The NewCrits Podcast

She paints memory, sensation, and the space between languages. Candida Alvarez on intuition, inheritance, and color as a vessel for care. Candida Alvarez is a painter whose work explores personal and cultural memory through abstraction, vivid color, and layered visual language. She draws from Caribbean diasporic experience, family history, and city life to build complex surfaces that hold both clarity and mystery. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Chicago Cultural Center, with recent major exhibitions at GRAY Gallery, Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez, and her first large-scale museum survey, Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, at El Museo del Barrio. She explains: * Growing up bilingual and between cultures, and how that shaped her approach to painting and storytelling * Why color, surface, and rhythm carry emotion, memory, and political charge * Painting for resonance instead of clarity, and letting intuition lead the process * Using abstraction to hold grief, joy, labor, and inheritance in the same frame * Returning to domestic and familial spaces as a way to build intimate visual worlds * How risk, repetition, and instinct guide her through not knowing what the painting wants * The connection between care, culture, and making art that listens as much as it speaks (00:00) Learning to See as a Bilingual Kid(10:18) Color as Voice and Resistance(20:47) Working Through Grief and Reverence(31:02) Abstraction as Intimacy(42:11) Teaching, Listening, and Long-Term Practice(52:36) Making Shows that Listen Back(01:04:10) Holding Presence in a Fast World(01:14:32) Refusing to Be Defined by Trends(01:24:45) Language, Memory, and the Visual Archive(01:34:56) Painting as a Form of Freedom Follow Candida:Web: https://www.candidaalvarez.com/Instagram: @candida_alvarez_studio [https://www.instagram.com/candida_alvarez_studio/?hl=en] Follow GRAY Gallery:Learn more about Candida Alvarez’s exhibition, Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez, at GRAY Gallery NY here [https://www.richardgraygallery.com/viewing-rooms/67e3215cd2462d7fd9021df6#tab-1:thumbnails;tab-2:thumbnails].Web: https://www.richardgraygallery.com/Instagram: @richardgraygallery [https://www.instagram.com/richardgraygallery/] Follow El Museo del Barrio: Learn more about Candida Alvarez’s first large-scale museum survey, Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, at El Museo del Barrio. here [https://www.elmuseo.org/exhibition/candida-alvarez-circle-point-hoop/].Web: https://www.elmuseo.org/exhibition/candida-alvarez-circle-point-hoop/Instagram: @elmuseo [https://www.instagram.com/elmuseo/#] Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: “Dame un numero” which means “give me a number”, Candida’s mother would tell her. She intuitively knew that her mother meant a number from one to 26 in accordance with the alphabet. Selecting a number meant selecting a letter, and the letter would be her mother's compass to find out who is trying to contact her from beyond this realm. I love this story. It so quickly highlights how Candida is in this world and others, and the plays she sees in living. I met Candida Alvarez in 2023 at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a residency program in Maine where we both were faculty that year. I got to see her process as an educator and an artist, and at the root of both is a profound level of observation and responsiveness. It's always fun to talk to Candida. But when you ask her questions about painting and her practice, there's a different level of focus than that emerges. One where I notice myself hanging onto her every word. There were many times when it felt like she was tapped into something past this world, and her words were like a tunnel to that elsewhere. In those moments, it's best to shut up and listen. So I went back and listened to the talk that she gave at Skowhegan. When she finished, she was going like a mile a minute, and then she finally finishes and she quietly stops and says, thank you. And in what became typical fashion of the end of a Skowhegan talk, the room erupted with both applause and foot stomps more like a stadium than an art talk. But then a hush came over the room as she opened it up to questions. You could even hear it in the recording, and it’s something that I can't really explain. You could hear the spotlight on her, the concentration on what she was about to say. What I wanna say is that Candida has a bit of magic about her, and after a long time, New York gets to feel it. So with that, I'm just gonna list off some accolades of yours. Alvarez has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Luma Foundation, among others. Recent awards include the Trellis Art Fund Award, the Latinx Artist Fellowship Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and the Perez Art Museum in Miami, among many others. Everybody give it up for Candida Alvarez! Candida Alvarez: Thank you. That was so beautiful. Ajay Kurian: How are you? Candida Alvarez: I'm not sure. Ajay Kurian: Let's start with a number. I feel like the number 2 is the one that always comes up for you. Candida Alvarez: Well, I was born the second day of the second month and I'm the second child. So I guess you could say 2 does circle around me. But if I asked you, what would you say? Ajay Kurian: I would say 23. Candida Alvarez: 23. Candida Alvarez: T? No, UVWX. Ajay Kurian: Anybody? Candida Alvarez: X? Ajay Kurian: X? Candida Alvarez: No, no. There's 20. It's Z. That's a big one. Ajay Kurian: Z, Y,, T, V, W, X, Y, Z. So Z, Y, X. Yeah. It's 20. It's X. Candida Alvarez: Yeah. Okay. X. Ajay Kurian: What do we do with X? Candida Alvarez: Malcolm X, Latin X. Ajay Kurian: Oh shit. Candida Alvarez: X-ray, Extra, Xavier — X is a hard one, but not really. X is like multiplication, right? X is the thing you don't wanna get when you go up to show your math teacher the answer to the problem and she goes, X it means wrong. Ajay Kurian: I feel like I guessed wrong. Candida Alvarez: No, you did what you had to do. You gave me a challenge because that's a long way down the list. If my mother asked me, I would say four. I never played that all the way at the end. Ajay Kurian: But you played that game enough that you knew like, don't do twenties. That's X. I'm new to this game. Candida Alvarez: It's all right. Ask me another question. Ajay Kurian: We're looking at your retrospective here at El Museo del Barrio and it's called ‘Circle, Point, Loop’. Here are some install shots of works that are called View from John Street. Candida Alvarez: Yeah, those charcoal drawings were from John Street, Brooklyn where I had a studio and that building's still there and there are still artist studios there. I was up on the second floor and it was a great space. It was one of my first spaces in New York. It was very dangerous. I remember one of my father's friends gave me a really old car to drive. I could see the plant and I could see the water beyond. I had a residency in Germany that was through a program in Philadelphia — creative artist network, I believe. And I learned about it through a fellow artist in residence, Charles Burwell, who was from Philadelphia. It was an opportunity for an artist to go away for a month and they chose the city. So I went to Cologne. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Candida Alvarez: Right. That's what I said. And I spent a lot of time at the Dome Cathedral. I was fascinated by it structurally and what it meant for the city. But also there was this above and below. So, below was the crypt of the church and it was beautiful. It was a beautiful space with little light bulbs and just sort of a very special place to chill out in after a big day of traveling around. The church was filled with a lot of art and stained glass. I met so many wonderful artists there. And they actually put together a catalog for me and they curated a show, and those drawings were a part of it that I actually did in John Street. So I came back with a lot of beer coasters — the circular forms, which I was fascinated by. And I just wanted to do charcoal drawings, which I had never really done, but I think it was the dust, and the dusty feeling. I just used charcoal and got to work. You can see the circular pattern came from one of those beer coasters, and tape was used to get some of those rectangular shapes. I used a razor blade to get these kind of whitish, almost dashed lines through the paper. I got totally engaged with them and after I did them, I didn't do any more. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I mean I've never seen a charcoal drawing from you since. It was really part of going to that show and like walking through the museum. I've known you for a couple years now and I've seen the work and I understand that color plays such a huge role in how you think about life. So it was surprising to see charcoal drawings and just the breadth of the work. There's so many different projects, there was so many different ways of working. Did this feel foundational? Because you talk about drawing a lot as really the root of what you do. Candida Alvarez: Well, I think there's something beautiful about blackness and black is a color. I mean, people don't often think of black and white as color, which I find kind of interesting. But it's really a beautiful way to see deeply. I love charting space using black and gray tones. There's something about commanding space with a very little tools, right? The stick of charcoal is kind of beautiful. That one thing that can create all this magic, I find really beautiful. I just didn't like the dustiness so much, you know? Charcoal is hard to pin down. I love the highlighting, the light and dark, and I also like taking pictures. You know, I had a camera for a long time and my first tool was a camera. Ajay Kurian: They almost feel like abstract photographs. Candida Alvarez: Yeah. I love black and white photography. I fell in love with it. I used to love Roy Decarava’s work, where he went from pitch black to white. And Harry Callahan. Ajay Kurian: That's when you can see that black and white are colors. Candida Alvarez: There was something poignant and very stark, and at the same time, the gray tones allowed for a time interval to be introduced into the compositions. When you just have black and white, your eyes move really fast. But when it's gray, your eye moves. Like it's on a tripod and it could be moved. It's more like when you're making films. I love classical film — vintage black and white films. Ajay Kurian: Did you grow up watching a lot of movies? Candida Alvarez: I think television was mostly black and white for a long time. But yeah, I did. Not a lot, but enough to keep me at the edge of my seat. I think to have a camera and to be suspended in time, to have Polaroids, that was magical to me. I really thought I was gonna do more work with a camera. But I still do work with a camera, because I take a lot of pictures for my own documentation. I just don't show them. Ajay Kurian: Why don't you show them? Candida Alvarez: Cause I don't need to. I just use them. Ajay Kurian: So they get used for compositions? Or how you think about the work? Candida Alvarez: Well, I love capturing details of my daily life. Ajay Kurian: So this is in the eighties and then by the nineties, that's when you apply to Yale, get in and go there. I think there are consistencies, but also there's some really major things happening. Candida Alvarez: There was more change. It was less photography and more about the body interacting. I came up with a way to identify a sort of a dimension to this idea of intentionality, which is the name of this case study with Mel Bochner. Of course, that was his big question to us all the time. What is your intention? That was a word that I held onto and I was trying to define it for myself. I wanted to have a formal way to define that. That was my curiosity, and so I wanted to move. When I got into Yale I was doing those multiple panels. They were really colorful. This all happened at Yale because I was trying to unpack something that was significant. I was really trying to mine my life experiences. These kind of ways of being in the world. Like the ways I listened, let's say in my family, the way I heard my mother, the way I paid attention, the way my father taught us a game of boxes, right? I love the systematic nature of that. I just like threading through the unexpected and I wanted to sort of use this language and invent a language that came outta something really familiar. Ajay Kurian: Mm-hmm. Candida Alvarez: But yet it was very conceptual. It like all of a sudden got elevated to something else. And so I love the retranslation of something unexpected. The mystery of making for me is very exciting, but the context is also really important — how it begins. And what are the questions and why is that so important? Well, it was a way to identify, right? Who am I as the artist? Why is it that what I was making was boring? To me, it was becoming boring. Because familiarity gets boring to me. Ajay Kurian: Could you see yourself in these? So we're looking at almost like a wavy grid of nails that have kind of looped wire around them and rubber bands. Candida Alvarez: But I was drawing with nails, pencils, and rubber bands because I was reconstructing the language. I was naming, I was using, it was kind of using the alphabet. It was a way to get back to a word or to a beginning point, like the word intention or the word convention I was using. I was kind of mimicking Mel in a way, but in my own little weirdness I was able to respond. So I was responding. Ajay Kurian: And did he see it as a response? Candida Alvarez: I think he was intrigued. I didn't reveal all my mysteries, you know, I just kind of went for it. Ajay Kurian: I don't think you ever do. Candida Alvarez: No, you can't. You kind of just do what you need to do. You don't have to over explain anything. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, then it dies a little. Candida Alvarez: I like to keep some mystery. Ajay Kurian: I feel like there's a lot of systems early on. I mean, there's always systems, there's always patterns and finding ways to make a composition based on kind of chance operations too. Like this one, tossing pennies literally happens from tossing pennies. Candida Alvarez: Exactly. But that also came at the beginning point. Goes really early back to my father who tossed pennies in the air for good luck. So as this inquisitive child, I'm more mesmerized by the fact that the penny is tracking a pathway. There's something about the penny being flung that was more interesting to me than the penny landing. But the landing was the luck. Somehow it's like what held the space. It kind of held the space in a way that that's what my father's desire was. So was that what he wanted? It was weird. What can I say? But I noticed it and I wanted to use it. This was one of the first pieces I did when I got to Yale and it was an empty studio and I just looked around the room and collected things. Those were all free for taking, 'cause they were just pieces laying around. So I just used them and I love the way that I felt free enough to organize them together. Because that was new for me. And then I had my son in 1991 and I was there in 1995. So that's my little son's hand, Ramon. He was in the picture too, so I made that little thing. Ajay Kurian: Oh, right here? Candida Alvarez: Yeah. That's my son's hand. So my son was there with me too. So what happened was I had those pieces of wood paneling and then I just started tossing the pennies into them. Wherever they landed, I just traced them or I glued them down. Then I had these little pathways and I really was very intrigued about that. Like how to mark territory and how to create a space that was coming out of something intentional in a way. And also memory. So it was like solving a puzzle that I felt I had to create for myself as the artist. Ajay Kurian: You know, I feel like the word abstraction gets used a lot, and a lot of times people mean different things when they say it. And I love how much you bristle at the word abstraction because it bothers me too. I think people use it too freely and I'm using your words here where it's like we're abstracting all the time. When you think about your practice, what is a better word to describe what it is that you do? Candida Alvarez: I paint. I draw. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Okay. I'll take that. Candida Alvarez: What do I think? Like we were talking about Vernon Reid, I mean, I love Vernon Reed, and when he came out with that album Living Color, I was just blown away. I was blown away. 'cause he collaborated with Greg Tate. They were artists who worked with words. The lyrics are so incredible and powerful. I took that to represent what I do, you know, living color. I could never forget that. So for me, when I talk about painting — I love painting because I can use color and color is living to me and that means that it can change. It changes depending on where you situate that painting. What kind of light is on that painting? I love that. I love that it's alive and I think that's really what I like to do. I like to wrestle with color. There's something about that engagement that never ends. It's a conversation that's continuous. And I just love it. Ajay Kurian: I feel like that shift into color, like, I'm actually curious because to me, I've known your work when color was always there. It was like foregone occlusion. But in these works, like for instance in extension, you know, there's definitely color. How do you conceptualize a shift from a piece like extension to what we're gonna see in a bit? Candida Alvarez: Well, because these are all stepping stones. They’re all steps towards something and that's the mystery of making or being the artist, right? I mean, I only make these pieces 'cause I wanna try to understand something and I'm not really sure what that is yet. But it's the mystery of wanting to discover something that keeps me going. Ajay Kurian: This feels like a portal to me. There's a lot of mysterious works, but this one in particular really does stand out. Candida Alvarez: That's convention extension. Well, I was responding, because we had to read Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. Ajay Kurian: Was he teaching there at the time? Candida Alvarez: No, this was Mel's class. I think for me, I was talking to myself, so I wanted to extend myself like a clock. I wanted to see myself like the Vitruvian man. I was like, I could be a star. I could be a man extending like a clock. Ajay Kurian: Candida’s talking about DaVinci's Vitruvian man. Candida Alvarez: Very famous. I’m sort of intrigued by history, and history that maybe people don't think I should be a part of, you know what I mean? By chance you bump into things or you're reminded of things. It's like you ask me a question and all of a sudden you take me on a tangent or something. And I might have not been thinking about that as a portal, but all of a sudden I can connect something that I was thinking about. I think it's having the courage to just do whatever the hell you wanna do. And we just get so locked into other people's expectations. When we're young, we're students, we hang on to every word and we try to be the best that we could be. But sometimes you just forget yourself in that equation, right? Because you're trying to be something that you think you should be as opposed to being what you really are. And so I think learning and unlearning is a part of it all. Ajay Kurian: Did you always have that courage? Candida Alvarez: Probably not, no. But I failed at trying to be perfect. I like to practice my penmanship, and I loved the practice of calligraphy. I tried to be good at math and I was terrible, but I tried my best with trigonometry and all of that. I didn't know that I was an artist or I wanted to be an artist because that wasn't something that was in my early learning. But the daily news had this little picture that you could color. To me it was like little paint by number, like a wall thing. I used to love to do that, and I used to love working with collograph. Ajay Kurian: What was that? Candida Alvarez: That game where you peel the plastic and it was all these shapes. I was always drawn to something that I could participate in. But I never knew that this was my path. Ajay Kurian: But then you go to Yale, I mean of course it was years later. First you went to Fordham and that’s when you really started to feel it. Candida Alvarez: That's where I took art classes. And I wanted to carry that big black portfolio. I was fascinated by that big black. Then I got lucky. I took a class with Susan Crowell and Jack Whitten. Paul Brock was teaching history and he was married to Miriam Schapiro. So I got lucky. It was the seventies. Somebody like Jack, I didn't know who he was. I didn't know that he was such a well-known artist, but I took his class and he was very encouraging. I didn't have a lot of supplies and I didn't know how to stretch a painting. But I used to go to Pearl Paint and buy my stretch canvases. Towards the end when I was graduating, Jack looked at me and said to me, you know, if you continue to make those pieces really big, you can actually win awards. I was thinking, is he really talking to me? So I was kind of shocked, but what happened was, at that moment, he was paying attention and he noticed the seeds that I had. He acknowledged them and made me aware of them. And that gave me pause and gave me something to really think about. And that gave me a lot of courage. Ajay Kurian: That's beautiful. Candida Alvarez: Right. But he actually said, you should apply to Cooper Union. So I asked for the application. It was about, I don't know how many pages, but I looked at it and kept turning the pages, and I was like, I can't handle this. But fast forward how many years? And then I'm teaching at Cooper Union. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Right. Candida Alvarez: And I'm like, I guess I did have to come to Cooper Union and to make my move back to New York. I mean, here I am again. Ajay Kurian: You've taught for so long. You were at the SAIC in Chicago for… Candida Alvarez: 20 years. Ajay Kurian: When you started, it was in the late nineties, right? Candida Alvarez: Yes, 1998. Ajay Kurian: Did you feel ready to be a teacher then? I guess Ramon was probably what, seven, eight? Candida Alvarez: So I went to Fordham, but didn't go right to art school. I went and stayed at El Museo del Barrio, that had free classes and workshops, so it was a little easier to handle because there was no expectation. So Bill was teaching there who was a phenomenal printmaker, actually he was a professor at Pratt and he came to work there part-time. While I was there, I started looking at catalogs. I had one of Vermeer Bhutan and I fell in love with those black and white photo montages. I think that there is something about that dismantling and gathering of something familiar that's interesting to me. So then from there, I did a little curatorial engagement with pre-Columbian art. I was studying pre-Columbian art. So we had this book and I was fascinated by the little statues that they were collecting — the wooden sculptures. Then from there, I learned about the Cedar Artist Project, which happened in the late seventies or early eighties. That was another really amazing and very robust community of artists that came together. It was the first time that the city of New York actually paid artists to do their work. And I got lucky. I was part of the first group and stayed there, and that's where everything happened. So I started to feel more confident in being the artist. I was probably the youngest one in that program. They had photographers, they had painters and, and I was kind of in the writer's section. For some reason they had groups. I was with the poets, but lucky me in a way 'cause it was like Bob Holman and Pedro Pietri. But we all met once a week to get paychecks. It was fantastic to feel the energy of being an artist in New York and to be able to do what you do and get paid for it. It was just unbelievable. And then I stayed in New York, got married, had a son, and my partner wanted to go to Yale to get his master's degree in photography. So we went as a family. He graduated and then I was like, well, I think it's my turn. So that's how it happened. That's how it landed in Yale. There was a market crash. It was a good time to leave the city. Artists weren't making any money, but a lot of us were going back to school to get our degrees so we could make more money. Ajay Kurian: Right. Teaching classes. You know, today it’s like, on the one side of things, you can maybe be a mega star and make all this money as an artist, and then there's the sense that nobody's making any money and it really isn't a great career path for any reason at all. But I feel like that program gives you this sense early on that like oh, I can do this, I can make a living off of this. It just seems like a really specific thing that you might've just… Candida Alvarez: Lucky. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Candida Alvarez: It was three years for us and we had a really cheap apartment, which we lost and it makes me sad thinking about it ’cause I used to have my studio right in the front. But anyway, we lived in Connecticut and I had found a beautiful studio at Rector Square, which is not too far from the school — our son had just started school. Ajay Kurian: In my head, I've heard this from many female artists that either are thinking about children or have children, that they've heard from gallerists that if you have kids, it's gonna damage your career if you do this. There's so many shitty things that female artists get told. But you just jumped in. Candida Alvarez: It just kind of happened. But I want to say something — Bob Holman was married to Elizabeth Muray, so I got to meet Elizabeth Murray and became friends with her because of Bob, who I met at the CETA Artist Project. She had at least three kids. It was never an issue. And Hettie Jones who was the mother of Kellie Jones was also a dear friend. And I'm trying to remember how I met Kellie, but it must have been the Studio Museum in Harlem, because I was also an artist in residence in ‘85. And so there were shows at the Jamaica Art Center that Kellie curated. We were all beginning our careers. We were all in the beginning. Ajay Kurian: Did you know Daisy Elizabeth's little girl or did you ever meet her? Candida Alvarez: I didn't really know them that well. But Elizabeth was a great mother and she was a fantastic artist. She wrote the essay for the first show that I had at June Kelly Gallery. Ajay Kurian: No kidding. Candida Alvarez: And that was her first ever essay for an artist. Ajay Kurian: Wow. Candida Alvarez: It was very beautiful. Ajay Kurian: I feel bad that I haven't seen that, I need to get access to it. Candida Alvarez: It's somewhere in my archives. But so, I don't know why certain things happen. You know, they just happen and you notice and you just feel like your life keeps moving, right? But I had no idea that this is the person that I was becoming. I just trusted something. I mean, you have to have courage. You have to do things that may be scary, like move out of the city or marry somebody you love or have a child or take up classes. I mean, it just kind of started and it just wouldn't stop. I couldn't let it stop, no matter what. And I wasn't selling a lot, you know, I just kept doing it. Ajay Kurian: What did you trust and what brought you to all black embroidered images? Seeing this at the Museo threw me completely, like for the Skowehegan people that are in the room, it's crazy. You go into a room and it's all black and it's fucking wild. It was beautiful. There was so much weight there. And then there's a video of your mother and she's preparing food and she's very serious too. It was a really powerful room. I have so many questions. Candida Alvarez: Well, black and white drawings, right? So this is going into a very deep, dark space, but there's a lot of tenderness in that space. The sewing, which I did by hand. Ajay Kurian: It is very tender. Candida Alvarez: The light captures it in such a way, and I love the whole idea of thinking that the viewer thinks there's nothing there, but then you have to get really close and then you notice something. I started to work with dinner napkins because they were soft and easy and my son was little and I couldn't get to the studio. So I needed to work on something that I could take with me and do it on the bed, or the chair, wherever I could watch my kid running around. So I would just take them and, and make these images. My mother collected and was given a lot of porcelains, and she had a lot of them in Puerto Rico at this time. My parents were living in Puerto Rico and we lived in Connecticut. Then we came back and I had a studio, and these were done in Chicago. So I was doing these small drawings and it was really interesting. At some point I remember seeing this small little painting by Francisco, a Puerto Rican painter. I went to Puerto Rico just before, like in the seventies for the first time. I went and I met Lorenzo Homar, who's an artist I really admired. Puerto Rico has these amazing artists who worked that I noticed with printmaking. I didn't really know a lot of the visual artists, but from Fordham University at Lincoln Center, I met somebody there who knew this artist. And so that's how I got to the studio for the first time and I was so nervous. I remember Harley talking to him, but he told me to read all the books in the Social History of Arts. Ajay Kurian: Oh wow. Candida Alvarez: I wanted to go to Paris, and I think it was during the CETA Project. When I had a little bit of money, I took myself to Paris because I wanted to see the work of Francisco firsthand. I saw that work in the eighties because there was a show that El Museo del Barrio was putting together with the Met and it showed a lot of work from Puerto Rico. This was one of my favorite paintings and I wanted to paint like that. When I saw that, I was like, I wanna paint big. Ajay Kurian: From 1893. The weight. Candida Alvarez: 1893. So he did a piece that's much smaller and it was a portrait of a meal order. He was drinking tea at a table. And right next to him is like maybe his housemaid and she has this big dress on her lap. This black material and she sewing. So it was years later after I made my black drawings that I remember seeing that painting. And I was like, did that really affect me? It was so wild. I was like, oh my God, I became that housemate painting. That painting was so beautiful. It was facing the Mona Lisa, that little painting. So that was an amazing moment that I'll never forget. Ajay Kurian: Wow. I would've never known that whole backstory. I mean, the works are beautiful and they're moving on their own. Candida Alvarez: I don't think I've talked about it, at least not in a long time. Ajay Kurian: That's incredible. Candida Alvarez: Well, that's why conversations are interesting, right? Ajay Kurian: Is that why they're called lap drawings? 