The NewCrits Podcast

Inside the Machinery of Ruin: NewCrits Talk with Banks Violette

He built a career on dark stages, scorched metal, and fragile narratives. Banks Violette looks back at the neo-goth label, the toll of self-destruction, and what it means to walk away from the art world and return on his own terms. Working between sculpture, installation, and sound, Violette treats subcultures, violence, and fandom as unstable stories rather than fixed identities. From Slayer panic and satanic scare headlines to burned stages and Jägermeister firepieces, his work tracks how trauma gets turned into image, how labor disappears behind polished objects, and how an artist survives a system that rewards collapse as much as rigor. He explains: * Why “neo goth” was a convenient label that flattened a generation of young artists and obscured the real story of illness, addiction, and burnout. * How murder cases, satanic panic, and The Sorrows of Young Werther reveal a long history of fiction being blamed for real-world violence. * What it means to make work about calamity and Weegee’s photographs without treating trauma as raw material or spectacle. * How class, fabrication, and hidden labor structure the work, from doing everything by hand in Brooklyn to orchestrating 14 chandeliers for Celine across the globe. * Why drugs once felt like the only rational way to survive a tiny career window, and what it took to trade that pace for a decade of near silence, family, and fishing. * How fan-level enthusiasm for Void, Smithson, and Judd can coexist with critical rigor, and why reentering the conversation matters if art is to function as a real dialogue. (0:00) Welcome and the Weight of First Impressions(3:00) The Blowtorch Narrative(7:00) Noise, Sunn O))), and the Gravity of Sound(12:00) Polke, Richter, Danto, Judd(19:10) When Stories Justify Violence(22:00) The Accomplice Problem: Art, Trauma, and Ouija(26:00) Invisible Labor, Class, and Who Really Makes the Work(34:00) Drugs as a Work Tool and the Decision to Disappear(47:00) A Decade Offstage and What It Means to Come Back Follow Banks: Web: https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbFVOTGhfb0pCVjhqMTBFbnUxVXRWOUY3YTI3UXxBQ3Jtc0ttWUJScnVlaGlfUng5T1l4aUVSdXFlelhadGtXNkw5dGtSSkxkcTB5NUNDTnBEa2VCdnBsOU0ySG1DaXBPc1VyZFZXQ2RKNlF5NlpBLTROTHZrOW1pcE44U25NUVBoT0t2aTlEdjVKcWpHcnBGcEhHSQ&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aaron-studio.com%2F&v=8eJD1jAZPwkhttps://ropac.net/artists/85-banks-violette/#Read: https://vonammon.bigcartel.com/product/banks-violette-no-title-gas-station-black-version [https://vonammon.bigcartel.com/product/banks-violette-no-title-gas-station-black-version]Instagram: @banks_violette_616 [https://www.instagram.com/banks_violette_616/#] Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling? Banks Violette: I feel like I’m catching up on sleep still at age 52. All the sleep that I missed in my twenties and thirties, I still feel like I’m trying to balance the books. Ajay Kurian: That’s fair. You know, there’s a camel theory of sleep that you can kind of keep it and grow it in a hump, and deposit it when you need it. Banks Violette: I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds absolutely accurate. Ajay Kurian: This was the project that I really did foresee, and this was the moment that the press was largely calling a neo goth moment. There were a handful of artists at that time that were really maybe engaged in a neo-goth visual culture. But I wonder, did it feel like the right way to talk about your work at the time? Banks Violette: No. It felt like a convenient way of talking about the work because it was a way to organize a group of disparate artists and make them legible in a way that was easy for people to encounter. Ideas that were potentially easy to dismiss unless there was some kind of lens attached to it. Whether or not I ever felt like I shared a lot of commonalities with the artists that I was grouped with — not necessarily. Ajay Kurian: Of that sort of generation, were there artists that you felt like were your peers or fellow travelers? Banks Violette: It was always presented as if there was much more closeness, or similarity in our practices, when there wasn’t necessarily in actuality. So the person I can point to that I think I had the most in common with when I was working actively, was probably somebody like Gardar. He had a preoccupation with a specific period in art history, a specific kind of discursive lens that he was attaching to things, and a certain kind of political bent. I think that there were a lot of ways that we dovetailed, but then there’s a lot of ways that we were totally different. The one thing that I did have in common with a lot of the artists that I was grouped with was that we were all young and pretty engaged with self-destructive behavior. And you know, the artwork kind of reflected that. So on one hand, there was this goth thing, which is an inaccurate way of organizing that work, and then there’s what was actually taking place. Which was, here’s a bunch of people who were all probably not well, and let’s lump them together. But you can’t really be like, oh look at this group of artists who are all drug addicts. So instead, you know, there’s an easier way of doing that and say oh they’re all goth. Ajay Kurian: So they almost said that though. Banks Violette: Yeah, it was implied. Ajay Kurian: I want to go back to that era where you started in New York in order to understand where you are now. The image that I feel like was paraded around the most was probably this one where you’re lighting a cigarette with a blowtorch. When you search the name Banks Violette, this was the image that used to come up. Now I think Vanity Fair has the rights to the image and they’re not putting that on Google. Banks Violette: I had this experience, and I know a lot of other people, my friends and my peers, all had this kind of experience with people coming to the studio to take photographs of you working. And it would somehow turn into the “hey, do this, hey, do that”. And yes, I did definitely light my cigarettes with map gas, a hundred percent, hand on the Bible. I use propane to light cigarettes all the time, but that was definitely somebody trying to elicit that. So on one hand, that’s accurate. On the other hand, it is a totally theatrical presentation of what that moment in time looked like. If I had been necessarily in my right mind, would I have chosen to reveal that part of myself publicly? Probably not. I think there was a lot of that. People weren’t necessarily in the greatest position to author the way they were being perceived by people. Ajay Kurian: It was a fascinating thing to watch in the studio. Because on the one hand you were really private and there were things that I think were just for you and your world. And then on the other hand, seeing how you were able to move. For instance, I think the first time that I met you, I was an intern at the Guggenheim and they were doing this young collectors thing and came to the studio and you had this giant Jagermeister piece that you were working on. It was an incredible performance. It was all the ideas that you were thinking about, but it was the first time that I was hearing it. So you’re stringing together Smithson, Hegel, satanism and all these things that I am hearing for the first time. And I was like, this dude’s a fucking genius. Not to say that you’re not, but — Banks Violette: If I’m stringing together Hegel, satanism, and Smithson, then yeah, I’m definitely not. Ajay Kurian: What was fascinating to see after that was that you’d have other studio visits and this performance, it would be the same speech. And I was like, oh right, there’s some preparation to this. For a young artist, it dialed me in because it made me think about how none of that was untruthful and none of that was coming from a dishonest place. But you’re asked to do this thing again and again, and how do you not think about what this looks like, feels like, and appears as. How much of that was on your mind in that, like period of time? Banks Violette: The things that I refer to, gravitate to, and cite within my practice are things that I care deeply about. But they’re not necessarily things that somebody has deep and intimate knowledge of. Smithson’s practice or satanism or whatever it happens to be. These are the things that I think about a lot and I don’t wanna misrepresent them. Part of doing these things is figuring out a way to translate what is potentially this kind of esoteric language or something potentially marginal, and making it into something that other people can find themselves within. You know, the perfect example of that is a band called Sun, that I’ve worked with a number of times. Incredible musicians, incredible composers. But the last time I saw them — they just played at Lincoln Center last year. What they played at Lincoln Center was identical to what they were playing in Brooklyn in like 2000 at some lousy club. What they were doing in Lincoln Center is the same, but those things are really sophisticated. It is really easy to get caught up in the more outrageous aspect of what they’re doing or pointing a finger at something and being like, oh look how crazy this is. That’s never been something I’ve been interested in. I’m interested in these things. Deeply, sincerely, and I’m trying to communicate that. And there has to be a way of translating that. Sorry, this is all very vague. Ajay Kurian: I want to come back to sincerity ‘cause I think it holds a major role in how the work comes about and also the positioning of certain things. But maybe it’s also a good time to talk about where that deep sincerity for expressing yourself came from? What’s your background and your background with art? What made you gravitate towards art in the first place? Banks Violette: I’ve always made things. That’s kind of how I understand the world. I was always a kid in the back of the class, sitting and drawing and definitely not relating to anything outside. That’s always been how I view things or related to the world. I didn’t have any kind of background with contemporary art and certainly didn’t really know that much about art history. I had one of those sort of perfect, kind of what you hope for is the experience that people have in college. Which is not a vocational route, but you go there and you’re exposed to new information and your world expands and that’s how you discover what you want to do. So I went to undergraduate in New York City after a very long roundabout route of dropping outta high school and doing all sorts of other shit. Then going to undergrad and my intention was to parlay this kind of thing that I’d always done being the kid in the back of the class just doodling - and turning that into something, or being an illustrator or a graphic designer or something practical. Ajay Kurian: And your grandmother was an illustrator? Banks Violette: She was a really prominent illustrator and she illustrated some of the original Wizard of Oz books and she was one of the first King Features Syndicated artists. She had this amazing career as an illustrator. So within my family, it was always looked at as a very responsible career path, which is fucking not practical. So I knew a lot about the history of illustration, but I didn’t know anything about contemporary art or much about art history. In undergrad, I realized this is the kind of discourse that I want to be engaged with. And I was in school in New York City, so there were plenty of opportunities to meet professional working artists and galleries. That’s how I got involved with that. Ajay Kurian: You know, I like to draw too. And it was a skillset that I was like, oh I can do this thing. But then in high school, I had an art teacher who kind of showed me that it was a way to think through the world, to think through ideas. That you could embody philosophies into an artwork or a sculpture or a drawing, whatever it might be. That was through Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Arthur Danto. Those were the things that lit me up where I was like, holy shit, I had no fucking idea. Who were the artists that lit you up in that particular moment? That you were like, oh this is the club I wanna be a part of. Banks Violette: For contemporary art? Ajay Kurian: Or whatever, ‘cause if you’re an undergrad and you’re saying this is something that I want to do. What was that clique in art history that started to itch at you? Banks Violette: I mean, this is gonna sound strange, and I remember when we had a previous conversation in Connecticut it seemed kind of odd. But just seeing images of Judd and Marfa. There’s something about that that I responded to immediately. You know, as a teenager and making album covers, art and fire art for punk rock bands and playing in bands and stuff like that. Sort of assembling and creating this kind of culture that I was a direct participant in an active way. I think that there’s something really specific to that experience. The idea that you have to be an active participant in the culture that you are consuming, right? Instead of turning on the radio and something is handed to you, but instead you have to manufacture these things all out of whole cloth. So that sense that art had some kind of connection to a broader social thing I already had in my head. Ajay Kurian: In a DIY sense. Banks Violette: In a DIY sense and, you know, seize the means of production kind of sense, that you were responsible for creating things. That sounds very Pollyanna-ish, but there was something about seeing Judd that fully realized a landscape that this art inhabited and it was architected around this person’s vision. It was like, oh shit, this is not that dissimilar to designing this t-shirt for this band and now that is part of a collective social and cultural history that all these people are engaged with. There’s a thread that unifies those things. Ajay Kurian: And it is about contributing to a culture and potentially shifting a culture. But it’s not about the singular genius. You see yourself as contributing to something and that’s potentially the charge of it. It is something larger than simply one person’s gesture. Banks Violette: I think that was the biggest part about going to school and being exposed to people who were actively showing. This is what a gallery is, and this is you. Anybody can go there. If you don’t have a relationship to that and you’re looking at it from the outside in, it all seems very terrifying. It is designed to be a wholly exclusive space that is condescending in the extreme and then you suddenly get involved with it and you’re like, oh shit, it’s not. It’s a forum like any other. Like booking a VFW hall for your shitty hardcore band is not much different than curating a group show, kind of. Ajay Kurian: That’s great…But you went to Columbia for grad school and you had your first solo show while you were in grad school, right? Banks Violette: Well, yes and no. I was in the first year of grad school and I met a woman who’s an incredible video artist, Laura Parnes, who ran a not-for-profit art space in Williamsburg called Momenta with her husband. I had seen her at a show at Participant when it was on Broadway. It was this really amazing, very gnarly kind of punk rock video kind of thing. So I wanted her as a visiting artist at Columbia. She came to the studio and she was into what I was doing. She invited me to do a two person thing at Momenta, ’cause that’s how they did their programming. They would do two person, sort of spotlight shows. So I did that at the end of my first year in graduate school and it kind of just went out into the ether. But I did have one person who responded to that. It was this guy named Jose who had just opened this gallery Team in Chelsea and he had his own long, weird history. He came to the studio when I was in grad school and he invited me to do a show. So I already had a show in a gallery lined up by my second year of grad school, which probably made me like the most insufferable fucking person to be around, to be honest. Ajay Kurian: I hope you don’t mind me bringing this up. The story that I remember, and I need you to correct me if I’m wrong, but that the dean at Columbia said that you couldn’t show the work for that show as your thesis show and that you had to make a new body of work. Banks Violette: The story is way worse than that. I got in an argument with a guy and ended up throwing something at the wall. I didn’t realize that he was standing right by the wall, and it was a whole thing. There was like a departmental restraining order, which I’ve never heard of before, but it was this thing where I could not be in the room with him. It was right at that moment when Columbia was transitioning from it’s older, Madison Avenue, second generation Abex teachers, to staff that had been kind of poached from Yale. They were trying to shift the emphasis of that program. So there were some internal conflicts in the way that program was structured and I think I was kind of the casualty of that. Also my aim was not fucking awesome, apparently. Ajay Kurian: So the show that you ended up doing at Team Gallery, was that Arroyo Grande? Banks Violette: Yeah, it was. Ajay Kurian: It’s hard to find pictures of that one. To me, I think there are some immediate concerns from that exhibition that still carry through to what’s happening now. You know, it’s based on a very specific event, which is the murder of this young girl. Banks Violette: Yeah. I’m not unhappy with the show. It was a way of working through a bunch of different ideas and having them coalesce. But I can look at it now and be like, oh, that was a clumsy first attempt at addressing these set of concerns. Be it, you know, subcultures and the way people organize themselves in these potentially very antagonistic kinds of ways, the exigencies and accesses of faith, you know? What does it mean to look at something that is a horrific thing? What does that mean for a viewer? Those are all ideas that later on spun out into things like the Whitney show that we started talking about. It may have been a much more flat-footed attempt at addressing those ideas and kind of sorting out why am I interested in these things in the first place. Ajay Kurian: So this was a murder that was documented where these teenage boys murdered a young girl. I guess purportedly because they’re listening to Slayer. Banks Violette: They had a band, there was some dim idea on their part, and it’s always one of those things where you’re like, how much of this is true? How much of this is somebody writing this to make it conform to these preconceived ideas of what this looks like? Teenage boys in Arroyo Grande California who were huge Slayer fans, had a band, and decided that they were gonna kill their classmate as a way of propitiating, and having Satan or the Dark Ward support their shitty garage band. Even describing that is glibly skipping over that this is a tragic thing. I think that kind of tension at the heart of it is fundamentally really interesting. That the narrative becomes a way that we can wall off trauma or calamity or render it legible. If you are engaged with manufacturing that narrative, you are complicit in that process, and alienating the horrific fact of what you’re referring to. Ajay Kurian: So then this story becomes kind of a veil to cover up something else. Banks Violette: Yeah, and it’s also that idea of, we’re now talking about stories and that this group of teenagers believed this story and believed it to such an extent that they had to enact it in real world terms. And what’s the ultimate period at the end of any sentence? It’s death, you know? So the way of realizing that in its grossest form was the murder of their classmate. And that’s not an alien event. I mean, we started talking about Tipper Gore and that hysteria that I experienced in the eighties, the satanic panic and all those kinds of things. But you could trace that backwards to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and how that was supposedly responsible for an endless series of copycat suicides to the point where it was banned in some countries and cities. So the pedigree for these ideas isn’t solely based on a bunch of Slayer fans. In the 1980s, it was a thing. A kind of queasy relationship to fiction that proceeds and anticipates that in a number of different points in instances throughout history. Ajay Kurian: So there’s a difference between being the artist that basically causes a death, where that hinge between fiction and reality opens up and something fucked up or psychotic happens. In your work, it tends to be that you are always observing or playing the role of accomplice. I remember you had a Ouija show in Germany? That was a really fascinating premise because it was a similar condition where, this is a photographer who’s kind of going to these insanely gruesome events. There’s a complicity of documenting something like that and blowing it up. Banks Violette: The part where I find it queasy is the manipulation of the photograph. It wasn’t purely documentary. It was manipulated and it was manufactured to a certain point. And what does that mean when you elaborate calamity and trauma and tragedy as a fiction? Which is what happens when you start editing out parts because it just doesn’t work. It’s hard for me to process. I don’t know if that’s myself personally, but that is always something that I’m asking — what does that mean? What does that mean if I’m referring to these things and I don’t think you can do it casually. Hopefully I have not done it casually. I can’t say that a hundred percent, but I’ve done my best to make that idea apparent. Ajay Kurian: I don’t think it was ever casual. I think that it doesn’t matter how serious you are about your own practice, people can look at it and say, oh, that’s fucked up. He’s doing fucked up stuff. Fuck him. Banks Violette: That’s the weird fucking irony. What we first started talking about, which was that grouping that took place, that categorization of myself and my peers. I’m obviously preoccupied with the idea of being subsumed within a narrative and then having a personal experience of what that looks like when there is a narrative that is being draped over you that you don’t necessarily agree with. It doesn’t fit really well. It’s super fucking uncomfortable, but it’s still exists and is kind of choking you. Ajay Kurian: This was a dual show at Gladstone and Team, and I don’t even remember what you had to go through to get the fire department on board, but having open flames like this inside a gallery is not easy. We didn’t get the fire department on board. Banks Violette: Also not OSHA approved. Ajay Kurian: This is the Jagermeister piece that I saw in the studio. You would think that the studio is like some airplane hanger. But it was pretty big and crowded. It was like, you know, you’re a real worker. There was a moment I remember, when I was working for you, and people would come up to me and ask me where we get our things fabricated. And I was like, we do everything. There was an ethic about that. When you’re talking about the discomfort of what it means to talk about these ideas and to be in that place, I think part of the honesty of it is that there’s an honest labor relation. There’s an honest sense of this is what I grew up with, this is what I think about, this is what I love. I also know there’s a darkness here that I’m trying to think about and work through. Then it all kind of spills out into these forms that have to do with complicity and almost being late to the performance. Banks Violette: I like the idea of being late to the performance, or that kind of anticipatory experience of waiting for the thing to happen and that idea of the pause. Those are all things that I find incredibly beautiful. And that idea of fabricating everything by hand. This is a total digression, but another thing that I’m also very interested in is a class language or class vocabulary specifically in an American sense, whatever that might mean. I think anybody who’s worked in an art warehouse has had an experience of throwing out their back moving a dematerialized art object. Ajay Kurian: I herniated a disc. Banks Violette: What does it mean when you’ve rendered labor discreet? What happens when the act of fabrication is something that happens over there with a series of anonymous actors? After grad school, I had worked for other artists and been a fabricator and knew lots of people who also had that job. I mean, there’s this whole sort of strata of people who are responsible for the creation of things that don’t have an identity, you know? I think there’s something kind of fascinating about that. I’m not necessarily saying that it’s purely problematic, but it is a seam to pick at. Ajay Kurian: Right. There’s so many new ways to fabricate too. There was this purity about painting for quite a long time where it’s always the artist’s hand. Now there’s just so many people that get their paintings made in China and then ship it over. There’s a way to think about the complicity in that, if you’re being honest about it. I think that if that’s a part of production for you, then that’s a condition of what you’re thinking about and talking about. Banks Violette: Absolutely. You have to think about that. If you are just doing it because that is a thing that you can access and as a way to go from point A to point B, I find that kind of lazy. But instead, if there is a structural logic for why you are making things in a certain way – I know an artist who does have paintings fabricated in China, but that is part of the discursive framework that he’s erected around his work, you know? That makes sense. Then there’s other people where you can see it’s just a lazy way of doing that thing. It’s an unconsidered gesture. And what I respond to with art, most of the time, is that it is something that is thoroughly considered. It’s not necessarily a rational gesture but it is somebody thinking through the totality of a problem or an issue or an idea. Ajay Kurian: Like Judd. Banks Violette: Yeah, absolutely. Perfect example. This is somebody who is exploring all the dim unlit corners of this particular idea. And the idea is just a box that’s on the ground. Fuck, that’s amazing. Ajay Kurian: You were talking about the rigor that artists might have that you sort of believe in when you’re really affected by an artwork. But on the other side of that – do you see a difference in the world of art journalism when you were coming up and art journalism now? Banks Violette: No, not necessarily. And this isn’t really even a criticism directed at writers. I just think it is an apples and oranges kind of thing, and there is no one-to-one writerly way of translating our ideas and vice versa. There is always gonna be some gap and some kind of slippage, and there’s always gonna be, as a consequence, resentment when you didn’t get it right. But it’s impossible to get it right. That’s just the nature of it. So I think that is a constant condition that exists in art writing. So yeah, I don’t think that there’s much difference between then and now. I just think there’s an inherent structural flaw. Ajay Kurian: Going back to the moments when you’re doing flyers for shows, was music journalism like a different space? Did it feel like it was more in the fabric of the scene? Banks Violette: Okay, now this is me undermining exactly what I just said. There is good art writing. Absolutely, no question. But I like writing on film. I like writing on music. I find the people who write about those things, or the product that they put out there in the world is much more interesting, much more engaging than a lot of what is written about art. I couldn’t point a finger at why that’s the case. Ajay Kurian: I think it’s only just to say that people are trying to figure it out. People are trying to figure out what are the problems with art writing and what are we missing sometimes? I feel like with music writing, you can feel a diehard fan. And with art writing, you’re not supposed to be a fan. I think that when you read something and you understand that this person loves this shit too much, it’s a negative. But there are those moments when it can transcend the form because there’s such a love there. Banks Violette: It’s funny, you know, music is this thing that you sort of experience viscerally. And in cinema, it doesn’t matter if it’s horror, porn, or comedy, those elicit a visceral response. Art is this thing that is supposed to be rarefied. It is not visceral. It is a mental experience. I think that is sort of cultural bias that’s built into the way things are written about and interpreted that you’re not supposed to have that fan response to something. Which I’ve always found very off putting because I absolutely have a fan response to stuff I like. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Void song or a Smithson artwork, my response to that is, holy shit, unadulterated enthusiasm in the dumbest kind of way possible. Not dumbest, but just like a raw joyfulness in relationship to something. So it doesn’t mean that it’s not critical. The criticality is still there and that’s still the lens. You can’t get rid of it as soon as you’ve built it. Ajay Kurian: I think that might be more you, though. I think there are people that see something that hits a nerve and they’re completely uncritical. But the thing that’s fascinating about how your work has moved throughout the years is that there’s something you felt, something touched a nerve that was real, that reverberates. Then it’s almost trying to puzzle out what the fuck is happening and why. What is it? Is this connected? Is that connected? It’s almost as if so much feeling pushes you into a space of figuring out the conspiracy of your feeling. Banks Violette: That is a really great way of describing it and it’s probably pretty accurate. But it’s also needing to know the broader context that these things exist within. So it’s not just purely the object in isolation, but what is the kind of framework that is allowing the object some kind of ability to resonate. So again, going back to the Marfa example, which is not just the object, but it’s the stage that the object sits on. The use of the word stage is really specific. And tying back to what you were first talking about with stages and theater, where it’s not just the event, but it’s the framing device surrounding the event. Ajay Kurian: And then you left the stage. Banks Violette: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: So, why did you leave? Banks Violette: Health would be the first reason. You know, I saw and you saw what my studio was like. My reasons for working the way that I did still make sense to me. Absolutely still agree with them, but it was just not sustainable like that. Maintaining that kind of schedule, maintaining that kind of weird prominence that I sort of managed to get at a certain moment in time. You know, maintaining this idea that I had to consistently produce everything by hand to a degree. All that was just sort of psychotic and the only way to resolve that and make it not psychotic was a shit ton of drugs. Which is clearly not the best way to navigate anything. So at a certain point, the drugs went out and it was just, okay, do I wanna keep beating my head against this wall or do I wanna get healthy? I’m also not happy with the art world. I’m not happy with having watched a few of my friends pass away and see the way people respond to that. It was a whole lot of unhappiness fueled by a whole lot of unhappy things. So I chose to absent myself and I thought it would be a brief break. Take a week off, and then it became two weeks, and then it became three weeks, and then three years and yeah. So a decade and some change later. That’s how long it took. Ajay Kurian: And how does it feel now? Banks Violette: Weird. But it felt weird then. There’s some internal consistency running through so that’s fine. I still maintained relationships with galleries and I still produced work. I just wasn’t eager and enthusiastic about the idea of presenting work out there in the public. And I had, almost accidentally, two events that kind of butted up against one another in 2023 or 24. One was, I did a museum show that turned out to be kind of a retrospective in Belgium. Suddenly, I was in this position of encountering works that I have not physically seen for years and years, pulling them out and being able to see them again. And go, oh, this is making me think about things again and here’s some threads that I wanted to pick back up. Then Hedi [Slimane], who is the designer of Celine, invited me to do this big project. So I was making new work. I was suddenly forcibly confronted with older work and being asked to make newer work by somebody who I deeply admire and have a preexisting relationship with and trust. So if those two things hadn’t happened, and if they hadn’t happened back to back, would a decade have turned into two decades? Fuck if I know, but possibly so. Ajay Kurian: That seems really possible actually. Banks Violette: Yeah, totally possible. Ajay Kurian: The collaboration with Hedi is deep. I mean, you designed when he was at Dior. You designed like the back showrooms or I can’t remember. Banks Violette: Yeah, in Osaka, and that was around the time I did that show at the Whitney. Ajay Kurian: So it was a longstanding relationship. Banks Violette: Oh, a long, long standing relationship. I think he took that photograph of me smoking with the propane tank. So that’s his fault. Ajay Kurian: I mean, he’s good at playing certain things. He’s really good at that. Banks Violette: But I think in the moment when you’re doing something where you’re like, oh, this person is being very knowing about it. You forget that this is ending up in vanity fucking fair, and will then haunt me for the next God knows how long. At the moment it seemed like a great idea, but that’s sort of true of almost everything I’ve done. Ajay Kurian: I didn’t even smoke cigarettes and I was lighting cigarettes with a propane torch. It’s good. Banks Violette: It’s good. Ajay Kurian: This is a more recent collaboration where there were 14 chandeliers that went essentially across the world in different saline stores. Banks Violette: They all have very specific footprints because of the limitations to the spaces. So everything had to correspond to that footprint. It wasn’t that they were custom made specifically for that. They’re meant to have an identity outside of that they are as sculptures. But they were meant to be in 14 different locations all being installed within a very tight window of time. So they had to be made in a certain way that people that you’ve never met would be able to sort of decipher these instructions, which also necessitated me shifting from making all this stuff by hand to now I have to work with fabricators. Which is this thing that I’ve steered away from for many different reasons and establish a relationship with these people. So it was a whole fucking huge transition and thankfully it worked out really well and I’m super pleased with it, and it allowed me to reimagine how I might make things in the future. Ajay Kurian: The way that I’ve thought about fabrication for myself is that it’s always based in relationships. I think you took a long time getting to know Aric and Serena. So Ark and Serena run a fabrication company called ShisanWu, where they do many artist’s fabrications, and they’re incredible. It feels very homespun when you work with them. Banks Violette: They’re the loveliest people possible. But I still have it in my head that they’ve gotta be somebody who I’d be comfortable with at five in the morning. You know, doing something like, hey, let’s see if this looks better, if it’s burning, that kind of thing. It is not unrealistic to describe that as a trust thing. Ajay Kurian: Who was the dude at that steel deck? Oh, Christian. Banks Violette: Yeah, he was down for burning everything. Anything. Didn’t matter. He’s a really great guy. Ajay Kurian: He was a fabricator who helped fabricate a lot of steel, well any kind of steel structures. Banks Violette: Yeah, he did. Then it just turned into, well, I want to do that and I don’t wanna rely on this guy. But he had a studio very close to mine in Williamsburg, and he was part of an English company that made steel staging decks. You can see them all the time, you know, it’s a really very distinctive design for a decking system. It’s this huge company, but it was really just this one guy on a tremendous amount of drugs with a lot of heavy tools, just building these things in Williamsburg. So clearly we got along great. Ajay Kurian: I came to the studio right when you were trying to get clean. I had never done any drugs at that point. All of a sudden I was working in this studio where a big dude would come to the door late at night and we’d get deliveries of cocaine and then that would fuel everybody else till the wee hours of the morning to get work done. Then I’d go home around two, ‘cause I was like, I just can’t do this. But then it felt like there was an urge to get clean. There was like an urge to sort of leave that behind. Did you feel like it was part of you as an artist at that point? Banks Violette: The reason why I was doing drugs, you know, I was not having a good time. It wasn’t like going out and getting crazy or anything. All I wanted to do was be able to work and if I could stay up for 48 hours, that was great. If this would allow me to stay up for 48 hours, that seemed like a reasonable fucking trade at that moment because the window is really tiny. Ajay Kurian: So this is a real story that I, to this day, still kind of don’t believe that I saw. But banks would disappear from time to time. Banks Violette: Like a decade. Ajay Kurian: Well, yeah. But we’d be working in the studio and we’re like, where the fuck is he? It would be like a week and then you show up fucking nuts. And he built out a whole wall of cabinets and a level area for our chop saw in a day. Everything was level, everything was perfect. We just see him and it was one of those cartoon montages where you see someone and then it’s just finished and it was done and we’re like, this is really good. It was all sound. It wasn’t about you partying. Banks Violette: Yeah, it was purely work. Ajay Kurian: It was a bizarre thing to witness. Banks Violette: And it’s, call me super lucky, I’ve got an atypical response to opiates. They make me stay up and work really hard. You know, it’s how somebody might describe doing meth or something like that. I do heroin and I work really hard. It’s really fucking weird, but it is true. Ajay Kurian: The come down’s not so great. Banks Violette: Come down sucks. It’s not fun. So yeah, that was kind of the backstory for it. But in that period I was just being hyper conscious of this very tiny window. And the way this window was being constructed was like, oh, you and all your young friends who are young artists and cool. But I’m not gonna be young at some point, so I need to make a volume of work that overcomes this kind of built in flaw in the way the work is being described as solely a product of youth. Right, and I’ve gotta get ahead of that somehow, which is a psychotic kind of expectation to have to yourself daily. In my very dysfunctional way of navigating that, at that moment in time, the solution was I’ll just do a ton of drugs. And I was surrounded by a peer group and a moment in time when that wasn’t that atypical. Ajay Kurian: I mean, it was noticeably toxic. Banks Violette: It was fucking terrible. Ajay Kurian: It felt like, when does this run out? Banks Violette: Seeing, you know, Dash Snow, who’s got such a distinctive face. His work is constantly sort of being churned back up and seeing him being used almost like a meta him for a moment in time where we’re all young and crazy and you’re like, dude, that’s a tragedy. That was a sad thing that happened and there’s no sense of joy to that. So, yeah, I’m still queasy about that when I see that and sort of discussing that moment in time. Ajay Kurian: If there was an artist that you could bring back from the dead, it would be Steven Parrino. Banks Violette: Bruno easily, a hundred percent. I would be just fascinated seeing him respond to people. He did not sell a lot of work while he was alive. People certainly knew who he was, but not to the degree that they do now. And to the degree that he’s discussed and the regard of his work as hell. I think he would find this shit funny as hell. He would find it hilarious, but I also would like him to have the vindication of being like, you know what, you were absolutely right what you were doing. He was the loveliest, most generous person that I had the good fortune to have known and be friends with. And he had this community of people that he supported and was deeply involved with and cared tremendously about. So just to have the hey, yeah, people will acknowledge and recognize that you are very important. *Audience Question* Banks Violette: If I’m understanding correctly, what did I do with myself for a decade? I got married, I became a stepdad. I had a normal life, which I did not have when I was in New York and working all the time. When you’re presented with a situation where being a drug addict seems like a rational response to your environment, then fuck, normalcy is kind of great. So I was just normal and quiet and I’m still producing art and still thinking about art. It has left me with this happy thing of doing a number of shows now, and each time somebody invites me to do something, I’m like, oh, great, that’s covered, because I’ve got 10 fucking years of back inventory. For lack of a better description. So it’s really easy to sort of show me the space and I’ve probably got something that I’ve thought about that will work exactly with this. So does that answer the question? Audience Member: Yes, it does. Also, how does it feel to speak again, like within your visual language that you wanna showcase? Banks Violette: It actually is really nice. Again, I don’t want to give the impression that I think art can take place in a vacuum. That, like me, monologuing in a studio is being a practicing artist. Because I don’t think that’s the case. I think art is fundamentally a communication that is a dialogue with the outside world. And that is a necessary thing for an art object to have its status as an art object. Reentering a discussion is reentering this thing that I love deeply. So yeah, it feels really good. Ajay Kurian: You did a lot of fishing too. Banks Violette: I did. Audience Member: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: Everybody, thanks to Banks. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

On Tender Assembly and the Politics of Display: NewCrits Talk with Eric N. Mack

He builds with fabric, scaffolding, and light — Eric N. Mack on tenderness as structure and the unseen labor that makes art visible. Eric N. Mack works between painting, installation, and fashion, reimagining how material, care, and collaboration shape contemporary image-making. His large-scale assemblages drape and lean, collapsing distinctions between surface and structure, styling and architecture, autonomy and support. His practice reveals how beauty, fragility, and display coexist within shared spaces of labor and care. He explains: * How gestures of rupture, cutting, and collage become ways to think through care, not violence. * Why stylists, curators, and unseen collaborators form the hidden architectures of art. * How fabric behaves as both image and body — draped, suspended, and alive to air and time. * What scaffolding, transparency, and light teach about the precarity of presence. * How tenderness and structure coexist as the real politics of display. * Why every act of making is also an act of attention — a choreography of support between maker, viewer, and space. (0:00) Welcome + Intro(01:00) Rupture, Reflection, and the Studio as World(05:00) Grace Jones and the Clarified Aesthetic(10:00) The Unseen Hand and the Architect of the Image(15:00) Collaboration, Care, and the Space of Display(20:00) Fabric, Fragrance, and the Politics of Form(30:00) Craft, Styling, and the Education of Looking(33:00) Art School, Value, and the Work of Belief(40:00) Draping Architecture and Breathing Structures(47:00) Fragility, Care, and the Social Life of Objects Follow Eric:Web: https://www.artsandletters.org/exhibitions?slug=eric-n-mackInstagram: @ericnmack Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: When you’re putting together a show, I know you’ve talked about art being present for the world’s brutalities, but how do you conjugate that or stay present in the work with that? It’s not even saying that you have to, because it’s not your responsibility to do so. It’s more so, I see glimmers and I see the way that you think about how things come together and how they kind of fall apart. Eric N. Mack: Yeah. I have a lot of epiphanies that sit in the studio, that come from the studio that end up allowing me to think about the external world from the happenstances in the studio, and from coordinated or measured gestures of rupture. And those ruptures could have implications of or sit alongside what folks could regard as kind of a material violence, or violence to a material, or decomposition, or collage, or something for the work to feel chopped like the ingredients are chopped up. I love a good metaphor, like a good salad, it’s aromatic with all the ingredients. Nothing overpowers one another, but it’s transformative. It holds meaning, sustenance, and maybe a level of a counterpoint, maybe the sunflower seed gets stuck in your teeth or something like that, you know? Ajay Kurian: You gave us a lot to chew on, even in the press release. At the end of that, there’s literally seven hyperlinks to run through. We had The Clark Sisters, Nina Simone, a trailer for the Unzipped documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, the Harlem Restaurant of which the show was named after, Sinners movie tickets. Eric N. Mack: Why not? Ajay Kurian: And Grace Jones on an Italian talk show or an Italian show. Eric N. Mack: A talk show, I think. It could have been Eurovision. Ajay Kurian: But that was serious. She was really in her pocket. Eric N. Mack: Yeah, it’s intense, ‘cause she’s in drag in a way. You know, she’s wearing this wig and I was like, the wig is architecture and the wig is like a hat. She’s architecture. If you’re watching the YouTube video or seeing the performance at the end, this camera pans out and she leans back and someone catches her as she falls and snatches her wig. Then she becomes this doll, this kind of copy of herself, this quotidian, you know the things that she would process with Jean Paul. She’s always around and I always think about her. She’s an interesting marker, because she’s such a clarified aesthetic. She’s a sound, she’s a voice and she also possesses her own tension. There’s incredible softness and vulnerability, but she’s also a tank, you know? The thing is, these images are also ones that she’s used herself. I just think that she will always be relevant. Ajay Kurian: There’s an ownership over the image too. There’s a way in which she’s self representing and it feels beautiful and antagonistic, but also really generous. To be both aggressive and generous at the same time isn’t an easy thing to do. Ajay Kurian: But I feel like, for her embodiment to be a black woman who is beautifully angular and masculine and feminine at the same time, it’s a lot to have to deal with, specifically in that moment of pop culture too. Eric N. Mack: Yeah. She’s an artwork. She’s her own artwork. There was an exhibition I did in London and I kind of couldn’t stop thinking about Misa Hylton. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was a stylist for Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige. So she was a part of this kind of bad boy regime, but she was a part of their visual representation. She’s an iconic stylist. Everybody takes notes from her in New York. Ajay Kurian: Really? It’s so interesting ‘cause I think you’re the first artist that I’ve talked to that holds stylists in this regard. That the grooming of an image, the understanding of what it takes to put together a scene, an idea, a world building essentially, that it’s happening completely behind the scenes. You’re really picking out these people to be like, you’ve changed this whole scene. Eric N. Mack: I mean, it’s what we do as artists. It’s just asking questions like, okay, what’s in the byline? Who did this? Who’s the architect? She called herself the architect, and I respect that. There was an awareness and a renewed understanding of her importance as these looks became more prominent again. The nineties in general as a kind of nostalgic, bygone era, that we were there for. So it also is an interesting thing to think about, who made the thing that sits in your heart or that sits with you, that rests in your references, and that you connect with? Who made that? Obviously, I mean, that’s what we do. That’s research. Maybe people don’t look at the production of the image as much as, you know, there’s a lot of romanticism around the fashion designer and who made the garment, but you won’t see the garment without seeing how it was put together and how it was aligned. The tension. Thinking about my good friend, Haley Wollens who has been working for a long time. I think more recently she’s done Dsquared, she’s done Au Claire, she’s done all of these important brands that end up being reconstituted, recomposed by this unseen hand. Ajay Kurian: That’s the thing. It’s a level of research that is fascinating to me because I think everybody gets caught up in the director and the designer. Even when you’re a kid, you watch the movie and you like the movie.Then there’s the kid that finds out who the director is. Then there’s the kid who finds out who the producer is. That’s a different kid. Eric N. Mack: It is a different kid. But you know, sometimes it’s meant to be that way. It may be structured for folks to be completely enamored with the superstar, with the actress or the actor. It was designed that way, you know? Ajay Kurian: Now I want to see behind that. Eric N. Mack: That’s what I do. I mean, that’s what I’m interested in. Questioning wasn’t enough, and was never enough. Like thinking about Amanda Harlech, she’s an incredible stylist who was a big part of the way that we experienced the early days of John Galliano and some of the more important days of Karl Lagerfeld. I mean, she’s established, but she’s a visionary and at a certain point she kind of sought Galliano out when he was finishing his degree at CSM. So there was a premise that was going around between them. They were collaborators. There’s something about the unseen magic in between these figures and some of the social qualities of discourse between two people that end up generating meaning for so many. Ajay Kurian: So what’s the plural for you? Do you feel like there’s similar relationships that you have in your practice? Of course, I know that you actually work with stylists and designers. There’s plenty of collaborative things that you’ve done. But when I think about the kind of classic idea of a painter, for instance. You have a studio practice, you go to the studio, you work, you come home and that’s potentially a very solitary thing. Eric N. Mack: I mean, it’s up to me, and it’s up to artists to be able to question that, to reposition that. Sometimes that works, and the main collaborator at this point is the curator. Eric N. Mack: So for this exhibition, shout out to everybody at Arts and Letters, Jenny Chasky, Nick and Juan — these are really important people in actualizing the exhibition. It was through conversation and also acknowledging that everybody, they got eyes and it matters like that we are all seeing. And I’m not afraid to ask what people are seeing right in the room. Sometimes people think that just means I don’t have vision myself and that’s stupid. But I think also with time, it’s also a practice for me, to see what I get from that. Ultimately, I’ll make my own decisions about these things. But it’s really important for me to be able to reflect from people who are familiar with the space that I’m working in currently. You know, I’m scratching my head, I’ve been here all day, why is this not working? There’s people who have been up on the lift and been able to see what the space looks like from all these different vantage points. The material that the walls are made from are all significant aspects of architecture that many of us can take for granted. Ajay Kurian: I’ve been lingering on this picture, because it’s kind of the first thing that you encounter when you walk into the space. There is a piece suspended from, and kind of draping, in the wind. And it was a really cloudy, somewhat rainy day. Just seeing that floating above does inaugurate an experience and what you’re about to move into. Your work, maybe more recently too, has felt like a collaged brush stroke. I think a lot of people might think of the brush