The NewCrits Podcast

The Forum 19 | Rachel Rose: Psychic States, Motherhood, and the Moving Image

She works through feeling, perception, and narrative — Rachel Rose on interior weather, unstable perspectives, and art as a way to process what cannot be easily named. Rachel Rose moves between film, installation, and painting, using sound, light, and narrative structure to explore how experience is shaped from the inside out. Her work often begins with an emotional register and expands into systems of history, perception, and embodiment. In her recent film The Last Day, she turns inward, tracing the psychological and biological complexities of motherhood, identity, and crisis without resolving them into clear frameworks. She explains: * How personal feeling becomes a starting point for building larger perceptual and narrative systems. * Why motherhood, postpartum depression, and identity loss resist clean cultural narratives. * How sound and light can destabilize reality and reorient one’s relationship to the world. * What it means to make work that stays with ambiguity rather than resolving into message. * How falling in love with characters becomes a method for discovering structure, rather than imposing it. * Why occupying unlikeable or unstable perspectives creates more honest and generative work. * How art can act as a container for experiences that are culturally unspoken or difficult to locate. (00:08) Welcome + Intro(00:31) The Last Day and the Mrs. Dalloway Transposition (01:37) Motherhood, Identity, and the Book Read Twice (03:35) Lake Valley, Saturn Return, and the Invention of Childhood (07:19) Excerpt: Lake Valley (2016) (10:57) Art School, Painting, and the Crisis of Meaning (15:01) Editing as Voice, the First Video, and Finding the Medium (22:34) Transcendent Experiences and the Power of Art Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8pGHKThZ_o&t=6s]. Follow RachelWeb: https://gladstonegallery.com/exhibit/rachel-rose-the-rest/ [https://gladstonegallery.com/exhibit/rachel-rose-the-rest/]Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/worrrld/ [https://www.instagram.com/worrrld/] Rachel Rose (b. 1986) lives and works in New York. The work of Rachel Rose explores how our changing relationship to landscape has shaped storytelling and belief systems. Rose’s films draw from and contribute to the long history of cinematic innovation; whether investigating cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, or an astronaut’s space walk, Rose directs our attention to sites and histories in which the sublime and the everyday blur. She translates this in her paintings, sculptures and drawings, which materially reverberate with one another, connecting the immediate to deep time. Recent solo exhibitions include: Science Gallery, London, UK (2024); GL STRAND, Copenhagen (2023); SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe (2023); CC Strombeek, Strombeek (2022); Pond Society, Shanghai (2020); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2020); Fridericianum, Kassel (2019); LUMA Foundation, Arles (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2018); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2017); Museu Serralves, Porto (2016); The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2016); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Serpentine Gallery, London (2015); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark (2023); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Geneva (2023); 3rd Jeju Biennale (2022); 9th Beijing Biennale (2022); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2022); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis (2022); Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2021); Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, US (2021); Artspace, Sydney (2021); Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2021); A Tale of A Tub, Tlön Projects, Rotterdam (2021); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Carnegie International, 57th Edition, Pittsburgh (2018); 57th Venice Biennale (2017); 32nd São Paudalo Biennial (2016); Hayward Gallery, London (2016); Okayama Art Summit, Japan (2016). She is the recipient of the Future Fields Award and the Frieze Artist Award. About The ForumThe Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here [https://www.newcrits.studio/events].Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio [http://www.newcrits.studio/]. — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Can you tell us a little bit about The Last Day? Rachel Rose: It’s a film that I wrote. Loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the book, but maybe I’ll just summarize the book briefly so that you understand what I did. The book takes place in a day, and it was written after World War I. It describes a bourgeois housewife, Clarissa Dalloway, going about her errands in her day at 50, about to throw a big party for her husband in the evening. She has an 18-year-old daughter that’s kind of separating and rejecting her. There’s a foil character, who’s equally important in the book, named Septimus Smith, who’s a World War I vet who Clarissa sort of passes by. It’s almost like sliding doors throughout the day. He’s suffering from severe PTSD from World War I. Clarissa throws a party and at the end of the day he kills himself. I had read the book in high school and not thought about it much again. I had always been into Virginia Woolf and that was that. And then one day, I have two kids and I was getting our Tesla fixed in Red Hook at the Tesla dealership, and I was texting my friend sitting there in the waiting room. She’s said oh, what a Mrs Dalloway day you’re having. And I was like, oh am I Mrs. Dalloway? Let me think about that. So I read it again and I was completely blown away. As a mother reading it, I now understood the book totally differently than I understood it as a 16-year-old because obviously the perspective and consciousness changes as that’s what Virginia Woolf does. But now I was sitting in Clarissa’s position, obviously I’m not 50 and my kids aren’t 18, but I was feeling her pain, her rudder, her sense of loss of identity, all the kind of acts of self-actualization she had reversed or given up in exchange for her motherhood. I was incredibly moved and so I decided to transpose it into a modern day New York story, and the Septimus character, I transposed into a labor and delivery nurse that was suffering from severe postpartum depression. Ajay Kurian: Oh, wow. Rachel Rose: Which is something that I also suffered from. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Rachel Rose: So I kind of, in different ways, felt myself in the different characters. Ajay Kurian: So much of what I’ve understood about your work prior to this moment is like larger systems in which humans find themselves in. It feels like this movie is a shift to the internal weather, rather than the external weather. I know it's just a matter of what the focus is. They're all kind of an ouroboros of sorts, but did it feel like a shift? Did you feel like you were going into something more intimate with the film? Rachel Rose: Before making the film and also before having children, so much of my experience in making works was a combination of I’m feeling this thing. For example, I’m feeling really anxious. Could I attach it? Now of course there’s all kinds of internal reasons why I might be feeling anxiety, nothing to do with, let’s say the weather or something. Ajay Kurian: Sure. Rachel Rose: But can I attach it to something I’m spotting outside, and make the artwork the container for that connection. So the work was always coming from something that always began with a personal feeling, but the difference is, that you’re right to point out, in this film it doesn’t go beyond that. A guess if you’re talking about motherhood, but the film isn’t a political comment on motherhood structurally in society. It’s actually totally not that. Ajay Kurian: What you’re saying there, there was a moment in an interview, I can’t remember who you were talking to, but you were talking about the process that you go through to make anything. Which is almost like you’re a sensor that’s like feeling things around you. And then as soon as you feel it and kind of know that you’re feeling something that’s worth noticing, that you then almost zoom out to see what the feeling is doing. Rachel Rose: I’ve done it in some really rudimentary, almost stupid ways. Ajay Kurian: I love stupid. Rachel Rose: This film The Last Day, than I made, is me contending with my ambivalence, confusion, pain and ecstasy around being a mother. For me, that’s why I made it. To kind of figure something about that out and give voice to a crisis I feel many other women experience, but there aren’t clear places to put that necessarily. For example, if I think back to when I made Lake Valley when I was 28, that was a work that I made in the beginning of my Saturn return. Actually, it was just the year after I had that Whitney show, and I was beginning this new stage of oh, I’m a working artist now and I have a career and I’m like a grownup. Of course we all become grownups to a certain extent when we’re 18 and we leave home. But then there’s this second thing, which is your Saturn return. Many of us know it, where you experience a new version of adulthood, like what’s this thing gonna look like? So this work came from that. Questioning, what does it mean to turn 28? It sounds so, honestly trivial, but at the time it didn’t feel trivial to me. It felt somehow kind of big. Ajay Kurian: 28. I guess I thought you were older at that time, ’cause there’s so much that’s related to childhood here. Rachel Rose: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: Now it makes sense that it is a reckoning of the idea of leaving childish things behind, but then also those things translating into this, as you’re gonna see in a second, very baroque visual language of all these different ways of storytelling coming together. Before we continue, let’s just play this excerpt. This is an excerpt from Lake Valley from 2016. Rachel Rose: 10 years ago. So weird. Just to give the texture of this, at the time, I found and then scanned tons of early children’s, the kind of early proliferation of children’s books, 18th or early 19th century. That’s what all these textures and the surfacing of everything is made up from that and hand collaging, well on Photoshop, but collaging these layers. Ajay Kurian: And it’s kind of the story of this Rabbit-ish figure that gets lost essentially. Rachel Rose: Yeah. Lives in a suburban housing development and goes into the little tiny greenery right next to the house. But then it turns and imagines it as though it’s this forest, but it’s kind of just a whatever space. Much of this was a kind of return to how childhood is formed, culturally. and that it’s kind of a modern invention. Even the idea of the storybook is so modern, and this coincides with the Industrial revolution. The idea that you sit down and read your kids a book and that there’s an illustrated thing that they look at. This is like a totally recent thing. Ajay Kurian: So that structure that seems part of the scaffolding of this —before that, what was the feeling that started this project? Rachel Rose: Saturn return, becoming an adult, understanding ourselves through a childhood, which is a very recent — super recent idea. I mean, Freud, that’s extremely recent. But even the idea that there’s a separation between childhood and adulthood and that we define ourselves as different is also very recent. So I was questioning, why do I now feel like an adult and I didn’t before? And what does that mean in the history of where we are today? So that was the inception. Ajay Kurian: And then getting into that history takes you into the Industrial Revolution and the foundations of how we start thinking about that separation. Rachel Rose: Yes. And then separately, which is true for all my work, I also always have a thing I wanna learn how to do. “I don’t know how to do this” is to me, an essential project and point of making an artwork. When I complete the work, I might know a little bit more about how to do it. So in this case, I’d never done an animation before. I had no idea how to do it. And actually, I don’t think I had ever written a proper script, because up until this point, the two or three works I had made had been basically essays. This one, because it was an animation, I had to storyboard everything. So I had to write a very clear script. It was actually the first time I ever wrote a script. Ajay Kurian: What did that feel like? Rachel Rose: I mean, I didn’t know what I was doing. So it was that, and then it was the storyboarding, and then it was working on a traditional animation because this is hand drawn. Ajay Kurian: Let’s go back even further. Because you went to art school and you went in for painting. But then you started moving into film, seemingly suddenly. Was it like, I can’t think in this medium anymore? Rachel Rose: Yeah, I mean, I got obliterated in all the crits. Everyone hated on everything I did, and I felt so bad about myself all the time. Which wouldn’t necessarily happen in this. But yeah, I felt so bad about myself all the time and I felt like, why do I have to feel bad about myself for this pointless thing? I don’t think painting’s pointless, but… Ajay Kurian: You have a painting show that’s opening in like a few days? Rachel Rose: I don’t think the painting is pointless, but at the time I felt a major existential crisis, right? And when I say this is pointless, I meant all of art making, start to finish. What am I doing here? I wanna do something meaningful with my life. I want to affect change, I wanna contribute. What can you do in art? Seemingly like nothing. Ajay Kurian: So that was the takeaway. Rachel Rose: Well, no, that’s the crisis that I had at that point. And then I thought, if I became a documentary filmmaker, that could be politically actionable. So then I started learning how to make films immediately, thinking that when I graduated I would try to make my way into the documentary film world. So the best thing I could do is learn all the skills I could in the meantime. Ajay Kurian: Did it come as a shock to your professors at the time? And when you started making that first video piece that you thought was gonna be a documentary — when did you know that it wasn’t? Rachel Rose: I knew it wasn’t when I started editing, but not up until that point. I was driving around shooting this footage and doing these interviews. I didn’t understand how much it wasn’t a documentary film until I started editing, which was the first time I ever edited anything. And I just fell in love with the medium. I felt that this is it, this is me. I’ve been waiting all this time, and I was in the middle of my second to last semester of school at that point. It was like, let’s say November of my last year when I was finally editing. So I was like, oh my God, this is it. I love this medium so much. Ajay Kurian: Did everybody in the crits just shut the fuck up? Rachel Rose: I mean, I wasn’t showing anything at that point because I didn’t have anything to show. I was just working on my project or whatever. Ajay Kurian: But then you had a final piece. Rachel Rose: Yeah, but I guess what I’m saying is I fell so in love with editing. I felt like this is my voice. Ajay Kurian: I mean, that’s when I met you, when you were graduating from graduate school. Rachel Rose: That’s right. That’s when we met, because you were in that show. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I was in the show that Ian was in, at PS1. Rachel Rose: And I was coming over and bothering you guys during install, I remember that! Ajay Kurian: Yeah. So Rachel’s married to Ian Chang, another artist, they both show at Gladstone. An amazing artist in his own right. And we were in that show together and Rachel was asking for studio visits from everyone. Rachel Rose: Yes. I’m sure I was. And Josh came and changed my life Ajay Kurian: I believe it. To every person you were like, I’d love to show you this. And I was like, wow. I remember seeing it and I was like, this is her first video piece, that’s stupid. It really blew me away. It really towed that line. I hadn’t seen that much video art that felt borderline popular that could have been released in a gallery and it could also be released by Vice. It felt like it had the makings of something that were highly specific and rigorous. And in that particular piece, it was thinking about the border slash limit of life and death. What happens in that transition? How do we codify those things? And seeing it, it really shocked me. You were so proficient in doing this so quickly. It’s obvious that was your voice. It was a no brainer. Rachel Rose: I remember that feeling, I felt high during that period because I felt like after all this time of feeling like I actually wasn’t an artist and like I was wrong and it was time to pivot. Then I found this medium that felt like I could channel myself through it. And at the time, also in the art world, there was a place for making work like that. I think that’s changed now, but at the time there was. Ajay Kurian: I mean, I feel like your rise was in a moment when new media and video was being shown constantly. Now it’s harder to come by exhibitions like that and people that are gonna put the money into it. Because, what you can’t see in this excerpt, is that your videos are installed incredibly specifically. Actually, we can just see it on the website. Did you know that in grad school, was that already something that you were thinking about? Rachel Rose: Yeah, I had this position, I guess at the time, of hanging around in the art world. Which is okay, if I’m gonna do this, if these things are gonna be shown in exhibition spaces and not black boxes, then I should really use the exhibition space for what it can offer. I had screens made out of tapestries and carpets, and all kinds of ways that particularly address the way that the film sat in the space. So yeah, this was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and we wrapped the room. You can’t see it in these images really, but the room is wrapped in this scrim. The same scrim that we’re projecting on, but it’s double wrapped. So it created this kind of moire effect with the light. And that moire effect was also in the film. So experimenting with things like that. Ajay Kurian: I mean, I guess your first solo exhibition was at the Whitney Museum. And even there, it was the scrim and the way that light was coming through the room. You couldn’t call it site specific, but it was site sensitive. Rachel Rose: It was, that’s exactly the word. I went in and actually edited and played with the blacks in the space. So the idea was that when there was black on the screen, it would be porous because obviously that is a dim projection of light. and you would see the outside world. So I projected a scrim that was in front of a glass. The whole film was about what we can access. And what we can in light and sound is obviously biologically determined, but what does it mean to take our biological form and extract it from this one? Let’s say you become an astronaut or something. What can you see and hear differently? Can you extend the limits of human perceptual capacities, not through drugs or alcohol or whatever else, but through just moving our body into a different environment off of the earth. Ajay Kurian: And what was the thing that you wanted to learn in this piece? Rachel Rose: Well, this piece came out of something really simple actually. I don’t know if it was a thing I wanted to learn, but it was a feeling I wanted to explore, which is that Ian and I had gone to see Gravity in Battery Park City. When we left, we walked home to the Bowery where we lived at the time. I can remember it exactly now, the feeling of leaving the theater and walking on the street and looking at the street signs and the traffic lights. Just like New York City laid bare and feeling actually very alienated from it. And it took that walk, or maybe a few blocks of that walk, to kind of resettle. Actually we never left America. We never left New York City. We were here the whole time. Because I found that film so transportive and seeing it in the theater so transportive, which I think is something to do with the way it was shot and the time and the moment. Then I remember saying to Ian it’s so weird that just sound and light did this to me or to us. That’s all it was. We were just sitting in a black box listening and looking. And yet, a streetlight feels alien to me. So I started to wonder about sound and light and how it enters the body and what it can do to us. Ajay Kurian: And seeing if you could conjure something similar. Rachel Rose: Yes. But first I think I was interested in, what are the extremes of this? Then I heard this interview with this astronaut about a spacewalk he had done in outer space, when he was repairing the International Space Station and the Earth was on the night side. So I guess when the earth is on the night side, the earth is nothing and it just looks black. At least that’s how he described it. Maybe it’s something about the position of the — I can’t remember the details of it, but it was like a void. He described this experience of total blackness in outer space and then what it’s like to come back to earth as an astronaut, which many astronauts have talked about. Having to relearn how to walk, how color is different and sounds feel different. Ajay Kurian: It almost feels like a microcosm of how you think about an artwork in general because there’s something about compression and distortion that happens repeatedly. Where using compression and distortion is a way to unground your viewer and to have them see the world anew again, where there’s something liquid and something destabilizing. You’re using extreme experiences sometimes, but it’s to induce the vertigo of the everyday. Rachel Rose: That’s right, like that image on the screen. Then I got really interested in Douglas Trumbull and early special effects designers from 2001 Space Odyssey and actually how homegrown and simple these effects were. Like that’s just milk and ink, and learning how simply you can suggest something. Ajay Kurian: So there’s just a lot of liquids that Rachel was mixing together, and when you see them, it’s so alchemical. Especially in the age that we live in today, you would just assume that it’s rendered, like it doesn’t look real. Rachel Rose: But it literally was just in my kitchen. That’s all it is. I was really interested in that, which I think is similar to this thing of, I was actually just at the movies and many of us probably saw Gravity. It’s not that big of a deal, but you know, it can also change your relationship to living for a second and that’s meaningful. Ajay Kurian: I mean, outside of how a documentary can potentially move politics if it does. It depends, right? Depends what we’re thinking right now and maybe the world is past documentary help. But there’s also that feeling that art can be a transcendent experience that pushes you out of your body into a place where you can experience yourself in the world in a very different way. Those are very life-changing experiences. I remember when I interviewed you during Covid, I asked you whether you’ve had transcendent experiences with the work of art and you adamantly were like, yes I’ve had many. One that you mentioned was a story by Joyce Carol Oates. Rachel Rose: Maybe I was reading it at the time. Ajay Kurian: You had just finished reading it. It was a short story called Feral. Rachel Rose: I can’t even remember this. Ajay Kurian: Oh, man. It was intense because you kind of narrated the story and then you were like, I wanna cut that. But it’s a story of a couple that have been trying to have a kid for quite a long time. They finally do. They’re so pleased. The child’s very calm, pleasant and lovely. And then, unfortunately, almost drowns and the child’s revived. Then his demeanor is completely different. He’s like a feral child. He’s running around constantly escaping every situation, almost demonic. And throughout this, what you described is that the language is very simple, not flat, but just simple and matter of fact. And then in this last section where the child disappears and runs out into the woods, all of a sudden it’s like time is distended and every single thing is described in high definition. The end of the story is that you see the child howling in the woods with other children. Rachel Rose: It’s such a crazy, beautiful story. Thank you for reminding me of that. Ajay Kurian: It made me think of weapons if you saw that. Rachel Rose: Yes. Ajay Kurian: That came to mind and I was curious if that director had seen that. If you haven’t seen weapons, it’s actually really worth seeing. But it also just tapped me into that feeling of distortion and it made perfect sense to me why that would be one of those experiences that had that effect on you because it feels like a feeling that you chase too. Rachel Rose: You know what’s cool about that story? That I forgot about. Is that as a reader, when you’re reading it, the whole time, you’re in the position of the parents, right? I can’t remember exactly whose consciousness, but you’re in their position. Maybe you’re the mom. I can’t remember. Ajay Kurian: I think you are. Rachel Rose: So you’re like, why? You know, it’s all the bad stuff that’s happening to her because of her messed up kid and this kind of mid loss. What happened to my kid? His brain is damaged by the water and you’re in this whole detective story about, can she get him back? When’s he gonna release her to love her again? And then at the very end it’s revealed that this way bigger thing’s been happening the whole time. And who knows what happened under the water. Maybe it was just a little thing, it’s meaningless. Or maybe he was down there and he met a spirit. It just flips the whole relationship to the problem that you’ve been following the whole time. Ajay Kurian: That’s so weird that I didn’t think about that moment in the water. I guess I assumed that it’s like a life and death experience, but when you said who knows what happened in the water, it kind of gave me goosebumps. Something happened in the water. Rachel Rose: Or not. Ajay Kurian: Or not. Rachel Rose: Or nothing happened and he was born feral. Ajay Kurian: Have you had any transcendent experiences recently with the work of art? Rachel Rose: I have had two in the past four days, which is very unusual because I don’t know if it’s like this for a lot of you guys, but there are long stretches of just nothing. I saw Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a Belgian choreographer on Thursday night. I don’t need to paraphrase the whole piece, but it just completely blew my mind so much that I got Ian a ticket to go alone on Friday night, and made him go because I was like, our relationship needs you to see this. I can’t be the only one who saw this. That’s the level of masterpiece I thought it was. Then on Sunday, we took our kids to see hoppers, which also is just mind blowing. It’s like a Pocahontas story or Avatar. Now we’re in the animal world and we’re here to save the animals, and people are bad and they’re violent. They’re like there to destroy nature and we hope that humans will learn a lesson or something. Kind of exactly like Avatar or Pocahontas. Then it weaves into something much more complex and a kind of forgiveness and empathy for human behavior. And locating it within the kinds of needs and drives that all animals have in different degrees and is organ principled and organized in different ways. In the end it sort of offers human destruction and behavior an enormous amount of empathy. It’s a super complicated movie. I really don’t know how it got made. Ajay Kurian: In thinking about animal consciousness, witches and thinking about all the things that start to get banished from the world because there’s a particular kind of colonial rationality and also the beginnings of capitalism that are happening in this moment. I mean, this is the grounds for the film Enclosure and I’m sure you can speak to that in terms of what that means for that proto capitalist