade of grass or exaggerating their relationship to their own fingers. I loved being able to dive fully into universes that could be created out of play, but very much a serious commitment to a certain reality that you’re creating. And so it just feels like, again, it’s this cropping that’s happening. Really closing in on something that’s so subtle, but it can command a room if you give it the right amount of power. My favorite clowns are deeply subtle people that can build something really slowly. When you lean into that kind of play it’s almost scary to see how much power can be tapped into something completely made up.

Seems like this approach can be recreated in visual art making.

Sometimes I’ll start a painting, maybe with a joking kind of pose because I’m in a funny mood or something. And suddenly, I’ve closed in on it, and I just couldn’t feel more serious. When you look at this mood under a microscope, you can’t see the joke of it anymore. And now it’s a religion. I can’t even take the hat off anymore. I’ve committed to the bit too hard or something. I think it’s funny when things become very serious that way.

Tell me more about motion vs. the still image? When does one inform the other? Why do you make paintings that are so still but feel like they’re in motion? Loose strands of hair, red cowboy boots mid step, to name a few of your arresting images.

I probably would have been an animator or a comic artist, if it wasn’t for how many decisions have to be made. The amount of decisions that have to be made with every single panel feels overwhelming. Choice is something that I struggle with. I’d rather say yes to everything.

Molly Bounds, She’s Here (Red Robe), 2024.

That’s very improv. Saying yes to everything. Right?

I have a hard time trusting my own decisions. I know, that’s not what you want to hear from artists. You want to hear artists say, “I’m going full force into this thing, and I am absolutely sure.” I’m somebody that wants to trust my intuition, but I hesitate. I watch myself hesitate all the time. And really, these automatic processes free me from that. But for the most part, I’m very much emoting in my paintings, something that I’m dealing with in my daily life of making decisions. It comes down to that frustration, that freeze, how quickly time is passing as you’re watching an opportunity, or a decision not being made until it’s made for you and there’s no agency left. So I kind of love to vacillate between hypermobility/agency, versus what does being held hostage look like? I’m interested in seeing these alternate realities, these overlapping possibilities, like doors shutting and opening. The different lives that can be lived and which way one takes you in, which way one doesn’t.

You can never really know what’s going through anyone’s head or what they’re dealing with. Even with relationships, you just kind of don’t know what it’s like until you’re on the inside of it. Maybe that’s why [my paintings] feel like a story that people can relate to because there are so many unanswered questions.

I know you have ADHD. How does it hinder and/or help you navigate the creative process?

I still struggle, but it’s taken me so long to see how ADHD is absolutely a strength for me. I used to be jealous that other people can stick with something for their whole lives, artistically, whether it’s style or one medium. I just feel like I’m that jack-of-all-trades thing, master of none thing where I don’t have this span of attention to deeply master this thing, but if I limit what my attention wants to do, if I limit too strongly, then it’s like I probably never would have done, the Kohler metal residency. I probably never would have gotten into clowning. I think that play is so necessary to find your best ideas. There are so many things I would not have done if my body didn’t need to move as much as it does and be introduced to new things. Maybe I’d be somebody with an office job.

Molly Bounds, With Pleasure (Laura), 2020.

I often get to this point where I’m like, “Oh, no. I can feel it happening again. I have to try a new medium.” I have to in order to keep my own attention. It’s as if I’m babysitting myself. But that’s such a strength, actually. My favorite artists didn’t stop themselves from really getting involved with anything that they found interesting. I love to see artists take those breaks and just pay respect to their own multifaceted attention spans. I think it’s good to honor where your attention is going.

I don’t want to follow every single thread because then it would be truly like, “What can I get done?” I do have to watch myself with that. But I think it’s so important to honor where your interests are going. More and more we have to be practical. “How do I support myself while being this kind of person?” But knowing and being good at multiple trades and skills usually isn’t going to hurt you down the line, It’s gonna be useful in different spaces.

How do you approach deadlines? Do you have any advice for other artists with ADHD?