stroke as a unit of expression. And what I really like about how you’re using the bolt of fabric is that it becomes both brushstroke as an expressive entity, but also, it kind of carries all the social weight of the ready-made as well. They happen simultaneously. It’s just this kind of non-binary thing where you’re not choosing between one or the other in particular moments. They just happen to exist at the same time. So you just see this streak across the sky of a variety of fabrics, and you can feel what each of them does to you without being able to place it. It’s a nice thing because then you walk in and it almost felt more like portraiture to me. These are all just like iPhone pictures that I took because I was too late in asking arts and letters for pictures, so that’s all me. But they’re not bad pictures. Then you get into this kind of diaphanous space and it just completely opens up. The whole space just has this air of levity and there’s brushstrokes in the sky and it feels like a realm of possibility. I know I’m waxing poetic a little bit, but I just really enjoyed the show. This is one of those moments where just seeing materials come together was such a nice moment. Eric N. Mack: I took this picture too. When you sent it to me, I was like, oh good. Because when we got the documentation of the show or I was talking to the photographer, I was like, get this, and I wanted that shape, that jagged shape where the scarf enters the picture and how it’s held together and being able to see the other side of the room through that. It’s framing, but it’s also the implication of the transparency and opacity kind of playing. I mean, for me, this one’s such a chopped salad. you know? The beauty isn’t its presence and almost shies away from image or something, like a fragrance. I’m thinking about a fragrance. I’m thinking about how one experiences layers of scent and how transformative that is no matter where you are. You know, that’s abstraction. Ajay Kurian: Then what title do you think of when you think of the perfume notes of the show? Eric N. Mack: I mean, sometimes it’s just literal, like one is called On vetiver. Ajay Kurian: Okay, so it takes you there too. It’s direct. Eric N. Mack: So I’m imagining, a little vial of oil, that would just be something that the fabric could be dipped in, you know, imagining it being like drenched in oil or the lived life of the fabric being like worn. Ajay Kurian: There’s the presence of a body. It’s interesting the way you’re talking about visuality when it comes to a scent. Because it, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but the way you’re talking about it, it sounds like you’re able to imagine something without a picture. That it’s almost a posture with no body, or there’s something that gives an evocation of presence. And there’s a fragrance, this fragrance portrait of a lady that like, now I smell it everywhere. It’s everywhere. There was a moment when you could just pick it out of a room. As soon as I walked in, I’d have a picture, but it didn’t matter if it was the person or not, or if I matched it up. It was a different kind of picture. Eric N. Mack: I like that. Because it also is just about a material. It’s about like a plant or something. But it doesn’t give itself away and it doesn’t tell you about what it does or what it can do.The center figure is called bod. I thought that was really funny. But also thinking about bod cologne and just like a shorthand and thinking about the figure. Just trying to get there so it can carry notions of the viewer. There’s a lot I could say in terms of that work in relationship to the armatures. Ajay Kurian: The armatures are kind of new. I feel like there’s been kind of ready-made armatures in older works, but these are fabricated and then also kind of anonymous. There’s anonymity to them, to me, where it’s almost bureaucratic. It’s Subway poles and there’s this kind of brushed anodyne aluminum and it’s a highly specific form. It’s cantilevered and counterbalanced. There’s a lot of specific things, but then it also feels like a particular kind of architecture that’s city based. And then to have it have this delicate form draped on it. I’m curious about how these forms are continuing to develop, how you’re starting to understand them for yourself. Eric N. Mack: These were made really thinking about this space, the kind of variedness and wanting there to be an almost figurative element that would lean on the wall. Maybe the sculpture could be holding up the wall like a buttress or some kind of architectural element. Also, the kind of premise of scaffolding, and just thinking about how scaffolding is used as a structure for support. I mean this fabric, I’ve been carrying around for probably maybe eight years. Ajay Kurian: Wow. That was actually a question I had, do you have an archive of fabrics? Eric N. Mack: Absolutely. I love the properties of a pleated fabric and how, you know, thinking about structure and support, the fact that it could be almost self-imposed. It’s imposed on the surface. It’s like the structure comes from within, and it’s held through heat. I mean, that’s how pleats are made. And as the fabric contracts and then expands again. The form is communicated through that. Ajay Kurian: It’s really beautiful. It made me think of Matisse. Because it felt like a color study where this much red means something and this much red means something. And like then when you add dimension to it and light and all these other things, here is where the pleats stop and you can see a different orientation of color. It really is a different experience. It was a nice feeling to not have immediate vocabulary for what I was experiencing. Eric N. Mack: I think I was trying to describe an experience of looking at a painting and being like, how does this operate and why is it this specific form that’s significant? You know what I mean? And you look at it kind of pissed off. You’re just like, what? How does this do that? And why is it just one color that does it? Ajay Kurian: The first person that comes to my mind is Sam Gilliam and what that experience was like when first encountering that work. What was the first work of art that you can remember that pissed you off? Or that you had an adversarial relationship with? Sometimes things piss me off ‘cause they’re so good. Eric N. Mack: I’m trying to, I don’t know. I know there’s a lot. You can get angry at all the art out there, but really it is those gestures where you look at the side of the painting and be like, what? Oh, you painted that or you finished the edge like that or just these finalizing gestures that are about the craftsmanship of the work. It communicates to people who are craftsmen. I can’t think of anything that really pissed me off right now. Ajay Kurian: It’s good that you mentioned that moment of looking at the edge of a painting. To me, it’s something that I think about with your work where the line between craft and styling is completely blurred. So for instance, if you’re. Stretching Belgian linen and you’re building up a surface and then you’re applying oil medium. We know what that surface looks and feels like when it’s done right. And when it’s not, when it’s okay. The preciousness of when it really feels like luxury. With your work, there’s almost a slightly different motivation. That’s why it’s so cool to me that you can rattle off the most important stylist here, because to me, you understand that as a craft. You understand that as a world and how precise it needs to be. To think about styling and craft in the same conversation is very interesting to me because I hadn’t thought about it like that. I was thinking about how we both grew up on the Style channel. Eric N. Mack: That’s true. Ajay Kurian: That was a formative moment for me, the style channel and being able to see runway shows in high school. I started to think about why things look the way they look and got obsessed with a certain level of craftsmanship. I didn’t get into the styling part of it and I think that’s why I’m so intrigued by it. I’m curious, what was that early experience like for you? You were around a lot of clothes and your father had a clothing store, right? Eric N. Mack: Yeah, he did. My dad had a brick and mortar clothing store on the border of DC and Maryland. I don’t remember how many years, but he eventually renovated a moving truck and turned that moving truck into a popup. That’s the language now. But it was a clothing store in the back of a white moving truck. He put wood paneling, very nineties, and hangers and clothing racks and places where you could fold the jeans and put them in the drawers. Because sometimes you would hit a speed bump and the clothes would fall on the ground and me and my brother would have to go back there and fix everything before the light turned green. Ajay Kurian: And that’s when you noticed the silhouette of fallen clothes. Eric N. Mack: My room is like that, respectfully. But, I think I’ve always been interested in self styling or the things that you choose are emblematic and idiosyncratic. You know, you speak through them, they’re really important. Maybe it did start in my teenage years alongside of when I started drawing really seriously. I mean, we’re kids of the nineties, so it really was all about what you chose and how you speak through that. We know it now as like crazy psycho consumerist culture, but that was really tailored to us, you know? Ajay Kurian: I wonder what that felt like for you. Because in the beginning, art for me was just, I was good at drawing. And then there was a moment where it opened up into a conversation that was like, oh, you can create things that embody and live an idea and that there was a different kind of gesture that happens there and a different way that those things could live and challenge what already was. I’m curious because clothing, styling, and then also a real foundational understanding of drawing, painting. You went to art school and got an MFA at Yale, you did all those things and you had this kind of super foundation of art. But then you didn’t let go of the things that were kind of left out of that conversation. Did that happen? Does that happen naturally? Do you have to recover things along the way? Were there things that you felt like you had to push out of your life and then bring it back? Or did it all just kind of keep moving with you? Eric N. Mack: I think they were always together. I thought they were always important and I didn’t believe anybody that told me otherwise. You know, fashion for me was personal and it was something that invested time and interest. It was an interest of mine and it still is. I’m definitely an artist and there’s no carrot on a stick that could convince me to compromise that. Ajay Kurian: So your definition of an artist is far-reaching. Eric N. Mack: I’m also thinking about art as the viewership of art. I think the art audience deserves a lot more than what we’re seeing. I felt like a responsibility for the work to be drenched in exactly what I felt was most important. That’s why the work is so much about value. For you to see something is for you to see the significance of its presence. I wanted you to be able to look at a work and not be able to take away what’s there. It’s made concrete, it’s made manifest. Ajay Kurian: It’s almost like reorganizing the commonplace gives it a different scent. Eric N. Mack: I also will just say going to art school, I really believed that it was a place of invention. I was gonna be a part of a conversation about something that’s contemporary and new. I’m gonna go to get my MFA at Yale where we could be, I don’t know, flying paintings around. You know, just something that dealt with technology and it’s what we are not seeing now. There’s something about a futurist notion of innovation. I was looking for invention. Ajay Kurian: I feel like there was a particular moment, around that time that you would be in art school then, everything else was saying that painting’s dead and old. There was this kind of fire to be, no, it’s not dead. There’s other ways to reinvent it. Eric N. Mack: Right. Or it’s in plain sight. It’s in everything you see. There was a time where I told somebody I was a painter and they assumed that I was like a wall painter. And that’s an honest living. Ajay Kurian: I mean, if I told somebody in my extended family that I was a painter, they’d think I was a wall painter or house painter. They wouldn’t be like De Kooning. Eric N. Mack: Maybe they’d be like Picasso. Ajay Kurian: If you said artists, they’d say Picasso. You say artist and they don’t even think of anything besides palette. And there’s so many levels to it. There’s the thing that we think is gonna happen, which is we’re in the 21st century and it’s gonna be flying paintings, and then there’s people that are outside of that and they’re still in the 1600s. Eric N. Mack: There’s a lot of ways that people experience art and it is a part of the way that people think about beauty, decoration and decor, their interior spaces and I think that is also really important. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, and in fact, I think it’s more vital because the conversation about art with a big A is one that feels very dead to me. But I know that everybody who’s alive has a beating heart that tells them the things that excite them the most and they just haven’t connected the fact that’s art. Whatever your niche is, whatever you get most excited about, you can go into that infinity. I have no boundary about what that can be. What bothers me is that there’s still so much connective work that I feel discursively we have to do. Just let people admire the things that they admire. Eric N. Mack: I know. I think some of that stuff is not art though, to be honest. I’m disgusted about some of the things that people call art to be honest. Because I think people do give themselves a lot of permission in certain arenas, and I think art is one of them. But I do think that there is something about a kind of urgency. I think there’s something about a larger message. I think there’s something about being able to see an individual voice in a larger conversation that deals with a question of beauty. It is something about the tension of Contemporary reality, be that political, social, cultural. I think that there is something about the friction that art in itself is supposed to kind of possess these things. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. I see that and I can feel that. There’s things that are design, for sure. And I accept that as well. This is not Eric’s work, this is Petra Blaisse, who has her own firm called Inside Outside. I know that this person has been an influence on you and it sounds sort of like a stylist of spaces. Eric N. Mack: Absolutely. Ajay Kurian: This was so fascinating to me, to see the realms in which she works and then seeing this project in particular. It reminded me of your Desert X project. Eric N. Mack: Really? Ajay Kurian: Not that it’s the same thing, but just thinking about how to drape an architecture and thinking about what it means to give a space a halter towel. What do you think of someone like Petra, is that an art practice? Does it need to be called that? Does it matter? Is that just like somebody that you see working in the intersection of things? Eric N. Mack: I think there is someone working in between so much, but I see it as interior architecture in a way. Her firm is called Inside Outside, and I love the urgency to it and also the dexterity of it as a comment on the domestic and on the lived space. As architecture it would possibly be defined as dexterity in the built environment. Or as an imposition or a question on the built environment. There’s something advanced about this for me that feels so futuristic. The way that it would respond to the elements. You see how it billows and moves and the wall would be able to breathe. It reminds me, I used to live in this crazy loft in Bushwick, when I first moved to New York with my Cooper friends. I guess we just didn’t have enough money to build walls, so we ended up just putting up curtains for a while. They went up to the ceiling and it really wasn’t a productive way to live, but it looked great. And I was like, yes, this is painting. It was like a cotton duck kind of a canvas. Ajay Kurian: You really were drenched in it. When you say drenched… Eric N. Mack: It’s about recognizing it. This is what that is. I’m gonna make meaning out of this. Let me use it later. Taking note, you know? We were just 19, so it was still kind of early in references in terms of trying things out. That was a good thing about being in school. Let’s try out this way of living This was all about the structure, being able to breathe. Using the gas station structure, the canopy as a structural form. That was gonna be the unshakeable structure. And I didn’t want to completely obscure it, so there’s this kind of translucency of the knit fabric which is mostly made outta Smithsonian. Any kind of pattern you would see on this is Smithsonian Luxury Fabric. That was a really nice opportunity and probably my first engagement with a major brand. Ajay Kurian: So it was a conversation with them to understand this is what we have access to. You wanted that relationship to happen. Eric N. Mack: The way things happened for me again, is about a lived experience. I was doing a residency in Milan and I met one of the creative directors of Misson at a dinner and we chopped it up. But also, there was a tension and intensity around developing this large project. My curator at this time was Amanda Hunt, and she was just like, think big baby. I was like, oh, I just wanna hang some fabrics up and she’s like, think big. You know, you can do this. We have the support to do this. So I was like, okay, great. Then I was thinking about this conversation that I had and Milan and how amazing it would be to have this vestige of an experience be so expansive in this other moment. That conversation kind of led to this collaboration. It was very simple and direct. I chose from the PDF, and then to see them in person, it was just like, really? Ajay Kurian: You ordered the paints online and then you got the paint? Eric N. Mack: Right. This was a lot of fabric, probably the most fabric I’ve ever seen at that time. This was 2019. Ajay Kurian: I feel like there’s this conversation around art, that it needs to be purposeless. And in the ways that you install your work and the ways that it kind of suggests so many different things, it almost feels like the opposite, where it’s like an excess of purpose. And that maybe that’s the space in which art really starts to affect people. Where there’s the space of design that has a purpose. It’s beautiful and there’s artistic merit to it. But I think maybe what pushes art into a different category is that it not only has those purposes, it has other ones and as you get older, it has other ones. And as you move with it, it has other ones. It just keeps giving you new purposes. That it’s never purposeless. It’s an excess. Eric N. Mack: I’m thinking about the kind of nuance around it. There’s intent. There’s aspects about beauty that shift and develop through the experience of making, but it’s intent, like at least being a point where its presence can’t be denied. Because it’s intent in being there. Do you know what I mean? Its relationship to the support of this building. I want it to feel like the fabric needs it, so it’s clinging to it. And it ends up being compositionally reconstituted and there’s things that you get from that are unexpected. Like the way that the fabric billowed, but then also the way that it caught air and the movement ended up being its own kind of choreography. The rope is the same kind of rope that I used uptown at Arts and Letters. It’s like a canyon diving rope that I bought from REI. I talked to this guy at REI and he was like, this is tough as steel. This is gonna just survive everything, but it’s not gonna survive a knife cut. It could hold our weight or whatever, but it’s not indestructible, which is the way he sold it to me. Ajay Kurian: I always sense fragility and in everything that you make, every stitch, everything. That’s the kind of funny thing about super well tailored clothing. It falls on your body so beautifully, but also you can break it real easily too. It’s a very delicate, beautiful, gorgeous thing. When I see the work, there’s a precarity that feels like a social precarity. It feels like there’s clashing things coming together and holding. But if there’s a little too much rain, it might not be there tomorrow. Eric N. Mack: I mean, I think that’s a part of the concept. I think there’s some things that acknowledge presence, right? It’s the intention in being there at that moment that you see it. I like to think about fragility as a subject. So I want people to be able to regard it as part of the meaning and the content of the work. Thinking about the definition of sculpture, thinking about a dimensional object that has a condition, there’s a real world condition or social political condition that this object goes under. Having fragility on top of that, communicates in such a tense and interesting way, an importance of care. That’s when care comes in for sure. That’s when you know the importance of the architecture. That’s when you know the curator. That’s when all of these points of consideration that are seen and unseen are intentional and needed. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Saints, Stained Glass, and the Work of Belief: NewCrits Talk with Raúl de Nieves

He builds worlds from devotion, labor, and light. Raúl de Nieves on myth, death, and the joy of transformation. Raúl de Nieves is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, performance, stained glass, and music. His work merges ancestral craft with queer exuberance, creating ecstatic spaces where life, death, and rebirth coexist. Known for his intricate beaded sculptures and radiant installations, de Nieves transforms discarded materials into devotional objects that question permanence, value, and faith. He reflects on: * Why failure and fear are essential teachers * How myth, labor, and ritual shape his understanding of transformation * The link between spirituality and psychedelia in his creative process * The politics of beauty, excess, and craft * How performance and collaboration sustain his practice * The tension between art and commerce—and what it means to say yes * Why joy, respect, and self-love remain his most radical tools (0:00) Welcome + Intro (1:00) The Origin of “St. George and the Dragon”(10:00) Death, Culture, and Safety(21:00) Excess, Labor, and the Ephemeral (31:00) The Whitney Window (35:00) The Carousel and the Brand (43:00) Pact with the Devil (47:00) Celebration and Decay (53:00) Belief and Legacy (56:00) Joy, Respect, and The Smashing Pumpkins Follow Raúl: Web: https://companygallery.us/artists/raul-de-nievesInstagram: @norauls [https://www.instagram.com/norauls] Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Hi everybody, thank you all for being here. Welcome to our NewCrits Talk with Raúl de Nieves! I’m gonna give you some background as to what NewCrits is, I’m gonna give you a little introduction to Raúl, and then we’re gonna get into the conversation. NewCrits is a global platform rooted in aesthetic education. We’re committed to fostering critical care, rigorous inquiry, and artist-to-artist dialogue. We offer mentorship and courses that challenge the assumptions of traditional art institutions while honoring the intensity of their best methods. We have crits, but we don’t think about crits as a way to tear you down to build you up. That’s trauma we don’t need anymore. Our offerings are designed for artists at any stage, especially those seeking meaningful critique, rooted in trust, discernment, and deep attention. These talks are an instantiation of that. The way that I think about art will be on display. This kind of conversation is the kind of conversations that we have in crits. It’s one where we’re building together. Now let’s get to the main event, which is Raúl here. Raúl de Nieves: Hello everyone. Ajay Kurian: All right, we’re gonna start with this image. I’ve known Raúl for some time now, but we really got to know each other better during the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which we were both in. We were both also part of the five artists that were asked to collaborate with Tiffany and Company. So we were spending a lot of time together and it was really nice. Raúl is one of those artists where you can’t tell if the art is an extension of him, or he’s an extension of the art. There’s a purity and transparency to who he is as a person and an artist, that feels free of shame and free of hiding. You’ll see the dark and the light. He’s joy and sparkle at times, but he can access a banshee scream and speak from unknown deaths as he does in his band Hairbone. Dark and light, life and death, are not seen as mere opposites in his work. They are a faded coupling, archetypes, and fantasma characters emerge throughout his sculptures as if enacting scenes from forgotten religious books, rituals, and beat through much of the work in ways that give them new life. There’s plenty of art that looks to religions, but few works of art inject a new spirit into that old fist to open it up. Raúl has a new exhibition at Pioneer Works that just recently opened. The space is wide and gleaming with colors pouring through the windows. He’s created new stained glass works for the windows of the entire building. They’re modestly made with tape and colored plastic, but the effect is regal. The colors almost tune a frequency that makes you smile. So when you see texts that might be darker, more bodily, even a little gross, you accept this as part of the light too. Nothing’s left out. Everything feels redeemed. After spending so much time seeing how Raúl creates, thinks and cares, I was and am convinced that this person is a star. Not a star in the sense of celebrity, although there is that, but in the sense that he radiates with an unflinching and holistic energy as if he simply is a star. I think it’s easy for us to see someone like Raúl whose light shines brightly and think that’s just who he is, that it’s not the result of enormous amounts of work and discipline of the ability to bring death to an old self in order to birth a new one and find joy again and again. A person like that right now is worth talking to and hearing their stories. So please help me welcome Raúl. Raúl de Nieves: Thank you. That was very nice. Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling? Raúl de Nieves: I feel great. Today was a lovely day and being here is so nice. To be able to talk to you and share a moment of my life and just some of the things that mattered to me. So thank you for having me. Ajay Kurian: It’s really a pleasure. It’s an honor. I have loved your work, I’ve loved seeing it and I love learning more about it. This image was one that came up when I was reading about the work. I’ve seen this story told many times in your work, but this is from 2003 to 2005. This is a story of St. George and the Dragon, and I wanted to start here ‘cause I think there’s a lot of things that are formative in this particular image, the story itself and how you saw that story. Raúl de Nieves: I moved to San Francisco in 2002 to attend the CCA college. And unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take into the school because of the financial situation that I was in. So it’s really nice to know that you are providing mentorship to students, because there wasn’t anything like that in 2002. The internet was just starting and moving to San Francisco was such a dream of mine and I made it happen even though I didn’t end up going to the school. For me, the bridge of San Francisco, which always shined so much to a forgotten soul or this idea of the hippie, the queers, gay culture. It really attracted me to this idea of knowledge. But once I couldn’t attend the school, I had to find my own mentorships, and I saw that through my friends. The image of St. George and the dragon appeared to me through a woman who was selling embroidery at the store that I was working at. I ended up buying the embroidery off her and I started to really think about how I grew up in a religious household that spoke about angels and the defeat of the self. But in a more Catholic way, where you have to repent your sins and think about what it means to not follow the status quo of a normal way of thinking because heaven is the ultimate power of our existence. St. George, to me, became this mantra. I started to really ask myself who I was in the picture, and I decided to think that I was all aspects of this fable. The fable talks about a dragon that houses itself next to a water well, and the town is in fear that this dragon is gonna drink all their water. So they must gather their beans into a sacrifice because the dragon ate all the animals. As if the dragon shouldn’t eat the animals because the humans are eating the animals. I don’t think that the saint really exists in the image because that is up to the future to decide. So in a sense, I thought about some of the people in my life that I felt had that idea of themselves. Not going to school gave me an opportunity to seek these kinds of icons or lessons through things that appeared to me and I frantically started painting this painting over and over and over again. My goal was to paint 50 of them. I still haven’t painted 50, but once I moved to New York, it’s almost like the image faded away somehow. But it’s something I constantly go back to, and when I recognize it through my journeys, it reminds me of finding things to reflect on. Ajay Kurian: The part where you say that you can be every single character in the fable is what stands out to me because there’s the dragon or the snake, there’s St. George, and then there’s the townspeople that are afraid. There’s this sense that St. George is banishing the dragon, and there’s a sense that people think it’s a dragon but really it’s just this snake and it’s not that big of a deal. They’re afraid of this thing that maybe they shouldn’t be afraid of. To be able to embody the people that are violent and fearful, to embody the saint who comes to save the day, and then to embody this dragon figure is a lot to think about, especially right now. I wonder, can you still embody all those positions or do you feel like you have a different kind of sense of self right now? Raúl de Nieves: I definitely can. I think fear is man’s best friend as they say, and sometimes we really have to get to know our fears in order to understand what they look like. It’s one of the hardest things that we can allow ourselves to communicate with. Because sometimes that comes with a tragic death, addiction, or just being alive. I thought about this and the fact that this dragon was portrayed as the entity of the end of life. A dragon is essentially a mythical creature, so this idea of the myth or the flamboyant also became what I was thinking about. I was like, oh there is a fear of the other side of the human being that maybe we aren’t allowed to or we shouldn’t exercise. Which is our inner divas, our inner goddess, or our inner demons. But I still relate to each character because not every day is so jolly. One of the things that I’ve been trying to continue to exercise within myself is how to let go and what does that mean? When letting go, is it an idea or is it part of the past? Ajay Kurian: When was the first time that you felt like you befriended your fears? Raúl de Nieves: Definitely being in San Francisco. Knowing that there was a part of failure because I decided not to take on the academic route through the school. I felt afraid of debt. I just felt afraid that some of the things that I was working towards had an end there. But I think being afraid is what gave me this exercise to really think about what that looked like. It gave me an opportunity to grow and to start experimenting with what it felt like or what I thought an artist would do in school. What conversations would you have with your peers? Or what was a critique? Who was gonna tell me that this was right or wrong? I can be a masochist and that’s part of one of my best traits because I put myself through hell. But to me, hell is not the hell we live in. To me, hell is the entrance to the subconscious, the unknown and the act of finding what the dragon really looks like. Ajay Kurian: I refuse to believe that it happened. Like debt is such a primal thing and it’s just so hard. I’m thinking of my mother, for instance, and confronting her fears feels impossible. It feels like it’s never gonna happen. There’s incremental things that happen. But what I’ve seen in your work, how you continue to confront new challenges, how you reduce these binaries between life and death, open that passageway. There’s a part of me that’s so hungry to understand how you became friends with death, how you were able to really be okay with those moments of spiking fear, and to welcome this and understand that the dragon is really a snake. Raúl de Nieves: I guess it’s because I grew up in a house full of death, as they say. Essentially, I grew up knowing that death was a reality. I have two brothers and we’re all two years apart. My little brother who was six years old when our father died, has no memory of him. So for us to grow up looking up at the sky, and my mom being like, if you see an airplane, wave to the airplane, ‘cause that’s where your dad is. It was this sense of comfort because when growing up in Mexico, we didn’t see many planes flying over my small little city. So it was a rarity to find some sort of connection through an idea that my mom was planting on us. The celebration of death in my culture is one of the most beautiful things that we have. It’s such a rich and beautiful act of nature to embody this idea of the ephemeral aspect of life and how people are the closest things to us when it comes to a memory. Not having that person next to you creates an idea of sorrow. But for me personally, it has created an idea of safety. That’s why this aspect of life becomes so important. I have really intense conversations with my mom where I’m like, I’m gonna die first, and she’s like no, me, and I’m like, me. And then we’re like, oh my god, we’re so weird. But it’s funny, like I obviously don’t want my mom to die or me, but I’ve thought about death. What would happen if I died tomorrow? Would anyone even care? I don’t have children. I have a family, and I have a lot of friends. We’re seeing so much death every day, and it’s almost a normality. But it’s not celebrated, like we aren’t celebrating the death of people right now. We’re trying to understand the reality of why it is so easy to access this fear now. It’s almost like the fear is gone because it’s prominent and nobody’s celebrating it. We’re just really thinking about what tomorrow brings because it’s far away from us right now, but it can get close any moment. I think that’s when you have to start to really gravitate towards what would this look like if it really happened to me? Ajay Kurian: I was just thinking about this today, so bear with me if I don’t have a full thought here, but there’s this anime called Demon Slay. I’ve been watching it and it’s really brutal. The beginning of the story is really brutal and terribly sad. This new movie came out and apparently it’s like the biggest selling anime film ever. I was just thinking about why that would necessarily be the case? There’s a part of me that thinks exactly what you’re saying about this possibility of celebrating death. Understanding grief as a part of living and being alive. Because that brutality is so present, it almost allows you to sink your teeth into life and really experience something that feels more real and more charged. When I go to your exhibitions, I get the sense that life is charged, that you don’t fuck around. This is real, this is happening, this is important, and it’s joyful and there’s such a spectrum of emotions. This show El Rio, now several years ago, 2016, I just remember being floored by this one character in particular. The body language and behind all the pearls are bullets streaming down the fabric. I was actually shaken. It was such a beautiful, coy, strange sculpture that was in the press release. It alludes to saint or assassin. And I was like, Jesus Christ, this is a lot but it’s really beautiful. So you are left with — what do I do with all of this? Raúl de Nieves: As you can see, this character is wearing a military suit and it is covered in fake pearls, but it also drapes these bullets. You can’t see his eyes, but you can see their smile or their grim. That’s what reminds me that sometimes a saint can’t be a saint without the act of defeat, death, and renewal. So in a way, it is a double-sided image of the self. Not just of the person that decides to take on that role, but the reality of our personal selves and how we have the capacity to flip. It’s one of the scariest things to imagine because you can’t help it. Sometimes you question people’s actions and it’s hard to understand what it is that people are going through when they can’t communicate. This object was a really interesting thing to bring into this exhibition called El Rio, which to me, was work that just accumulated in my studio. It all related back to the idea of St. George and the Dragon, and how the fable really just became my ultimate teacher. I wanted it to teach me something. And it taught me a lot because it’s made me believe in the past. It’s made me understand that by thinking of something that once was here, or an idea or a memory; what would it be like if those memories weren’t here or if those people couldn’t tell you about their future or their stories. So it’s a sense of understanding that our lives come with so many stories from the past, and they usually relate to other people’s lives. Ajay Kurian: This is the next version of St. George and the Dragon. It’s such an insane piece. You really do have something masochistic in you, but it also feels so multidimensional. When you’re talking about the past, it does feel like time is folded on itself over and over again in the drawing itself. All of these things are related, but it’s not like it’s far away or near, it’s like all of the things at the same time. It’s 11 dimensions instead of three. Raúl de Nieves: Yeah. I think for me, spirituality is psychedelia. When you really reach that level of trust and belief and it comes with other people’s practices or ways of thinking, you can tap into something that just takes you there. And as you can see, the image of St. George is so fragmented and now it’s almost like a computer chip. But that was the whole point of using and abusing that image over and over. So that I could access more of myself through this idea of wanting to see the double-sided picture of the self. Ajay Kurian: Were you at all influenced by underground comics when you were growing up? Raúl de Nieves: No, I never was. I think Mario was the only thing we had access to in Mexico when we were little, but I never got into comics. I think I made this when I moved to New York and I learned about this artist, Augustin Lesage, who I believe was a mailman (coal miner). They would get home and make these very intense drawings. The influence of this idea of the self going into hibernation and hallucinating, or using your work ethics as a form to access the subconscious and this idea of psychedelia became so real. I don’t know if it was because I was living in a city that is fragmented by buildings and people, and it’s really moving forward like every day is fast. This became a reflection of landing here and understanding what my idea of wanting to adapt myself into this place felt like. Ajay Kurian: I feel like you’ve probably talked about this a million times, but shoes have been such an important part of your practice. And these are the encrusted results of where the shoe goes? Or are these still part of that series? Raúl de Nieves: Yeah, everything is about the discarded and the shoe became the momentum. It broke down and it was time to throw it away, but instead of throwing it away, I started doing the bead work in a repetitive form and then I was like, whoa, this repetitive notion can really create an organic form of creation. The shoe allowed me to think about structure. I guess shoes do give us some sort of structure, but the discarded object was something that I felt so connected to. It’s so hard to throw away a pair of shoes sometimes, or your favorite underwear or a piece of clothing. It was an accident to start working on the shoes. Before they were decorated with beads, they were just covered in tape or yarn, and a curator was like, that’s a sculpture. And I was like, it’s trash. And they were like, it’s a sculpture. They put it on a white pedestal and I was like, oh my God, it is a sculpture. This is the fun part about taking the advice of others and just believing that maybe you should give it a second chance. Ajay Kurian: I like that it’s a pair. I like that it feels almost pedagogical in a way where there’s these dualities that are meant to undo that duality, whether it’s life or death or whether it’s the artist and curator. That person seeing that work and being like, oh, I think this is something to think about and something to make out of that there’s this doubling that routinely happens and continues on. To see how encrusted and how insane they can get. As much as you’re influenced by the heritage of ancestral traditions in Mexico, there’s also queer and drag culture. So much of that feels like it’s about going over the top and choosing excess almost as a spiritual path. Raúl de Nieves: For sure. I think it is one of my favorite pastime activities. Like you can call me an alcoholic, a drug addict, an overachiever, masochist, a good friend, all of it at once. But I think it was the towering effect of trying to put these things together and believing that these materials were not meant to work together. So it is the duality of the yes and the no. It’s the yin yang. It’s like the Wabi-sabi of life and it became so prominent that this was a direction I needed to go in order to exercise this idea of the making and finding these materials, like throwaway castaway shoes, plastic, inexpensive beads, and hot glue. But when I think about the main material or thought, it’s labor. Labor is something that we forget is so important. I think people undervalue labor and especially when it’s in a sense of a craft. I saw so many artisans growing up in Mexico, and they work on the streets. It’s like their studios and their freedom seems so relatable. But then you can buy these things that are so easily accessible. I wanted to emphasize that into my work. I would think about some of the people that I saw as a child that didn’t exist in the United States. So in a way it was almost like putting a remembrance to something that I knew existed. These things can take forever. The most annoying thing is that yes, as you get a little bit more well known, some collector will buy it and they’ll be like, a bead fell off, or I didn’t know this was made out of hot glue. But it is, and you don’t even have hot glue in life and it’s falling apart. But I think it’s just so beautiful to remember that even art is an ephemeral aspect of life and we get the opportunity to feel important and to have people take care of our objects. But in reality, nothing’s here forever. So I think that’s why, when I look at these works, they exude beauty because beauty can’t exist on an everyday basis. One of my favorite aspects of life is nature. It’s beautiful and it always falls apart, but it comes back stronger. So in a way, the shoes also reference this idea of the tower. If it doesn’t fall apart, it’s not important because in order to understand what life can look like, you have to see the cracks in it and the failure that it comes with, and you only get to learn more from those experiences than having this pristine aspect of the self. Ajay Kurian: There’s a part of that I’m so happy to hear. And then the other part is like, alright, so what are the collectors saying about all this? Raúl de Nieves: I think they’re very happy. They put ‘em in like plexi boxes and it just freezes the work. Now I add resin so that it can have a long lasting life, but I don’t make this kind of work that often anymore, specifically the shoes. It was happening at a time in my life where it was the only thing I could really make. I didn’t have a studio big enough to make a grandiose sculpture or 10 foot stained glass windows. So working in my room or in this tiny space in New York gave me the opportunity to exercise that value. I think that’s something that following my own journey as an artist has been one of the greatest things I could have given myself. Maybe at that moment, not choosing the academic world. The desire to believe in this moment and that I could exercise something just through the simplicity of going to Michael’s and buying $50 worth of beads and taking my dirty shoes and putting beads on it for four months, was incredible. Yeah, never give up. That’s something that I try to always exercise is even if you hit that wall, there’s always tomorrow. Ajay Kurian: So all of that labor, modesty, and working in that small studio then results in having an opportunity that puts a highlight, a spotlight really, on your work that propels other major projects that continue and are continuing right now at Pioneer Works. But this felt like the first major moment where you had the window. You had these figurative sculptures that were telling a loose story and to see someone believe in the practice. What does that feel like and what were the things that you had to break through to find something like this? Raúl de Nieves: It is very emotional to look at this photo because I think it’s a dream of any artist to be asked in these prestigious exhibitions. When I was asked to do this show, my studio was literally the size of a hallway and somehow it was an artist-run space called Secret Project Robot in Bushwick. It had moved several times and they were ending their lease. So I had gotten the opportunity and then my friend Gage, started this club called The Spectrum, and then that closed and we had the Dream House. I was able to make the window for the Whitney Biennial in a basement, so there was no light coming into that basement and it was like thinking backwards. I never really was meant to make these windows. Somehow they were such an afterthought to an exhibition where I would just see a window in an exhibition. In the El Rio show, Company gallery had four little sets of windows, and I put these paper tape trashy windows up. Chris and Mia looked at the work and they were like, why do you do this? And I bullshitted the story by saying it’s a reaction to architecture, but now I realize it is. When they gave me the opportunity, they brought me to the museum and were staring at a vast window and they’re mainly talking about my practice as something that they really saw living in the outside of the museum and having a greater relationship to its community out there than inside the institution. So they really wanted to bring that into the space and have the dual reflection from the street within the space. I was like, I must have won the lottery, because whatever I’m doing is a form of respect and when I close my eyes and make a wish, it’s the only thing I can ask for because I feel like respect really comes with everything that we can imagine. All this work was made, except for the window, at the old Secret Project Robot. And I am so curious to understand how this work is doing, because at that point, the way that I was building these things was so different than what I can do now because I’ve done this so many times now that I understand exactly how the materials will react and what will stop them from having a form of decay. But I also love the idea that maybe this is slowly disintegrating and that’s the beauty of this testament of time. The piece is called “Beginning & the end neither & the otherwise betwixt & between the end is the beginning & the end, so it’s a repetition of time. Ajay Kurian: Do you have a writing practice? Because your titles always sound like they’re from longer poems. Raúl de Nieves: I feel like my writing practice comes a lot with my collaboration with Jesse and Hairbone. My performance practice, specifically the band, allows me to improvise. And I’ve realized I’m really good at improvisation. When it comes to giving a speech, I can give the speech of a lifetime. But it comes from the heart, so when I sit down and really exercise the act of writing, I can get in a really beautiful space. I don’t do it often because I find that it’s such an amazing thing to access at points. I don’t wanna overdo it. Sometimes making art has become such a struggle to want to continue and it’s emotionally draining. So I think finding time to exercise this moment of creating a title or a verse is something that we have to access at that point. Ajay Kurian: I want to go to another project that was really forward facing, this carousel piece. We can see your vocabulary here, but it’s also a ready made form and who you’re collaborating with. There’s so many components to this and the piece turned out and it’s insane. It makes perfect sense. Raúl de Nieves: This defines that I’m crazy. I don’t know. I’m like fucking crazy sometimes and I’m like, stop me. I got asked by our production fund to submit a proposal for a collaboration with Bulgari. I love jewelry and I love the idea of the unattainable, like object of desire, which sometimes is money and status. I was making this in 2018, and it’s so funny to think about where we are now and how art and commerce are best friends and museums want to have relationships. You don’t even have to be an artist. You want the recognition of these entities. And actually, because I’ve had several of them, I realize that they are the modern patrons. They treat you with so much respect and allow you to dream big. They’re almost the only ones that can help you access this crazy form of making. The carousel was such an easy thing to propose. When this brand is talking about legacy, the only thing that came to mind was a carousel and the cycles of life that we go through. Just knowing that this object is something that we all rode as kids. And as you get older, maybe you have the opportunity to do that if you have a child, but the remembrance of time is in a spinning circle. As you can see here, the dragon is once again an aspect of the image. It was almost like the fear itself of saying yes to something so big. I was told not to do this so many times. They were like, nobody’s gonna take you seriously because you’re working with this brand. And I was like, I don’t give a fuck. I wanna take myself seriously and understand what it means to be offered this kind of experience. If it comes with saying goodbye to a traditional way of thinking, then I’ll learn from that. But I think we’ve all left relationships and moved on from things that hold us back. And to me at that moment, I had to listen to my instincts and just believe that this is an opportunity because the world wants you to exercise this idea of the opportunist. But we aren’t opportunists, we are seekers. In a way, this was something that was brought to my attention and I didn’t even take it seriously. And maybe not taking it so serious is what gave me the opportunity to exercise this form of magic. Now I look back at this and it is a monster of its own. The beauty of this thing is that it does exist and these galleries have helped take care of it and it’s been shown throughout the United States in so many different places. So it comes back into my perspective at different times in my life. It is showing me the cycles of time and it still reminds me of that kind of baby self that I had to grow into as an adult. It makes me feel really proud that time has given me this opportunity to exercise some of the craziest things that we can think about. Ajay Kurian: Was that a moment that showed you the limited thinking of a past art world? I don’t actually think the art world is really in that place anymore. Now they welcome any fucking partnership in the world. But I think back then, the idea of selling out and the idea of not being taken seriously was so pertinent and on so many people’s minds. Did it give you license to be like, I know the division that I have? Raúl de Nieves: For us being in the Whitney and being asked by Tiffany to collaborate, was really crazy. It made me believe that people really do care about the arts and people care about people. There is a sense of abundance and this abundance does come with saying yes to things that might make you feel uncomfortable. Especially with fashion and commerce. But we are all part of the cycle. That’s where it’s really interesting to see how much they’re dancing together now and everyone wants to be at the party and everyone wants to have the experience of sitting on that table. And it