moment. But I’m gonna show this first. Rachel Rose: One of the ways that people thought about healing other people during this time was through transferring consciousnesses into bodies of animals. So if someone was sick with the flu and nothing was working, they might kill a goat. I don’t remember exactly, but you kill a goat and stick the goat next to the person to try to transfer the death into another body, for example, or the illness into another body. Ajay Kurian: And then you have a show that’s opening this week at Gladstone Gallery, which is called The Rest, where you’re thinking about landscape and politics and the stories that we tell ourselves, but again, through this sort of distorted lens. These are really beautiful paintings. I don’t think I’ve actually seen one of these in person, so I’m excited to see it in person. Rachel Rose: They’re small. They’re a little big, but they’re small. This is something I’ve been working on for maybe three or four years. It’s not actually in the Bible, but this allegory of the rest on the flight into Egypt, which is this moment that has been depicted throughout European Western painting from Caravaggio to Flemish to Southern, everywhere, of Mary, Jesus, and Joseph fleeing. Basically running to safety in Egypt as Herod’s army is on their back trying to persecute and capture them. And Jesus, I think, is three days old. So she’s like breastfeeding, very new mother shit. There’s this moment, it’s called the rest on the flight in Egypt, where they stop to rest and Joseph gets them food and usually there’s a water source. And usually symbolically, there’s this hay field that sprouts up automatically so you see Herod’s army is blocked and can’t find them. Mary sits in the center just breastfeeding Jesus, calmly. And at her feet often grow the exact herbs that she needs to feed him and feed herself. There’s this thing where the tree branch bends down to give Joseph the exact olive or depending on where they are, pear, whatever that he needs to give for her. The donkey just waits there and everything is perfect for her and for this moment. It’s a kind of time warp space thing. I’ve interpreted the allegory many different ways in different shows and different ways of working with the paintings. In this show I decided to reset the allegory in Northern Westchester. Now from the perspective of Mary. Taking Mary, Joseph, and Jesus out, and looking at the symbolic elements that she looks at in the painting as transposed to Northern Westchester now. And kind of experiencing the world from her perspective in that moment. So that’s what the show is. Ajay Kurian: Beautiful. Go see the show. It opens on Friday. Rachel Rose: Yeah, that’s it. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Forum 18 | Reginald Sylvester II: Discipline as Devotion

Reginald Sylvester II approaches painting as a structure of discipline. What begins in daily rituals—routine, repetition, and care—extends into a larger philosophy about belief, responsibility, and endurance. Practice, for him, is not separate from life. It is shaped by it. Fatherhood, spiritual inquiry, and the demands of time become part of the architecture of the studio. Rather than protecting art from those pressures, Sylvester allows them to recalibrate how the work unfolds. The result is a practice grounded less in spectacle and more in sustained commitment. Abstraction emerges through this framework as an act of faith. To begin a painting without knowing its final form is to trust that meaning will surface through repetition and attention. At a certain moment, that commitment required stepping away from exhibition altogether, allowing the work to evolve privately before returning to public view. Rather than presenting artistic growth as clarity or mastery, Sylvester describes a practice built through persistence, where rigor, vulnerability, and belief remain inseparable. He explains: • Why daily rituals and discipline are foundational to sustaining a studio practice.• How fatherhood reshaped his relationship to time, responsibility, and ambition.• Why abstraction functions as an act of faith rather than a stylistic choice.• What it meant to withdraw from the exhibition to deepen the work in private.• How travel and research expanded the historical resonance of the work. Timestamps (0:00) Ritual and the Structure of Practice(5:00) Fatherhood and Responsibility(11:00) Abstraction and Faith(18:00) Stepping Away from Exhibition(26:00) Discipline and Repetition(34:00) Cutting into Surface: The Gates(41:00) Travel, History, and Material Memory(49:00) Persistence and Staying in the Work Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube [https://youtu.be/0HAmvQn6m-w]. Follow Reginald Instagram: @reginaldsylvester2 [https://www.instagram.com/reginaldsylvester2/] Follow Maximillian William Web: https://www.maximillianwilliam.com Instagram: @maximillian_william [https://www.instagram.com/maximillian_william/] Reginald Sylvester II (b. Jacksonville, NC, USA, 1987; lives and works in Jersey City, NJ) creates large-scale paintings and sculptures that trace the generative threshold between the two mediums. Working predominantly in abstraction, he expands the language of his painting practice by incorporating materials such as rubber, tarp, aluminium and steel. His singular approach lends his paintings a sculptural presence and imbues his sculptures with a painter’s sensibility. While grounded in traditional painting techniques, Sylvester II ventures beyond the conventions of stretched canvas, working on surfaces that both absorb and reject paint. His layered, often multi-partite works investigate the language of his chosen mediums: stretcher bars are left exposed, becoming part of his compositions, while oxidised and patinated metal surfaces evoke the histories of gestural painting. Sylvester II also transcends the surface, creating monumental sculptures that reference forms observed through painting and from his environment. The artist is drawn to materials that relate to his personal history, spirituality, or broader societal narratives. In his approach to assemblage, Sylvester II appropriates byproducts of his making process, physically attaching studio debris to works to enrich their tactile quality and textural narrative. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here [https://www.newcrits.studio/events]. Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio [http://www.newcrits.studio]. — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: I’m gonna start off with the big questions, things that are really important to people. You are 37 years old. What the fuck is your skincare routine man? Reginald Sylvester ll: 39. Ajay Kurian: That’s insane. Reginald Sylvester ll: Knocking on 40, bro. Ajay Kurian: Oh my God. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, man. Cold water and shots out to mom Dukes. Ajay Kurian: That’s really Mom Dukes and cold water. I remember this very clearly when Pharrell was asked, he said cold water too. Reginald Sylvester ll: He’s right. Closes up your pores, but, yeah 39, about to be 40. Ajay Kurian: And you’re a new father. Reginald Sylvester ll: And I’m a new father. Ajay Kurian: Congratulations. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, man. Ajay Kurian: What’s family life right now? How do you do studio, father, all of the things? Reginald Sylvester ll: To be honest, it’s not much studio. It is just really wifey, Noah, supporting her, you know. She’s still getting back to a hundred percent and so I’m just support right now. I’m the calvary. Keeping it down. I fit in drawing, some reading when I can, but for the most part, I’m waking up, and it’s, what do you need, what you need help with, what does Noah need, and you need a break. I’m just support, you know, at this point. Ajay Kurian: That’s good. Reginald Sylvester ll: But the time away is gonna help the practice. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. I think it always fuels it. Even if you’re not in the studio, other things are happening and you just brought life into the world. Your lovely wife brought life into the world. So how could that not affect? I was thinking about you having a kid and what that means for the studio practice, but also what that means for how you share your spiritual practice with the next generation, with your kin, and how that’s meant a lot to you. Is church a part of your life or is it a different kind of spiritual practice? How are you gonna pass this on? Reginald Sylvester ll: I grew up with my grandma going to the church. You know, that was how I grew up. But obviously as we grow and become adults, you start seeking after things on your own. So I’m just in big research mode right now. I’m just doing a lot of reading, a lot of research, things that feel true, and things that I stray away from. But I’m in a big learning research, discovery mode, lots of conversations with my pops, my mom. Ajay Kurian: And they’re open to those kinds of conversations? Because I know for myself, my parents are from Kerala, and there’s a huge Christian population there. So I grew up Christian and they’re very religious. And I thought learning about theology and the history of Christianity and all that stuff would build a bridge. It did not. It was like it created more hostility in a way because it’s like, why do you have all these questions? Why are you inquiring? What are the bridges that you have with your folks? Reginald Sylvester ll: So my dad, he went to theology school to become a pastor at a certain point. He’s done a lot of research and reading and so forth in his own life. And so when I come to him with questions, he’s very open arms, answering those questions, and guiding me with the questions. Sometimes, parents can be very opinionated, you know, that’s not what you know, that’s what we should be looking at is this soul. But it’s great because I think in terms of spirituality, for me, I just wanna get to the truth. That’s what it’s really about. And I think, through becoming an artist. Art is a thing that deals with truth. So once I made the decision to actually become an artist, it made me question a lot of things about, where I am, who I am, where I come from, you know what I’m saying? What do I believe? So I started to become a student of history and really just started to do a lot of reading, and then again, going back to my folks asking questions, did you hear about this? What do you think about this? Ajay Kurian: That’s beautiful. It’s nice that you have that relationship with your family. I mean, it seems like they’re all kind of artists in their own way too. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah. My dad, I guess I call ‘em like an artist and graphic designer. Growing up, I seen him do a lot of things with typography. Not really painting, but more so graphics. He did t-shirts, which is what led me to falling into streetwear, watching him kind of having a brand and doing his thing. Ajay Kurian: Oh, he had a brand logo? Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, I mean, Pops made shirts. But just seeing him kind of move like that gave me the confidence to wanna be a graphic designer or want to learn about typography or wanna learn about silk screening t-shirts. He was a big part of that. Ajay Kurian: I wanna start with Limbo first. This is a quote that hit me really hard just ‘cause it’s a heavy thing to say. You said ‘making that connection between abstraction and faith grabbed hold of me. Suddenly for me to paint or find an image became symbolic of how one lives life, with hopes of dying to then enter into the kingdom of heaven’. That’s a heavy ass thing to say. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, I guess I didn’t mean it to be so deep or sound so heavy. Ajay Kurian: What is the Kingdom of Heaven for you? What is that? Reginald Sylvester ll: Kingdom of Heaven is to be with God, to be with Christ, to make it to paradise or spiritual paradise and how I attested that to painting. When I first came to New York for my second business trip in my graphic design days, I wasn’t concerned about being an abstract painter at all. But I ended up going to the Met and went to the abstract expressionist wing. First time with De Kooning, Gilliam, you name it — the guys, right? And I immediately felt like this is something I want to do. But I don’t know how I’m gonna get there. When I did start to research and read, I learned about De Kooning and him talking about finding an image, and it very much sounded like a painterly way of faith. Or how one goes through life, living life. We all try and I don’t know if people are religious or believe in God or heaven or after life or whatever, but we all live life the best we can in order to make it to that next place where our soul will rest, you know? He talked about finding an image and it made that connection for me. So I said, if I’m gonna be any type of painter, it would be an abstract painter. Because it was like a painterly motif that defined faith, or how I sought and see faith. ‘Cause faith is believing in things unseen, right? Ajay Kurian: For sure. Reginald Sylvester ll: And so if you’re in the process of making a painting, but you don’t necessarily know what that finished image is, but you’re working your way through it, that’s what that thing is. And so, I don’t know what the Kingdom of Heaven looks like. It’s been described in a few ways, but I hope to get there, you know? So to get to that finished painting, I don’t wanna say perfect painting, but the act of making to find my way to new images is what made that connection for me. Ajay Kurian: I remember I had to write something about On Kawara back in the day. And weirdly, after spending more and more time with the work, it felt like it was a practice of prayer. That every painting was a small act of devotion towards something unnameable. It didn’t have a shape or a way of being described, but you put in the work. It felt similarly related to thinking about what all this means here for somewhere else. It feels like that’s kind of the starting point for these 12 gates that are in Accra right now. How did this all come about? First of all, this space is fucking stunning. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, shout out to Limbo, man. That’s Dominique and the homie Diallo. Diallo suggested me to Dominique, who runs the Limbo Museum. Very forward-thinking in terms of the vision. But it’s a museum that basically uses abandoned spaces in order to give artists an opportunity to put together shows. They’ve started a residency program and I was the first artist to do the residency. Initially, when I went to go visit for the first trip, I thought we were gonna use the space that they used for the prior presentation when they did the inaugural talk and show. And she was like, no, I’m just taking you here to just show you the initial space, but this is the idea that I have for you. So she went to the University of Ghana, and I was like, you are gonna let me do a show and this is what we’re doing? She was like, yeah, and it was great because it was my first time on the continent and I’ve always wanted to do a show on the continent. My father always talked about taking the family to the continent. Obviously I wanna touch roots. You know what I’m saying? Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Reginald Sylvester ll: But then it was also challenging ‘cause I’d never worked at this scale before. How are you gonna treat this space? How is the work gonna function in this space? How is it gonna reverberate in the space? Diallo and myself had a lot of conversations surrounding that and he challenged me on a lot of things in terms of these gates from their initial intent and how they were shown. How to move past that and to allow them to do other things. And so, this allowed me the space to do so. Ajay Kurian: The first time you showed them was in LA . I just wanna show images of that exhibition, which had a great title, T-1000. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yep, I’m sure everybody’s familiar with Terminator. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Reginald Sylvester ll: I’m super big into sci-fi movies that got that post-apocalyptic punk undertone. You know, brutalist, kind of futurist. Ajay Kurian: I mean, it shows. The work is definitely in that vibe and I remember when I was researching you, that I saw this show. But I do remember when you were fabricating those gates and I was checking the progress on Instagram, and I was like, shit, this is different. This isn’t a new step. Reginald Sylvester ll: Finding my way through making new types of paintings led me to sculpture. I’m a fan of painting first and being interested as a maker, you’re always trying to figure out, how can I push the work? How can I find myself? If I’m interested in sculpture, how do I find my way there? Being introduced to a new material, which is rubber, led me to really changing the whole process and way I make work. That led me to a form that was found by way of the byproducts of the paintings, which gave way to the gates. And so that’s the cutting that you see in the rubber. Because at one point I was researching and reading a lot about ready-made sculptures. I started to think about my paintings in the sense of a ready-made and how I can show all parts or all aspects of the painting. Making this curvature incision, and the shape that I was left with when it was laid on the floor in my studio reminded me of the floor plans used for the boats that were used in the transatlantic slave trade. Ajay Kurian: That’s interesting to hear. I always thought it was the other way around. I thought that you had that shape in mind and then that curvature got cut and it became that act of violence in the surface. But it’s interesting to hear that it was first a formal decision. One where it was like, let’s get to the truth of the material. Reginald Sylvester ll: The thought of even showing the substrate. I think that’s why I wanna continue to put myself in new situations in the studio. Because for me, and every artist is different, but that’s the way that I grow. So if the aesthetic of a material interests me, it’s for me to not really ask too many questions. It’s just to respond to it. So I was using a lot of military tent shell halves, they’re called pup tents. You basically button two of the tent halves together to make a full tent. I was buttoning them together to stretch them over the substrate, but because they don’t make a complete closure, you get access to the substrate. I thought, oh, I can be more intentional about that. This is happening by way of accident. I made a series of paintings with the pup tents, but I said, how am I gonna be more intentional about this access to revealing the substrate and how it changes the form and the structure of my work. The reason why I called them Gates, because thinking about that history along that journey. I mean, we’ve seen Amistad films, so how do I take this history and reverberate it into something, I don’t wanna say beautiful, but speak further into it. Ajay Kurian: It feels like the history of black culture in so many ways where it’s like you take shitty situations that are beyond the pale, and then you consistently make joy out of it. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yes. I think some of the best work is made from the most mundane things. I think that’s black and brown folk in general. We take a lot of the waste and cook and repurpose it into something great. Reginald Sylvester ll: And so I said, all those bodies that were lost along that journey, where do those souls lie? Scripture say that all souls return to the father once they pass. But I just thought that, maybe I can take this shape and I can reform it as this gate-like sculpture in order to give way for those souls to pass through, to have rest. Ajay Kurian: So in that early version, that’s sheet metal welded together and it has a structure underneath, but then this becomes airy and light. What does that translation mean for you? What does it mean to take it to this place of pure structure? Reginald Sylvester ll: A big part of my work and how I continue to try and grow, is I’m just paying attention to what interests me. I used to have a studio out in Ridgewood and I would look at a lot of the debris. The junk by the trash cans, the back of semi-trucks and how they oxidize over time, the environment of the city, the outside. And using that as a language to bring into the studio. So I did the same thing when I went to Ghana. Ghana’s a very interesting place because it excited me, but it also made me really upset. Because you see wealth and poverty right next to each other. You go to a hotel that’s around the corner from people who don’t even have clean water. You know what I’m saying? Ajay Kurian: That feels like Mumbai too. I remember going there and there’s like Prada on one side, and then this dude with his hands disintegrating from leprosy. It is so stark. Where I’m from, in the south, it’s still communist, and the discrepancy in wealth is much less extreme. But there’s certain places in various parts of the world where the jump is so crazy that it really fucks with you. Reginald Sylvester ll: And just getting a grasp on, why is this happening? So from my understanding of what they were telling me, when new individuals were elected or coming into power, certain buildings that had paperwork and had the okay to go forward — build this hotel, build up this certain area, build up these certain advertisements — if that project wasn’t complete by the time that individual who gave way for it to happen, the next person that came into power can say yay or nay on whether it’s finished or not. Which initially gave Dominique the idea for Limbo, right? Because you’re seeing all these great infrastructures half built and then the people that are living there have to deal with it. Anyway, getting to the language within the gates here, it was by way of seeing the advertisement signs and the structures that were exposed. It’s funny, I see Eric Mack in the back, my bro, and I thought about ‘em a lot. I told Dominique to reach out to Eric, because you would see a lot of torn away signages breezing in the wind. I was just thinking about the structure of these gates and the call or need for tension. You know, not as this solid form, but as this form that your eyes can kind of pass through. And then thinking about the space that they’re about to be exhibited in. It’s a very raw skeletal space. So I want the works to have this presence, where they’re there, but they also evaporate. Even these sight lines were very important for us because I want your eye to rest on the sculpture, but I also want your eye to be able to pass through the structure and just enjoy the space as well too. You have sculpture after sculpture that reveals a painting in the distance. So that was another reason why I wanted to stick to this thing and also just thinking about radical black empowerment or thinking about Nkrumah. Thinking about his influence on W-B-W-E-B, du Bois, Malcolm X, all these individuals who I look up to, and have read about and thinking about. The writings, the fortitude and resilience they had, and how maybe these forms can give way for those teachings and those hopes for the continent or those from the diaspora. For those that kind of echo throughout these works as well. Ajay Kurian: I’m not familiar with, you said Nkrumah? Reginald Sylvester ll: He was a revolutionary that really wanted to unite all of Africa. While he was living and was active, he had a huge influence on a lot of American activists as well. Malcolm X was somebody he really influenced. Ajay Kurian: I gotta do some reading. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah, so that first trip was very visual and the latter end was very like, I’m looking, I’m reading, I’m writing. Then the second trip was going to work. Ajay Kurian: It’s beautiful that you find the vernacular of the city, the tubing, and it sits in the space but it takes you somewhere else. It’s like it’s building on all these conversations that you’ve already been having. It really makes me think how far you’ve come in this crazy way where you started in graphic design, typology, and working in streetwear. To go from that to this. It’s not insane or anything, but it’s a pretty serious distance in terms of what that work looked like and where you are now. Your first show is In Search of a Wonderful Place. It’s very obviously condo inspired. Reginald Sylvester ll: Heavily. Ajay Kurian: Heavily. You’re bringing your own things to it, but it’s also within this space of what I’ve seen a few times over. Of people who are in streetwear and the artists that they’re interested in are all the same artists, which are Condo, KAWS, and Picasso Reginald Sylvester ll: Murakami. Ajay Kurian: Murakami. Also, let’s not forget Basquiat and Warhol. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yep. Ajay Kurian: Those are the names. And it’s an instance in which we get to see an artist process it live. You’re doing it in exhibitions, not in the studio. There are people that are figuring their shit out and they get their opportunities much later. But one thing that is a credit to you is you are always adept at what you were doing, and somebody saw some promise there and then you kept pushing it forward. So to go from this to deep gestural abstraction is already a huge jump. Why did you forsake this? Reginald Sylvester ll: This is when I moved to New York, but prior was that trip to the Met. I was aware of the Met, but I didn’t have the studio time, nor the hand and eye coordination to even make a pure gestural, abstract painting. But that’s why I named this show In Search of a Wonderful Place. I don’t know if I’m at the wonderful place now, but you know, this was me making the work that I was interested in at that time. And also titling the show in a way where I could have definitely stayed there, but I’m in search of something. Ajay Kurian: When did this place stop being wonderful? Reginald Sylvester ll: I mean, it was funny when we were talking the other day. I was going back on our conversation and the beautiful thing for me about art is that it’ll let you know if your intent is pure. My intention behind all the different bodies of work that I made, was always pure. It was to push as hard as I could at that particular time. But at the end of the day, art is gonna push you to truth if you’re really doing it for real. If your intent is to really make the purest work that you could possibly make, it’ll pull out all the lies. It’ll pull out all the fake shit. It’ll make you question. I’d make work, and then I’d ask myself, why is this work relevant to you and who you are? What aesthetic interest does it have to you? What more do you have to say? I would ask myself these questions, and then at the same time, I’m seeing retrospectives for the first time, I’m traveling, I’m buying books, I’m learning about this, that, and the third, there’s a cannon. I’m educating myself at the same time, but I never thought, not until after this show, I made the decision that I wanna just take two years off. Ajay Kurian: Oh, wow. Reginald Sylvester ll: And just be in the studio and really push as hard as I can in order to make my first presentation of abstract paintings. But, you know, before that, it wasn’t a fear for me to be growing and developing in front of people. I just thought, you know, I’m making work. You saw the last show that I’m doing and I’m progressing. Also, I think a lot of my favorite shows were retrospective. So I would see an accumulation of an artist’s life within one exhibition, so I never really thought about it in a scary way. But after this show I said, yo, I really want my next presentation to be pure abstractions. Ajay Kurian: Interesting. I had never seen the show, so I had to do some digging. For one, it’s crazy that it’s at the Lever House. That’s no small thing. And two, was Richard Prince on your mind at all? Because it was really fascinating that I could see Matisse, Picasso, Basquiat, but also you pushing it into a different place. It did feel like, okay, I see a voice here. It doesn’t feel like it’s just pulling from these things and kind of chopping