'Cause you were literally sewing… Candida Alvarez: On my lap. Ajay Kurian: So then they got bigger, right? Candida Alvarez: So the big ones, I still did them on my lap, but they were bigger. Ajay Kurian: They're huge. Candida Alvarez: Yeah, they're really big Ajay Kurian: I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit. I wanna go to the air paintings. So 2017 was a really consequential year for you, for a whole number of reasons. There were amazing things that happened and not so amazing things that happened, and it feels like the air paintings kind of became a way to process the ups and downs. Candida Alvarez: Well, in 2017 I had a really big show at the cultural center that was curated by Terry Meyers, who was one of my colleagues at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. It was a very important show for me. So after it closed, my father died. He was in Puerto Rico and then about three months later I was there with my mother and my sister went to stay with my mother 'cause she was grieving and my mother has never lived alone. I mean, it's been years. But when I left and my sister was there, Hurricane Maria came. So it was devastating because we couldn't find our people, right? We were all searching on Facebook and trying to connect with people who were there and the cell phones weren't working. There were weeks and weeks where we were just frantic and not really knowing the state of things. So I was in Chicago trying to keep sane. Because my mother and sister were there and we couldn't find them. We couldn't hear from them. But there was something that said, I'm sure they're okay. Just before that happened, I had a commission that was sort of this digitized mural printed on mesh which was used for banners. Chicago has a lot of mesh. This was for under the Wacker Bridge. The engineers had to construct the weave in such a way, so the bridge wouldn't come down. So this idea of air was really important to the design of the material, and I was fascinated by that. It's like a canvas, except that this was outside. But there's that little window of air, and I kept thinking about that. Ajay Kurian: It makes me think of you being fascinated with launching the penny. Candida Alvarez: Exactly. There’s something about something else that happens, inside and outside of material. Or inside or outside of functionality, that gets to something that is mysterious, like a wish, right? So I had to produce this piece. It was very big. It was one of my largest commissions outside. It was like maybe 200 feet across and 70 feet high, multiple panels. We had a proofing process, and so these pieces came from that proofing process. They were the excess and the stuff that wasn't used. So I just asked for them. I wanted to take them and I just rolled them up and took them to the studio never thinking I would use them. It was during this time period when we couldn't figure out where my mom or her sister were or how they were doing. It was a very restless time. I decided to unroll them and just do something kind of different. And so I started pouring pain and squishing pain and stepping all over it and just doing something else. That's how these came to life. That's why they're called air paintings. But also the framing for them took a while to get to. I didn't know what to do with them 'cause I never thought I would show them. I was just making them. And then I thought, wow, two sided paintings. Ajay Kurian: Is it sandwiched between the aluminum at the top? Candida Alvarez: Yeah. There's a really beautiful way in which they get inserted with a wooden dowel. I'm very happy with them. And so sometimes I refer to them as paintings with little feet, but it was the first time I've ever had a show and I wanna say thank you to Monique Meloche because she was really the only person that wanted to show them. So I was grateful to her for showing them and taking them on. Because I've never shown anything like that. I've never had a show where I didn't use the walls. Ajay Kurian: Right. It was all in space. Candida Alvarez: But I love the idea of working with these, like a kaleidoscope. Eventually I'll do more of these because I still have a plan for them. Ajay Kurian: They're really great. There was a quote that you said around the time of producing these, Mother Earth is dealing with all of this abuse, and it's in overdrive right now. So people are scared. When the ground doesn't stop rumbling, you don't recognize your home turf. You become lost as the walls crumble. Overall, there's lots of tenacity and creativity. Overcoming fear is just part of who we are as human beings. We have to stand up for something. We have to love something. Death and life are so close together. And when we suffer trauma, we're pushed in different ways to remember that there are ways in which you can find and be reminded about what is right and what is wrong. And this, I think, is kind of key. Still be the individual in the room without losing our commitment to community. I thought that was really moving just in terms of being able to center yourself, but also realizing it's not just you going through something and it's not atomized. We can hold space for ourselves while within the community. And it, when you say that there was nothing on the walls, they're all taking up space together. There was a community of works. Candida Alvarez: Community has always been a very important word to me. It's always been important. I can never live life without it. To think you're all by yourself here is kind of, I mean, you are on some level, but we all need each other on another level, right? I mean, love is so important. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Right? Candida Alvarez: You need the seeds to grow from and with. I mean, to take the courage you have to fall in love with something. Or to dare yourself to do something, you know? Or like why pick up a brush? You know, why pick up a pen? What makes us do those things? Outside of an assignment. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, the assignments end. Candida Alvarez: But you know, when we were kids, we would take rubber bands and we would nod 'em together and skip rope. They called it Chinese jump rope. Or you had a long piece of rope and then we did double dutch. So think about that, right? The way we were being creative since we were really young. Ajay Kurian: This work is called I'm Okay or I'm Good. And it finds its way into a much larger landscape and it makes me think, again, of the individual in the community. Somebody shouting out, I'm good! But in this landscape of all these other things happening and potentially a lot of destruction happening as well. That phrase became really powerful for a lot of people because like first it was for this particular work and then it was for the triennial. Candida Alvarez: It became Estamos — being. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, exactly. Candida Alvarez: The story came from listening to all the interviews with the Puerto Ricans that they were trying to find up in the mountains. They would say, well, how are you? Well, what am I gonna say? I'm alive, I can talk to you. But it was kind of a way to sort of hold the space, so you wouldn't ask me anything else, or I might start tearing or something, you know? It was a way to hold space. To hold oneself together. It's like a quiet period. I need time to reflect and I can't say anything else. It's kind of more cynical than not. But I was trying to be okay too and I was trying to do what I loved and it felt good. I could disappear for a while. Ajay Kurian: I like that you say that it was kind of cynical because it became this banner of we're okay, we're fine. But you're hiding a lot of pain. It's just like, just shut the fuck up and leave me alone. Candida Alvarez: Exactly. Ajay Kurian: There's two sides to that. And it's nice to hear it from you, because you feel it too. There's something protective about it. Even though there's air that's going through it, even the way that it's in the painting formally speaking, it's there, but it's not, it's not welcoming you. It's not bringing you in. It just happens to be there. Candida Alvarez: Well, I remember writing that too. I felt like it was almost like a little text bubble, like a pop. Ajay Kurian: You have a show at Richard Gray Gallery right now with a person who I think has been very influential on generations of artists, but of course for you as well, Bob Thompson. Candida Alvarez: That was the first piece I fell in love with at the Art Institute of Chicago when I started teaching. Ajay Kurian: This is called Equestrienne. Candida Alvarez: From the Tang Dynasty. And I did a whole series of paintings using that figure. Ajay Kurian: It was called flower of the Horse. Candida Alvarez: I was very interested in describing a beginning and ending point. I was tracking my tenure and my emeritus status, and I was leaving teaching. So I wanted to do these pieces that were paintings that really reflected this time. The Tang Dynasty horse, which is, you know, a symbol of beauty. This is this figurine and I love the relationship of the body to the horse. They’re sort of bowing to each other. It's a very beautiful piece. It's still one of my favorite pieces. One of the first pieces my eyes gazed upon when I entered the museum as I was about to teach. So that's the beginning point with my relationship to Chicago and teaching. But I love this circular motion, the slowness of it. And then when I left I got this beautiful orchid as a gift. I was leaving my studio and I was going to Michigan, it was COVID. And this artist, Maria Pinto who's an amazing designer and whose clothes I wear sometimes. She was leaving her studio and she had these beautiful orchids and she said, you can take an orchid. So I took an orchid and that orchid still blooms. I just used the idea of the gift as a way to say thank you. I have this wonky way of combining things, so that's how I got to these paintings. Ajay Kurian: They're really rich and they feel so alive, but the way you were talking about leaving teaching and this being a sendoff too. It made me even look at this sculpture differently. It feels like there is something more melancholic about it, but I'm curious, was this a way of almost making a celebration for yourself? Candida Alvarez: Oh, yeah. Ajay Kurian: It shows. Candida Alvarez: It’s about making it present and you give it visibility. You give a certain amount of time visibility. You can create a painting that can hold something particular. For me, I needed to do this. That's kind of how I work. You know, I just have these ideas and I wanna put 'em together. Ajay Kurian: So with the Bob Thompson show, how did this come together? Candida Alvarez: Richard Gray Gallery were doing these shows where they invited artists to work together. They came to the studio and they saw I had a Bob Thompson, and that I liked Bob. I had a beautiful card that I've had for a long time. And they said, would you like to show with Bob Thompson? It's been amazing. I'm still working with him and I'm still making more paintings, but the show is six paintings that I had to create. I loved it. It was beautiful. It was magical. I like having conversations with artists, and to have a conversation with him felt right. He died so young and so I wonder if he would've been an abstract painter. I mean, he was going that way, right? Ajay Kurian: Yeah. He definitely was. Candida Alvarez: But I just wanted to talk to him. It's kind of nice to have this sort of conversation. Ajay Kurian: There’s paintings before this from your show at Gavlak in Los Angeles, which I’ll show in a minute, but the way that you’re developing layers there is very different from here. Say this one, where everything feels like it’s on the same surface. It's very flat and it's very matte. Then there are other paintings before this, where there’s layers you can see through the paint and you can see other things happening. It almost reminds me of when we see early to mid de Kooning versus late de Kooning where the mark gets much more fluid and soft and there's a serenity to it. Ajay Kurian: And I'm wondering, does it feel like that's where you're at? Does that relate to you? Do you think about late de Kooning when you're making works like this? Candida Alvarez: I have worked with De Kooning. Ajay Kurian: You've worked with De Kooning? Candida Alvarez: I've created paintings with de Kooning. I've been in conversation with a lot of artists. I used to see excavation painting almost every day on my way to classes. It was always in there. I mean, the museum is very important to me. Because I'm always looking at things. So there are residues; the coloration, there's something about the whole notion of excavation. In a biography that was written on him, he was talking about how he was looking at this particular scene from a movie. There was a group of women and there was some kind of little fight that happened in the rice patties. He claims that that has something to do with how he painted the painting excavation. Which I found really interesting. So I looked at the film too and said, wow, this could be really interesting. Looking at excavation, I was trying to dismantle it. I was trying to understand it. It's a curious painting and I love that he uses women. I mean when you look at his paintings, he has a whole mashup of things. It's a very active painting. I love that it's all like in motion sort of. Ajay Kurian: These are paintings from the Gavlak show. Where the surface and the way that you're thinking about paint, about movement, about how a painting comes together is very different from the works with Bob Thompson. There's something much more serene about when it moves into an interlocked shape and how that shape lives. I guess since there's always stories that come with these movements and how these things develop, I'm just curious, what are the stories that get you into a place where they can lock together that way? Candida Alvarez: I don't think about it that way because there's a pathway and I'm interested in composition. I was taught painting, and I was taught that the most important thing in a painting is how you begin the drawing and the composition itself. How do you keep the eye engaged? Where's the opening? It's like a navel. So you have to have a little part for the eye to go into it. Like, I gotta get you in there and then I gotta keep you enraptured enough, I gotta entangle you enough in there to keep you there. So that's my main objective — to keep you looking at the baby. And how do I do that? How do I stay with the painting? It's really a color thing. It's not really the story thing. When I'm painting, I just really look at how the colors are being activated, how they're becoming families. I love this idea that two or three colors can become a family. And how you start to see the, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth color within the combinations. I love that. So when I start to see that I'm happy. So it's really a seduction, is what I need. It's what I do for myself. Ajay Kurian: This is what you need right now. Candida Alvarez: I just need the color to sort of hold me up. I need the alchemy. It's like a fix. I need to see it growing. It's like having a garden, I guess. You know, you flower, you water your garden, and you see all those blooms and they're all really beautiful. There's just something about the feeling it gives me. Ajay Kurian: You brought up both family and the garden and it makes me think of this quote from the book that you worked on with your colleague, Tim. I've begun to see that it's not just oneself, it's a multitude of selves. For me, that definitely includes the politicized woman who embraces her Puerto Rican heritage and bilingualism, as well as the self-determination to stay out of all the cultural boxes, which threaten my freedom to make choices. It's like you have a family of selves in your work too. You've had so many different ways of being that manifest through the way that you make and like what gives you the support and what gives you that flowering. Go see the show at El Museo del Barrio. Because you can see a person, where even in the darkest moments of it, there's so much joy. There's always joy in how you