is a pleasure. It is something that I think should be exercised in many different forms. It also goes back to believing that these things come when they’re supposed to be there. Ajay Kurian: I think that this collaboration worked out beautifully and I actually was really surprised at how well the Tiffany collaboration went. But do you have any hesitance about the ways in which commerce and art have joined forces? I don’t know. You put it so beautifully when you were talking about the difference between being an opportunist and a seeker. I think from the artist level, that’s a beautiful way to put it. It’s very centering and grounding to say that’s the reason why you move towards certain things and not other things. But when you zoom out and look at art, fashion, commerce and all these things, do you feel like we’re okay? Raúl de Nieves: I would definitely say we made a pact with the devil somehow. Behind the scenes, we don’t know where a lot of this money’s coming from and what it can do to a person. But I think from my knowledge and my experience, it’s been a very caring aspect of my relationships and it’s helped me grow. It’s made me take myself a little bit more seriously, which is sometimes hard to get to. But I don’t know. We’ve done so many exhibitions and institutions, and you need to exercise the idea of asking for financial help because we can’t do these things without a sense of capital. It’s so interesting because everyone then thinks that you must be rich or something, but you’re still connected to this idea and network of trust. I’m really happy that people get to exercise these forms of thinking. I think it gives more of these opportunities being awarded and feeling like that is an important gift. The award becomes a self appreciation and most of the time you’re either applying for the award or just secretly being told that you won. I’m just so thankful for the experience that I’ve had with these moments of time. Ajay Kurian: This really stands out to me as one of my favorite exhibitions of yours and of that year. I thought this was one of the best exhibitions that I even saw in images. I’m speechless. I was jealous at how great it was. Thinking about how many people need to come together for something like this. I actually am really curious about the gallery and museum involvement, all of these different parts, how does that come together? You’re giving me a face now — I’m trying to decipher. Raúl de Nieves: These conversations and these visions are so hard to execute. Specifically, this was so intense. I get myself in a lot of trouble by saying I’m gonna do something because then I end up having to do it. It was the same thing for the carousel. Doing this show at the Henry was the same thing where they’re like, oh my God, what do you wanna do? And I said, I want to build skylights with these stained glass windows. And then I was like, shit. But the installation aspect became so natural. The idea of looking up became so important and finding a way for people to connect to the space architecturally. Then I was like, okay, I’ve tapped into something and just from thinking about sites that I visited, like the pyramids in Mexico and how they’re stationed, I wanted to embody that kind of energy. Obviously on a very slow scale. Everything here looks so expensive, but it’s made out of paper tape and paper, and these benches were made out of plywood. The most expensive thing is probably the carpet. But I think it’s the labor of time that you really get to experience in a simple way. The three sculptures that are in the exhibition are works that I’ve had in my life for so many years. This broken sculpture is a portrait of my mother. It was one of the first things I made when I thought I could make a sculpture. I casted my friend in tape and thought I could glue beads on top of the tape and that it wouldn’t fall apart. But guess what? It fell apart. And now I get to show the sculpture over and over again and add something to the piece. So it’s not a work that is for collection, it’s a work that just continues to travel in my life. Ajay Kurian: Oh, that’s beautiful. Raúl de Nieves: It’s called Celebration. So it’s a celebration of time and most of these beads that you see on the platform are either sweepings from my studio or just accumulated trash, if you want to call it that. This is where collaborative thinking really comes to mind, because in reality, this is a work that is made in relationship to the institution. And everyone gets really excited about what it is that you are bringing to the table. So the exhibition courier will be like, let’s do this and let’s focus on making this really beautiful. A lot of these things are other people’s ideas coming into the perspective. So it is a collective mind. This work here, I think it’s called the deaths of every day, was putting so much effort into something and just seeing it collapse and finding that there’s other ways of bringing things back into motion, which is having support. So this is that star that we think we can all become. Ajay Kurian: I want to get to your exhibition at Pioneer Works. You keep saying you get yourself into situations. This feels like another situation. This is a lot of windows. Raúl de Nieves: It’s 50 of them. Ajay Kurian: My stomach sank, just hearing that. Raúl de Nieves: I’m gonna take a shot for this. Pioneer Works is this amazing place. They gave Hairbone and I our first residency and we got to experience having space as a band. We recorded some songs there, we got to play with Psychic tv, and Gabriel has been in my life for 15 years. When he offered me the exhibition, it was his dream to see Pioneer Works as a sacred space. So he was like, please do this for me. And I was like, I gotta do this for me too. Once I said yes, I really felt fucked. I wasn’t getting fucked, but I was just fucking myself over, but in a really beautiful way because I knew what I had said yes to. I was just complaining before this started and someone quoted me saying that this is the last time I’ll do this. In reality it’s not the last time I’ll do this. I’ll maybe consider the labor a little bit more because as you’re making these things, there is a sense of, like help. But once again thinking about labor, they don’t pay an artist to work. They think that whatever you make turns into gold, which it can’t. But making these works, I really wanted to reflect on this idea of the ideology of conversations and symbolism, the past, present, and future, and what that has looked like in my life. The first aspect of the project was asking a question and maybe not having an answer. So the tarot became a very iconography use of language. I’ve got my cards read maybe three times in my life, and the three times that I’ve had the readings, they’ve been quite tragic. I was thinking about why I felt a sense of unluck. Someone wants to tell you that your tower is gonna fall and the card of death is here. Then you as a person, you’re like, it’s over. I think reflecting on seeing these symbols of the end became so important. It gave me more to exercise to the beginning. I do want to see an end to something that allows me to continue again, because that’s what we do every day. In a way paying homage to my life in the times that I’ve been able to experience here in this world is something of beauty. I do use more text that’s a little bit more direct that could be used as a mantra. Like happiness runs in the form of circular motions, close your eyes and manifest the future dream. There is the name of a single person, and it’s Felix Gonzalez Torres. I was thinking so much about what it means to be an artist and who is gonna take care of our legacy afterwards, if that’s even a possibility. And if so, how do we exercise this experience in different forms of making? When I thought about his art and how it is an ephemeral practice and it comes with instructions, it just clicked. I was like, wow, anything is possible as long as you create that knowledge of belief. It really made me feel a sense of comfort to be able to have this space as my latest exhibition because I have seen such beautiful times in New York City in that space. Pioneer Works is a place of community. It’s exercised in that way. So when Gabriel’s dream was to see that space be this, I was like, I can make your dream come true, but you’re also gonna make my dream come true. So we’re both in it together. So yeah, I hope you go and experience this exhibition. It’s up for many months and it has so many beautiful times of day that you can access it. In reality it is gonna be a space that is filled with bodies. I think that’s been one of the most beautiful things to experience — this catharsis of people reacting to the simplicity of a space being filled with light. Ajay Kurian: I feel like a common thread throughout so much of what we’ve talked about today, which is that with belief, whether it be in the self or in the world, can come joy. And that’s what essentially banishes fear. Raúl de Nieves: Yeah, I think for me, self-love is what respect brings you, and that is just one of the best gifts I’ve been able to give myself. Appreciating not just my body, but my consciousness. In a way it really reacts to a form of being a happy person and acknowledging joy as a gift of life. Ajay Kurian: This is a funny thing to bring up now, but in talking about being a happy and joyful person, what is it about the smashing pumpkins that you love so much? Raúl de Nieves: Oh man. When I was a teenager and wanted to be cool, that band was like wearing eyeliner and silver pants and James Iha looked like he was like a girl. And I was just like, I need to be that. They gave me this beauty of exercise, of believing in the magic of the hero. They were my ultimate heroes and they paved the days for me to exercise that form of performance and music. They were like my angels coming down and saying, the world is a vampire. Ajay Kurian: I can’t and I’m not gonna add anything to that. This is a great time for questions. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Tracing Absence and the Lives We Inherit: NewCrits Talk with Tamika Abaka-Wood

She builds archives, conjures futures, and questions everything. Tamika Abaka-Wood on ritual, refusal, and the joy of cultural strategy. Tamika Abaka-Wood is a cultural anthropologist, conceptual strategist, and artist whose practice moves between community building, archival work, and spiritual inquiry. She's the creator of Dial-An-Ancestor, an ongoing project that collects voice notes as offerings to the past, present, and future. Her work resists categorization, merging care and critique, and often asks: what are we remembering, and who are we remembering for? She explains: * Why she’s more interested in frameworks than mediums * How Dial-An-Ancestor creates a space for grief, communion, and speculative healing * The tension between facilitation and authorship in creative work * What it means to build archives that feel alive—not extractive * How refusal and withholding can be generative tools * Why she resists the singular identity of “artist,” and what she embraces instead * The ethics of visibility, looking, and representation in public programming * How joy and mischief shape her strategies for imagining otherwise (0:00) Welcome + Intro(08:30) Refusing the artist title, reshaping the role(13:00) Strategy as creation(17:22) Dial-An-Ancestor: calling in future histories(26:08) Branding is not world-building(30:31) Building intimacy into the infrastructure(35:03) Refusal is not a pause, it’s a position(44:00) Grief, play, and spiritual maintenance(48:21) How to get involved with NewCrits Follow Tamika: Web: https://tamikaabakawood.com/ Instagram: @tamikaka Learn more about Dial-An-Ancestor: https://dial-an-ancestor.com/ Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Hi everybody. Welcome to the July NewCrits Talk and Summer Party. Thank you all for coming! I met Tamika through my partner Jasmine, who's here tonight. From day one she was electric, a mile a minute, excited about anyone's excitement, game for anyone's game, a facilitator par excellence. Whatever you supplied, she'd give back threefold with tangents, detours, serious things and fun things, codified and color coded. Tamika wants to help. She wants people to see their ideas through, and to excite them to build the worlds they're making and to believe in the possibility of a different tomorrow without blinders on. She's not deaf to misery or darkness, but somehow she manages to channel her best energies to maintain a joyful persistence. It's only recently that Tamika has felt comfortable calling herself an artist, and she probably wants to chime in right now and question the importance of the name. Anyways, she has self-identified as a cultural anthropologist and I think that's definitely true. Her ongoing project, Dial-An-Ancestor, is a beautiful testament to this where she gathers future histories into a building archive. But her work as a kind of conceptual strategist is also its own form of cultural anthropology. And I'm interested in people who are creating in multiple ways in multiple worlds. But really I insist on the term artist, not because everyone needs to be an artist, but because I think it allows her to momentarily assume the role of head creative and not facilitator. She's not alone, of course, but sometimes when you're in an ensemble, it's time for your solo. The group steps back and lets you play because what you have is special and singular, and the group knows you'll come back. But for that moment, it's about you, and this is a chance for that to happen. This is Tamika's world, and tonight we're all in it together. Please help me welcome Tamika Abaka-Wood. Tamika Abaka-Wood: That was so special, thank you. I feel so shy, I really do. That was beautiful. Ajay Kurian: Of course. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Thanks for having me here. It is still surreal. Ajay Kurian: What's surreal about it? Tamika Abaka-Wood: What is surreal about it? I think you touched on it there. I definitely feel more comfortable in a facilitator role — a question asker role. You anticipated my reaction to the word artist, and you're a fine artist. Big A. Ajay Kurian: So they say. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Who's they? Ajay Kurian: I dunno. Ajay Kurian: There are prompts over there, so I'm gonna ask you one of the prompts and then we'll get into what these prompts are. How's your head, your heart, and your body right now? Tamika Abaka-Wood: Okay, let's start with body. I came back from London yesterday last night, so in my body it's like midnight, which is way past my bedtime. But my body feels relatively relaxed. I feel like my heart's beating maybe a little bit fast and I'll ease into this weird space. My head feels really unburdened and my heart's really open. I went to London because my mom is sick and I got to be there with her, and it reminded me that life is so much more important than anything else. And doing it with people is so much more important than anything else. So I feel really grateful that I was there and I feel really grateful that I'm here. Ajay Kurian: Oh, I'm wishing your mother well. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Thank you. How's your head, heart, and body? Ajay Kurian: Let's see. I'm only gonna answer so many questions from you but I'll answer that one. My head is clear. I just got back from Bard where I was teaching for the last three weeks, so I need to clear out a little bit more. But I feel like, as I prep for these things, I try to do some breathing and get that clear. My heart is always open in these conversations because really it is a very responsive thing. I'm here to celebrate the things that you do and that makes it easy to have an open heart. And my body's okay. I want to start with Dial-An-Ancestor 'cause I think it's probably the project that has created the most iterations. Maybe it's the thing that's built a momentum in which this becomes an artistic practice and one that's of course related and implicated in cultural anthropology. But this is a very specific project and it's one that's very open and you have the ways that you want it to be. And that's interesting to me 'cause this is this is a vision — what you want it to be. So I want to hear the beginning. I want to hear how this started and kind of the bones to the flesh to where we are. Tamika Abaka-Wood: So Dial-An-Ancestor is a techno-spiritual hotline. It is gonna exist for a hundred years, which is obviously beyond my lifetime, purposefully. It asks people to do two things; to consider who is asked to listen and who is asked to speak. That is the most blunt, simple two questions that this artistic process asks. But it came around in 2021 when I was pregnant for the first time. I know it's so biographical, but I just think I wanna go straight there with you. I was pregnant for the first time and it was unexpected and it was really exciting and scary, and made me realize how precious and precarious time is. At the same time that I had this germination of life within me, I also got a call from back home in London that my dad was really sick, so I've got two parents that are sick at the moment. So it was conceptually holding life and death at the same time and being like, oh my God, I'm the link between what was before and what is to come, what do I wanna do with that? So it made me think about ancestry and links between the past and the future, but within my body for the first time. That's where it came from within my body, but also it was 2021 and I was new in America. Ajay Kurian: That's lot of new things. Tamika Abaka-Wood: It was a lot of new things at one time. But it came out of a learning experience, so twice a week I got on Zoom with seven people who are strangers that I did not know, and we had a self-directed course that was about unraveling our relationships to time. I know, it is like the weirdest thing to do. Ajay Kurian: How did that even happen? Tamika Abaka-Wood: I just know a guy that knows a guy. Honestly, that's how anything in my life happens. I have no idea. Just like through WhatsApp, there was this group. Ajay Kurian: Know a guy that knows a guy, that's like intellectual gangsterism. Tamika Abaka-Wood: No, true. Like I don't know anything. I just know people that know things and I get put on. So we were unraveling on our relationships to time, and this is where Dial-An-Ancestor really came from conceptually. Ajay Kurian: Of course it happened in a group. Tamika Abaka-Wood: It had to, there's no other way. Every good idea, if you really boil it down, comes from multiple dialogues and multiple references. Like you can't really locate it in one place or one person. There's a multitude of unraveling of references over a lifetime that leads you to one idea. An idea finds a person or a set of people at the right time. Ajay Kurian: And so this was that time. There were so many thoughts that were going through my head right then where I think that's true for all artistic creation. The funny thing is that when people take on the name artist, they do slough off the group. They’ll say that they're for the group. They’ll say that they're for the community. But there are instances, and I'm not damning all artists and I'm not saying that everybody does this — it’s not that severe. But there are instances where that dynamic falls away, and then the singular artist is raised up and we get the genius. And what I hear in what you're saying is that you're keeping all the things that make that rich and real and true. That's the time when I understand why maybe you shy away from the term artist because it does consolidate so much of that feeling of the one. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Ugh, yeah. So much of that is western ideology. It's never been real. It's never ever been a real thing. And this isn't to shun the idea of a singular artist, I think that's so important as well. Ajay Kurian: Absolutely. Tamika Abaka-Wood: I'm interested in the idea of the me within the we and vice versa. But for me, the way that I've been ignited, I definitely need external catalysts and factors to stimulate thinking and doing and practicing. I guess this is a really bastardized, quiet, and trite understanding of what an artist is, but I'm just gonna do it anyway. So I think the traditional understanding of an artist is someone standing in a room being like listen to me, I've got the answers, I’m an artist. I came up with this individual like singular genius thought and I'm being praised for it, like in silo. But nothing ever happens in silo. Whereas, I guess the thing that is interesting or natural for me through Dial-An-Ancestor is there are all of these things happening around me. What is the kind of consensus of what it is that we need as humanity right now? Or what mistakes are we making? Where are we tripping up? What is it that we're yearning for? What do we need collectively? And then is there something within that where I can play a role in at least moving us forwards as a people. So there's a step before the individual idea, which is based off of need. Ajay Kurian: But then that part of it does still take guts because I think there's so many times when you have conversations with people and people are like, that's a fucking good idea. You have an energy, but then it just fizzles and nothing happens. But the difference between somebody saying, this is real. We've all acknowledged that these problems are real, and the solution that we're collectively coming to is also real. So let's go do something. That step of doing something is usually terrifying enough that it stops 99% of people from doing the thing. So for you, what was the thing that made you start this. Let me start Dial-An-Ancestor and let me make this real in whatever way. Tamika Abaka-Wood: It's such a good question. So my background is in research insight and strategy, where you inherit a brief that has come from somewhere else and someone else and you don't really know what purpose it's serving ultimately. Whereas this kind of brief and idea I could fully see, and it almost felt as if there was no other choice but to try. I was really purposeful about being a guest in New York. It happened in 2021. I was living in Bedstuy, I was new and I wanted to be a good guest. So for a year I was like, I'm just gonna sit back and figure out how things are done around here. I think the steps to realizing Dial-An-Ancestor and making it real were baby ones, which involved other people. So it kind of spread the risk as well. There's an accountability that comes with doing things in groups, but there's also a spread of risk. So when I say it's our thing, not my thing, I think it's me being like, Hey, love me, I’ve got an idea. I have things to say, judge me, love me, pay attention to me. But also this is really scary and I can't do it by myself, and I know that I don't have the skillset to do it by myself, so who else is around me that I can lean on when things do get nerve wracking or I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing. Ajay Kurian: So just like the basic existence of Dial-An-Ancestor is that it's a hotline that you can call and record yourself as a future ancestor. I feel like we should listen to one. Tamika Abaka-Wood: We should listen to one for sure. Ajay Kurian: All right. I feel like we should start with “I wanna be a giant”. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Oh my gosh, yes. Start with “I wanna be a giant". This was anonymous by the way. I went full stalker mode to figure out who left this. DAA audio: Hi, I'm Reva Rutherford. I started the record a message before and then I realized I had my air pods in, which have water damage. So this is me calling again. I wanted to share a half written poem that I have in my notes. I write mantras and manifestos in my notes a lot. So yeah. Here's one. No more shrinking. I wanna be a giant. I want my titties to swing to the floor when I laugh. I want to step over all the fucked up towns white people create. I'm gonna be a giant so I can leave my big footprint on your ass if you fuck with me. I wanna be a giant. Unassailable. If you try and shoot me down the bullets ricochet. No more shrinking. Hear me roar. I'm trying to exchange tips with Godzilla at the kickback. Zine and pen in my back pocket so I can doodle newfound manifestos in the margins. I wanna be a giant, so big that I can grab the moon out the sky. I wanna be so big the moon gave the moves out the way for me. I wanna be a giant so I can stuff the clouds into my cone, smoke it and feel the entire world in my chest. I wanna be a giant so all the kids can play on my back when I lay down. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Right? So sick. So this person left a voicemail twice and the first time that they did it there was like a little stutter in their voice, which I actually really liked. But they left this message again and I had to listen back to it over and over again to catch the name, Reva Rutherford. I was like, who is this like secret notes app poet? I must find them. They're from New Jersey. It didn't take that long to honestly find them, but New Jersey poet. We ended up connecting and chatting afterwards, but they are so fantastic and I think there's something of a confessional aspect to being able to leave your truth to whoever is listening. Regardless of like where they're at, context, any of the various identities that we play with and perform and put on. It felt so pure and so wonderful that I had to second guess myself to be like, should I reach out? Is this kind of like breaking the spell? Is this being unfair to the person that left it? Thankfully she was into it, but what I'm trying to say is morally, there are a lot of questions that this throws up for me that I do not have the answers to right now. Ajay Kurian: Before getting into that moral quandary of stalking someone. Good intentions, we'll stick with that. But when you're doing something that's so based in community and collaborative, I think the question that comes up for me and something that I'm thinking about now is when you're beginning something, how long does it take before it turns into something that you believe in? You start dialing Ancestor and nobody's called, that's a thing that probably happened and then you get your first call. Tamika Abaka-Wood: So the way that people find out about Dial-An-Ancestor is mainly through like street intervention. So we paste them, I don't have time, I don't have money. I come from a very working class background where we grew up quite poor, but conceptually and the ideas that were instilled into me in these like limitless propositions, we were surrounded by them. So there's a really lovely playing with scale where it was like, nothing's impossible, but your material reality means that right now you have $250 to figure out how to turn this techno spiritual intergenerational exchange into something tangible that people can interact and fuck with. So how do you do that? That's a huge leap from how do we share knowledge intergenerationally to, you have $250. Like how do you actually activate that? I wheat pasted for the first time, it was the scariest thing in the world. 