I think it helps to have daily check-ins with the self. Writing in a journal. Starting my day watering plants or gardening and getting my hands in the dirt is very grounding for me and calms my nervous system. Everybody’s got their coping mechanisms. Nobody should just be pacing at all hours of the day. When I’m pulling weeds, it’s a form of meditation, an active meditation.

Specifically with ADHD, it’s deeply necessary for me to reframe my relationship to structure and discipline. So much of my early learning experience was feeling shame for what I couldn’t align with, what I was lacking. Now, discipline in my life connotes the practices and routines that sustain me, support my overall health and wellbeing. My structure is making to-do lists every night, setting alarms (so many alarms), saying no to others when I need to say yes to myself.

It’s hard to set boundaries. I still struggle with it. It feels like a monk’s perseverance sometimes, to turn away a fun new thing and to hunker down on the thing that I know I need to get done. Routine is something that I lean on. My art club. Drawing night. When these things go away, I really feel it, and it seems to affect everything.

Molly Bounds, The Process (Stephanie), 2022.

Molly Bounds, The Process (Elongated), 2022.

I would love to hear a bit more about your relationships with different mediums. What was your time like at the Kohler Residency? What did you learn about yourself as an artist?

What I learned was, “Wow, I’m so strong.” I can push 300 pounds! That residency was Something that asked a lot of the body. It was actually really exciting. I’ve been in a lot of spaces. This one was mostly male dominated. Factory culture. I was pretty committed to making whirligigs and things that could spin in somebody’s yard. It was exciting to pick up something so new. I would have never guessed, while making that work, and the experience of making it, how much I would be so precious about it afterward. Now I look back on that experience, and how hard it was. Makes me appreciate the things I made even more. I’m not going to have an easy time letting go of any of that work because I’m scared of losing the fond memory that came with making it. It was this camaraderie with our other members in the residency. The people that we met in the factory became such friends. It’s intimidating to come into a factory setting as a newcomer. I’ve never been around any of this machinery. It’s all deeply dangerous. We got forklift certified. We watched insane safety videos. The whole thing felt overwhelming. But I came out of it thinking, “Wow, I was capable of that.” And now I just want to go back.

Your work was famously featured on the US cover of Normal People by Sally Rooney. How did this commercial success change the trajectory of your career?

I was really excited because I initially wanted to make books. During my time as a print maker, I got really into zines and zine making and rare artist books and collecting. I would host these events where I was trying to get everybody I knew to make small art books. Everybody was churning out something they hadn’t made before. An excuse to have a deadline helps people make things. Who would I be if I didn’t have a deadline?

I’ve always had an affinity for the tactile art book. So it was surreal to find out that my art was going to be on the cover of a book. A book that I didn’t even get to read first. I didn’t even know who the author was. It didn’t really change my life, other than it created an even stronger bond to art and books.

Does this book resonate with me, though? You can’t really check. It’s kind of a mystery bag. It used to make me nervous. I don’t even know what the book’s about, but here’s an image. That’s really fun. I feel really fortunate and very lucky to have gotten to do the cover of something that was really successful.

I haven’t made a book of my art yet. For some reason it’s daunting. I don’t know how to make these decisions. It’s a lot of decisions. So, I’ve put it off. I’d like to hand it over to somebody I trust and be like, “Don’t even ask me anything, because I’ll just be like a bundle of not knowing.”

Molly Bounds, Burlesque, 2022.

Aside from money, what are the rewards of a creative practice? What do you get out of this work and what has it taught you about yourself?

I think there’s a lot of dignity even if there’s no money. I think there’s a lot of dignity in creating something that you feel compelled to make. Growing up with artist parents that struggled financially, they were very deeply worried for me carving out a similar path as them. I just think that there’s such dignity in following a poetic way of life and honoring that, and it can absolutely be a struggle. Of course, you have to find other routes sometimes. You have to have simultaneous multitasking skill trades. You have to be able to pivot. But the scarier thing to me, than being poor is not listening to that intuitive process and kind of squelching out the flame. I just think it’s a slippery slope. Maybe that’s alarmist of me to say, but I think it’s a slippery slope to fall out of your artistic practice sometimes and step away from it. I don’t want to lose this voice and this access to my most powerful form of agency. It’s just a scary thing to have to chip away at. Sometimes I’ll take a month off of painting and the fear sets in and suddenly I’m like, “Oh my God. I hate this feeling.” It’s spooky, you know?