make and how you think about being alive no matter what happens. Candida Alvarez: Oh, thank you. At the end of the day, it's about my freedom to choose and to determine the outcome, right? There's not too many other path careers that I can think of where you could do that. So I say, you know, the choice is yours. I mean, it's mine to make and why not make it? And so, there’s a name for what I do, right? They say it's art. And I became the artist. I'm still becoming the artist. I think we have to just, you know, words and the limitations of what that is. I think enjoyment and pleasure is number one. And I guess, doing this for as long as I've been doing it, I don't feel old. I feel it gives me so much potential and opportunity and joy. Ajay Kurian: Who said you're old! Candida Alvarez: I know, but if I tell you how old I am and how many years I've been doing this, it's a long time. But for me it always feels brand new. And so I don't really work well with this idea of repetition. I kind of always wanna reinvent something. So even the way I break away from my own systems, you know, I develop systems and then I break them apart again. It's like Legos, you can either follow the rules and build that truck or you could just do it your way and get to something else. Ajay Kurian: I wanna end before we take questions with one of the prior Candida talks. This is from the lecture that she gave at Skowhegan. And I just loved this question and I loved the answer even more. ***** Recording from Candida’s Lecture at Skowhegan School of Painting (2023 Audience Question: What is your favorite part of being an artist? Candida Alvarez: I love following what I love. I love painting. I love color because it lives. I love the freedom to be myself. I give myself my own permissions. I feel like creativity is the most wonderful gift that we have as human beings. I feel that you have to be courageous in your life, and you have to say yes to the things that you want for yourself. It's not easy to get that. Certainly not. You know, it's a challenge being honest to yourself. But at some point in your life you realize you're either gonna go for it now or it's never gonna happen. So I say take courage and say yes to the things you really want. And sometimes it takes time to figure that out. It's a slow journey. It's one step at a time and you always make mistakes. But I always say paintings have to make mistakes. You have the mistakes of invaluable. That's how you get to your work. ***** Ajay Kurian: Are there any questions that people have for Candida? Audience Member: First of all, thank you so much for your words and your energy. I'm curious around you as an educator as well. What is your philosophy or your mission as an educator? You also say that you're not too fond of familiarity and has the philosophy and mission changed over the years? Candida Alvarez: What is my philosophy? Be yourself. Learn as much as you can and don't be afraid to break the rules. I never thought I'd be teaching and I didn't plan on it. I think to be a good communicator is a must for teaching. So I think to be honest and to try as many things out as you can. Learning is, it's just kind of bumping into things that you didn't expect and to. You have to learn the basics, right? And so you have to be skilled and you have to commit. I've always been who I am. So just be yourself and find joy in that, and not everybody's gonna agree with you, right? You're gonna feel bad along the way too, because you're gonna say, oh man, what did I just do? I can't explain myself. You know, there’s just a mystery to it too. And I think going back to the mistakes — mistakes could be some of the most empowering things, right? When you understand that it really wasn't a mistake, it's just something fresh and new and unexpected, and you have to kind of reconsider it. Surprises are gifts. I think not to be so afraid of the unknown. Just the power to be yourself is so amazingly important, and we have to own that. We would be happier if we would just be more content with ourselves and that's something you learn. You have to learn that or unlearn something else. Because there's a lot of pain that we suffer too, in that evolution. Oh, I wanna be an artist. And you're like, what is that? If you don't come from a family that appreciates that. It was a word that I had to understand. I didn't know what it was. It was a hard word to utter — I'm an artist. I am an artist though. But I mean, you could do anything. You could write, you could play the violin, you could tap dance. Like I said before, creativity is everything. Right. It makes us all happier. Audience Member: I have a lot of questions, but I'll choose one. I think a lot of people here are probably artists or have artistic endeavors, but for me, I've been struggling mostly with the idea of an audience. Art is such a personal, intimate thing that you do for yourself in so many ways, and even separate from making a career out of it. But there always is an audience outside of yourself. You touched on it a little bit, that a lot of this work is so personal and cathartic in some ways, but how do you balance that? Is it ever for other people more than for yourself or how do you try to navigate that? Candida Alvarez: Honestly, I never thought there would be an audience. I didn't know that there would be an audience. I didn't know that I would continue to do this in this way. I had to learn it. I had to trust something. I had to listen out for it. I trusted my teachers, you know, I listened, I made mistakes. I was really shy as a kid. I had to really move slowly and try different things and feel like I failed at 'em, you know? Unless you're a performance artist then the audience is really important, right? I mean, I think that those are the things that might keep you from doing the actual things you need to do, because you're so preoccupied with this other notion of who's right or who's more right than you. I mean, we were talking about that earlier. The fear of public speaking, you know, until one day you realize, well, you could only speak for yourself, right? And so trusting that is a big deal. When does that happen? Like when do you feel you've crossed that bridge? I really do believe in what I'm saying, or even better, it's like I'm finding the language that I need to explain what it is that I'm trying to do. And so I think we can find that language in so many different places. It doesn't have to be just from the painting catalogs. There's so many ways to riff and to trust this material. You have to trust the material that you're choosing. Or maybe it chooses you, I don't know. Sometimes you trip into something, I think to ponder and to have the time to consider is huge. Not everybody has that time. Audience Member: It's a privilege, yeah. Candida Alvarez: Right, so I think that whatever time we do get is to use it wisely. And not flounder so much. We waste a lot of time too. Ajay Kurian: We can get one more question. Audience Member: Your work often moves between abstraction and figuration. In pieces like John Street series 12, there's a center of fragment memory embedding urban architecture, right? So how do you see drawing, especially in charcoal, functioning, not just as a medium, but as a language for claiming personal and cultural stories that are often overlooked or a race in dominant narrative? Candida Alvarez: That's a huge question. Drawing is basic, right? I mean, as a kid you have to learn the alphabet. You kind of have to string that alphabet together to form words. It's fundamental within our core. So drawing is fundamental, I think. Your question is so multifaceted. I don't know if I get it or if I can even jab at it a bit. I just wanna say that nothing is ever certain. I think the beginning point is a beginning point, but you never really know or understand where that is. And then how that takes root and then how you can cross how you begin to expand that with real roots or threads that really become the fiber of your intelligence and your memory, your love of the realities of life. I mean, there's so many ways to be in the world, to be present, to be able to be creative, but yet still be more of a historian, right? Or seeking histories of cultures that are still misunderstood. To sort of figure out how we all do come together. You know how diaspora really does live as a heartbeat. It's complex because you can thread this in so many different ways. Landscape is not just horizontal. It could also be very vertical, right? So like history, right? I like to think of history like the root of a tree, and sometimes those roots could go for miles and miles and miles. Then it can go up and then it becomes something else. So I think that we just have to fundamentally be creative and free to translate and retranslate and to sort of begin to take on the materiality or the tools that we are clinging towards. Because we all have different relationships to tools. Like I need that pen to really write what I'm thinking, or I need that recorder to sing what I'm feeling, or I need to be in a conversation with somebody — like a historian. To figure out what's next. So I think that there's so many ways, if you just rely on your creativity, I think you can get to some truth that is for you. And I think everybody in this room can have different ways of finding answers to the same question. So we have to dream and we have to fail too. We have to fail at trying to answer something that just gets deeper the more serious you get about it. That's why I love what I do because I can keep exploring and I can keep changing my mind. Then I can turn it into something else, and I can stop when I want to. I love having that kind of space that I'm in control of. Ajay Kurian: Thank you everybody and give it up again for Candida! Candida Alvarez: Thank you! 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She paints distortion, vulnerability, and the psychic residue of history — Janiva Ellis on contortion as language and survival. Janiva Ellis is a painter whose work stretches emotional and political registers through fluid mark-making, surreal juxtapositions, and animated dissonance. Her paintings contort and erupt, channeling humor, grief, and ancestral hauntings. She’s exhibited widely, including in the Whitney Biennial and at the Carpenter Center, and is known for refusing easy resolution. She explains: * Why cartoon logic and slapstick pain offer the perfect language for distortion, survival, and historical violence. * How she embraces ambivalence by showing unfinished or uncertain work as a form of radical transparency. * Painting not to perform virtuosity but to let discomfort, exhaustion, and doubt remain visible. * Letting go of the “entertainer” impulse and choosing instead to rest, reflect, and resist institutional pressure. * How working through rage, shadow, and cultural projection allows the paintings to become psychological landscapes. Why she paints for the terrain she’s in and how Germany, Berlin, and Kollwitz shaped one of her darkest pieces. (0:00) NewCrits Podcast Intro(1:34) Ajay Kurian introduces Janiva Ellis (08:02) The Cartoon’s Burden (17:00) From the Cruise Ship to the Studio (24:30) When Whiteness Becomes the Subject (32:00) Disillusionment and the ICA Show (41:00) Exuberance, Masochism, and Recognition (47:37) Working in the Dark: Technique and Intuition (54:10) Letting Go of Control and Embracing Vulnerability (1:00:44) White Spirals and Cultural Projections (1:07:18) The Value of Communal Witnessing (1:13:52) The Challenge of Raw Rage (1:26:59) Dream Recall and the Fade of Intuition (1:31:28) New Crits Upcoming Classes and Services Follow Janiva:Web: https://47canal.us/artists/janiva-ellisInstagram: @janivaellis [https://www.instagram.com/janivaellis/?hl=en] — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Welcome to the 20th New Crits Talk. My name is Ajay Kurian and tonight for our 20th talk, we have Janiva Ellis here with us. Janiva Ellis: Hey guys. Thank you so much for coming. There's so many people that I admire here and strangers who came because they care. So thank you so much. Ajay Kurian: I'm gonna start with a little intro for Janiva and then we're gonna get into it. Sometimes when a person contorts themselves for so long, their reality itself becomes a distortion. If a person forgets their contortion, then the distortion is reality. More often than not though, somewhere deep down, the score is being kept - and that's what keeps it a distortion. The figures in Janiva Ellis's paintings are living in this wonky place, where contortion and distortion meet, where internal and social realities commingle and conflict. I think maybe that's why she favors cartoons. Because they can stretch like an accordion, get blown up by land mines, and freeze or burn without ever skipping a beat. They are projections of contortion and distortion. The cartoon, despite its flatness, here acts as an echo chamber for history's emotional and violent contradictions. Meanwhile, a richly detailed illusionistic landscape may in fact be entirely flat - a visual lie that we've accepted as reality. In the interplay, Ellis is able to conjure vivid but slippery tableaus that weigh as much on the sociopolitical as they do the privacy of one's most intimate thoughts. She is a skillful conductor. The haze is intentional; the confusion is part of the pleasure, and the finish is meant to be a question. She's an artist who knows how to simultaneously set a trap and set you free. Please join me in welcoming Janiva. Janiva Ellis: You tore that, you ate that the fuck up. Thank you. Ajay Kurian: It's my pleasure. Janiva Ellis: Thank you for seeing the work. Thank you for confidently putting words to it, engaging with it, and not shying away from your assumptions about the work because they're really right on and it’s cathartic to hear. Ajay Kurian: Thank you, I’m honored. It’s not easy to write or talk about your work. I don't know the dynamic of how I'm supposed to play it all out because it's charged, and I think in this conversation it'll be really nice to talk about how those dynamics stay charged and how they move and change throughout the work. There's been a lot of changes and that’s the reason why I wanna start with such an early piece. We're gonna start here and then we're gonna go all over. The development is amazing. I don't say that often and I'm not blowing steam. It's rare to see an artist where every show it gets better and better. I'm genuinely astonished because when I saw your first show, it was great but I'm curious what comes next. I remember Tyler the Creator talking about Vince Staples’ album. It came out and he was like, this is it. But then the next album was the one he was excited about. Janiva Ellis: Totally. Oftentimes in the studio, I've processed the idea, but I still have to make the show. I'm halfway through the painting and I got the idea, but then I have to finish the painting and I have to finish the show. But I cannot wait to take what I've metabolized and bring it to the next project. I'm on the hook for this project and I do need to finish this and get it out, but there's already so much enthusiasm for what I wanna say next. Then in the next project, I don't know what I'm doing. While I'm making, I know what future me needs to do until future me is present me, and then I'm confused again. Ajay Kurian: How do you stay in it and how do you keep that same energy? Janiva Ellis: I don't keep that same energy. I think it's an underlying drive. Sometimes I try and let the energy of the past project evacuate by taking a lot of space or creating interventions in the work that are challenges so that the part of my mind that's stimulated by problem solving is activated again. I try and take what I've learned and I'll keep notes. Sometimes I don't even know what that note