'cause like I'm trying to make friends. I'm in New York, I don't really know anyone that well. This is the kind of left field idea. Maybe one of the most visible acts of the way that I think that I've put into the world, which felt really scary for me. But people fucked with it immediately. Weirdly, it’s now like the tail end. We love a new thing, we love a launch. We don't really love maintenance and care. It’s really boring to see this same wheat pasted thing over and over again. And it makes me think so much — Mierle Laderman Ukeles, you know who I'm talking about? Ajay Kurian: Yeah, Ukeles. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Maintenance art and her manifesto. I dunno how, but I found it and I think so much of her work really resonates with me for that reason. The invisible labor that comes around maintaining a thing is not as sexy as the launch of a thing. So actually I'm finding it harder now than I did going out wheat pasting for the first time because everyone's like, oh my God, so cool, what is this? I wanna get involved. Whereas after four years it's oh, same thing again. Ajay Kurian: But now that you now you have all these stories, now there’s there's maintenance. You get people that are like, oh yeah I know that, they move on and that's fine. To me it's the ongoing stories and it is the thing of just constantly meeting new people that meet it where it is, and when they see it, they're like, holy shit, this is an archive of four years and it's gonna be going for another 96 and I can potentially be a part of it. And even what you were saying before about when people call, there is a very confessional tone. The energy on the phone is almost grave. They start talking and you can feel that they feel like either they're gonna make a detour and be like, I need to be irreverent about this. Or there's consequence and I need to treat this with consequence. I think that makes for a very fascinating project and a fascinating archive. But the, I totally hear you in terms of maintenance. So this is how the website exists. This is the format. But then you also have a deck for it. I guess I'm curious — who is the deck for? Tamika Abaka-Wood: Great question. I don't know how many people here are like in the big A art world. I have no idea how you people make anything happen because it is painstakingly slow. I come from a more so a break glass option. People reach out to me when it's ‘fuck, we've exhausted all options’. We can't do this internally. We need an outside point of view and process that is not our own to make something happen. So I think I'm really used to doing things on like an accelerated timeline. That’s become my natural pace of putting things out into the world. Otherwise I'll just talk myself out of it. But I've found that any inbound kind of inquiries from the art world, immediately I'm like, let me put a deck together. I'm gonna put this together in 24 hours. Otherwise the opportunity's gonna dissipate because that is so used to how I'm working. But girl, I've gone like a year and a half waiting for some people to get back to me who shall not be named right now, but god damn. So I make the decks really quickly, but they're usually for inbound inquiries that I couldn't do by myself. All of this is at a scale that my money, my time, and my energy can afford. But if someone comes into the inbox, which is really rare, and say ‘Hey, I'd love to turn this into and X, Y, Z, or what are you thinking about turning this into something more physical immediately?’ I'll pull an all-nighter to be like, okay, this is the idea. This is what we can do. Where do I meet you where you are at to make sure that this is something that is a joint process and is mutually beneficial. So I've probably got hundreds of those decks. Ajay Kurian: I think you should just send an email back. I think there's a level sometimes, at least in the art world, what I've seen is that there is too much is ‘oh shit, I don't even operate that’ or ‘I'm not this prepared’. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Yes. There is a word for this in East London vernacular that I've grown up with and it's stushness. Have you heard that ness? Ajay Kurian: No. Tamika Abaka-Wood: So I grew up in East London slash Essex, depending on where your positionality is. But stushness is you've gotta withhold. You can't put it all out on the table. The act of refusal is actually really powerful. I think some of these psychological games that all of you are playing in the capital A art world, like I'm not hip to yet. So I actually think that's really brilliant advice, but this is something that is bigger than me and bigger than all of us. So I just feel like I wanna keep the momentum going. But I hear what you're saying. Ajay Kurian: I have so many decks of yours open. I love the decks, do not get me wrong. This is in no way a shaming, it's more so to me that there's something very valuable about seeing these decks because I do think that there are ultimately multiple ways of operating and multiple ways of expressing an idea. Sometimes having the clarity of a vision and being like, this is what we can do, this is how we can roll it out. This is how it can be meaningful and this is the role that you play. It doesn't have to be so hard and it doesn't make you more intelligent to be vague. Tamika Abaka-Wood: A hundred percent. It does not need to be deeper or more complex or complicated than it is. Also, I think I tend to see things in power structures and who really holds the power. Sometimes when you upset the power hierarchy and being like, wait, I actually have a vision and thank you for giving me this opportunity. I actually have thought about this in depth. It skews the natural hierarchy that an outsider artist is supposed to come into the conversation or the dialogue with that is not so helpful because power can only really talk to power. And I think sometimes we confuse agency and decision and choice with power. I think sometimes I try maybe a little bit too quick, I need to think of my when on to reveal. Ajay Kurian: The art world is an interesting place in that there's these functionaries of power that have no power and there's a precarity there. There's like a lived precarity in that most of them are paid shit, or some of them have wealth already or have some forms of security, but many others do not. And they're just doing that job and they're putting things together and making it work. So in that position, I feel like they see something that feels more quote unquote corporate. There's also an aversion where it's oh, this isn't what we're about. This isn't how we function. That's something that has occurred to me and something that I'm just wondering about because I want to say I wouldn't have been that person, but maybe I would. So maybe I would see a deck like this and be like, wait, what is she doing? That's just something that I had to learn where this is a really beautiful way to express yourself and for somebody to be brought into the fold and that you can build something and it's not scary. I think people are also scared by confidence, especially when it's from a black woman, but like I think there's something that can be threatening about a level of confidence where it’s, I have my ducks in a row, do you? And then it's on them. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Without a doubt. I think the idea of governance and operating structures and who does what… This is the difference between joint process and collaboration that we've spoken about before. I don't like collaboration and people are like, oh my God, what do you mean? I don't like it because I feel like there's a level of accountability that people can shoo away from when there is no understanding of where you are at in the process. My mission in life, and it might change, is to make potent, irresistible, malleable imprints for other people to fuck with, and the other people to fuck with is really important. But I'm coming in with a point of view and a directive and a mission and where I want this to go. That keeps me accountable to the broader mission of whatever the thing is, right? Facebook started as a thing that was about intimacy and forging connections and then people gain power and start to really lose the guiding principles of why they started the thing in the first place. I'm not immune to that at all. So I think some of this is also about holding myself accountable and keeping me in place as to what we're actually doing here. So I think, I'm threatened by this as well. I'm like, how the fuck am I gonna make this happen? I've said it out loud, but it's a really scary thing to say this thing is gonna exist for a hundred years. Ajay Kurian: But I don't doubt that it will. When you have people reach out, are they interested in the archiving aspect? Are they interested in how you're framing time? It's even in the deck here, the concept of braided time and how you're thinking about complicating how we address time. What is the spatiality of this project? How does it take form and how does it move into space? Because for instance, it doesn't have an Instagram account, it doesn't have a social media presence. It is just wheat pasting and word of mouth. What are these stipulations? And if it is about reaching more people and getting out there, why these limitations? Tamika Abaka-Wood: I think we are in a really big data, low context time right now, and so much of our lives have been designed to be frictionless and to take away any like difficulty in making a thing happen. So much of Dial-An-Ancestor comes from quite a radical socialist practice. My parents are very socialist. I am from the uk, I am mixed black. I have a lot of contradictions and tensions within my being that have been there for forever. Some of those things are really generative and useful and complicate the way that we move through the world and I just like complication. I like things that don't fall off of the bone because so much of our lives are just fucking frictionless right now. There's so many barriers to Dial-An-Ancestor. It sounds so simple, but so much of this is anti mimetic. If it finds you, it's supposed to find you. If you get it, it's probably for you. And if you don't get it, that's also fine. I don't really mind. It's not about scale and numbers and productivity and how big this thing gets, it's just, does it interrupt or intervene in someone's life? I guess that's where the spatiality comes from. It is an unignorable intervention that asks a very human question, no matter who you are. I like that the friction and the non explanatory nature of it, because it naturally keeps a lot of people out. Ajay Kurian: It's I just learned about this a week or two ago. One of the students at Bard was talking about an indigenous writer, and forgive me for not remembering who the writer is, but the idea was that there's low context information and high context information. And through the process of the enlightenment, we prioritize low context information. That’s isolating and abstracting and creating something that we can look at and be like, oh, that's a universal. There's a universal man, quote unquote, and there's universal ideals and ideas. And these are very low context ideas. With that structure in my head, I'm looking at projects differently and thinking about what are the benefits of that friction and that high context that can offer some forms of aesthetic resistance that feel like, if this becomes a model for reality and how we want to exist and persist with one another, then maybe that starts offering different opportunities for things to happen. Tamika Abaka-Wood: I think this is why I landed in anthropology and not in art, because I think that is like the natural home. I think it's a discipline that has a lot to answer for, obviously, but I think it's a discipline that is absolutely scared of its own potential because it asks too many questions and doesn't offer solutions, offerings, gifts for other people to configurate in different ways. Because so much of Dial-An-Ancestor came from the frustration of feeling like we were making the same mistakes over and over again. And in 2021 Black Lives Matter, that was so embedded in our consciousness, but I didn't trust it. I didn't trust it and I didn't believe it and I was really worried that we were looking at this thing really myopically and not thinking beyond our lifetimes and before our lifetimes. Like this playbook is the same frigging playbook, but in a slightly different context. I think abstraction is great because we understand what it means to be human, those type timeless qualities. But what does it mean for those things to exist in the context that we live in today? Ajay Kurian: Yeah. To me it's about volume in a way. Like water is good and necessary, but you drink enough of it and you die. Abstraction is the same thing to me. We're abstracting at every single point in time. There's never a time when our brain is accepting all evident information around us. But when you abstract to the point when you can dehumanize or you can create categories that have no bearing on reality, that abstraction starts putting lies into the world. And then it's a different thing and you can mobilize that and do things with it and have create power from that. There's realms of abstraction to me. Tamika Abaka-Wood: I think that is so interesting. This is the way that my brain works, it’s like all over the place. I don't have an art background at all. So when you are saying some of these things, if I'm picking up the wrong end of the stick, just let me know. Ajay Kurian: I don't think there's a wrong one. Tamika Abaka-Wood: To me, the way that you've described abstraction, it feels like that is a very important thing for each of us to do as individuals, right. A very basic theory of change of how to make anything happen. The way that I see it, it's so fucking simple. You be the individual and see the individuals that are around you. You unite those people together with a common cause or a mission and then you tackle the challenge. But it seems like we skip tackling the challenge immediately and don't think about scales of intimacy when it comes to introspection and how to relate to ourselves so we can relate to other people. I think that abstraction should happen but internally as an internal process. As a mixed black person, that level of abstraction and understanding of the way that I exist in the world, my own gaze on myself changes depending on where I'm at. And other people's gaze of me also changes depending on where they're at and where I'm at. There's multiple gazes. If we did that level of abstraction within ourselves, I think the world would be such a better place. I remember having a conversation with a mixed friend, in a group of people, and several negronis down, so Lord knows what I was saying. But someone asked, as a mixed person do you feel confused? And I remember being like, fuck yeah. Are you not confused? I wish that everyone felt more confused about their positionality in the world when it came to race, when it came to gender, when it came to gender expression, when it came to the heteronormative or ableism, all of it. I'm like, gang, there's no way that none of you are not confused about this. Maybe you need to abstract within yourselves a little bit more. Am I understanding abstraction right? Ajay Kurian: I think so. I think there's plenty of ways to understand it, but that's the way that I was thinking about it in this particular circumstance. I think the fact that you turn it inwards is what can be so valuable about it. Because for instance, growing up and going to the movies; If I were not to abstract, then I'd go to the movies and I wouldn't be able to identify with anyone 'cause I wasn't there. And so, you have to abstract and say, I'm that white character, right? I identify with that character and I identify with that struggle. That struggle is an abstraction. So for that to even occur, there has to be a flight from self. Then you return to self with the gifts that gave you. If you leave and don't come back, you've become potentially tyrannical. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Classic hero's journey type. You need to return back to self with the new information. So much of the archive from Dial-An-Ancestor is so interesting right now. Because obviously it's people's own stories and ways of moving through the world in their own voice. I don't know where I'm going with this exactly, but I'm really interested in the material and printing out the words on paper. Understanding what those stories feel like in someone else's body and voice as a way to gain empathy. Then to abstract and be in someone else's shoes for a second, and intonation of voice, do you know what I mean? It's a really difficult thing to feel and to do. Ajay Kurian: On the flip side of that, an interesting foil to this is that in hearing the quality of sound that it's on a telephone. It's not like Hi-Fi production, and it drops you into something so specific that it almost allows for more abstraction. In art school you'll hear this a lot and in a lot of different circumstances, but you gotta go specific in order to go universal. There's a space of if you get the texture of something that feels really intimate and specific, more people will respond to that. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Oh, a thousand percent. Do you know what the amount of people that have left voice notes, that I know deeply, and are like obsessed with mallards or something so specific, but will live, laugh, love on this archive. And then I'm like, oh, this is also my responsibility in something that is so limitless and so open to provide a few more specific prompts that gets the person to be as hyper specific about what it is to be them in this time, in this body walking through this world as a way for more people to be intimate from that, you know? Ajay Kurian: That's beautiful. This is one of the spatialization of this project. This is one of the ways that this has turned into something else. This feels important for so many reasons. Tamika Abaka-Wood: Yeah, play it. Dial-An-Ancestor Audio: Hey this is Nadia Hun. I'm calling in to tell you a story and this story is with a promise. The promise is that there are Palestinians in the future, and here's my story on humanizing the Palestinians and how to do it. I am really good at code switching. Perhaps it's my blended identity. I am half Palestinian and half polish — an identity that loves to be objectified. I have heard every strange remark, othering remarks, racist remarks, islamaphoc remarks, classist remarks, oh, you're from Pakistan, et cetera. I grew up with that. I learned as most Palestinian kids learn that the very word Palestine or Palestinian is an act of revolution. I grew up mostly around white Latins in Miami, another strange identity marginalized in the US by the American settlers of this land, but at the top of race and class structures back home. W hite Colombians, white Venezuelans, white Cubans, et cetera. What you learn quickly when you are a blended race, ethnicities, languages, and religions, is that race in the US is completely made up. An indigenous, brown-eyed and brown-skinned person from Mexico checks off the same Hispanic box. As a light-skinned blonde, blue-eyed Colombian, it is designed to erase indigeneity, which is the core cause of all subtler states. Growing up in Miami meant that almost everyone I interacted or stayed with assumed I was Latina, and after a while I stopped correcting because to correct meant to say what I really am. And to say Palestine to White, Catholic, Latin at a Miami private school would prompt a plethora of strange responses for a plethora of reasons. This strange identity soup on the land that is not ours, that is stolen from the quest of peoples, created a version of me that can talk to anyone about anything. I know when I am talking to a white Jewish American about the federal state of Israel, that I need to almost always preface with an antidote that my family too was murdered in Auschwitz, that I'm a Polish citizen, that I speak Polish. It's a way of disarming a white person with my whiteness, and that is the part that I want to talk about today. My white Polish grandmother of Jewish ancestry, who lives in Miami right now could become an Israeli citizen with a snap of a finger. Her trip would be paid for, she would be given land, and she would become a first class citizen in an ethno state with an advanced military that is funded by the United States. My Palestinian grandmother who is older than the state of Israel itself, and lives in Jordan right now, she could never go back to the land she was born in. Never. She would never be given citizenship and she would never be allowed on a land that was once hers. There is no way to justify that. And the main question I would like you, the listener, to ask yourself is, why does the rest of the world always have to pay for the atrocities of Europe? Why? Why is it that we Palestinians have to talk to you about this only when white people are killed? Why? Why don't we engage in armchair activism around the clock? The very concept of Gaza, an open air prison created by Israel where people are not allowed to work, fish, farm, or leave. Why? That is the question I'd like everybody to meditate on. And lastly, I wanted to say that I know there cannot be an earth without us because there has never been an us without the earth no matter how much they try. You know the word Palestine? The word Palestine is a radical act in itself. I hope you're having a good day, dear listener, wherever you are. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Codes, Color, and Mapping the Invisible: NewCrits Talk with Candida Alvarez

She paints memory, sensation, and the space between languages. Candida Alvarez on intuition, inheritance, and color as a vessel for care. Candida Alvarez is a painter whose work explores personal and cultural memory through abstraction, vivid color, and layered visual language. She draws from Caribbean diasporic experience, family history, and city life to build complex surfaces that hold both clarity and mystery. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Chicago Cultural Center, with recent major exhibitions at GRAY Gallery, Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez, and her first large-scale museum survey, Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, at El Museo del Barrio. She explains: * Growing up bilingual and between cultures, and how that shaped her approach to painting and storytelling * Why color, surface, and rhythm carry emotion, memory, and political charge * Painting for resonance instead of clarity, and letting intuition lead the process * Using abstraction to hold grief, joy, labor, and inheritance in the same frame * Returning to domestic and familial spaces as a way to build intimate visual worlds * How risk, repetition, and instinct guide her through not knowing what the painting wants * The connection between care, culture, and making art that listens as much as it speaks (00:00) Learning to See as a Bilingual Kid(10:18) Color as Voice and Resistance(20:47) Working Through Grief and Reverence(31:02) Abstraction as Intimacy(42:11) Teaching, Listening, and Long-Term Practice(52:36) Making Shows that Listen Back(01:04:10) Holding Presence in a Fast World(01:14:32) Refusing to Be Defined by Trends(01:24:45) Language, Memory, and the Visual Archive(01:34:56) Painting as a Form of Freedom Follow Candida:Web: https://www.candidaalvarez.com/Instagram: @candida_alvarez_studio [https://www.instagram.com/candida_alvarez_studio/?hl=en] Follow GRAY Gallery:Learn more about Candida Alvarez’s exhibition, Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez, at GRAY Gallery NY here [https://www.richardgraygallery.com/viewing-rooms/67e3215cd2462d7fd9021df6#tab-1:thumbnails;tab-2:thumbnails].Web: https://www.richardgraygallery.com/Instagram: @richardgraygallery [https://www.instagram.com/richardgraygallery/] Follow El Museo del Barrio: Learn more about Candida Alvarez’s first large-scale museum survey, Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, at El Museo del Barrio. here [https://www.elmuseo.org/exhibition/candida-alvarez-circle-point-hoop/].Web: https://www.elmuseo.org/exhibition/candida-alvarez-circle-point-hoop/Instagram: @elmuseo [https://www.instagram.com/elmuseo/#] Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: “Dame un numero” which means “give me a number”, Candida’s mother would tell her. She intuitively knew that her mother meant a number from one to 26 in accordance with the alphabet. Selecting a number meant selecting a letter, and the letter would be her mother's compass to find out who is trying to contact her from beyond this realm. I love this story. It so quickly highlights how Candida is in this world and others, and the plays she sees in living. I met Candida Alvarez in 2023 at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a residency program in Maine where we both were faculty that year. I got to see her process as an educator and an artist, and at the root of both is a profound level of observation and responsiveness. It's always fun to talk to Candida. But when you ask her questions about painting and her practice, there's a different level of focus than that emerges. One where I notice myself hanging onto her every word. There were many times when it felt like she was tapped into something past this world, and her words were like a tunnel to that elsewhere. In those moments, it's best to shut up and listen. So I went back and listened to the talk that she gave at Skowhegan. When she finished, she was going like a mile a minute, and then she finally finishes and she quietly stops and says, thank you. And in what became typical fashion of the end of a Skowhegan talk, the room erupted with both applause and foot stomps more like a stadium than an art talk. But then a hush came over the room as she opened it up to questions. You could even hear it in the recording, and it’s something that I can't really explain. You could hear the spotlight on her, the concentration on what she was about to say. What I wanna say is that Candida has a bit of magic about her, and after a long time, New York gets to feel it. So with that, I'm just gonna list off some accolades of yours. Alvarez has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Luma Foundation, among others. Recent awards include the Trellis Art Fund Award, the Latinx Artist Fellowship Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and the Perez Art Museum in Miami, among many others. Everybody give it up for Candida Alvarez! Candida Alvarez: Thank you. That was so beautiful. Ajay Kurian: How are you? Candida Alvarez: I'm not sure. Ajay Kurian: Let's start with a number. I feel like the number 2 is the one that always comes up for you. Candida Alvarez: Well, I was born the second day of the second month and I'm the second child. So I guess you could say 2 does circle around me. But if I asked you, what would you say? Ajay Kurian: I would say 23. Candida Alvarez: 23. Candida Alvarez: T? No, UVWX. Ajay Kurian: Anybody? Candida Alvarez: X? Ajay Kurian: X? Candida Alvarez: No, no. There's 20. It's Z. That's a big one. Ajay Kurian: Z, Y,, T, V, W, X, Y, Z. So Z, Y, X. Yeah. It's 20. It's X. Candida Alvarez: Yeah. Okay. X. Ajay Kurian: What do we do with X? Candida Alvarez: Malcolm X, Latin X. Ajay Kurian: Oh shit. Candida Alvarez: X-ray, Extra, Xavier — X is a hard one, but not really. X is like multiplication, right? X is the thing you don't wanna get when you go up to show your math teacher the answer to the problem and she goes, X it means wrong. Ajay Kurian: I feel like I guessed wrong. Candida Alvarez: No, you did what you had to do. You gave me a challenge because that's a long way down the list. If my mother asked me, I would say four. I never played that all the way at the end. Ajay Kurian: But you played that game enough that you knew like, don't do twenties. That's X. I'm new to this game. Candida Alvarez: It's all right. Ask me another question. Ajay Kurian: We're looking at your retrospective here at El Museo del Barrio and it's called ‘Circle, Point, Loop’. Here are some install shots of works that are called View from John Street. Candida Alvarez: Yeah, those charcoal drawings were from John Street, Brooklyn where I had a studio and that building's still there and there are still artist studios there. I was up on the second floor and it was a great space. It was one of my first spaces in New York. It was very dangerous. I remember one of my father's friends gave me a really old car to drive. I could see the plant and I could see the water beyond. I had a residency in Germany that was through a program in Philadelphia — creative artist network, I believe. And I learned about it through a fellow artist in residence, Charles Burwell, who was from Philadelphia. It was an opportunity for an artist to go away for a month and they chose the city. So I went to Cologne. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Candida Alvarez: Right. That's what I said. And I spent a lot of time at the Dome Cathedral. I was fascinated by it structurally and what it meant for the city. But also there was this above and below. So, below was the crypt of the church and it was beautiful. It was a beautiful space with little light bulbs and just sort of a very special place to chill out in after a big day of traveling around. The church was filled with a lot of art and stained glass. I met so many wonderful artists there. And they actually put together a catalog for me and they curated a show, and those drawings were a part of it that I actually did in John Street. So I came back with a lot of beer coasters — the circular forms, which I was fascinated by. And I just wanted to do charcoal drawings, which I had never really done, but I think it was the dust, and the dusty feeling. I just used charcoal and got to work. You can see the circular pattern came from one of those beer coasters, and tape was used to get some of those rectangular shapes. I used a razor blade to get these kind of whitish, almost dashed lines through the paper. I got totally engaged with them and after I did them, I didn't do any more. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I mean I've never seen a charcoal drawing from you since. It was really part of going to that show and like walking through the museum. I've known you for a couple years now and I've seen the work and I understand that color plays such a huge role in how you think about life. So it was surprising to see charcoal drawings and just the breadth of the work. There's so many different projects, there was so many different ways of working. Did this feel foundational? Because you talk about drawing a lot as really the root of what you do. Candida Alvarez: Well, I think there's something beautiful about blackness and black is a color. I mean, people don't often think of black and white as color, which I find kind of interesting. But it's really a beautiful way to see deeply. I love charting space using black and gray tones. There's something about commanding space with a very little tools, right? The stick of charcoal is kind of beautiful. That one thing that can create all this magic, I find really beautiful. I just didn't like the dustiness so much, you know? Charcoal is hard to pin down. I love the highlighting, the light and dark, and I also like taking pictures. You know, I had a camera for a long time and my first tool was a camera. Ajay Kurian: They almost feel like abstract photographs. Candida Alvarez: Yeah. I love black and white photography. I fell in love with it. I used to love Roy Decarava’s work, where he went from pitch black to white. And Harry Callahan. Ajay Kurian: That's when you can see that black and white are colors. Candida Alvarez: There was something poignant and very stark, and at the same time, the gray tones allowed for a time interval to be introduced into the compositions. When you just have black and white, your eyes move really fast. But when it's gray, your eye moves. Like it's on a tripod and it could be moved. It's more like when you're making films. I love classical film — vintage black and white films. Ajay Kurian: Did you grow up watching a lot of movies? Candida Alvarez: I think television was mostly black and white for a long time. But yeah, I did. Not a lot, but enough to keep me at the edge of my seat. I think to have a camera and to be suspended in time, to have Polaroids, that was magical to me. I really thought I was gonna do more work with a camera. But I still do work with a camera, because I take a lot of pictures for my own documentation. I just don't show them. Ajay Kurian: Why don't you show them? Candida Alvarez: Cause I don't need to. I just use them. Ajay Kurian: So they get used for compositions? Or how you think about the work? Candida Alvarez: Well, I love capturing details of my daily life. Ajay Kurian: So this is in the eighties and then by the nineties, that's when you apply to Yale, get in and go there. I think there are consistencies, but also there's some really major things happening. Candida Alvarez: There was more change. It was less photography and more about the body interacting. I came up with a way to identify a sort of a dimension to this idea of intentionality, which is the name of this case study with Mel Bochner. Of course, that was his big question to us all the time. What is your intention? That was a word that I held onto and I was trying to define it for myself. I wanted to have a formal way to define that. That was my curiosity, and so I wanted to move. When I got into Yale I was doing those multiple panels. They were really colorful. This all happened at Yale because I was trying to unpack something that was significant. I was really trying to mine my life experiences. These kind of ways of being in the world. Like the ways I listened, let's say in my family, the way I heard my mother, the way I paid attention, the way my father taught us a game of boxes, right? I love the systematic nature of that. I just like threading through the unexpected and I wanted to sort of use this language and invent a language that came outta something really familiar. Ajay Kurian: Mm-hmm. Candida Alvarez: But yet it was very conceptual. It like all of a sudden got elevated to something else. And so I love the retranslation of something unexpected. The mystery of making for me is very exciting, but the context is also really important — how it begins. And what are the questions and why is that so important? Well, it was a way to identify, right? Who am I as the artist? Why is it that what I was making was boring? To me, it was becoming boring. Because familiarity gets boring to me. Ajay Kurian: Could you see yourself in these? So we're looking at almost like a wavy grid of nails that have kind of looped wire around them and rubber bands. Candida Alvarez: But I was drawing with nails, pencils, and rubber bands because I was reconstructing the language. I was naming, I was using, it was kind of using the alphabet. It was a way to get back to a word or to a beginning point, like the word intention or the word convention I was using. I was kind of mimicking Mel in a way, but in my own little weirdness I was able to respond. So I was responding. Ajay Kurian: And did he see it as a response? Candida Alvarez: I think he was intrigued. I didn't reveal all my mysteries, you know, I just kind of went for it. Ajay Kurian: I don't think you ever do. Candida Alvarez: No, you can't. You kind of just do what you need to do. You don't have to over explain anything. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, then it dies a little. Candida Alvarez: I like to keep some mystery. Ajay Kurian: I feel like there's a lot of systems early on. I mean, there's always systems, there's always patterns and finding ways to make a composition based on kind of chance operations too. Like this one, tossing pennies literally happens from tossing pennies. Candida Alvarez: Exactly. But that also came at the beginning point. Goes really early back to my father who tossed pennies in the air for good luck. So as this inquisitive child, I'm more mesmerized by the fact that the penny is tracking a pathway. There's something about the penny being flung that was more interesting to me than the penny landing. But the landing was the luck. Somehow it's like what held the space. It kind of held the space in a way that that's what my father's desire was. So was that what he wanted? It was weird. What can I say? But I noticed it and I wanted to use it. This was one of the first pieces I did when I got to Yale and it was an empty studio and I just looked around the room and collected things. Those were all free for taking, 'cause they were just pieces laying around. So I just used them and I love the way that I felt free enough to organize them together. Because that was new for me. And then I had my son in 1991 and I was there in 1995. So that's my little son's hand, Ramon. He was in the picture too, so I made that little thing. Ajay Kurian: Oh, right here? Candida Alvarez: Yeah. That's my son's hand. So my son was there with me too. So what happened was I had those pieces of wood paneling and then I just started tossing the pennies into them. Wherever they landed, I just traced them or I glued them down. Then I had these little pathways and I really was very intrigued about that. Like how to mark territory and how to create a space that was coming out of something intentional in a way. And also memory. So it was like solving a puzzle that I felt I had to create for myself as the artist. Ajay Kurian: You know, I feel like the word abstraction gets used a lot, and a lot of times people mean different things when they say it. And I love how much you bristle at the word abstraction because it bothers me too. I think people use it too freely and I'm using your words here where it's like we're abstracting all the time. When you think about your practice, what is a better word to describe what it is that you do? Candida Alvarez: I paint. I draw. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Okay. I'll take that. Candida Alvarez: What do I think? Like we were talking about Vernon Reid, I mean, I love Vernon Reed, and when he came out with that album Living Color, I was just blown away. I was blown away. 'cause he collaborated with Greg Tate. They were artists who worked with words. The lyrics are so incredible and powerful. I took that to represent what I do, you know, living color. I could never forget that. So for me, when I talk about painting — I love painting because I can use color and color is living to me and that means that it can change. It changes depending on where you situate that painting. What kind of light is on that painting? I love that. I love that it's alive and I think that's really what I like to do. I like to wrestle with color. There's something about that engagement that never ends. It's a conversation that's continuous. And I just love it. Ajay Kurian: I feel like that shift into color, like, I'm actually curious because to me, I've known your work when color was always there. It was like foregone occlusion. But in these works, like for instance in extension, you know, there's definitely color. How do you conceptualize a shift from a piece like extension to what we're gonna see in a bit? Candida Alvarez: Well, because these are all stepping stones. They’re all steps towards something and that's the mystery of making or being the artist, right? I mean, I only make these pieces 'cause I wanna try to understand something and I'm not really sure what that is yet. But it's the mystery of wanting to discover something that keeps me going. Ajay Kurian: This feels like a portal to me. There's a lot of mysterious works, but this one in particular really does stand out. Candida Alvarez: That's convention extension. Well, I was responding, because we had to read Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. Ajay Kurian: Was he teaching there at the time? Candida Alvarez: No, this was Mel's class. I think for me, I was talking to myself, so I wanted to extend myself like a clock. I wanted to see myself like the Vitruvian man. I was like, I could be a star. I could be a man extending like a clock. Ajay Kurian: Candida’s talking about DaVinci's Vitruvian man. Candida Alvarez: Very famous. I’m sort of intrigued by history, and history that maybe people don't think I should be a part of, you know what I mean? By chance you bump into things or you're reminded of things. It's like you ask me a question and all of a sudden you take me on a tangent or something. And I might have not been thinking about that as a portal, but all of a sudden I can connect something that I was thinking about. I think it's having the courage to just do whatever the hell you wanna do. And we just get so locked into other people's expectations. When we're young, we're students, we hang on to every word and we try to be the best that we could be. But sometimes you just forget yourself in that equation, right? Because you're trying to be something that you think you should be as opposed to being what you really are. And so I think learning and unlearning is a part of it all. Ajay Kurian: Did you always have that courage? Candida Alvarez: Probably not, no. But I failed at trying to be perfect. I like to practice my penmanship, and I loved the practice of calligraphy. I tried to be good at math and I was terrible, but I tried my best with trigonometry and all of that. I didn't know that I was an artist or I wanted to be an artist because that wasn't something that was in my early learning. But the daily news had this little picture that you could color. To me it was like little paint by number, like a wall thing. I used to love to do that, and I used to love working with collograph. Ajay Kurian: What was that? Candida Alvarez: That game where you peel the plastic and it was all these shapes. I was always drawn to something that I could participate in. But I never knew that this was my path. Ajay Kurian: But then you go to Yale, I mean of course it was years later. First you went to Fordham and that’s when you really started to feel it. Candida Alvarez: That's where I took art classes. And I wanted to carry that big black portfolio. I was fascinated by that big black. Then I got lucky. I took a class with Susan Crowell and Jack Whitten. Paul Brock was teaching history and he was married to Miriam Schapiro. So I got lucky. It was the seventies. Somebody like Jack, I didn't know who he was. I didn't know that he was such a well-known artist, but I took his class and he was very encouraging. I didn't have a lot of supplies and I didn't know how to stretch a painting. But I used to go to Pearl Paint and buy my stretch canvases. Towards the end when I was graduating, Jack looked at me and said to me, you know, if you continue to make those pieces really big, you can actually win awards. I was thinking, is he really talking to me? So I was kind of shocked, but what happened was, at that moment, he was paying attention and he noticed the seeds that I had. He acknowledged them and made me aware of them. And that gave me pause and gave me something to really think about. And that gave me a lot of courage. Ajay Kurian: That's beautiful. Candida Alvarez: Right. But he actually said, you should apply to Cooper Union. So I asked for the application. It was about, I don't know how many pages, but I looked at it and kept turning the pages, and I was like, I can't handle this. But fast forward how many years? And then I'm teaching at Cooper Union. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Right. Candida Alvarez: And I'm like, I guess I did have to come to Cooper Union and to make my move back to New York. I mean, here I am again. Ajay Kurian: You've taught for so long. You were at the SAIC in Chicago for… Candida Alvarez: 20 years. Ajay Kurian: When you started, it was in the late nineties, right? Candida Alvarez: Yes, 1998. Ajay Kurian: Did you feel ready to be a teacher then? I guess Ramon was probably what, seven, eight? Candida Alvarez: So I went to Fordham, but didn't go right to art school. I went and stayed at El Museo del Barrio, that had free classes and workshops, so it was a little easier to handle because there was no expectation. So Bill was teaching there who was a phenomenal printmaker, actually he was a professor at Pratt and he came to work there part-time. While I was there, I started looking at catalogs. I had one of Vermeer Bhutan and I fell in love with those black and white photo montages. I think that there is something about that dismantling and gathering of something familiar that's interesting to me. So then from there, I did a little curatorial engagement with pre-Columbian art. I was studying pre-Columbian art. So we had this book and I was fascinated by the little statues that they were collecting — the wooden sculptures. Then from there, I learned about the Cedar Artist Project, which happened in the late seventies or early eighties. That was another really amazing and very robust community of artists that came together. It was the first time that the city of New York actually paid artists to do their work. And I got lucky. I was part of the first group and stayed there, and that's where everything happened. So I started to feel more confident in being the artist. I was probably the youngest one in that program. They had photographers, they had painters and, and I was kind of in the writer's section. For some reason they had groups. I was with the poets, but lucky me in a way 'cause it was like Bob Holman and Pedro Pietri. But we all met once a week to get paychecks. It was fantastic to feel the energy of being an artist in New York and to be able to do what you do and get paid for it. It was just unbelievable. And then I stayed in New York, got married, had a son, and my partner wanted to go to Yale to get his master's degree in photography. So we went as a family. He graduated and then I was like, well, I think it's my turn. So that's how it happened. That's how it landed in Yale. There was a market crash. It was a good time to leave the city. Artists weren't making any money, but a lot of us were going back to school to get our degrees so we could make more money. Ajay Kurian: Right. Teaching classes. You know, today it’s like, on the one side of things, you can maybe be a mega star and make all this money as an artist, and then there's the sense that nobody's making any money and it really isn't a great career path for any reason at all. But I feel like that program gives you this sense early on that like oh, I can do this, I can make a living off of this. It just seems like a really specific thing that you might've just… Candida Alvarez: Lucky. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Candida Alvarez: It was three years for us and we had a really cheap apartment, which we lost and it makes me sad thinking about it ’cause I used to have my studio right in the front. But anyway, we lived in Connecticut and I had found a beautiful studio at Rector Square, which is not too far from the school — our son had just started school. Ajay Kurian: In my head, I've heard this from many female artists that either are thinking about children or have children, that they've heard from gallerists that if you have kids, it's gonna damage your career if you do this. There's so many shitty things that female artists get told. But you just jumped in. Candida Alvarez: It just kind of happened. But I want to say something — Bob Holman was married to Elizabeth Muray, so I got to meet Elizabeth Murray and became friends with her because of Bob, who I met at the CETA Artist Project. She had at least three kids. It was never an issue. And Hettie Jones who was the mother of Kellie Jones was also a dear friend. And I'm trying to remember how I met Kellie, but it must have been the Studio Museum in Harlem, because I was also an artist in residence in ‘85. And so there were shows at the Jamaica Art Center that Kellie curated. We were all beginning our careers. We were all in the beginning. Ajay Kurian: Did you know Daisy Elizabeth's little girl or did you ever meet her? Candida Alvarez: I didn't really know them that well. But Elizabeth was a great mother and she was a fantastic artist. She wrote the essay for the first show that I had at June Kelly Gallery. Ajay Kurian: No kidding. Candida Alvarez: And that was her first ever essay for an artist. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Candida Alvarez: It was very beautiful. Ajay Kurian: I feel bad that I haven't seen that, I need to get access to it. Candida Alvarez: It's somewhere in my archives. But so, I don't know why certain things happen. You know, they just happen and you notice and you just feel like your life keeps moving, right? But I had no idea that this is the person that I was becoming. I just trusted something. I mean, you have to have courage. You have to do things that may be scary, like move out of the city or marry somebody you love or have a child or take up classes. I mean, it just kind of started and it just wouldn't stop. I couldn't let it stop, no matter what. And I wasn't selling a lot, you know, I just kept doing it. Ajay Kurian: What did you trust and what brought you to all black embroidered images? Seeing this at the Museo threw me completely, like for the Skowehegan people that are in the room, it's crazy. You go into a room and it's all black and it's fucking wild. It was beautiful. There was so much weight there. And then there's a video of your mother and she's preparing food and she's very serious too. It was a really powerful room. I have so many questions. Candida Alvarez: Well, black and white drawings, right? So this is going into a very deep, dark space, but there's a lot of tenderness in that space. The sewing, which I did by hand. Ajay Kurian: It is very tender. Candida Alvarez: The light captures it in such a way, and I love the whole idea of thinking that the viewer thinks there's nothing there, but then you have to get really close and then you notice something. I started to work with dinner napkins because they were soft and easy and my son was little and I couldn't get to the studio. So I needed to work on something that I could take with me and do it on the bed, or the chair, wherever I could watch my kid running around. So I would just take them and, and make these images. My mother collected and was given a lot of porcelains, and she had a lot of them in Puerto Rico at this time. My parents were living in Puerto Rico and we lived in Connecticut. Then we came back and I had a studio, and these were done in Chicago. So I was doing these small drawings and it was really interesting. At some point I remember seeing this small little painting by Francisco, a Puerto Rican painter. I went to Puerto Rico just before, like in the seventies for the first time. I went and I met Lorenzo Homar, who's an artist I really admired. Puerto Rico has these amazing artists who worked that I noticed with printmaking. I didn't really know a lot of the visual artists, but from Fordham University at Lincoln Center, I met somebody there who knew this artist. And so that's how I got to the studio for the first time and I was so nervous. I remember Harley talking to him, but he told me to read all the books in the Social History of Arts. Ajay Kurian: Oh wow. Candida Alvarez: I wanted to go to Paris, and I think it was during the CETA Project. When I had a little bit of money, I took myself to Paris because I wanted to see the work of Francisco firsthand. I saw that work in the eighties because there was a show that El Museo del Barrio was putting together with the Met and it showed a lot of work from Puerto Rico. This was one of my favorite paintings and I wanted to paint like that. When I saw that, I was like, I wanna paint big. Ajay Kurian: From 1893. The weight. Candida Alvarez: 1893. So he did a piece that's much smaller and it was a portrait of a meal order. He was drinking tea at a table. And right next to him is like maybe his housemaid and she has this big dress on her lap. This black material and she sewing. So it was years later after I made my black drawings that I remember seeing that painting. And I was like, did that really affect me? It was so wild. I was like, oh my God, I became that housemate painting. That painting was so beautiful. It was facing the Mona Lisa, that little painting. So that was an amazing moment that I'll never forget. Ajay Kurian: Wow. I would've never known that whole backstory. I mean, the works are beautiful and they're moving on their own. Candida Alvarez: I don't think I've talked about it, at least not in a long time. Ajay Kurian: That's incredible. Candida Alvarez: Well, that's why conversations are interesting, right? Ajay Kurian: Is that why they're called lap drawings? 