I know.

I would so much rather just carry a sketchbook with me every day. I carry one with me everywhere I go. It’s the closest thing I have to a security blanket. Maybe the sketchbook gets smaller and smaller, but I really can’t let this go. If I’m taking a trip or I’m doing anything, I need to have it. Sometimes when I’m out and I don’t have a sketchbook, and I’m witnessing something, I try so hard to remember every detail of this thing I’m looking at. “Is it possible to just remember this person’s face? Is it possible to remember it for later?” The agency that an artistic life grants me to be able to answer to a desire like that, it’s too empowering to leave behind. It’s funny that I make so much work about not being able to make up my mind but the one thing I can make up my mind about very much is that I have to make art.

I feel the same way about taking notes. If I don’t have anything to take notes on, I feel like I lose my mind. I’m constantly taking notes because it feels like note taking is tricking my mind into thinking I’m not writing, but I’m actually writing because I’m taking notes. Even if I’m running away from it, I’m actually still always doing it.

I used to be really bad. I used to not be able to go on a vacation without bringing a scanner.

What do you do when you feel discouraged and uninspired to make art?

Reading is usually what brings me back [from a funk]. Or going to a live performance. Experiencing something with a group of people. It’s so easy to be isolated in my studio, arms crossed, thinking about how the world is so fucked. Instead, get yourself in a room full of people.

Molly Bounds, Leech’s Way, 2024.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Diana Ruzova.

It felt like school was a waste of time because I wasn’t going to use anything I learned other than sanitation. They’re like, “Acrylic is the only way,” which is the standard in America, but everyone else on the globe does gel. Usually I don’t see the forest for the trees, but this time, I was like, okay, I know I don’t want to work for anybody else anymore. I don’t just want a paycheck. I didn’t want to answer to anybody. I wanted to be myself, one hundred percent, and I wanted my kids to see that, too.

In the ’90s, there were five seconds where you could do crazy shit on your nails, but only in Los Angeles. Only in New York or Japan. Today, the accessibility to the internet—like, what does Meg Thee Stallion have on her nails right now?—makes it different, but before this you couldn’t really see nails unless they were in an editorial, or if you were in hip hop or Flo-Jo. I grew up in Denver and Arizona, where everyone and their mom were getting French tips. Just cute, dainty tips so they could just get through to like their next manicure.

I got in and got good at the right time. The dude I was dating, he’s a tattooer. As an anniversary present, he got me an appointment at the shop where I ended up apprenticing. We sat down, bro’d down, and she was like, “Oh, you should go to school and come work with me. You seem like you know what you want.” I did, but I got into it because I was bitching every single time I got my nails done and they weren’t right. I was like, “Cool, I’ll just do it myself.” At the end of the day, I just didn’t want people to feel how I felt, like damn. “I just spent all this money, and it’s not what I wanted.”

There’s trust involved too, though. People come to me and say, “Do whatever you want.” And I’m like, no. Let’s not do that. My crazy is different than your crazy, and if I don’t know you, I don’t want you to be disappointed. I’ve had a couple of babes for three and four years. We’ve done crazy different nails each time, but they’re still in the same four colors. I remember if you like your thumb and pointer finger short so you can take out your contacts.

But I have boundaries. Sometimes I feel badly, because I’m like, damn. “If you’re talking to me that way, how do you treat people when there’s a language barrier? When you’re talking about a trend or product they can’t access or have never seen?” I get bummed. If people can’t get their act together, they’re fired. That’s another reason why I got into doing nails. Like, at the end of the day, dude, they’re just nails. I’m not going to block you from seeing my story, I can suggest shops that align better with your personality and style, but I don’t think I’m your tech.