meant, but let me interpret it in the now and run with that thread. So it's not necessarily about holding tight onto the thoughts that happened in the past, but maintaining the same enthusiasm around my curiosities and my desire to feel challenged by what I can create. Ajay Kurian: This painting is called the The Okiest Doke from 2017. Janiva Ellis: One of my friends said “don't get caught up in the Okeydoke”. It's either DeSe Escobar or Juliana Huxtable, and it could have just been the community. It could have just been something we all said. But it was very much a 2014 “we're out here” vibe. As with a lot of my titles, they come from notes I had taken about things I had said, or friends of mine had said on nights out about the predicament we'd find ourselves in and the joy we'd find in feeling like we were able to put language to this spiral we were navigating. Ajay Kurian: It always feels that way. The titles catch a vibe. I understand it sometimes and other times it washes over you. But then you click with the vibe of the image, and you can feel that vertigo of where the picture takes you to. Part of why I wanted to start here is this cartoon hand. This communion into cartoons is an interesting place to start, and also how you continue to use the cartoon in the work. In my understanding, the history of cartoons is a pretty fraught one, especially as we get into Looney Tunes and all that. The precursors of those cartoons is essentially seeing blackface and minstrelsy turn into the cartoons that become beloved characters and then become these characters that never die. They can always be distorted, can always work harder, can always explode, freeze, do whatever, and just come to life again. For that to be the person who's giving the wafer here feels wild. Janiva Ellis: This the cartoon’s burden. It’s like the burden of constantly having to endlessly embody a projection. When I started doing cartoons, it was literally out of the need for speed. I was taking my practice really seriously for the first time, and I felt a lot of shyness around pursuing what I wanted to pursue. I really wanted a level of grandiosity that I didn't know how to achieve and I also had a lot of self-doubt. So I decided, let's just go back to basics. You can communicate the things you want very quickly and easily by cartooning, and you can re-access your hand and your ability to draw by using cartoons. I think the fact that it speaks to the fraught of the way that white violence depicts blackness and the way that whiteness cartoonized black people was not the starting point. There's just so many moments where it was like, I'm gonna do this. Then the funny byproduct of that is that there's a critique to be had about whiteness. It's not the point, but oftentimes it's just there. There's a painting I did of a woman and I made her into Pinhead. Then I did some research on Clive Barker, who made Hellraiser. But where did Pinhead come from? And it came from African sculpture and I wasn't trying to give that, but obviously it gave that, and as I was painting, it worked out that way. There's violence woven through so much pop culture and so much of things I'm referencing from an organic place, from a place of resonance, that it doesn't take too much to connect those dots and I can just riff without trying to make a heady dialogue around blackface. It's already there. The history is there. Early on, people were asking me a lot about blackface and I'm like, yeah, that's inherently in there but I'm not trying to flatten that dialogue. I'm trying to create broader worlds for that representation to exist. Ajay Kurian: Did you always trust your intuition? Janiva Ellis: No, absolutely not. It's a constant moment to moment. I do feel really driven and I know that I'm strong, but I do also have doubt. There’s an underlying pulse that I trust, but topically I feel really disillusioned and really capable of falling for dumb tricks. So as I get older, I feel more capable and more self trusting. As the people in my life become reflections of who I want be surrounded by and the relationships I wanna see in the world — That really bolsters my sense of self worth, and that bolsters my trust in myself. But no, I didn't feel that way. Even when I started painting again after years of taking a break, I was like, what's the story there? Ajay Kurian: How did you come to painting? Why did you go away from it and what got you back? Janiva Ellis: I started painting as a kid and was always painting. My mom was very encouraging of me. Being good at something, finding what I liked and just doing that and finding catharsis in some way. So she's really supportive of that. I did that for a long time and went to schools that encouraged creativity. Went to college and that evaporated all of the excitement and enthusiasm I had about the potential to make something meaningful. Ajay Kurian: Did you go to an art school? Janiva Ellis: I went to California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and the experience I had alongside school was so deeply enriching in terms of self-identifying and finding people that inspired me. But the school experience was pretty stale and I don't know if this is a broad thing or if this still happens, but I remember the idea they told you that only 5% of you are gonna be doing this for the rest of your life. It was very like, y'all are gonna be failures and compete for who can actually make this a thing. Ajay Kurian: Oh, that's horrible. Janiva Ellis: Yeah. Is that normal? Did people experience this in art school. That’s a thing, right? This idea that only exceptionalism will bring you fulfillment essentially, that was just the vibe. And then what I saw being labeled as exceptional, I was like, this is crazy, this is a bad art, what's going on? But I also knew just based on the kinds of things I attracted in my life that I was able to actualize and I was capable of fighting a heartbeat in what I wanted out of life. So I did have that feeling, but I didn't know how to get it and I didn't have models of what that really looked like. Ajay Kurian: But you knew you wanted to be an artist then? Janiva Ellis: I did deep down, but I was open to a lot of options of what that could look like and how art would enter my life, through teaching or through programs. I wasn't like, I'm gonna be a successful artist. That definitely was not something I thought was a given or something I was striving for outright. It didn't feel inherently valuable to what I had to offer the world. But it was there, and of course, I wanted to ultimately live a life where I was creating things that connected with people, and that I would have the respect of my peers and the respect of people who engaged with what I did. Ajay Kurian: So your first show at the gallery and entering the art world — what was that step? This is a painting from that show. Janiva Ellis: This was the first show. That moment was really a madness. I had gone to school, I had gone to New York, I had connected with people who I really felt were my people, I had crashed out, I went back home to Hawaii, tried to figure it out again. Spiraled deeply, decided to go back to the mainland, I grew up in Hawaii, so that's the context of that. I moved back 'cause that's where my mom lives and that's where I grew up. That's the context that shaped so much of my perspective in terms of growing up on an island, growing up very isolated as a black person, growing up with an immense wonder of the world and also doubt of my environment. So that was a whole thing. When I moved to New York, I finally was like, wait what? Black community, that's crazy. It was such a rich moment and the intersection of being like, I went to San Francisco and the queer community hit, now I'm in New York, it's black, it's queer, it's cute. So leaving felt really I'm abandoning, work that I put into finding my people. Janiva Ellis: But Hawaii had its own healing intersection and I knew I couldn't stay there forever, but it was a good detour. Then I moved to LA and my friend Jesse let me stay with him, and said you gotta do this, come on, you should paint. He helped me get canvases and helped me get things that I needed. I was like up in the air and I didn't have a solid job. I briefly worked on a cruise and I had made money bartending on this cruise. So I had a chunk of money from that. And that's when I was able to focus on painting 'cause I had that little savings and these materials and I started to make paintings. Very quickly, I think the enthusiasm of being somebody who had lived in New York, but also the novelty of being from Hawaii. Like really helps in people thinking you're cool. Like people are like, we wanna know more. Janiva Ellis: So that's an advantage. And I think when I got to LA, people were like, what's your deal? Or I've seen you around? I had spent some time partying in LA like years prior, so there was just some foundation there. Ajay Kurian: This is a totally random question, but having worked on a cruise, would you ever go on one? Janiva Ellis: No, I never wanted to go on one in the first place. The cruise I worked on was like a small Alaskan adventure cruise. It was a 60 passenger boat, so it was pretty intimate and it was freer, like middle aged to elderly, adventurous white, northwestern person. Ajay Kurian: Oh, so this is just, this is straight classes for you — you were this is classes of anthropology and whiteness. Janiva Ellis: It's all anthropology. It's like, this is how we're freaking it over here — it's data. It was actually a really crazy experience. Ajay Kurian: I can only imagine. I've been on two cruises and it was the wildest experience. Janiva Ellis: Did you see Sinners? Janiva Ellis: I saw Sinners. I loved Sinners. Ajay Kurian: Sinners is great. Janiva Ellis: It's so good. Ajay Kurian: We're going again on Thursday. Janiva Ellis: Good. I want the second time hits. Ajay Kurian: Oh, you've already seen it twice. Janiva Ellis: We saw it twice. Are you gonna see it in imax? Ajay Kurian: That's why we're going a second time. Because this is what's coming through for me. There's something vampiric here and there's something undead. Janiva Ellis: They're like in the warehouse, having a good time. The background scene is from, The Wiz, A Brand New Day, and I put him on top of there 'cause I was like, I feel like with all the incredible black media that I've been exposed to, for some reason there's just like some white guy constantly in the center. I think this early work, I was like, can we talk about this stuff? I feel like I wanna talk about these things. I didn't realize how maybe cryptic the work was being read. It felt so literal to me. In terms of just the tension of trying to thrive under white supremacy and microaggressions and all that. Ajay Kurian: Who thought it was cryptic? Janiva Ellis: Obviously non-black people, specifically white people. But the reflections I was having as I entered the art world were primarily through writing by people who weren't black or curating by people who weren't black. And I think, although I took that context into mind, it was louder. It just was louder than what I was, and what the conversations I was having with peers about the work. Ajay Kurian: As soon as I saw this there, the energy it was giving was, whiteness is on display and it's gross. Like this particular variety of toxicity. Janiva Ellis: The violence of it. Ajay Kurian: There's an enormous violence of it that's happening on so many different registers too, right? Ajay Kurian: Because there's overt things, but then there's the ways in which it shifts people of color’s visions of themselves. The internalized visions that people have of themselves is shifted by whiteness. Janiva Ellis: The parasite of how you self ideate through whiteness. Ajay Kurian: It's such an insidious space and it's very difficult to represent. I haven't seen painters represent that and I can't even actually think of anyone. Janiva Ellis: Yeah, thanks. Ajay Kurian: I hope it'll spawn other artists to think with it, but you're the first artist that I've seen that does that. Janiva Ellis: I just saw the Jack Whitten show and it was such a relieving experience to see the course of the work. I feel like a lot of the artists who are processing this information or doing it abstractly, it happens a lot more through music, cinema, and abstraction. Safety is a part of that. In terms of illustrating those sensations, it's not as common of a thing. It doesn't feel that safe to do that. And I think I just stopped caring. I stopped giving a fuck and being in LA felt like a frontier to not care. I had a really cute bedroom and that really helped me be like, I’m just going to do this. I like what my room looks like, I’m around my friends, and I feel inspired because I've left Hawaii. I came back to people who recognize me and I have nothing to lose. But yeah, this is edgy, but is it that edgy? It's not that crazy to be this painting Doubt Guardian 2. No matter how much you commune and how much care, there's always an internal spiral and there's always an impulse to make sure you're protecting whiteness even within the insulation of community. Or maybe not. That's a generalization, but that is something that exists. It's an anxiety. So I did want to articulate those things. Ajay Kurian: I think it expands and you keep pushing. It’s this sort of emotional palimpsest. Janiva Ellis: What does that mean? Ajay Kurian: Palimpsest is when a there’s a page and then another page will just be put on top of it and be embedded into it. So in this case, it's like a face on top of a face on top of a face. Things just keep getting layered and pushed in. So like you'll see an ancient text where it's either an Egyptian text or whatever it might be, and there’ll be a new text embedded into it. But not so literally. There's an emotional world that happens when all of these things get projected and pushed into one being. What's beautiful about it is that it doesn't even feel like fracture, which almost feels easier. This is the blurriness of having them all commingled at the same time. Janiva Ellis: It's like a lot of things happening at once. Reconciling how you're being perceived, how you perceive yourself and how you want to be perceived. Even the distance between how you are being perceived and how you want to be perceived is a lot to conceptualize. And then how you perceive yourself as like lifelong work and there's the immediate, there's the potential. There's the near future, there's the distant future, there’s the past. It's a lot of non-linear time happening especially when you're engaging violence. Especially microaggression relies on an ability and I think those things are really hard to name when you don't know yourself and you don't have the tools to articulate who you know yourself to be. Ajay Kurian: This is the thing that strikes me as even more of a singularity about you is that there are artists that know how to not know. There are artists that make great work that their intuition takes into a place and they do amazing things. They don't necessarily know everything that they're doing because they don't have to and that's not what's required of them. What I find particularly astonishing about the way that you move, especially from conversations we've had in the past, is how you're able to articulate those ambiguities both in the work and then also in conversation. I'm wondering, is this is just me going out on a limb, growing up in Hawaii and being away from dominant conversations about race, do you think it gave you a way to see things that other people couldn't see? Janiva Ellis: I think it gave me perspective because dominant conversations about blackness specifically weren't happening, but there were conversations about race and interrogations of colonialism and whiteness in Hawaii when I was