it up differently. So I was trying to find the show, and this felt really reminiscent, but this was a year later and he hadn’t made this work yet. It was an interesting thing to see that this gestural, sort of semi figurative abstraction was something that he returned to. But the difference to me is that with Richard Prince, there’s always this irony. There’s a built in sense of he believes it and he doesn’t at the same time. In a sense, there was a moment, when I was coming up, there was a moment in painting where everything about abstract expressionism was questioned. Is there such a thing as a pure mark? Is there such a thing as pure subjectivity? Or is it always filtered through ideology or economics or whatever it may be? There are artists that are thinking about that, like Cheyney Thompson trying to break down what the mark means. Wade Guyton taking the hand out of it altogether. Reginald Sylvester ll: I was watching Wade. Ajay Kurian: What’s your relationship to an artist like Wade Guyton? Reginald Sylvester ll: Aesthetically he speaks to stuff that I’m interested in. To me, this is futurist painting. But I come from graphic design, so the fact that he’s using the Epson printer, you know, I very much so understand Epson in printmaking in that way. His book practice is really incredible. I’ve learned from buying tons of books. I’m very interested in making my own books. I’ve been lucky enough to make a few, so I’m interested in him in that way. Prince, I’m also interested in, because he’s also an artist who has done different things. It’s funny that you say that work came a year after, but during Premonition I was heavily invested in that work. That’s where I was heavily invested at that time. Ajay Kurian: So we met in 2021. I feel like I started hearing your name and I started seeing the work and the thing that captured me the most was your presence, and the way that you are in the world. I was like, okay, that person has like an energy that radiates in a very specific way. And so I was like, I know they’re cooking, I know something’s happening there. What I’m curious about, in a moment like that, where you’re shifting so many things in yourself that you’re very clear about. What does that look like to other people? Like from where you come from to that particular moment? How does that environment start to change for you? Reginald Sylvester ll: I used to get all types of remarks from homies, from people that would meet me. I remember I mentioned to you when we were talking about what people are thinking about the work. I hope they think that my intentions are pure when I’m making this work. I hope nobody thinks I’m just trying to, oh, this might work. Nah, man. I’m gonna go back to that first thing and then continue to unpack the things that I’m seeing and reading about and watching in terms of art. I was motivated to and I want to have a rigorous studio practice. I want to continue to pay attention to the things that are working within the work that may not be working. Expand on those things and then continue to push. Just for myself, so I can sleep at night. At the end of the day I need to make the work that I’m the most happy about before anybody else has anything to say, and that’s why I made the decision to take two years off. I’m gonna dig deep. I’m gonna make the best abstract paintings that I can possibly make. You know? And that’s what I did. From that, I learned so much. I continue to do that in the studio today. If I’m making work, and there’s a small thing about the painting that I just finished. I’m expanding on it. What started to happen is, I was starting to reference myself in things that were working within the studio to expand on, opposed to maybe continuing to look outward or how am I gonna situate myself in the cannon? Or where do I fit? What do I contribute? And more so I just started thinking very insular about what my real interests are. That’s when the best work started to come or the work that I feel the most proud of. Ajay Kurian: And of course being able to sleep at night is a serious thing. That’s an important way to live your life. It keeps truth in you, but there’s also just economic realities too, if you had success with one particular body of work. Did you get pushback from people in that regard too? Like I see that you’re going this way, but this isn’t what we asked for? Reginald Sylvester ll: No, I didn’t really get pushback in that way. I think it was more, certain individuals or friends or whatnot would always kind of say that you are losing your previous audience. I would see on social media that I’d lose followers. Stuff like that, you know? But when you really sit with yourself, does that really mean anything? You know, again, art would beg the question of what’s true, what’s truth? Visually, what’s the closest to truth you can get for yourself. I mean, those things definitely in some way bother me. I’m not gonna say that they did not, but you know, I look back and I’m glad I kept continuing to have that kind of interest into pushing. Ajay Kurian: I mean, I’m glad too. But the other thing that comes to mind is the kind of racial dynamic here. Did people feel like, and did you feel like, you were moving from black space to white space? Reginald Sylvester ll: Nah, nah. I didn’t feel like that, but I probably got that from other people. Ajay Kurian: I’m not saying that abstraction is a white space. Of course, it goes back further in black and brown places. Reginald Sylvester ll: Than anywhere else, yeah. I think to an audience that raised me up and held me up. You know, coming from street wear, coming from culture in that way, I had a clothing brand, I had built an audience from that. Then my interests started to change and my, I call it maybe a calling, started to change and I really wanted to pursue art and try to make the strongest bodies of work that I could possibly make. I did lose people in that way. I remember, I had a homegirl tell me, she said something on the lines of, I don’t know what this work is about. I mean, from an aesthetic standpoint, you might not be understanding. But abstract painting and art history has layers to it. It’s not just the pictorial thing. But it’s funny now, a lot of those people are — Ajay Kurian: Coming around. Reginald Sylvester ll: Coming around, you know, because again, it’s a journey. Ajay Kurian: You’re very intentional about your movement. It’s not Ooh, let me jump on this, or, Ooh, let me do that. Reginald Sylvester ll: I mean, I could have stayed where I was at in 2021. I could have maybe stayed where I was in 2023. But it’s not what it’s about and there’s growing pains. For me, better things have gotten tougher. Ajay Kurian: I believe that. Reginald Sylvester ll: I’m just moved by evolving and growing and digging deeper and digging into what excites me in the studio. If there’s something that excites me in the studio, I’m going that way. You know, the show that I had in North Carolina at the Harvey B. Gantt Center was a great exhibition for me. I got that show, and I was making the refuge paintings. They were all basically gestural abstract paintings on the pup tents, and then came the offering paintings. And when I made that first offering, I said, the hell with those refuge paintings, I’m showing straight, offering paintings. To be in the middle of a situation where someone gives you a show, and you’re expected to make this thing, but you got this other thing. Luckily, I work with people that believe in what I’m doing and trust me. You know, had the real conversation, sat down, this is the work that I’m making. This is what I wanna do. Maybe I can find a way to bridge it, you know? And luckily, I was able to really think through and find a way to show and stitch together. That first image that you had up, that was the first time I was able to show those paintings. And you know, I’m always gonna make the shift, even with T-1000. I decided to use iridescent dark colors because I felt like, hey, I wanna be a stronger colorist. How am I gonna do that? Okay, instead of just working with colors that complement one another, you need to actually be able to work with a set few colors or one color. You need to be able to make paintings with the same amount of intensity that you would get from a saturated picture, but with a muted picture, how can you do that? So I said, okay, I’m gonna make these paintings and obviously there was an interest in sculpture and steel and the oxidization and all those things, and I made the decision to do it. You know, thinking on the other side of it with my first show in Los Angeles. Rob Bennett gave me this opportunity to have this exhibition and it’s very risky to go and do a show like that. But again, he was like, this is what you wanna do, okay, bet. There’s a Nina Simone clip that I see often and I reposted it. She’s saying that artists should be reflecting the times, you know? So I was like, yo, this is where I’m at in the studio and I’m seeing where things are going in our current and this is the way for me to tell truth. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. It feels like the way you’re talking about challenging yourself, it felt very mamba mentality. This is what I think I’m strong at. Let me see the weakest part of that, so I can figure out how to get strong there. That’s an ethic that’s not easy to put on yourself. I think when you’re in school or when you have people that are around you that are like, oh, you gotta push yourself, you gotta do these things. But when you’re alone and by yourself, and the temptations that are around you, where it’s oh, you’re getting all this praise and accolades and things for doing things in a certain way. You can get seduced by that and it stops being about the pursuit of what you find to be strong and true, but more so, all right, this works. Because there’s also very real world constraints where I could maybe put a down payment on a house if I stay on this course, versus who the fuck knows what it’s gonna be. Reginald Sylvester ll: Yeah. At a point I reached out to a few artists that I was lucky to be able to meet, who have been doing it longer than I have, that are a generation or two older than me. I actually was asking those questions like, I wanna do this, this is the work that I’m making, people like this stuff. Do both. If this is what’s working, pump that, and then that can support the other stuff. I was like, okay. I heard that a few times from a few people. But then it’s on you. You also have artists who don’t have the exposure at the age I’m at. I got an opportunity to meet William T. Williams, you know, a goat. And he’d been banging the boards way far longer than I have. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Reginald Sylvester ll: I got to go to him. Funny enough, the foundry that I used to make the gates at — I had been using that foundry for a year, not knowing that I was driving past his crib the whole time. Ajay Kurian: No way. Reginald Sylvester ll: So he was like, yeah, this is my address. I’m like, this is literally 10 minutes down the road from where I’m making these gates. Ajay Kurian: God damn. Wow. Reginald Sylvester ll: So I went to go see him and his studio. Met his lovely wife and we had sandwiches. It was great. It was fire. I just saw how dialed in he was at the age that he was, but then thinking again on how long he’s been doing it. So even for me to have opportunities since 2015 till now and to be able to continue to show work, whether it was considered valid or not. Still have opportunities to show work, have people that still wanna back you, believe in the work, help fight. When I get into those thoughts, what do I really got to complain about? There’s artists that have become stewards in a way, where they’re teachers and they support their practice by working. They’re doing that and then still dialed in on the practice. When I do get into those moments, I look at the peers that I really see who’s pushing and enjoy it, and I look at them and I’m like, dang, they doubling down. Fuck, I can’t not double down. I gotta double down. There’s great artists making within the same time that I’m making that I also am inspired by. I’m not gonna say it’s easy. I have my moments. The person that probably sees those moments a lot now is my wife. Of course. She’s like oh, you’re being on your Edgar Allen Poe, you is all mopey today. But that’s the journey though. Jack Whitten said it the best. They asked him, did he ever want to be one of the best artists, and he said, I just wanted to be one of the boys. And that was fucking legendary. I think for me, that’s if Jannis Kounellis, Gilliam, Hammonds, Ed Ruscha — If any of these guys were in the room, you know what I’m saying? Ajay Kurian: And they tipped their hat. Reginald Sylvester ll: I’d rather go out swinging than to just be like, you know what, this works and I’m gonna sell a hundred thousand of these. But then, what? Ajay Kurian: I mean, the punches are landing my friend. So I hope they keep landing. Reginald Sylvester ll: Lord willing. Ajay Kurian: I’m excited to see what transformations happen next. Thank you for this. Thanks for being honest. Thanks for opening up. Thanks for sharing everything. It means a lot to everybody here, so thank you. Reginald Sylvester ll: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Forum 17 | Ebony L. Haynes: The Terms Of Autonomy