My style doesn’t change when it comes to respect and upholding my boundaries. I take pride that I’m the same, no matter who is in front of me. I have a client in her eighties, and she’s just a bad bitch. She’s a lawyer. Incredible pillar of a woman. Sixth or seventh generation white Coloradan. I can guarantee that she has never been called a bad bitch to her face, but when she comes into the shop, I drop F-bombs like always. I don’t switch it up. I take pride in the fact that I’m the same person online that I am in real life.

I was grateful for the time I spent in my first shop, and then it got weird. It got weird in a way where I was like, “I’m supposed to like my mentor. I’m supposed to be one of your friends.” But it wasn’t it. There were times when the standard that was set for me was different than everybody else in the shop. Like when me and baby daddy were going through a divorce, I would come in quiet and get pulled aside for having a bad attitude. Once I teared up speaking to my client about custody. Didn’t get up. Kept working. The next day, I was told I had to leave my drama at the door. That same day, another tech told every single person about having to put a restraining order on her ex, but she was “just being quirky.”

I was the fall guy. I set my boundary like, “Okay cool. I’ll be civil to you inside these four walls, but outside of that I don’t have to hang out with you.” And I got blamed because I set the boundary. Leaving and starting my own thing, and not getting gaslit for it? The first bad day I had owning my own shop, I remember walking in knowing I had a shitty attitude. My client list for that day was maybe six manicures, and I was friends outside of client relationships with one of the six. I was like, “Shit. It’s a make money day.” Then I crossed the threshold of my own shop. All of my art, all my business partners. And I was like, wait. This is fucking fine. That’s when I knew I’m not a stormcloud. The validation I have received since leaving [the old shop]… when Crystal [Castro] and I left to open our own thing, everything cool about that shop left. There are still no POC working there, in a building that used to be one of the first Black-owned businesses in Denver. It always felt shitty. The justification was “If it’s not our shop, it’s gonna be something else.” I was always, “that feels gross, maybe don’t say that out loud.”

People are gonna find out who you are and what you stand for. You do not need my help. My dad’s mom was like that. Her senior photo, a glamour shot, and one where she’s eating ice cream are all up in my station. My compass definitely comes from her.

I think it’s weird that Indigo is on my bio and people refer to me as my Instagram name. I will never be comfortable with that. It’s just nails. It is just nails. I’m not saving lives. Getting recognized out in the wild for nails feels weird. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. So many people are all, “Oh, you’re Fingerspice!” I’m like, “Yeah. I’m Indigo.” I ain’t shit. When I first started doing all the TikToks and reels, not many other nail techs were putting their face to their videos. I didn’t even have the biggest following, but because I was a person instead of hands on a feed, people recognize me. “She’s goofy, I want to talk with her.”

What I want from it all is to be independent. Have my own shop. Work with babes. I don’t want to make money off my friends. I want all of us to make money and have our bills paid. Rae Lyn Paton, Crystal Castro, and I, we’re all three owners. We’re all on the lease, we all split everything. It’s funny, because my homeboys are all, “You’re the boss, you have to start charging people,” and I’m all, “The bills are getting paid for a fraction of what they were before.” Everyone’s making money. Everyone’s taken care of. The other independent contractors, like Hailey Vaughan, who are paying me booth rent? Okay, I don’t need to look at your books or your client list. As long as you show up and do your job, we’re good. Knowing your role when you’re in it, and keeping that understanding and communication open and honest, that’s the move.

I keep getting invited back to do these famous people—I get to do their nails because I treat them like I treat everyone. I just give respect. Whenever I take my stuff to location or travel to a different state to do someone before a show, I don’t take advantage of you just because you make more money than me. I’m going to charge you what I charge everyone. I’ve been invited back because I don’t blow people’s shit up, and I treat them like people. I don’t really fangirl. It’s just genuine. I grew up listening to your music and now I get to do your nails, but I’m just going to make sure my expenses are paid. I’m grateful I listen to my own self on that, because it’s fared well.