growing up. Lots changed and it's quite different. The colonial project moves quickly and that's very apparent in what Hawaii is giving now. But when I was growing up, it was still very appropriate to have verbal disdain for white people who had moved to Hawaii. You need to acclimate to this vibe and what is that energy? This is what we give here. There's still this kind of racial ambiguity, privilege and obviously white privilege, but in casual conversation it would just be ugh, that white guy is doing this thing. Whiteness wasn't the predominant race. And when we're learning about history, we're learning about the recent colonial project. So I think that helped to be culturally suspicious at large. I think in relationship to my removal from how race functions on the main land or the continental United States — I say mainland, affectionately, but it actually is a word we're trying not to say because it privileges the continental United States — But I feel like it gave me a perspective on certain things about how whiteness functioned differently there than it does in Hawaii. Ajay Kurian: In this particular painting, is that cartoon invented? Janiva Ellis: Things are rarely invented in terms of their structure. A lot of the figures in the work are armatures from different movies, cartoons, or landscapes. I rarely really make a character wholly from scratch. Janiva Ellis: There are inventions in how I navigate ultimately how to get to a finished product, given my shortcomings and my strengths. But which character are you talking about? Ajay Kurian: The red-haired white character. Janiva Ellis: The white character is from a Ralph Bakshi movie. I think it's from Heavy Traffic and the character in that movie is really vulnerable. Have you seen heavy traffic? Ajay Kurian: I haven't. I've seen Fritz the Cat. Janiva Ellis: I actually haven't seen Fritz the Cat, but Ralph actually made these movies in the seventies that were pointing at racial tropes. But they also felt very, when I first saw them, I was like, oh a black person made this. When I found out a white person made it, I felt betrayed. It’s such a thing because now I have to reframe this, 'cause I enjoyed it. But yeah, he made this movie about New York and about racialized dynamics. He's the main character. Janiva Ellis: There's this black girl who works at a bar that he likes and they have a vibe. There's this trans femme character in the thing that's based on her. So I didn't wanna literally be like, this is narratively about that, but that image of her flying and being knocked upside the head, she's incredibly vulnerable in that moment. Janiva Ellis: And the image itself was really striking 'cause this is injustice, representative through this cartoon. But also there's something about how the interplay around white fragility and blackness is creating a net. Ajay Kurian: These are conversations that continue in the work. I'm gonna shoot ahead now because that made me think of this painting. Janiva Ellis: Really different. A lot changed. I was really distrustful of the exhibition landscape in art and so much of that earlier cartooning work when being pretty explicit about black figures experiencing like subjugation or the kind of illustration of some turmoils or frustrations or the complexities. I made that work in earnest in my studio thinking about connecting with other black people through that work. And as I got deeper into the art world, I realized that that impulse was being manipulated by the agenda of the art market at any given moment. Janiva Ellis: So I was feeling pretty disillusioned, frustrated and angsty about not being able to freely access the things I was doing. Early work just happened so quickly and so fluidly; I’m gonna project that, and I’m gonna watch that movie, and that ties to that, and these narratives feel so interconnected. I feel like I can see it so clearly. But as I experienced more writing about my work, more conversations with respectable art people, it got cloudier and cloudier. My studio was full of people who I didn't like mentally, And I was just like, how do I do keep doing this and enjoy it? How do I take control of what's going on? Ajay Kurian: So on the one hand, there's who you led into the studio and who you led into your life. Janiva Ellis: My studio's full of people like psychologically, I'm spiraling, so people aren't actually in there physically. Sometimes, sure. But primarily, it's like I'm painting with chatter that didn't exist before. Ajay Kurian: Chatter. Janiva Ellis: Chad. Ajay Kurian: Chad just seems like the whitest name to me. Janiva Ellis: Chad's in there, but it's not like Charles. It's Chad’s coming. Ajay Kurian: It's maybe Alex or Brad. Janiva Ellis: Devin. You know what I mean? I think my radar for discernment recalibrated in that period, and specifically with this rat show at the ICA, because I had a very tense experience making the show with the institution that I just wanted to be like, I'm just gonna talk about whiteness. I almost wanted to be like, I'm not doing black figures, but I was like, that still feels oppressive. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, that's just the opposite side of the coin. Janiva Ellis: And I'm just inverting things and I do wanna make these cool images, right? I do wanna make these exciting compositions, and I still wanna represent the things I wanna represent. But I had more of an impulse to contrast that with images like this. Ajay Kurian: The reason I bring this up also is that this was based off of a Walker Evans photograph where white precarity and white victim hood are established in this long photographic project where Walker Evans and James Agee go through into the South and they document white sharecroppers specifically. I know those images and I know that book, but the twist here, I think is under you creating a place in which the hidden violence of starting that conversation is brought to the fore where there's a very neutral landscape. Even if you don't know Walker Evans, even if you don't know all of that backstory, just as an image, there’ is a landscape with the grave. You don't know who the grave is for, but you do see something roiling in the back… Janiva Ellis: Roiling. I like that . Ajay Kurian: …That fucks up what you're supposed to be paying attention to. So something is central, but you feel like the thing that is supposed to be central isn't? Janiva Ellis: Like the sensationalism of a representation of death is complicated by an ominous abstraction. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. That's not easy, ’cause it can easily fall into illustration. It can fall into you not paying attention to the right thing. You have to think and it can become this preachy discourse. But instead, there are two things for me that felt like a big jump in your work, one being the color palette getting like dark. Janiva Ellis: Murkier, yeah. There are voids created by the lack of vivid color that I was very much pushing really hard. I think in the midst of also being a figuration, all of this feels like an advertisement for engagement. I don't want my work to reduce itself to style and to repetition and to pushing buttons I know work. And I think color was one of those things that people was an “out” for when people would write about the work. They would would lean into the cartoon and the color as a way of not talking about the racial dynamics. And I was just like, y'all what? That's key. They're cartoons. Do you like cartoons? It's who fucking doesn't? That's not the point. Especially in that moment where black figuration was becoming so lucrative in the marketplace. I just was like, this is feeling disgusting and I don't want to advertise the value of my work through people's low vibrational impulses. I don't want like them to be like, I like colors and black figures. I was just like, I'm scared. You're scaring me. You're stressing me the fuck out. Actually, let's flip it around. This is about y'all and y'all's history and the self ideation with vulnerability and entitlement to ascending to your highest version of yourself no matter what. Because in the 1930s everyone was poor. That feels like a big part of white American identity. Everyone was poor in the thirties, like as a fallout of slavery and like the, war and all of these things. And that's like an entitlement to be demonic. And so I was just like, let's just paint that out. This image feels like a representation of that painting is called Blood Lust Halo. And this one ‘cause that's also Sinner's energy, like it is just a justification for a death drive. Because of an abstraction of precarity, as represented by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lang. These images of wow, look at these poor white people, there’s dirt on their faces. There's so much dirt. I just wanted to be like, okay, let's center that. I think also in the moment I had that show in 2020, black death was just such a topical hashtag, right? And so I'm like, let's talk about death as a concept, and what white death represents versus, I just try and stretch that a little bit instead of illustrating black precarity for thirsty rich white people. Ajay Kurian: Were there studio visits where those people would be in the studio? Janiva Ellis: Not during the time, thank God, because of Covid. But also, I had a full mental break and was like, I don't fuck with any of you. I don't fuck with this. I was feeling very appeasing coming in. So I had a lot of room, even though the work gave anger, the presentation gave appeasing and in service a little bit. Ajay Kurian: Before we go too deep into this, there's a shift, let me see if I can find that painting. Janiva Ellis: I do wanna talk about this painting though, 'cause I love this painting. Ajay Kurian: It's a great painting. There are paintings from this period that feel like they're tapping into a space that feels unclear between joy and hysteria and also masochism. I see those things like not being fully removed in the work that's more recent, but they shift and they develop in different ways. But I wanna see what that brings up for you. I kept thinking about when you smile so hard that it hurts there's an internal kind of masochism happening there. There's so much of this first period that feels exuberant. And it’s a challenging form of exuberance, ’cause it's not clean or simple or easy. It's difficult to figure out how a viewer's supposed to feel about that exuberance. And that tied up with all these kind of naughty issues, all this psychology that can't resolve itself. Janiva Ellis: The exuberance was so sincere because I was feeling so much catharsis from just painting and I was experiencing a recognition from my peers about the depth I had. I think I wasn't even being forthright about the depths of my thoughts in certain relationships. Even though I knew people knew they were there, they took them for granted. I think I just was like, I have this other world in which these ideas can live. I think taking for granted isn't an extreme, but I think I wasn't being reflected back. So I was just really excited. That's where so much of that excitement is coming from. I was making myself laugh and I was having a blast with myself in a really sincere way. It’s funny because there's a different type of fraught in these paintings than there are in the later paintings. The later paintings are existential in a different way. Ajay Kurian: Very much. Janiva Ellis: A painting like this happened so quickly. I constantly think of this painting as, how do I make a painting that fast again? That feels really exciting and a breakthrough of sorts with like the potential of paint. What I'm doing now I think is like a little more technically muscular. But I don't think it's better. I think it's focused on a different skillset and a different set of values and a different type of depth. This felt immediate, I don't even have to think about it that deeply. It just came out. Ajay Kurian: It's an amazing painting. Janiva Ellis: Thank you. I appreciate that. I really felt cool. Ajay Kurian: But now let's go back. So let', start diving into these darker — actually this project feels like where you fully embrace this next chapter. And embrace what it means to think about history painting in a new way. It also makes me think of even Renaissance painters, like Titian, where they're dealing with the architecture. They're thinking about what the architecture means and how that functions in the work itself. This is a crazy painting. I wish we could like, see every single part of it. Janiva Ellis: Thank you. Ajay Kurian: Sorry, it should be darker. Janiva Ellis: It’s hard to photograph. It's a hard picture to capture for context. It's 30 feet in a curve. So it's meant to simulate like an immersive panoramic type of experience. For context, I made this painting in Berlin. So I think that did contribute to the decay quality. But also, I worked with this curator who was saying it would be cool for you to do a site specific panoramic type of painting. And I was like, okay, I could do it. We've got four months, but I can do it. And four months was really quick turnaround. But I was like fuck it, I wanna do it. This room had been built by the Armand Hammer, the Hammer Museum. Ajay Kurian: Isn't that the actor? Janiva Ellis: No, that's Army Hammer. Tomato, Tomato. Bleak, dark, scary people. But I think this room was built to house some great Da Vinci work. Some special historical context and so I was thinking about that specifically. There's a painting I did recently that's in the show at the Carpenter Center, and it was also in my solo show in September. I learned a lot of techniques about creating value in dark, muted tones. And like really going dark to create depths by using sheen and subtle variations in muted tone and umbers and blues and things. Janiva Ellis: Can you pan? Ajay Kurian: We'll pan. We're gonna start over here where this kind of barren architecture happens. We'll turn the lights back on in a second, but I just want you all to experience this so you're all with us. Ajay Kurian: and then much better As we pan you’ll start seeing value differences too. You start seeing these distinctions between warm and cool with the exterior and the interior. I'm not even sure what the relationship is between the angel and the other figure. Almost like that angel is wrestling with themselves maybe. Janiva Ellis: Yeah, that one, the contorted, they're all going through it. They're all going through it. None of them are in a good place for different reasons. This spinning was interesting just because there was no natural light in the room it was exhibited in. But in the studio I had like this big, sunny room. The way that it changed with the spotlight versus how I was painting it in the sunlight was such a wild kind of set of circumstances. There was just a lot of journey happening like that. But a lot of these figures are taken from different artists. This contorted figure is taken from Kathy Kitz, who's a German painter or a print maker, who I really loved before going to Berlin. I happened upon a museum dedicated to her and got to see a lot of her prints IRL. But this is based on a print she did of a figure that had been attacked in a field. So I was like, let's do a German context and scoop it in. But I was also just so deeply affected by her work, her approach, and her ability to capture the path of just like the violence she's like depicting. It's just so masterful and stunning. And I didn't really learn about it until 2020, didn't really see the work, so I was just so deeply impacted by it. So I wanted to just shout out and put it in. Ajay Kurian: I love that. You should really see the work. It is incredible. Janiva Ellis: The technique and the poetry of how she's depicting figures is just really special. I think I was in