When David Zwirner approached Ebony L. Haynes, the conversation didn’t begin with vision statements or prestige. It began with reality: exhaustion, uncertainty, and the question of whether staying in the art world was even possible. What followed was recalibration. If she was going to continue, it had to be on terms that reflected how she actually works—through care, risk, and sustained presence. That recalibration became 52 Walker. Drawing from her time at Martos Gallery and its project space Shoot the Lobster, Haynes speaks candidly about what it means to build exhibitions from the ground up: buying furniture on credit cards, drilling into gallery floors, maintaining impossible works by hand, and staying late because the work deserves it. For her, autonomy is not branding or independence for its own sake. It is the ability to stay present with artists, to hold risk without spectacle, and to let rigor coexist with joy. Rather than framing curatorial work as management or authorship, Haynes describes it as a practice shaped by trust, repetition, and care—one that resists burnout not by slowing ambition, but by rooting it in pleasure, responsibility, and belief. She explains: * How Foxy Production taught her to do every job herself, and why learning the whole system changed how she values labor. * Why belief in the work often comes before money, and what it costs to act on that belief anyway. * How maintenance, repetition, and care are not secondary tasks but central to exhibition-making. * What quarantine, racial reckoning, and institutional fatigue revealed about her limits—and her resolve. * How 52 Walker emerged not from a master plan, but from presence, honesty, and the willingness to say, “I have this idea.” Timestamps (0:00) First Encounter and the Permission to Care (4:00) Foxy Production and Learning by Doing(7:00) Installation as Commitment (16:00) Belief, Debt, and the Couch(18:00) Maintenance, Repetition, and Joy (21:00) Quarantine, Burnout, and Almost Leaving (25:00) Martos Gallery and the Small Fish Problem (27:00) Shoot the Lobster and Experimental Freedom (32:00) 52 Walker and Building a Program (41:00) Artists, Power, and Staying in the Work Watch the conversation View the full episode on YouTube [https://youtu.be/MzT9CkromXI]. Follow Ebony Instagram: @ebotron [https://www.instagram.com/ebotron/] Follow 52 Walker Web: https://www.52walker.comInstagram: @52walker [https://www.instagram.com/52walkerstreet/?hl=en] Writer, curator, and phenom Ebony L. Haynes is on a mission to reconfigure the art world. Working her way up from her first New York City internship at contemporary gallery Foxy Production (then based in Chelsea), the Canadian-born Haynes would eventually become the director of Marts Gallery and its project space Shoot the Lobster. In early 2020, Haynes was approached by David Zwirner for a sales director position. She countered with a pitch for an exhibition model resembling a kunsthalle, wherein exhibitions would last 3 months and allow for visitors to spend more time truly considering the art before them. That idea led to the October 2021 opening of 52 Walker, David Zwirner Gallery's TriBeCa location, with Haynes at the helm as director. Unlike traditional commercial galleries, 52 Walker does not represent artists, and is instead dedicated to curating programming at a pace similar to that of a museum — giving artists more opportunity to challenge themselves and experiment freely. The recruitment of an all-Black staff at 52 Walker garnered disproportionate attention, but her two-pronged approach to catalyzing change in the art world is more far-sighted than mere identity politics. In challenging the ever-shrinking attention spans of a cultural milieu that increasingly consumes art through social media, Haynes aims to empower artists to take risks and dig deeper in their work. About The Forum The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here [https://www.newcrits.studio/events]. Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio [http://www.newcrits.studio]. Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: What does it feel like to watch this right now? Ebony L. Haynes: You know, I haven’t watched this in a while. It stands so clear in my mind. The first time I experienced this artwork of perfection… Ajay Kurian: This was what I read and gathered was the first art experience where you were really rocked to your core. Ebony L. Haynes: There was a small space run by this formidable woman, Ydessa Hendeles in Toronto, who at the time I knew nothing about. I stumbled into this space based on some kind of art map. I was emotional, I remember crying the first time. I went back at least a half dozen times and it made me feel like pursuing something in the art world could really mean something. It was the very first artwork I ever remember feeling like this shit hits and there are so many layers to it. The first time I walked in, I didn’t know who Shirin Neshat was, you know? And it’ll be one of my opuses. I already had one. I thought Gordon Mata Clark and Pope.L is a show I did, and I’m like, oh, I can’t top it. But working closely with this artist and something around this work would be the next major emotional insurmountable moment for me. You have to visualize this two-channel video, before I knew what two-channel really meant. You know, I don’t wanna pretend like I was encountering this work and I knew all of the ways to talk about it. I walked into the room, and there were two screens. This window was a screen and the wall facing each other. So these performers are essentially facing each other and you’re sitting in the center. It was a purple carpet, very well installed. I come from a music background, so immediately I was like, the sound design was impeccable. Somebody really thought about six channels of sound and knew how to put the subwoofers in the right place to make me feel it when it hits that note. I was like crying for this woman. And also feeling a little bit for the man and I mean, it was… Ajay Kurian: There’s layers. Ebony L. Haynes: There’s layers. It’ll be a chapter. Yeah, it was huge for me. Ajay Kurian: It’s also such a different experience. Because I was watching this on my laptop and I was like, this is crazy. Then hearing it here, the hair on the back of my neck went… Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah when you see it, it was floor to ceiling, so it was larger than life bodies belting in front of me. I almost felt like I could feel the air out of the speakers. I mean, I was also there alone every time I went. Ajay Kurian: Wow. So this clocks as one of the formative experiences a hundred percent. In your sort of art upbringing, I’m gonna fast forward a little bit to when you actually make it to New York. Is your first job in the art world interning at Foxy? Ebony L. Haynes: Intern at Foxy Production, yep. Whenever I’m about to talk about Michael and John, Michael, Gillespie, John Thompson. I make it sound like we are really good friends and I hope we are, but we don’t text and call each other. But they know how important they were and are to my story. Foxy production was one I wrote to because of their program. I felt somebody, who at the moment when I applied, had worked in music mostly and that was my only full-time experience and writing about music. They were really kind of schmutzy and unmastered is what I remember saying to John in my letter. It was like this underground basement, party of a gallery where they were doing a lot of new media before many galleries. Maybe not. You know, I don’t know, but from my perspective. Ajay Kurian: They have that reputation, yeah. Ebony L. Haynes: So I just wrote them a letter and I was like, do you want me, I’d love to come and work for you for free. And they were like, cool, come on down. I did, and it was life-changing. I really expected it to be an internship where I go back and get a job in Toronto and it turned into a job for them. Ajay Kurian: And that’s when we met. Ebony L. Haynes: That’s when we met, so many years ago. That was 2012, I think. Something like that. Ajay Kurian: With people that are in the gallery world or in the commercial art world — my gallerist for instance, Oliver, he worked for Alexander and Bonin. And he really credits them as being the ones who really gave him his grounding and his understanding of what it meant to be a gallerist. Do you feel similarly? You worked at Foxy, then you worked at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, then you worked at Martos. Of those three experiences, what has felt like the one that’s grounded you the most? Ebony L. Haynes: Grounded me, probably Martos. You know, Martos and Shoot The Lobster. I have to say both because I was tasked to program three galleries bicoastally at the same time with a staff of one. Ajay Kurian: That’s insane. Ebony L. Haynes: Sometimes an intern or assistant, eventually it grew, but it took years. Foxy though, made me really appreciate what it means to learn everything about my job. They taught me how to make an invoice, what a performer was for shipping, what the difference between national and international crates are, and how to hang an art fair booth. Registrars and production art handling are my complete IV lifeblood. If my registrar and my art handlers are not happy… I’m the queen of Donuts install morning or let’s get some pizza. When it was Martos time, I’d do some beer after hours, but not at David Zwirner. Because. I remember one story, this show at Martos, Invisible Man. Pope.L created a new work for me and it was a fountain that hung upside down. I’d hired an art handling and production company to help me build that plinth and figure out how to hang it safely and successfully from the beam. No shade, in case anybody is associated with that experience, and much love to the crew. But they bailed before it was hung. They claimed, and to their credit I think it was hard, but they just were not gonna be responsible for it. So I had to figure out how to rent scaffolding and enlist somebody, who I’m thankful is now a partner in all things in my life and at the time was just my art handler and production manager, and another friend who I knew was art handling for another gallery. One night I slept there. Just so many late nights for this show right before we opened. I have so much love and appreciation for people who say they come into 52 Walker and it feels like an installation and it’s always new. I have to be involved. I would never ask anybody installing a show for me to do it without my involvement. I’m really respectful and admire people who are willing to troubleshoot with me, and especially those who feel excited by it and not burdened by challenges because some people do. Some people have an attitude of, it’s not my job, this is not what I signed up for. But those who really get excited by problem solving and we’re in it together — I will vacuum up the floor while you are mopping. We have to do it ‘cause then it just looks so good. Ajay Kurian: I think also sometimes there’s a fear that the curator will get in the way and when you can actually fully collaborate that is a beautiful thing and it’s something that I think artists would want more if they could trust it. I’m wondering when you felt like artists started to trust you? Was this Martos? Was this Foxy? I think you always had artists on your side. You were always friends with artists. You were always in the mix of things. But when did you feel like, oh, I’ve earned this trust now? Ebony L. Haynes: I would say it happened early, but you know, there’s different levels of trust. I remember one time at Foxy production, this wonderful artist who I now call a friend, Sascha Braunig, had her second exhibition there. First of all, the gallery needed to be painted. Ajay Kurian: You painted the gallery? Ebony L. Haynes: With Sasha. Ajay Kurian: You’re kidding. Ebony L. Haynes: We texted in the morning and was like, can you bring an extra shirt, like painting clothes? I have to preface what we continue with our conversation to say I’ve never advocated for a kind of paradigm shift with 52 Walker. Of course, my practice is my own. Everybody is afforded the right to their own practice and opinions. But if you didn’t make art, and a lot of curators did. But I didn’t make art in the studio, I studied photography. I only worked primarily as a commercial photographer. So to really understand how the artist is working. I can’t imagine asking someone to move a painting one inch on blocks on the floor for me. Ajay Kurian: Really? Ebony L. Haynes: I hate it. I actually save a lot of money with art handlers because I don’t book anything until it’s really time to hang. I move the blocks, unless they’re really big and I need help, of course. But I feel weird and they’re always so generous. Art handlers are the blood of the industry. They don’t feel weird hanging back and waiting for me to take 10 minutes to look at a wall, but I feel intrusive and disrespectful of their time, just having them be around. So I do a lot of my installing after hours. I do a lot of facsimile printouts, even just 8 by 10 and tape them together to move things that are not worth $10,000 or a million dollars, and just move the paper. There’s something about feeling like I’m connecting with what I’m hanging that feels important. Ajay Kurian: Oh yeah. When I am hanging a show, I’ll move something and then I’ll walk out the gallery and I’ll walk in and then I’ll move something again and I’ll walk out of the gallery and I’ll walk in. Ebony L. Haynes: Me too. Ajay Kurian: And I just keep doing that over and over again because what is the choreography of this emotional experience? Testing it as many times as you can to see does it hold and does it do the things that I thought in my head? And trying to separate yourself from what was happening in the studio or what was happening in a different moment in time to what’s happening in this space right now. You’ve had so much experience putting together shows. This signaled to me what Ebony was gonna be about. This is the artist Peter Williams. I think we both agree, maybe an underappreciated artist Ebony L. Haynes: A hundred percent. Ajay Kurian: I didn’t know that many people talking about Peter Williams. I don’t remember if you were the one who told me about him, or there was some moment when I was looking at this work and I was like, holy shit, this guy is incredible. Here you were doing a show of the work and making sure that he was taken care of. He had his share of health issues and required some real care. It felt like this was a moment where you really gotta showcase an artist and show people a world that they hadn’t seen before, which I think we’ll start to see more and more. And then 52 Walker happens. Ebony L. Haynes: The show is heartwarming for me on so many levels. This is just gonna be an ode to Foxy production. Michael and John, to