When I first started, I didn’t want to do nails forever. My body hurts. But my mindset has changed now that I’m doing shit I remember saying I didn’t want to do: have my own shop, be responsible for anyone else. There’s still enough nails for everyone. I just want everyone to succeed, genuinely. If I was still at that other shop I would have exited Stage Left, but that is another thing that’s changed. I just want to keep doing cool shit and nails that people like.

My values and what I want hasn’t changed from day one to day now. I give a fuck about your natural nail health, and I want to pass off the education I have learned to you, so if you can’t get your nails done by me you can get them done, accurately, by someone else. I’ve had babes move and their new nail tech has hit me up to be like, “Okay, what’s on her nails? What were you using?” I just want the information and education to be out because I care about your health and safety. Hot girls don’t gatekeep. I’ll tell you the polish, the brush I use. I’ll send you links. I’m going to have full books because of the product I put out, and there’s no reason to be a mean girl.

It genuinely makes people feel good, so even if we’re in a recession, people will find a way to get their nails done. It’s self-care to the core. It brings people together, and we do cool shit, so it’s a good conversation. It’s very gender-affirming, no matter what. Shit, I feel better, too.

I’m known for the flames. One of my favorite nail techs, Asa Bree Sieracki, she just rips. She’s one of the reasons I wanted to do nails like how I do nails. I wanted to be as good as her for forever, her flames in particular. They were very Malificent. Black base, purple and green flame. I remember staring at them during Covid, and I got really good. Now I’ve taught so many people how to do the hot rod flames that I switched it up and started doing ghoul flames, like Japanese tattoo art. From the cuticle down instead of the tip up. I think I am a poor teacher because I have to show you. “This is how I do it.” I can’t tell you. That’s the brush, that’s the paint. Go for it.

Every single flame post I did, I would tag Guy Fieri. I’m like, he’s Flame Daddy. I’m the Queen of Flames, you need to know who I am. He needs to hit me up, I’m kind of mad I haven’t heard from him yet. But there is time.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mairead Case.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Honestly, it’s such a yes and no answer for me. I’ve wanted to be involved in exactly the category of music I’ve been involved with since I was like 6. As I grew older, just with the normal thing of your parents pushing careers on you and stuff, I went from this innocent idea of like, seeing a Daft Punk or Armin Van Helden music video and being like, “Oh, okay, I want to do this,” to then being like, “Ok, my parents want me to go to university, so I’ll be a software engineer or something.” And eventually I did that, but a year before college, I resumed my interest in DJing and nightlife in Montreal. And then by sheer osmosis of meeting people that I would work with at Bluedog [Montreal bar], I ended up falling back into this thing that I almost willed into existence when I was young.

In terms of expectations, maybe to my own detriment, I’ve always been very modest about my skill set or where I’m at in my skill set. Slowly, I realized I was a bit above hobbyist level and then started taking it more seriously. Coming from that more humble position, I guess I was always kind of good at managing my expectations, and in showing genuine interest in others artists’ work, people who are contemporaries of mine saw me like less of a culture vulture and more someone who’s just generally interested in participating or helping or what have you.

What do you think brought you to working with artists such as The Blessed Madonna and Jacques Greene?

I think the common ground for all these people is being lifers in their art, and having similar, resonant drives. I sense that the more confident and in touch you are with the music you like, or the art that makes you happy and the things that bring you joy, the more you connect with those people that resonate. You have to think of yourself like an antenna of some sort. If you have a strong signal, the communication channels will be very strong. And if you have a weak signal, it’s going to be a bit more cloudy.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not gonna end up in the rooms that you want. You can get lucky and someone could be dialed into your frequency. But you’re increasing your chances of connecting if you’re confidently giving out a strong signal about what you’re about. This goes back to if you’re giving a strong or convincing performance, you’ll command attention. But if you’re giving a kind of haphazard, not truthful performance, or not a high fidelity performance, it might be tougher for people to relate or connect to what you’re doing.