a place where I was like, how do I access this German thing, like I really do paint for the terrain that I'm in and I brought it to LA to show. But I did want it to feel reflective of what looms over Germany. What looms over people who go there. To feel freedom. Ajay Kurian: It definitely has a European-ness to it. Have you seen the movie White Ribbon? Janiva Ellis: No. Ajay Kurian: Directed by Michael Henneke. It’s this weird, creepy, black and white film of right before the war, and you can tell that it's coming and the kids are all fucked up. They start pulling these pranks that get more and more dangerous and more and more deadly. It’s like a lesson in how you can show the most quiet forms of violence and what they're about to turn into. Janiva Ellis: Was the movie made before the war or the movie was set before the war? Ajay Kurian: Set. Janiva Ellis: So it's contemporary? Ajay Kurian: Yeah, he’s alive. He's so good at quiet violence. It's terrifying. Janiva Ellis: Put me on. I'm so curious. I love the quiet violence and the ability to reflect in that way and be like, how do we depict this in a way that translates the terms of a moment. Ajay Kurian: This feels bigger than a moment though. I think there are times when the works feel potent and charged in the moment. And then, especially the more and more recent work, it feels like you're broaching larger swaths of history and different kinds of reservoirs of feeling, in a way. Janiva Ellis: Definitely. The older stuff was that moment when you're out here and this happens, and it was trying to do some broad sweeping stuff, but in a more kind of scratching the surface in a different way. It still might not nod to sweeping eras, but in a way that's very plucky. Ajay Kurian: These are great words. Janiva Ellis: Yeah, this is a different tone. Ajay Kurian: I'm glad we all experienced this together. Now when you see some darker works, we're not gonna keep turning the lights off, but now you know the register that we're dealing with. Ajay Kurian: We'll open it up to questions soon, but I think let's go to the most recent show. I want to go into the Carpenter Center Show because there's a new level of vulnerability. Janiva Ellis: Vulnerable in a different way. Ajay Kurian: I think I just wanna give you the floor for that. I don't know what got you there. I don't know what made you say, I want to show this even though I don't know where it's at. Janiva Ellis: I think honestly, the dialogue I was having with Dan, the curator, I think made me feel comfortable to just try something and try a different approach. I think the impulse to be vulnerable in a school setting was that I was empathizing with how students engage with professionalism. And the pretense of Harvard is this exceptionalist projection and it just seemed important to be vulnerable about what it takes to get to a goal. And how self-doubt is not an inherently embarrassing quality to have. That perseverance looks a lot of different ways. So when I was thinking about students seeing the show, that's really what inspired me to be like, I'm gonna do a massive studio visit, basically. Not try and say, here's this. Institution, let me flex some exceptionalism. And in all honesty, I was tired. like that also is part of it. It wasn't purely motivated by that, but I think it was a moment where I was tired and I'm not going to put myself into overdrive the way that I did for the hammer painting. With this show, there's a moment for me to show a bunch of work that I don't quite feel confident about. I still tried to finish everything and I still tried to create a level of resolution with all the paintings in that show to the best of my ability. But I didn't psychologically tap into the stamina required to set off the fireworks. I just let each painting be a different work and not try to really do the entertainment that I strive for in my work. This is not an entertainer moment. This is a vulnerability moment. Ajay Kurian: It makes me think, you can say if this is an incorrect metaphor, but there's something about it that feels like what a stew is like half done. Like t's done, but you can cook it down further. It can cook for another three hours, but everything's there. It's offering something in that moment where some things are still fresh, some things are still building, and you can see all of that happening and it makes me think that this gets to be this really beautiful moment that we get to see what's cooking. Janiva Ellis: There's something between my last show in September and this show, there's something simmering here. But it doesn't need to be a moment that is an era. I do treat a lot of shows, like an era of thought and an era of my studio. With this, it didn't feel necessary to approach it that way. I also just really wanted to access the feeling of being like, I'm shy about this work, but I'm allowing people to look at it. And it got the most press anything I've ever done has gotten. I don't feel confident about all this stuff and it's like on full display. But it felt like an interesting emotional challenge to just be able to be showing things that I would never want the public to see. Some of it, yeah. Some of it I'm like, I'm not like embarrassed but I just think there's works that isn't indicative of capacity. Just overriding that little goblin and being like, I got this. It's fine. It's whatever. You got this, I'm out here figuring it. We’re all figuring it out. There's no exceptionalism. Every day is different. Ajay Kurian: No notes. Janiva Ellis: Dan's fab. Dan, who's a curator I worked with, he made me feel incredibly comfortable. The approach I have for this show versus the show at the ICA are different dynamics. Ajay Kurian: This is getting to that fireworks level. Janiva Ellis: It's so funny because I struggle with this painting. It felt so just on the nose or something, and I'm not saying this isn't good or whatever, but I've been here before in terms of the themes. I think that's where the self-doubt came from this painting. But a lot of people are like, oh, this painting is going in. And I was like, oh okay, I have a new entry point for this type of portraiture and I don't quite know what it is. Ajay Kurian: To me, there's still a shift. I see what you're saying in terms of you having been here before. But the way that you're treating it is very different. When we think back to the first painting that we all saw together, there's definition, there's clarity, and the way that you're even putting an image into an image is one where it's still graphic. You've abandoned certain graphic sensibilities towards something that feels much more ambiguous, blurry, actually, and metaphorically. And yeah, there are times where landscape shows through the figure. You can see that cloudy blue sky and it's like through the figure. But here it might be landscape, it might be tonal, it might be internal, it might be external. It's much more difficult to discern what’s what. Janiva Ellis: How the layers are happening and what's creating distinctions. Ajay Kurian: You’re pushing and pulling in a new way. In a way that’s, in some ways, more sensitive and other ways you're just trying something else. It's a different register to me. So even though it might be familiar, because it's like the portrait centering this white woman in this way. Janiva Ellis: I think I was like, okay, the white girl's spiraling. You know what I mean? Like what more could be said about that? It was a painting I needed to make. The reference from this painting is Sallow. It's like a zoom in on the girl. If you guys haven’t seen Sallow, it's this movie about fascism and these young white kids are experiencing degradations that are really extreme and so over the top. Degradation — it’s what's the worst thing you could think of that happened? Ajay Kurian: I have so much to say about that, that's like a whole other spiral. Janiva Ellis: Oh yeah, this person is really being subjugated in this image. Reducing it to something in my own context, can be read a lot, can be attached to it through how I'm talking about whiteness in work. I do like to push through that ambiguity of we're still all human. This isn't trying to downgrade like violences that people at a human level experience. But here are the images we've been giving to value and what do we do when we manipulate them and recontextualize them. We don’t need to degrade them or make them feel like less potent. But what if we reframe them and what do they mean and what do they say about us culturally and what we prioritize? Ajay Kurian: Prioritization, I think maybe is also the register that you're hitting right now. You can move things forward and make it clear and move things backward and blur it. It allows for different and new distinctions to happen. And for us to think about our own priorities and think about what we've been paying attention to. It's not to say the human picture is vast and always overwhelming, but we focus on what we focus on. What are our associations? Janiva Ellis: What does it trigger when we look at different things. We're gonna all have different kind of entry points and familiarities, and those are just as much a part of the work. That's what art is, the communal experience of it. Not just the cathartic an artist has, or the dialogue two artists have with each other, but the witnesses and the people who make meaning of it for themselves. Ajay Kurian: I'm gonna open it up to questions Janiva Ellis: On that note. Audience Member: First and foremost, thank you so much for giving us your words about your own work. This is a great opportunity to, I think, dive a little bit deeper into your process and your history. I think the first question I have is a lot of your pieces are not framed. Is that an intentional decision that you make? I feel like the evolution of the frame gives an opportunity to add an even deeper layer of three dimensionality to your work as a sculptural element that could potentially add more to the narrative that you're trying to portray. So that's my first question, why no frames? Janiva Ellis: I do love paintings as their own object and I do love like them as this is a flat space. When you look at a complicated image and you go deeper and you build a world, then the depth is there. I do love that just existing on a surface that you can walk around and see the side of it. Then there's like a brush stroke on white or like a smudge and a fingerprint. The evidence of the evolution of an image is just really interesting to me, as you can see in other works of mine, where you see this looks more finished, this is abstract. Is that done? Is it not? I do the process being pretty transparent even when there's like a level of polish. And so that edge is something I like, but I'm into frames too. Sky's the limit for what something can be like and how it can impact people. It just hasn't organically come up. There's one painting in the Harvard show that has a white frame, but I found that canvas on the street. And it was already a painting and I painted on top of it. So it has a white frame, but I was like, oh, maybe I would make these really simplistic white frames because they do a different type of thing. Audience Member: Thank you. Lastly, the first time I saw your work was at the Whitney Biannual, Uh Oh, Look Who Got Wet. In that moment my world shattered. So if you could just talk about that painting a little bit more. Janiva Ellis: That’s nice to hear, thank you. That was a doozy of a time and there was a lot of chaos at that time. Uh Oh, Look Who Got Wet is a lyric from a little ugly Maine song, who is a white rapper who pitches his voice down to escape his whiteness. And it just felt appropriate. I had already been painting the river. She's running through and she's trying to figure out. I was thinking about, do I go literal? Oh, look who got wet? Give you're in this shit now. There was a lot of controversy swirling around that show. But that show was in 2019 and my first exhibition was 2017. So within two years or less, I was really catapulted and responsible for a certain discourse in art that I wasn't ready for. I was like, dang, uh oh, I'm responsible. So that was in there. But also I was like stealing and tugging at this little ugly thing. Then the imagery itself, I think is, the conflict of being responsible for something that is haphazard and oblivious. Being in crisis as you move forward and as you're propelled and driven to keep going. I'm just gonna keep doing this thing, but I don't know what I'm doing. And I also am holding this thing that presents itself as vulnerable, but is shape shifting and chaotic. A critic wrote about this work and said that a slave runs to freedom, which was so painful and telling, because it just said, oh, this is where we're at. This person just confidently is like, this image of a black figure running is like about enslavement to a degree. It is, but not in the ways obviously that she was framing it. It is about being beholden to things that don't serve you and making choices about what you need. But I also wanted it to be like a cinematic freeze frame where you're like, where is she going? What happened before this? What's happening after? We don't know. Ajay Kurian: Thank you. There's a Steffani Jemison video that also feels relevant. Where it's an ongoing panning shot of a black man running. And you don't have any context, but what you start projecting onto that man starts telling you about yourself. Janiva Ellis: Exactly. The projection is so much of work, especially in these contexts, in these institutional spaces, it does have to be acknowledged that these are in the context they're in. Even if they're made for an audience that is not actually represented in that space or is not centralized in how the work is framed by institutions and journalists and curators. Audience Member: Hello, my name is Anna, and I love the way you openly speak about your feelings. Every time you describe a painting or a project you would work with, like you mentioned, I felt shy, but people loved it. So that's cool. And then the other image and you go oh, I was so happy. That was joy. But my question is, do you have a specific painting that you felt like was a challenge? Something that you had to face at some point, because it's fantastic that you actually acknowledge your feelings and you are aware of even you don't trust your intuition, but you still just know what you're doing. Janiva Ellis: I'm glad you appreciate the transparency. I'm glad that's resonating. Do you mean paintings that are hard emotionally, or the existential emotional way and reconciling what meaning is being produced from that work? Audience Member: Yeah, but not only meaning. Even to put it on the canvas and be like, am I afraid of it? What is your relationship with the painting? Not how other people would react, but your own feedback on, what the fuck did I do right now? Janiva Ellis: I find rage, raw rage, scary and hard to be transparent about, in art and in life. Not couching my emotions and humor is something that's I'm working towards. I think humor is really useful. I think it serves a purpose. And I do feel like an entertainer at times with what I do. I want people to engage. I want there to be a range of emotions. Movies are what motivate me. Music is what motivates me. Time-based art is the thing that I am most impacted by. So to be working in a static practice, I really want to have that arc in that range, which is why I try and incorporate the violence and the humor and the levels of finish and all of these depths and the things that are coming out. But raw rage, flat rage, punctuated emotion that is not embedded in skill and playfulness is scary, but I'm curious about it. Audience Member: Hi, Terry here. I guess my very first impression of your work was that it's thought provoking, but