their credit, it was an artist who had been presented to them and in front of me. I was very privileged to be the only employee. The owners of the gallery really heard me. They really listened to my opinions about the work. We had engaging conversations about the work, and they said, why don’t you go to Delaware and meet with Peter? This was one year out of grad school. I mean, I’m sure there are many good bosses out there. Ajay Kurian: No, that’s special. Ebony L. Haynes: For these gentlemen to put me on a train, not a plane, but put me on the train. It was more than just a studio visit. It was an invitation to, not just a show, but representation. There were no titles at Foxy production. By any measure, I was a gallery assistant, but I was also their registrar, art handler, and did the fairs with them. This was my real first experience with an artist bringing in an archive that was on slides in binders and really bonding with Peter and helping with his New York show. Ajay Kurian: I feel like Martos was when you planted a couple of flags. Invisible Man being the first where you could start to make a stake curatorially. How do you create a relationship with a gallerist, specifically a white gallerist, where you’re like, this is what I want to do, these are the shows that I want to do, and get the support that you need? Because I’ve proposed shows that didn’t happen because there wasn’t the support that I needed, but you pulled these things off and made it work. Ebony L. Haynes: For better or worse. I was unaware of what anyone else thought. I probably should have taken note a little more and I try to learn from that now. I knew that this show had to happen. Many questions were put to me as to its financial viability, production, and installation. I didn’t have answers, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t all peachy, you know? I got in trouble a lot, not just with Jose. I mean, not in trouble, but I had to have many private conversations with people I worked with and for — here’s an example. In this picture, this couch, Kayode Ojo. I was such a believer in this complete installation that I bought this couch myself on two credit cards. It was only $600, which makes you understand what my credit card situation was like. I had to resell it on Craigslist at the end. For Kayode and I, the belief in this work and the conversation in the show was so much more important than me to think 10 steps ahead. I just thought two steps ahead. And so the blindness of that was rewarding for me as a curator. You know, how are we gonna get those Jessica Vaughn’s up? Let’s figure out how to do this large format printing for the seats. And you know, there was no Patreon then, but I did some sort of crowdfunding. Ajay Kurian: How did you maintain this steadiness and not just burn out after doing a show like this? How do you not just crash and be like, fuck it, I’m never doing a show like that again. Ebony L. Haynes: I mean, it’s so fun. Look at it. Look at this floor for context. I went to Red Hook a year before the show even opened to look at flooring that is reclaimed oak. It was pretty expensive. And the first show I do, I tell my boss, I love this floor. I am gonna drill a hole through it that will leave a mark for the life of the gallery and it’s still there. If you go in, you see I kept the piece, but the line marks this hole. Ajay Kurian: Oh, this is like your own little Gordon Matta-Clark. Ebony L. Haynes: It is. I mean art is so fun, you know, even the challenges. I think when I stop having fun in the challenges of each show, maybe my career will change. But I love working with artists. I love the conversations. I really have a good time. I’m not begrudgingly approaching an install because I have to stay till midnight. For me it’s more what’s for dinner at the gallery? Let’s go guys. Maybe when that changes, it’ll feel different. For this, I didn’t know what people would think. I didn’t know if it would be successful. I didn’t even know what that meant. I was excited for people to come in and see it. This Fountain, Pope.L was like fuck you, you’re gonna have to get on a ladder twice a day. First fill it with newly filtered water, and at the end of the day, drain it. Every single day, reset the timer. This was for eight weeks. That’s a lot of draining and filling. I would just laugh every time and send him texts and be like, you motherfucker, fuck you. I love you, but this is crazy. You know, it’s fun. That’s the answer. Ajay Kurian: There’s joy. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, there’s joy for sure. Ajay Kurian: I feel like there’s a moment in museums and art culture at large, after George Floyd, where everybody’s scrambling to figure out how they can address, what to them seems like this explosion of a crisis. Where it’s just been there all the time and no one’s been looking at it. So I think a lot of black creatives, a lot of black artists, a lot of anybody in the field, was trying to figure out how to not fucking quit and how to keep moving forward. That was right when you left Martos. It was the in between period, right? Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, it was in between, by default because we were quarantined. I mean, I can say a lot. Like many non-white bodies in the art world, I felt very angry. I felt sort of like this new moment of realization sociopolitically, where, oh, my neighbor’s racist. We knew that, you know, all these things were just bubbling to the top. And then having to deal with what I’ve always felt and then what became more apparent to others and making them feel comfortable. I reached a tipping point with this online programming — for those who remember the quarantine of online viewing rooms, experience in 3D, QR code this, and here’s a talk virtually. That was my first and only time so far where I was really literally almost out the door of the art world. I was really ready to go for my seventh life. I was like, this is it for me. I can’t do it anymore. Ajay Kurian: Is that before David? Ebony L. Haynes: It was really concurrent. Here comes my shout out to a friend in the room who gets a chapter in my memoir. You know, it’s about the people who are there at the right time. I had a conversation with a friend of mine, Mark, while we were quarantined. I remember just spewing my guts of frustration of just I just wanna do cool shit and make somebody realize that it’s cool and pay me to do it. I know it’s gonna be good. Don’t question me with your budget meetings and your bullshit and just just wanna fucking do it. Ajay Kurian: You sound like an artist. Ebony L. Haynes: Maybe I feel like an artist sometimes. It’s your practice. It does feel like I wanna create. I’m a little more like I wanna produce for my artists. And Mark said, what does that look like to you? In this moment, I don’t know, fucking I advising for Kanye. It was mostly really this moment of one person, not just Mark, but a few people very close to me hearing me spew this confession. I have imposter syndrome but maybe a little less in this moment when all these idiots around me are doing some bullshit posturing and I really wanna do something that means something and can we just get someone to pay for it? Then a few people encouraged it, whether they had the answer or not. Ajay Kurian: They didn’t slam the door. Ebony L. Haynes: No, they didn’t slam the door. And it was concurrent with David Zwirner, because before COVID is when I was approached by the gallery. But I was approached to work for them in a much more traditional way as a director which is what happens in the gallery world. There’s this kind of unspoken rule of three to four year life at any gallery and then you get poached, which is a problematic word, but I use it anyway. Or you have conversations about lifting or expanding your career. And at the time when I had my first conversation with somebody from Zwirner Gallery, I thought I couldn’t do any of this. I felt like a small fish and was kind of afraid to be honest about working with big fish. So I had the conversation to attempt to be professional and leverage myself as a business woman to go back to Martos and be like, make me a partner and big fish want me. I don’t know what it was. I don’t even know how to say it. Ajay Kurian: You were leveraging Ebony L. Haynes: I was trying and I thought I would, but I didn’t have to because of the way things played out. My second interview or what was to be a meeting with Zwirner Minds was the week they announced quarantine. And I got a text from somebody, who is now a colleague who I really appreciate, she’s really and truly the backbone to a lot of how 52 Walker came to be. It was a very casual text like, oh, when COVID and quarantine blows over. Remember there were news casts about clorox and wiping down your groceries. That was the week I was supposed to go in and I was like, yeah, let’s just see how it plays out. Months go by. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Ebony L. Haynes: Silence. I’m spiraling. I wanna buy a container and put it on a small piece of land. I was feeling very fiery in the way that I wanted other people to feel heard and seen. Then it was like, people are actually back at work and doing business. So it was almost like the interview that was meant to happen, in February or the second week of March, was happening six months later. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Did you have a vision of 52 Walker in that second interview, or was it something that was kind of iterated with them? Ebony L. Haynes: I had a vision largely through conversations throughout the pandemic that really solidified what my experience at Martos and Shoot The Lobster had affirmed for me in a way that I loved working. Shoot The lobster, for background, was sort of a project space of Martos. It was for sale, but we didn’t represent artists. I was the art handler, director, curator, programmer for New York and Los Angeles. I would install it after hours, I’d leave Martos and walk over to Shoot The Lobster. Ajay Kurian: It was at that moment, you were a restaurateur that opened their second restaurant and you were just scrambling between boats all the time. Ebony L. Haynes: Just all the time. I wanted to live in Chinatown because I spent every moment there. But there was something that happened for me as a curator where I could see the benefits of both worlds in that relationship where Shoot The Lobster felt free for artists. With me, it was like, no one’s paying attention. Let’s cut this ceiling open and break the pipe and nobody cares. Let’s put a video out on the street and it’s like Elger Street and nobody pays attention, but we tried it. We tried it out and it worked most of the time. Then I had Martos where we represented artists, we did art fairs, and a program that was representative of Jose and the history of the gallery with new artists that I was there to bring on. So it was four and a half years and the melding of both of those mines started forming 52 Walker. Ajay Kurian: That makes so much sense. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah. If I could do Shoot The Lobster bigger. But I had nothing planned going into the interview. Ajay Kurian: When you look at 52 Walker now, it looks very planned. There’s a vision of the catalogs. It seems like they are inspired by many different things from Cy Twombly drawing catalogs to Octavia Butler to magazine culture. I think the magazine culture is actually one of my favorite things about the editorial note, because it reminded me of how I think about introductions. It’s an editor’s note. It’s something that is about changing how we can be hospitable in art spaces and what voice do we use? Is it a voice where we’re looking down like this, or is it a voice where we’re like this and we can talk to each other as if we’re all just horizontal? Ebony L. Haynes: Totally. Ajay Kurian: It feels like there’s an ethic, rigor, but empathy with 52 Walker. Did you know that you wanted catalogs? Did you know that you wanted all of it to look this way? Did you have a sense of the first artist and then kind of importantly, the way that you were thinking about risk and safety? Because this is commercial at a much larger scale and you already said feeling like a little fish next to big fish. This is one of the biggest fucking fishes there is. So how do you make that transformation? How do you meet that and say, all right, let me do my shit. Ebony L. Haynes: I mean, I’m always gonna be honest and transparent. I really don’t know. I don’t encourage anyone to wait until this moment of fight or flight. But I truly felt like I had nothing to lose when I pitched 52 Walker. Which made me probably seem more confident than I am because if everyone said no, I had a container plan. You know, I studied art criticism. It was an art criticism and curatorial practice program. My through line from the beginning was criticism. I wanted to write, I wanted to be critically engaged with practice and the canon and publish. I wasn’t studying exhibition design in a way that maybe I would now. So I kind of was like, this is what I wanna do and if nobody wants to, I don’t know. I’m really good at growing cucumbers. I would hope that I could encourage anybody who feels any sort of inspiration not to wait for this dire moment, you know? Otherwise though, to be honest, I was in front of David Zwirner and I didn’t have my next interview with a partner or director. It was David Zwirner and Ebony Haynes in a room. We talked amicably and professionally about me coming in as a director. I’d never met him before either, full disclosure. I was just riding a vibe. That sounds so unplanned, but sometimes you feel people are listening. Or you could really have a conversation with somebody and it’s reciprocal. And I just sort of said, I have this idea. It’s real, that’s what I said. I have this idea. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Ebony L. Haynes: And the things that you’ve done during COVID and rethinking models and how to offer different kinds of support. Here’s my idea. Ajay Kurian: This is almost like an out-of-body experience. You’re saying things that are very matter of fact and I want to give commentary to the matter of factness. Do I have consent to do that? Ebony L. Haynes: I will share as much as I feel comfortable living online. Ajay Kurian: I think there’s a lot of situations where people walk into a situation and you might have preconceived ideas. You might come in with frustrations, angers, structural inequities, that you’re like, this is my fucking moment to speak truth to power. I am trying to decide whether that’s the angel or the devil on your shoulder. Because I think what Ebony did in that moment is that she met the situation in full presence, staying completely present in that situation, to say the thing that was on her heart and just seeing where it lands. I think that’s when people pick up what you put down because there’s no animosity. It’s simply stated, these are the things that are happening. These are the things that are happening in the world. This is the thing that I want to do. And I think it could change things and it doesn’t put that other person on the defense to say, I need to defend myself in A, B, and C ways, which in so many other contexts, maybe he should. But that’s not the context in which you’re gonna get something done and it’s not the context in which you can grow something that you’ve grown. To me, seeing the zen of that moment, I think is really important and a great lesson because it’s not easy to do. It’s not easy to maintain your presentness in thought and mind and spirit when you’re confronted with somebody that represents a lot of things, more so than just them as the person. When a person gets seen in that way, their defenses go down and you might be able to accomplish something different, which you’ve clearly done. Ebony L. Haynes: That is too generous. I mean, it’s so heartwarming for me to hear. I’m not trying to dismiss what you said, but it really feels generous. So maybe that is how it is landed outside of my experience. Ajay Kurian: I’m just trying to see it because in my head it’s coming from an honest place. I’m not trying to gas you anything. Ebony L. Haynes: No, I believe you. That’s why I’m really taken aback by it. It makes me feel joy to hear. Ajay Kurian: And to flip it, I think it also means that you’re okay in those moments of pushing those other concerns away momentarily. Even if you’re not thinking of it as the long-term vision, even if that’s not the goal in your head. I’m doing this because I want this in this many years. There is a presentness of mine to say, I’m gonna get this done and this is how it can happen. Otherwise it doesn’t happen and I’m just gonna move on and I’ll do something else and I’ll live number seven. But there’s a lot of complications and a lot of interesting things that happen there. I think for people trying to navigate this incredibly treacherous terrain, it’s good to hear shit like this. Because you also have a program that’s not easy either, you know. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah. Ajay Kurian: From Nikita Gill, who’s up on the screen right now. To Nora Turato, who is after that? Ebony L. Haynes: After Nora was Tiona McClodden. Then it was Tao, then it was Gordon Matta Clark and Pope.L. Ajay Kurian: That run of Nikita, Nora, and Tiona. Those are three shows about ruin, destruction, and failure. About the systems that have not served large swaths of the community, specifically people of color, specifically black people, and that these systems have failed and they’re fucked. They need to be torn down, burn, or they’re already in ruin. How do you find a way to talk to collectors that have benefited and continue to benefit from the maintenance of those systems? Ebony L. Haynes: Yikes. That is for a different talk, my friend. That is a deep talk. I’ll give you a little answer. Ajay Kurian: Give us PG-13. Ebony L. Haynes: PG-13 answer is… Ajay Kurian: Give us 2025 PG-13, which is like R from 1990. Ebony L. Haynes: In your in Ajay’s intro to me, you know, you mentioned eating shit, which is an analogy I personally use all the time. Because I had to early on find power in eating shit. I say early on as early as grad school, you know, I was the only black student in a cohort of 12. There were no black professors. I had to get two external black professors and I was the only one to do an extra semester. I mean, it just felt arduous and systemic in its bureaucracy. Realizing I could come out of that with something like foxy production and opportunity and then more opportunity. There’s always shit. As a non-white man, you have to eat and if you can work your muscle. No disrespect to the white men in the room, by the way. You know I have to say it because they’re near and dear to my heart. Ajay Kurian: I have plenty of white friends, but they can hear this. Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, they can hear it. Because we’re talking about the general category, right? The general label. If you are not in that group and probably what feels more powerful to me than any space I open or program or show I curate: if you don’t feel like shit when you go home because of the amount of shit you’ve been given, you’re a fucking champ. For real, you’re a champ. And don’t think that you have lowered yourself to anyone’s expectations or lack of expectation. It’s like your petty funny bone. I’ll be like, okay, I see you, collector from eight years ago, who’s come in the gallery, who doesn’t remember what you said to me or how you spoke about me in French, because I’m fluent in French. And we were in Brussels and I had to storm out of the booth out of anger. I see you being respectful is fuel for me. It makes me feel a small amount of authority or power. Power doesn’t come from me in this space or these shows. These shows, for me, are only powerful because of my artists. Some of my staff, who are wonderful, they’ll be like, oh, I went to this bar and I was wearing my T-shirt — I gift them 52W merch every Christmas. And someone was like, oh, you work there? That’s so cool. And I was like, girl, nobody said that shit to you. You are totally clowning. She’s like no, they did. I was like, I was out at Art Basel and get introduced as Ebony of 52 Walker and get, oh, what’s that? I mean, there’s two sides of the coin. That happens to this day, and I don’t care. I embrace it all like that. That is power and it’s just part of the journey of the space. Power is that I’m still here. I am smiling. Shit tastes like cheesecake. I’m telling you, this is the one lesson you should all take away. Nobody can feed you shit unless you feel like it’s shit. You take it, you bring it home. Don’t get depressed ‘cause depression is our crypt like fuck depression. You are just as powerful as anyone else. And if you could just wait 10 to 15 years, you will show them that it tastes like cheesecake. Just give it time. Be kind to yourself. The world was not kind to me. The art world was not kind but I didn’t care. Ajay Kurian: That’s the part that’s so fascinating to me. That you didn’t care. Ebony L. Haynes: I think I’m just too stupid to have acknowledged it, to be honest. Ajay Kurian: If everybody believes that you’re too stupid, that’s not stupid. Ebony L. Haynes: Not stupid but oblivious. Ajay Kurian: Is this ‘cause you’re Canadian? Ebony L. Haynes: Maybe. You know, I won’t listen to this again, not because it’s not wonderful. I have a podcast and I’ve never re-listened to an episode. I don’t reread interviews that I give. It’s sort of like fight or flight always. I let it go and there it goes. You could hate it. You could love it. Both reactions are great. I’m already thinking about September 2027. Ajay Kurian: Exactly. Ebony L. Haynes: It’s all okay. I love criticism of what I do. And accolade, it’s all fine. I don’t know if it’s because I’m Canadian. It’s because I didn’t study art history, that’s why. Ajay Kurian: So I’m gonna end with what the future holds. Because I think in a way, even if you say you’re only planning a couple steps ahead, it somehow seems bigger than that. And you’ve just been appointed as… Ebony L. Haynes: It’s a word. Full is a mouthful. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, global… Oh, you’re gonna make me try to say it. Ebony L. Haynes: GHCP. It’s Global Head of Curatorial Programs. Ajay Kurian: What does that look like? Do you have a sense of what that looks like? Ebony L. Haynes: Yeah, I feel very present and purposeful in what I’ve achieved, but I do have to acknowledge the forces around me. Like Foxy production, like Lucy Mitchell-Innes who taught me all about secondary market, took me to my first auction, allowed me to work with Pope.L. Like Jose Martos, who trusted me. I feel really fortunate to have people in my life who I’ve worked for and with, where I’ve never felt stepped on. My current job is no different. You know, I felt the ability to pitch something to David Zwirner the first time and I felt supported in ideating this new potential of what the role could be. Ajay Kurian: So this is something again that you brought to them. Ebony L. Haynes: To full disclosure, it was definitely co cooked. I think without knowing we were cooking something, it just started, it just felt like I needed a change and I wasn’t sure why or what. David was trying to suggest a change and it was a long time. This wasn’t like one week. I feel lucky to have support and dissonance. You know, if you have somebody who tells you you’re the shit all the time, don’t, it’s your demise. Somebody who questions my intent, my proposal or my show, or makes me try to fight for something and I make them fight for their opinion too. It’s been really generous in my experience. I feel really lucky. Ajay Kurian: Especially when it comes from a place of care. No one’s trying to fuck you. Ebony L. Haynes: And it’s care on both sides really. I wanna figure out what growth means for me and the program. I’m not sure if growth means being in the same space for another five years if I’m being totally honest. And that’s kind of exciting as somebody who loves exhibition design and curating. We have to keep moving. We have to figure out what it means to challenge like an artist. I do think curatorial practice is truly a practice for me. I need to practice a bit more. What does it mean to do a show in Hong Kong? I don’t know, but I could know soon. That’s new, you know. I don’t know what it will bring really, but I’m excited for a new muscle. Ajay Kurian: I think even in the moments when you were like, I don’t know how to answer that, the way that you go about it, I think is so revealing about the state of mind that it took to keep doing these things and how you’re gonna keep doing even more. I’m excited to see it. Ebony L. Haynes: I love you and I wasn’t gonna say this, but Ajay had a show that was as inspiring for me, which I’ve mentioned also in interviews but he didn’t reference. His show at 47 Canal in 2013. I was like, who is this artist who’s making these motherfuckers build walls and put tanks inside with new wiring? I went there six times, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you live here and there’s lots of shows, it’s a lot. Ajay Kurian: That’s a lot. That’s more than I saw my show. Ebony L. Haynes: It was so good. I mean, talking about pushing things, stretching yourself, and what you’re comfortable with. Ajay Kurian: I really appreciate that. Thank you. Ebony L. Haynes: Remember that show. Top 10 New York shows. It’s true. He didn’t pay me to say it. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I’m gonna, that’s the end of this. Ebony L. Haynes: It’s in print. It was interviewed. Ajay Kurian: No, thank you. Everybody, a round of applause for Ebony Haynes. Ebony L. Haynes: Thank you. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Forum 16 | Banks Violette: Inside the Machinery of Ruin

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]

The Forum 15 | Eric N. Mack: On Tender Assembly and the Politics of Display

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 Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube [https://youtu.be/xr8gC4EJlCQ]. Follow Raul Follow Eric:Web: https://www.artsandletters.org/exhibitions?slug=eric-n-mackInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ernatmack/?hl=en Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) is a painter who radically reconsiders the medium’s traditional conventions. By utilizing found materials, Mack creates richly textured compositions that investigate painting in an expanded field and formal concerns of the practice. In 2025, Mack presented a one-person exhibition and site-specific installation at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, as well as a solo exhibition of new works at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Mack attended The Cooper Union, NY (BFA) and Yale University, CT (MFA) and is the recipient of prestigious awards and residencies including the Chinati Foundation’s Artists in Residence Program (2023); the Rome Prize (2021-2022); the inaugural BALTIC Artists’ Award (2017); the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island (2017); the Delfina Foundation Residency (2017) and the Studio Museum in Harlem Residency (2014-2015). One-person exhibitions include Eric N. Mack, Paula Cooper Gallery (2023); Scampolo!, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin (2022); Lemme walk across the room, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2019); NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, FL (2021); and In austerity, stripped from its support and worn as a sarong, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2019). Major group exhibitions include Chronorama Redux, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2023); Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, NY (2015). Work by Mack is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. Mack lives and works in New York. About The ForumThe Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here [https://www.newcrits.studio/events].Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio [http://www.newcrits.studio/].— 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]