What has been the most surprising thing you’ve realized along your creative path? And what is your biggest obstacle to creativity? How do you approach it?

The most surprising thing is that sometimes the thing that I’m either the least excited about in terms of my own creative output, or the things I can come up with the quickest sometimes have the best reactions. Maybe it’s due to spontaneity and just pure, unadulterated creativity, I guess.

Last November, I had pneumonia and I finished doing vocals on a song and I was like, okay, I have a fever, my lungs hurt, and I did the vocal and sent it to the label just to meet the deadline for this compilation. The compilation comes out and then all these people are loving the song, and it’s reaching the top streams—it’s funny, just thinking of that. It’s a testament to unadulterated decision making.

To the second point of your question, the biggest hurdle for me is to reach that mental state of unadulterated decision making, like not second guessing myself, not overthinking, just allowing free flowing creativity and not trying to mediate myself too early in the stage. [It’s challenging] to hold off mediating until a later polishing stage.

So just diving in and doing it, editing and thinking later.

Yeah. Alleviating myself of that performance anxiety to start a project or to just like, start and keep going instead of thinking and editing too soon. Which can be tough as a musician as well, especially in the advent of digital recording technology, because you can literally make it sound like a mastered radio ready song the second you come up with the beat, so I have to limit myself to not reach that stage.

How do you approach your work day to day?

I wake up, check my emails, and begin working on what my brain is leaning more towards, whether graphic design freelance work or like, 3D work. I’ll do that for a bit. Then I’ll smoke a joint or go to the gym or for a run or errands, and try to forget what I did. And then I’ll do the other thing, so music or whatever I didn’t do in the morning. If I do that, without fail, I’m gonna have a productive day. Like honestly, just having that reset for yourself—and it’s even better when I wake up really early. The days when I wake up at six and work, do the errand or the break, and then get back to work, I’m like, wow, I’ve done five times the amount of work I did the other day.

As a multidisciplinary artist, you have such a strong presentation of who you are that transcends each artistic medium that you create in. Do you have a public facing self, or do you blend your public and private self in your work, and how do you go about that?

I want to say like 50/50? Because I have to market myself like everyone else on social media—that’s just a very social media age thing. For example, Madonna would market an album, and she’d be like, “Now I’m a cowgirl, right? And this is my music album and all my music videos are going to be very cowboy themed and I’m in my cowboy era,” and she had to market [her art] as such. Whereas now, if Billie Eilish is like, “I want to dress like Eminem, I’m a tomboy, I’m making lesbian references,” she’s gonna make lesbian innuendos on her instagram story, and she’s subscribed to the subculture, and she’s like, “This is now my personality, this is how I’m marketing myself now.” And then maybe next year she’s like, “I’m going to be evangelical Christian, like, I’m a tradwife, I don’t do lesbian stuff anymore.” And everything she’s going to post in her stories is her going to church.

I think we’re in a different world now where before, you could just be like, this is the show I’m putting on, this is what I’m marketing. But now,I think every successful artist is good at intertwining the “This is what I’m doing right now, this is my personality,” with the “This is who I [actually] am,” whether it’s real or not.

Like Charlie XCX’s Brat campaign. She announces the album and she’s smoking at nightclubs and doing all these things, broadcasting these things like, “This is me, I’m brat, this is brat, this is the world, this is what I’m doing on my Instagram.” But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s what she morally believes—she’s selling you this lifestyle and she tricks you into thinking it’s her day to day, even though we know it’s not, it can’t be sustainable.

So social media is the self and a performance of the self.

A thousand percent, yeah.

How do you think that affects actual performances outside of social media, when you’re performing for a live crowd of people in a room with you?

I could get very cliché with this, because I remember having one professor be like, “Are you performing the truth?” And it sounds very cliché, of course he was like a white guy with red rounded glasses, a salt and pepper beard saying that in a turtleneck, but he was the first person to articulate it like that: Is this [performance] your ultimate truth?