'Cause you were literally sewing… Candida Alvarez: On my lap. Ajay Kurian: So then they got bigger, right? Candida Alvarez: So the big ones, I still did them on my lap, but they were bigger. Ajay Kurian: They're huge. Candida Alvarez: Yeah, they're really big Ajay Kurian: I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit. I wanna go to the air paintings. So 2017 was a really consequential year for you, for a whole number of reasons. There were amazing things that happened and not so amazing things that happened, and it feels like the air paintings kind of became a way to process the ups and downs. Candida Alvarez: Well, in 2017 I had a really big show at the cultural center that was curated by Terry Meyers, who was one of my colleagues at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. It was a very important show for me. So after it closed, my father died. He was in Puerto Rico and then about three months later I was there with my mother and my sister went to stay with my mother 'cause she was grieving and my mother has never lived alone. I mean, it's been years. But when I left and my sister was there, Hurricane Maria came. So it was devastating because we couldn't find our people, right? We were all searching on Facebook and trying to connect with people who were there and the cell phones weren't working. There were weeks and weeks where we were just frantic and not really knowing the state of things. So I was in Chicago trying to keep sane. Because my mother and sister were there and we couldn't find them. We couldn't hear from them. But there was something that said, I'm sure they're okay. Just before that happened, I had a commission that was sort of this digitized mural printed on mesh which was used for banners. Chicago has a lot of mesh. This was for under the Wacker Bridge. The engineers had to construct the weave in such a way, so the bridge wouldn't come down. So this idea of air was really important to the design of the material, and I was fascinated by that. It's like a canvas, except that this was outside. But there's that little window of air, and I kept thinking about that. Ajay Kurian: It makes me think of you being fascinated with launching the penny. Candida Alvarez: Exactly. There’s something about something else that happens, inside and outside of material. Or inside or outside of functionality, that gets to something that is mysterious, like a wish, right? So I had to produce this piece. It was very big. It was one of my largest commissions outside. It was like maybe 200 feet across and 70 feet high, multiple panels. We had a proofing process, and so these pieces came from that proofing process. They were the excess and the stuff that wasn't used. So I just asked for them. I wanted to take them and I just rolled them up and took them to the studio never thinking I would use them. It was during this time period when we couldn't figure out where my mom or her sister were or how they were doing. It was a very restless time. I decided to unroll them and just do something kind of different. And so I started pouring pain and squishing pain and stepping all over it and just doing something else. That's how these came to life. That's why they're called air paintings. But also the framing for them took a while to get to. I didn't know what to do with them 'cause I never thought I would show them. I was just making them. And then I thought, wow, two sided paintings. Ajay Kurian: Is it sandwiched between the aluminum at the top? Candida Alvarez: Yeah. There's a really beautiful way in which they get inserted with a wooden dowel. I'm very happy with them. And so sometimes I refer to them as paintings with little feet, but it was the first time I've ever had a show and I wanna say thank you to Monique Meloche because she was really the only person that wanted to show them. So I was grateful to her for showing them and taking them on. Because I've never shown anything like that. I've never had a show where I didn't use the walls. Ajay Kurian: Right. It was all in space. Candida Alvarez: But I love the idea of working with these, like a kaleidoscope. Eventually I'll do more of these because I still have a plan for them. Ajay Kurian: They're really great. There was a quote that you said around the time of producing these, Mother Earth is dealing with all of this abuse, and it's in overdrive right now. So people are scared. When the ground doesn't stop rumbling, you don't recognize your home turf. You become lost as the walls crumble. Overall, there's lots of tenacity and creativity. Overcoming fear is just part of who we are as human beings. We have to stand up for something. We have to love something. Death and life are so close together. And when we suffer trauma, we're pushed in different ways to remember that there are ways in which you can find and be reminded about what is right and what is wrong. And this, I think, is kind of key. Still be the individual in the room without losing our commitment to community. I thought that was really moving just in terms of being able to center yourself, but also realizing it's not just you going through something and it's not atomized. We can hold space for ourselves while within the community. And it, when you say that there was nothing on the walls, they're all taking up space together. There was a community of works. Candida Alvarez: Community has always been a very important word to me. It's always been important. I can never live life without it. To think you're all by yourself here is kind of, I mean, you are on some level, but we all need each other on another level, right? I mean, love is so important. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Right? Candida Alvarez: You need the seeds to grow from and with. I mean, to take the courage you have to fall in love with something. Or to dare yourself to do something, you know? Or like why pick up a brush? You know, why pick up a pen? What makes us do those things? Outside of an assignment. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, the assignments end. Candida Alvarez: But you know, when we were kids, we would take rubber bands and we would nod 'em together and skip rope. They called it Chinese jump rope. Or you had a long piece of rope and then we did double dutch. So think about that, right? The way we were being creative since we were really young. Ajay Kurian: This work is called I'm Okay or I'm Good. And it finds its way into a much larger landscape and it makes me think, again, of the individual in the community. Somebody shouting out, I'm good! But in this landscape of all these other things happening and potentially a lot of destruction happening as well. That phrase became really powerful for a lot of people because like first it was for this particular work and then it was for the triennial. Candida Alvarez: It became Estamos — being. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, exactly. Candida Alvarez: The story came from listening to all the interviews with the Puerto Ricans that they were trying to find up in the mountains. They would say, well, how are you? Well, what am I gonna say? I'm alive, I can talk to you. But it was kind of a way to sort of hold the space, so you wouldn't ask me anything else, or I might start tearing or something, you know? It was a way to hold space. To hold oneself together. It's like a quiet period. I need time to reflect and I can't say anything else. It's kind of more cynical than not. But I was trying to be okay too and I was trying to do what I loved and it felt good. I could disappear for a while. Ajay Kurian: I like that you say that it was kind of cynical because it became this banner of we're okay, we're fine. But you're hiding a lot of pain. It's just like, just shut the fuck up and leave me alone. Candida Alvarez: Exactly. Ajay Kurian: There's two sides to that. And it's nice to hear it from you, because you feel it too. There's something protective about it. Even though there's air that's going through it, even the way that it's in the painting formally speaking, it's there, but it's not, it's not welcoming you. It's not bringing you in. It just happens to be there. Candida Alvarez: Well, I remember writing that too. I felt like it was almost like a little text bubble, like a pop. Ajay Kurian: You have a show at Richard Gray Gallery right now with a person who I think has been very influential on generations of artists, but of course for you as well, Bob Thompson. Candida Alvarez: That was the first piece I fell in love with at the Art Institute of Chicago when I started teaching. Ajay Kurian: This is called Equestrienne. Candida Alvarez: From the Tang Dynasty. And I did a whole series of paintings using that figure. Ajay Kurian: It was called flower of the Horse. Candida Alvarez: I was very interested in describing a beginning and ending point. I was tracking my tenure and my emeritus status, and I was leaving teaching. So I wanted to do these pieces that were paintings that really reflected this time. The Tang Dynasty horse, which is, you know, a symbol of beauty. This is this figurine and I love the relationship of the body to the horse. They’re sort of bowing to each other. It's a very beautiful piece. It's still one of my favorite pieces. One of the first pieces my eyes gazed upon when I entered the museum as I was about to teach. So that's the beginning point with my relationship to Chicago and teaching. But I love this circular motion, the slowness of it. And then when I left I got this beautiful orchid as a gift. I was leaving my studio and I was going to Michigan, it was COVID. And this artist, Maria Pinto who's an amazing designer and whose clothes I wear sometimes. She was leaving her studio and she had these beautiful orchids and she said, you can take an orchid. So I took an orchid and that orchid still blooms. I just used the idea of the gift as a way to say thank you. I have this wonky way of combining things, so that's how I got to these paintings. Ajay Kurian: They're really rich and they feel so alive, but the way you were talking about leaving teaching and this being a sendoff too. It made me even look at this sculpture differently. It feels like there is something more melancholic about it, but I'm curious, was this a way of almost making a celebration for yourself? Candida Alvarez: Oh, yeah. Ajay Kurian: It shows. Candida Alvarez: It’s about making it present and you give it visibility. You give a certain amount of time visibility. You can create a painting that can hold something particular. For me, I needed to do this. That's kind of how I work. You know, I just have these ideas and I wanna put 'em together. Ajay Kurian: So with the Bob Thompson show, how did this come together? Candida Alvarez: Richard Gray Gallery were doing these shows where they invited artists to work together. They came to the studio and they saw I had a Bob Thompson, and that I liked Bob. I had a beautiful card that I've had for a long time. And they said, would you like to show with Bob Thompson? It's been amazing. I'm still working with him and I'm still making more paintings, but the show is six paintings that I had to create. I loved it. It was beautiful. It was magical. I like having conversations with artists, and to have a conversation with him felt right. He died so young and so I wonder if he would've been an abstract painter. I mean, he was going that way, right? Ajay Kurian: Yeah. He definitely was. Candida Alvarez: But I just wanted to talk to him. It's kind of nice to have this sort of conversation. Ajay Kurian: There’s paintings before this from your show at Gavlak in Los Angeles, which I’ll show in a minute, but the way that you’re developing layers there is very different from here. Say this one, where everything feels like it’s on the same surface. It's very flat and it's very matte. Then there are other paintings before this, where there’s layers you can see through the paint and you can see other things happening. It almost reminds me of when we see early to mid de Kooning versus late de Kooning where the mark gets much more fluid and soft and there's a serenity to it. Ajay Kurian: And I'm wondering, does it feel like that's where you're at? Does that relate to you? Do you think about late de Kooning when you're making works like this? Candida Alvarez: I have worked with De Kooning. Ajay Kurian: You've worked with De Kooning? Candida Alvarez: I've created paintings with de Kooning. I've been in conversation with a lot of artists. I used to see excavation painting almost every day on my way to classes. It was always in there. I mean, the museum is very important to me. Because I'm always looking at things. So there are residues; the coloration, there's something about the whole notion of excavation. In a biography that was written on him, he was talking about how he was looking at this particular scene from a movie. There was a group of women and there was some kind of little fight that happened in the rice patties. He claims that that has something to do with how he painted the painting excavation. Which I found really interesting. So I looked at the film too and said, wow, this could be really interesting. Looking at excavation, I was trying to dismantle it. I was trying to understand it. It's a curious painting and I love that he uses women. I mean when you look at his paintings, he has a whole mashup of things. It's a very active painting. I love that it's all like in motion sort of. Ajay Kurian: These are paintings from the Gavlak show. Where the surface and the way that you're thinking about paint, about movement, about how a painting comes together is very different from the works with Bob Thompson. There's something much more serene about when it moves into an interlocked shape and how that shape lives. I guess since there's always stories that come with these movements and how these things develop, I'm just curious, what are the stories that get you into a place where they can lock together that way? Candida Alvarez: I don't think about it that way because there's a pathway and I'm interested in composition. I was taught painting, and I was taught that the most important thing in a painting is how you begin the drawing and the composition itself. How do you keep the eye engaged? Where's the opening? It's like a navel. So you have to have a little part for the eye to go into it. Like, I gotta get you in there and then I gotta keep you enraptured enough, I gotta entangle you enough in there to keep you there. So that's my main objective — to keep you looking at the baby. And how do I do that? How do I stay with the painting? It's really a color thing. It's not really the story thing. When I'm painting, I just really look at how the colors are being activated, how they're becoming families. I love this idea that two or three colors can become a family. And how you start to see the, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth color within the combinations. I love that. So when I start to see that I'm happy. So it's really a seduction, is what I need. It's what I do for myself. Ajay Kurian: This is what you need right now. Candida Alvarez: I just need the color to sort of hold me up. I need the alchemy. It's like a fix. I need to see it growing. It's like having a garden, I guess. You know, you flower, you water your garden, and you see all those blooms and they're all really beautiful. There's just something about the feeling it gives me. Ajay Kurian: You brought up both family and the garden and it makes me think of this quote from the book that you worked on with your colleague, Tim. I've begun to see that it's not just oneself, it's a multitude of selves. For me, that definitely includes the politicized woman who embraces her Puerto Rican heritage and bilingualism, as well as the self-determination to stay out of all the cultural boxes, which threaten my freedom to make choices. It's like you have a family of selves in your work too. You've had so many different ways of being that manifest through the way that you make and like what gives you the support and what gives you that flowering. Go see the show at El Museo del Barrio. Because you can see a person, where even in the darkest moments of it, there's so much joy. There's always joy in how you make and how you think about being alive no matter what happens. Candida Alvarez: Oh, thank you. At the end of the day, it's about my freedom to choose and to determine the outcome, right? There's not too many other path careers that I can think of where you could do that. So I say, you know, the choice is yours. I mean, it's mine to make and why not make it? And so, there’s a name for what I do, right? They say it's art. And I became the artist. I'm still becoming the artist. I think we have to just, you know, words and the limitations of what that is. I think enjoyment and pleasure is number one. And I guess, doing this for as long as I've been doing it, I don't feel old. I feel it gives me so much potential and opportunity and joy. Ajay Kurian: Who said you're old! Candida Alvarez: I know, but if I tell you how old I am and how many years I've been doing this, it's a long time. But for me it always feels brand new. And so I don't really work well with this idea of repetition. I kind of always wanna reinvent something. So even the way I break away from my own systems, you know, I develop systems and then I break them apart again. It's like Legos, you can either follow the rules and build that truck or you could just do it your way and get to something else. Ajay Kurian: I wanna end before we take questions with one of the prior Candida talks. This is from the lecture that she gave at Skowhegan. And I just loved this question and I loved the answer even more. ***** Recording from Candida’s Lecture at Skowhegan School of Painting (2023 Audience Question: What is your favorite part of being an artist? Candida Alvarez: I love following what I love. I love painting. I love color because it lives. I love the freedom to be myself. I give myself my own permissions. I feel like creativity is the most wonderful gift that we have as human beings. I feel that you have to be courageous in your life, and you have to say yes to the things that you want for yourself. It's not easy to get that. Certainly not. You know, it's a challenge being honest to yourself. But at some point in your life you realize you're either gonna go for it now or it's never gonna happen. So I say take courage and say yes to the things you really want. And sometimes it takes time to figure that out. It's a slow journey. It's one step at a time and you always make mistakes. But I always say paintings have to make mistakes. You have the mistakes of invaluable. That's how you get to your work. ***** Ajay Kurian: Are there any questions that people have for Candida? Audience Member: First of all, thank you so much for your words and your energy. I'm curious around you as an educator as well. What is your philosophy or your mission as an educator? You also say that you're not too fond of familiarity and has the philosophy and mission changed over the years? Candida Alvarez: What is my philosophy? Be yourself. Learn as much as you can and don't be afraid to break the rules. I never thought I'd be teaching and I didn't plan on it. I think to be a good communicator is a must for teaching. So I think to be honest and to try as many things out as you can. Learning is, it's just kind of bumping into things that you didn't expect and to. You have to learn the basics, right? And so you have to be skilled and you have to commit. I've always been who I am. So just be yourself and find joy in that, and not everybody's gonna agree with you, right? You're gonna feel bad along the way too, because you're gonna say, oh man, what did I just do? I can't explain myself. You know, there’s just a mystery to it too. And I think going back to the mistakes — mistakes could be some of the most empowering things, right? When you understand that it really wasn't a mistake, it's just something fresh and new and unexpected, and you have to kind of reconsider it. Surprises are gifts. I think not to be so afraid of the unknown. Just the power to be yourself is so amazingly important, and we have to own that. We would be happier if we would just be more content with ourselves and that's something you learn. You have to learn that or unlearn something else. Because there's a lot of pain that we suffer too, in that evolution. Oh, I wanna be an artist. And you're like, what is that? If you don't come from a family that appreciates that. It was a word that I had to understand. I didn't know what it was. It was a hard word to utter — I'm an artist. I am an artist though. But I mean, you could do anything. You could write, you could play the violin, you could tap dance. Like I said before, creativity is everything. Right. It makes us all happier. Audience Member: I have a lot of questions, but I'll choose one. I think a lot of people here are probably artists or have artistic endeavors, but for me, I've been struggling mostly with the idea of an audience. Art is such a personal, intimate thing that you do for yourself in so many ways, and even separate from making a career out of it. But there always is an audience outside of yourself. You touched on it a little bit, that a lot of this work is so personal and cathartic in some ways, but how do you balance that? Is it ever for other people more than for yourself or how do you try to navigate that? Candida Alvarez: Honestly, I never thought there would be an audience. I didn't know that there would be an audience. I didn't know that I would continue to do this in this way. I had to learn it. I had to trust something. I had to listen out for it. I trusted my teachers, you know, I listened, I made mistakes. I was really shy as a kid. I had to really move slowly and try different things and feel like I failed at 'em, you know? Unless you're a performance artist then the audience is really important, right? I mean, I think that those are the things that might keep you from doing the actual things you need to do, because you're so preoccupied with this other notion of who's right or who's more right than you. I mean, we were talking about that earlier. The fear of public speaking, you know, until one day you realize, well, you could only speak for yourself, right? And so trusting that is a big deal. When does that happen? Like when do you feel you've crossed that bridge? I really do believe in what I'm saying, or even better, it's like I'm finding the language that I need to explain what it is that I'm trying to do. And so I think we can find that language in so many different places. It doesn't have to be just from the painting catalogs. There's so many ways to riff and to trust this material. You have to trust the material that you're choosing. Or maybe it chooses you, I don't know. Sometimes you trip into something, I think to ponder and to have the time to consider is huge. Not everybody has that time. Audience Member: It's a privilege, yeah. Candida Alvarez: Right, so I think that whatever time we do get is to use it wisely. And not flounder so much. We waste a lot of time too. Ajay Kurian: We can get one more question. Audience Member: Your work often moves between abstraction and figuration. In pieces like John Street series 12, there's a center of fragment memory embedding urban architecture, right? So how do you see drawing, especially in charcoal, functioning, not just as a medium, but as a language for claiming personal and cultural stories that are often overlooked or a race in dominant narrative? Candida Alvarez: That's a huge question. Drawing is basic, right? I mean, as a kid you have to learn the alphabet. You kind of have to string that alphabet together to form words. It's fundamental within our core. So drawing is fundamental, I think. Your question is so multifaceted. I don't know if I get it or if I can even jab at it a bit. I just wanna say that nothing is ever certain. I think the beginning point is a beginning point, but you never really know or understand where that is. And then how that takes root and then how you can cross how you begin to expand that with real roots or threads that really become the fiber of your intelligence and your memory, your love of the realities of life. I mean, there's so many ways to be in the world, to be present, to be able to be creative, but yet still be more of a historian, right? Or seeking histories of cultures that are still misunderstood. To sort of figure out how we all do come together. You know how diaspora really does live as a heartbeat. It's complex because you can thread this in so many different ways. Landscape is not just horizontal. It could also be very vertical, right? So like history, right? I like to think of history like the root of a tree, and sometimes those roots could go for miles and miles and miles. Then it can go up and then it becomes something else. So I think that we just have to fundamentally be creative and free to translate and retranslate and to sort of begin to take on the materiality or the tools that we are clinging towards. Because we all have different relationships to tools. Like I need that pen to really write what I'm thinking, or I need that recorder to sing what I'm feeling, or I need to be in a conversation with somebody — like a historian. To figure out what's next. So I think that there's so many ways, if you just rely on your creativity, I think you can get to some truth that is for you. And I think everybody in this room can have different ways of finding answers to the same question. So we have to dream and we have to fail too. We have to fail at trying to answer something that just gets deeper the more serious you get about it. That's why I love what I do because I can keep exploring and I can keep changing my mind. Then I can turn it into something else, and I can stop when I want to. I love having that kind of space that I'm in control of. Ajay Kurian: Thank you everybody and give it up again for Candida! Candida Alvarez: Thank you! 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