Obviously there’s your idea of performing the role, and then there’s the objective idea of like, you’re being observed by other people, and you need to convince all these people unanimously of a performance. You need to be convincing. Nicholas Cage for example, in his most recent film, I get the sense that he is acting like what he thinks a psycho killer would look like, but not finding the truth of how it would be for him, in his experience. I think performance is about finding that truth, and then directing yourself from the outside so you’re protecting that truth while conveying it. You have to dissociate in a positive way, where you know your truth so well that then you can articulate it for others in an earnest way by repeating your experience.

Some people have an analogy for specifically DJing, where there’s a difference between playing with and playing at. Some DJs are like, these are my records, I’m going to play them at you. And then there are DJs who are like, these are my records, and now you’re going to be involved in them. Some people are just marketed and hyped and these people do well, but in terms of judging their artistic merits, that’s when I’m able to say something is bad because they’re just playing music at you and it doesn’t feel like you’re a part of it. Versus DJs like Moody Man or Omar S, they just envelop you in a moment and you’re like, whoa, I’m convinced that this is a real thing, and it’s unmatched because no one else could do it like that, it’s singular.

So it’s a valve: I could turn on my ego valve and say ok this is my set list and it is what it is. You can let your ego take the front seat for a bit, but you have to be able to bring it back. Working at Santos [a bottle service club in Montreal] was the perfect learning ground for that, where if you don’t play the right song at the right time, the bar manager’s going to get mad at you. Then, if a Hell’s Angel guy slips you a 20 and you don’t play a song at the right time, he’ll get mad at you and it could literally have real repercussions. If you don’t play the other song for this girl who’s really drunk, she’s gonna maybe vomit on you or throw a drink at you or not leave you alone for the rest of the night. So there are many variables and obstacles and you have to learn how to mediate so many different energies and people at the same time, or sacrifice things–so you’re literally doing all these calculations and being thrown into the lion’s den of DJing because you have so many spinning plates happening and you can’t let one fall, or you can, but you know it’s to the detriment of another one.

Is performance a vulnerable act for you?

Not as much as it once was. Now that I kind of understand it, I feel like I can kind of turn on the taps. If I need to be very vulnerable, like if something horrible happened, I think I would know how to broadcast that [on social media] in a way that would actually be serious. Whereas if I’m telling a really crass joke, I know how to be snarky and sarcastic, and it’s just a different valve to turn. When people get really consumed by social media, the valve turning gets mixed up. When I read my Facebook memories, I cringe at the way I would speak on facebook, it’s very interesting. And I think progressively analyzing that and looking at the trends of [social media], I’ve come to see it as more of a system than just a marketing tool.

So, you have these valves that are earnest, cynical–an array of emotions, and you just have to broadcast for what that [specific] moment or scene needs, or what needs to be conveyed.

So what do you do if you’re not able to reach that sweet spot, or if you mistuned your valves?

I don’t know, I feel like everything is kind of cumulative, and even if it’s not great, it’s kind of all about repositioning yourself for the next thing. Since I started playing tennis, even just watching professionals do it, they’ll have like a really good set and then the next one is garbage but they just need to reset because there’s a new ball coming, and all they have to do is return it and hit it. You can’t replay the last game. So you just have to play the next one.

It seems like you have a lot to say yes to. Are there times when you say no? And if so, did you have to learn how to create boundaries or is it something that comes naturally to you?

I’m getting better at saying no. There was a point when I was not good, but I’ve gotten to a better place with the concept of one door closing and another one opening. If you say yes to everything, there are opportunities you’re missing. That’s what you have to think about. There are a plethora of pathways to things, and if you say yes to everything—think of it like a tree, and tree branches. If you say yes to this thing [one branch], then you keep going on that branch, and there are these three other things that would make three new branches. So saying yes without consideration means you didn’t reset and renegotiate these other possible things. So it’s always going to be the same if you don’t develop new branches.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sophy Drouin.

I grew up in Oklahoma, a citizen of the Caddo Nation. However, I’m also Choctaw, Delaware, and Otoe. Both my mom and dad on both sides of my family are native. My entire family is pretty big and my dad works with the chief of the Cherokee Nation and does all of their public relations. My mom has been a museum director and helped open cultural centers, so we’ve always been tied to our community which is really important to us. So this [trajectory] has been a natural continuum for me. I’ve been making art for as long as I can remember and even in preschool, when they asked what I wanted to be an Artist. Always an artist. My family always pushed me to create and make and have been super supportive throughout this journey.

What brought you to stoneware as a medium?

I was thirteen years old when my mom took me to see tribe elder Jeri Redcorn who really revitalized traditional Caddo pottery. We went to her house and made pulled clay and pit fire to make traditional pots with material basically out of a river bed. I took that traditional knowledge with me to the University of Arkansas where I took anthropology courses about my own tribe—they are one of the original tribes from Arkansas. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Studio Art. So all of my interests have meshed together. I like to take inspirations that are more than just the self, looking at community. I get compliments on this, but people say the work looks like it could be made now, or thousands of years ago. They’re timeless, which is exactly what I’m going for.

Installation view, Raven Halfmoon, Neesh + Soku (Moon + Sun), 2024, Image courtesy of the artist and Salon 94. © Raven Halfmoon, Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

Can you talk about how you’ve made work using all of these historical layers all your own?

It’s definitely been about finding your voice out here in the world of millions of voices. It’s been tough, but also a blessing and I feel a huge responsibility to do everything right. One thing I’ve learned being an artist is that to just be true and genuine to who you are and your experiences and that is all I’m doing within the work. All my work features women, as I try to stick to what I know, what I’ve been through. A lot of it is about my grandmother’s and great grandmother’s stories and of course that also includes my ancestors. I feel like the work is very holistic, and there are so many people behind me helping me make it.

That’s really beautiful.

Thank you. I had one of the rooms in the gallery (on the 2nd floor) in my sketchbook where I took pictures of other shows and said, “I’m going to be there one day.” and I printed out the pictures and inserted my own pieces into the space collage style. I wrote in 2024, “Salon 94 Raven Halfmoon,” and it’s so crazy because four years later we are here.

You manifested it!

I know, and I actually just got that [word] tattooed on my wrist.

Installation view, Raven Halfmoon, Neesh + Soku (Moon + Sun), 2024, Image courtesy of the artist and Salon 94. © Raven Halfmoon, Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein.

Can you talk a little bit about your process? Some of the new work is really massive.

Yeah, we are already in about two years with these. Process wise these two, “Dancing at Dusk” and “The Guardians” (both 2024), were started with a sketch. I always sketch everything out. I know how I want to place the form and I have an idea of how I want to glaze them, patina, or particular color palettes I want to use. With “The Guardians,” I did a nine foot tall drawing that functions as an outline that I put on the wall. It’s all coil built and sitting clay and still at United Artist Projects (UAP) in Upstate New York. We are trying to figure out how to fire it because it was built out of clay and is sitting there (the clay was used to make a mold for the finished work which is in bronze) and they sand casted it and we have an edition, but there is no kilns that are nine feet tall. They told me she might even break from casting, but she popped out perfectly which made me think, it’s a sign!

With the stone piece, “Dancing at Dusk,” I went to Arkansas for a residency, and I built the work out of clay and she is about three feet tall. So we’ve scaled the sculpture up double the original size using machine CNC Router [laser carving]. We were in conversation about possibly using marble, but I wanted a stone that was from the United States and closer to my history. I wanted a stone that spoke to the same language as the clay that I use. The stone has a sealant on top so that it can go outside. Getting to this point where I have a team that can help me with my vision has been so nice because it’s a moment for me to let go, which has been hard. It’s like having someone else taking care of your babies. But admitting that I didn’t know how to carve travertine, was part of the process. Giving power to the tools that help you build is something I really like.