it provokes more than just thoughts. It provokes feelings and emotions, and throughout this talk, something that came up a few times, was intuition. You mentioned earlier that there was a journey for you to maybe get more attuned to that intuition. And since the theme is based on distortion and contortion, I was wondering how that could play a role in your intuition or intuition in general as an artist? How you're able to distinguish between the noise and the distortion that could potentially interfere with, intuition itself. And again, as an artist who's trying to create, there must be things around that inspire you all the time. So how do you filter? Janiva Ellis: Yeah, there's so many options. The wide range of options in which to pursue and the roads and the threads to go down. There's so many ways to freak your art and make something happen. And do I go this way? When I think about music production, I'm like, you could do this, it could be this, it could be fast, could be slow, there’s so many choices in music production. I'm like, how did they get it? I find that so inspiring. But the way that I paint, I think about those things like the pitching up and the pitching down, and the slowing down and the reverb of all of those kind of moments when I'm just gonna blur that and then I'm gonna make that really crisp. I think I had a really solid foundation of, and broad array of influences at a pretty young age. And this isn't the only way that this happens, but I trust my take. I think I have cool taste. I don't know, I like my taste. So I think that gives me faith in what I do. I feel like the palette that I have has attracted people that I admire deeply and that gives me the confidence to pursue my intuition and explore. And, the stakes are low. In terms of following threads, that's not quite what I thought. It doesn't come out on the first try. Like that painting where I was like, that happened so fast and I've been trying to get back there. A lot of paintings are dense and have a lot of depth because I've tried 15 things and committed to them and had to commit to them not being there. It is a lot of trial and error, but it also is I'll know, when it happens because, the people in my life are a reflection of that. The things I get to do and the things I've chosen to do fulfill me. So if I've been able to actualize that. I can pick an image, I can pick a line. And maybe I don't have to pick, there's five lines representing one line. like a lot of paintings are just like, I'm not picking, I'm just gonna do everything and do it all, and then edit into something that makes the most sense. Ajay Kurian: Let's have one more, but I have a quick question based off of that. Rick Rubin was interviewing James Blake. And James Blake was talking about that he's not good with melody and that he feels weak in melody. And that already was like a funny thing for me. I was like, really? And he was like, I could take something that I thought worked pretty well and then just start looping it and then building it and transforming it. It was almost like he took a weakness, what he saw as a weakness and made it a strength. He was like, I'm never gonna write like a pop melody like Miley Cyrus. Janiva Ellis: Like a collage. I think some people are collagers, some people are inventors. I think he's got a lot of influences doing a lot of work for him. And I think that he's maybe a curator. I haven't listened to a ton of his music, so I don't wanna flatten the thing, but you know how there are good curators. I'm like, you're really good at that. You're good at looking at stuff. You're a strong connoisseur. Some connoisseurs make things and some people are riffing and some people are channeling, some people are inventing, some people are contorting, some people are crashing all the way down so that they can pick one thing up and make it something. And some people are really good at research. Some people have 60 tabs open and they look at every tab and they, absorb it and they use it and they take it. Some people have 60 tabs open and for years, and then take one thing, different approaches. I'd say James Blake looks, seems like a person who has 60 tabs. He looks at every single tab and he uses and extracts all the stuff. Ajay Kurian: How many tabs do you have? Janiva Ellis: A million. The tap culture is so intense, but there was an impulse to follow one thing, and then maybe a few of those things will be used. I'm not trying to create a comparison between me and James Blake, but I think there are different approaches that produce different types of work, and there's a different catharsis to be had in that output. Like thinking about Rauschenberg versus Winton, I just saw the Winton show, incredible. Such a relief. Thinking about that work, thinking about Rauschenberg, it's a different approach to assembling things from other things and they have their different values. Audience Member: Hey, Janiva. I love hearing you speak. I really feel a lot of the things that you're saying with disillusionment at the immediate recuperation of identity politics into capitalism in the art world. That's just an aside, but I had a technical question. I liked what Ajay said about palimpsest and layers of drawing, and mark-making superimposed on top of each other. That's something I see a lot of in your earlier work, decision making about how to draw borders and lines. Like you make decisions about where to end something with a graphic area of color. And now the new work is like extremely exciting. It still has that drawing trace, but it's expanded and maybe less based on referential images. So I'm curious like where you're at with, being beholden to reference images and also how you've changed your decision making around, where to merge or diffuse or make clear elements of drawing. Janiva Ellis: That's a painter right there, that's a painter's question. A fab painter, skilled, talented. I decided to take my time. I think that's the choice. I think early work was speed and I have so many ideas and I don't know how to keep up with them. Just gonna do it. It's done. It was a lot of shorthand for ideas because I was like, this is my shot. I don't know if I'm gonna do this again and I don't know what time I have, I don't know if I'll have the money to do this again. I don't know if I'll have the support. I don't know how long this will last. I'm just doing it now. I hadn't fully finished this question where I had taken about four and a half years after school where I wasn't painting for a number of varied reasons.I had such a kind of truncated relationship to when I would start and then it would be clunky. But there was just a lot of self-doubt, a lack of funds, a lack of space, and a landscape that didn't seem like I even cared about. Coming into it again, I was renewed with a sense of enthusiasm that made me paint quickly. That was around the time that the Kerry James Marshall Show, had happened and was touring the country Mastery. There was a Robert Cole Scott show, there was just these shows that I was like, oh my gosh, I don't have time, I gotta do this. We don't have time and so I was moving really quickly. I think the difference now is I'm moving more slowly. I am sitting with things, I'm taking a step back, I'm taking naps, and then I go back in and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna paint over that. I don't need that and I'm gonna go back in with a more measured hand. I think there was a different type of editing that was happening at that time where I was like, paint black over it. Paint another face, paint this, paint that. But there was a crudeness that came from the speed. And I think there was a lack of technical concern. I did care of course, about communicating a competency around painting and a knowledgeability around the history of image making. But precision wasn't the priority. I was like, there's a lot of ways to communicate competency, and precision isn't the one I'm focused on right now. Now I think in lieu of prioritizing the conversations I was wanting to have in that work, because I'm communicating them in what I'm very firmly planted in as an institutional context. And things are morphing, if I wanna keep making art, I have to find joy in it. That's through learning and that's through getting better. So I'm gonna take my time, and not as fixated on the reveal of violence and like the feeling of like black people, are you out there? I wanna connect to you. This happens, I'm not crazy, that’s weird, right? That really formed my personality at the time where I was just like, are you guys there? Is this happening? And now I'm not in that place. I'm like, I have my fucking people around me. I feel cute, I feel fab. I'm sipping wine and, this is so fun. Still feeling crisis, but like finding catharsis and like learning about forms and then getting to sprinkle ideas on top of that form and that understanding of what makes forms like deep and resonant. Ajay Kurian: All right, last question. Audience Member: Hello. I somehow found myself living in Somerville, Massachusetts, and I saw a flyer for your paintings at the Carpenter Center, and I was like, in my way, Massachusetts is my Hawaii. And I was like, oh, this will be a chance to meet people so I went on Friday but the opening was on a Thursday. But I had so much time to sit with your work and I didn't realize I had met you before, but I was like, I had served you at a restaurant once, that's crazy. Janiva Ellis: This relationship between working in the service industry and meeting people. Audience Member: It's New York, I feel like. So one thing that I really think about when I see your paintings is I'm someone who loves to be like under the covers and turn a flashlight on. I feel like your paintings are inside when we're outside. And I'm just curious about the architecture of your dreams and memories and like how you reflect on them? Janiva Ellis: Wow. I will say that, when I first left Hawaii, my dreams were really vivid and the recall I had with my internal inventiveness was spill over. And being in New York for a long time and turning this catharsis into a profession, has created certain gaps, like in in the freedom of my subconscious making contact with my conscious feels cloudier and concerned with things I don't care about in the emotional sense, and the fulfillment sense. So I had this really vivid dream the other day, a very art world dream where it was very like conspiratorial dream about how I was being attacked and all these things, but it inspired me 'cause I hadn't made contact with a vivid dream in a while. The vivid dreams happen and when I go back to Hawaii or when I'm not in the city, it is a little associating freedom, saying yes to impulse, like all of those things. Ajay Kurian: I can't thank you enough. Janiva Ellis: Thank you, honestly. Thank y'all. I really appreciate you guys coming. Ajay and I have been talking about doing this for a while and I'm glad that it could come together. This felt very cozy. I was nervous and this felt very normal and really nice. So thank you. Ajay Kurian: It's really my pleasure, thank you so much. Thank you all for keeping the energy and again, let's give it up for Janiva. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

He paints exhaustion, desire, and the ghosts of modern life—Aaron Gilbert on how to stay human in a fractured world Aaron Gilbert is a painter whose work bridges the mythic and the domestic, capturing moments of intimacy under the weight of spiritual, political, and economic pressure. He’s exhibited internationally and is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery. His paintings are both tender and prophetic, filled with symbolic ruptures, spectral presences, and radiant color. He explains: * Growing up in a creative family and abandoning a career in engineering to pursue painting—while becoming a father. * Why he doesn’t chase “great art,” but instead builds images that hold his full self—flawed, contradictory, and reaching. * Painting not to reflect the moment, but to prophesize what lies beyond our broken stories. * The struggle to maintain mystery, emotional precision, and resistance within large-scale work. * How brand logos become talismans, color becomes spirit, and art becomes a tear in the fabric of what we think is real. 00:00 Welcome to NewCrits01:06 “People still seem to fuck—and that’s a good thing.”02:24 What does it mean to paint history now?04:07 “I wanted to make the worst WPA paintings ever.”05:01 Intimacy vs. Monumentality10:14 Painting the workplace: a shape-shifting host12:34 From engineering to painting14:20 Becoming a father and an artist, simultaneously15:53 “These might be the only paintings I ever make.”17:01 Art as a lifeline for the socially awkward20:00 Too private to paint?24:01 The artist as prophet30:39 What’s missing in art school? Elders.37:08 SpongeBob as an exhausted adult42:45 The levity of “Hot Moms”47:00 Floating balaclavas and unsolved images50:00 Spectral figures and ghostly presences52:00 Medieval symbology and the power of icons52:53 Giotto and the doorway between worldviews54:06 Enchantment vs. extraction in Western philosophy55:03 Mark Fisher, hauntology, and lost futures56:16 Logos as spiritual metaphors—enter Adidas57:10 The metaphysics of branding and seduction59:50 White holes, time loops, and painting as rupture01:03:15 Against the heroic posture in painting01:04:24 Imperfection as access to potential01:09:00 Influence, indebtedness, and divergence01:13:00 Time as a mystery—Carlo Rovelli and quantum thought01:14:10 Consciousness, rupture, and looped time01:15:03 Final thoughts and an invitation to see the work in person01:16:00 Thank you, Aaron Gilbert Follow Aaron:Web: https://www.aaron-studio.com/Instagram: @aaron_gilbert_studio [https://www.instagram.com/aaron_gilbert_studio/] Follow Gladstone Gallery:Learn more about Aaron Gilbert’s exhibition, World Without End, at Gladstone Gallery here [https://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/14096/world-without-end/installation-views.].Web: https://www.gladstonegallery.com/Instagram: @gladstone.gallery [https://www.instagram.com/gladstone.gallery] — Full Transcript Ajay Kurian: Hi everybody, I want to thank you all for coming. This is the 19th NewCrits Talk. NewCrits is a global platform for studio mentorship, we have 16 artists on our platform that you can meet with directly, and we offer studio mentorship, professional mentorship, portfolio reviews and contract coaching. It really is a platform to democratize our education. The one thing that we do in person are these talks. But we're also starting to offer classes. Our first class starts tomorrow, which is called New Identities for Dangerous Times. We'll be offering three more courses in the fall with some more artists that will all be announced soon. Okay, that's it for NewCrits. We are worn out psychologically, physically, financially, ecologically, spiritually. We've suffered injuries and lost loved ones, limbs and homes. We've struck out and played on lost love and conjured hope. Ours is an age of exhaustion, and Aaron Gilbert paints the exhausted of the earth. The figures in Aaron's paintings are weary, beyond weary, but nevertheless, we see them on dates playing with their children, buying one another with desire and holding one another with heat for all the exhaustion. People still seem to fuck. And that's a good thing because in a way that erotic charge is hope. A hope for a new tomorrow, for new life, and for survival. Now with all that I saw in Aaron's work, it would still be enough. But what compels me to stay longer is a strange sort of enchanting that many of the paintings hold. They're pictures that hold their own ruptures in very subtle and sometimes secretive ways. They're paintings of modern life with wormholes to other moments, other feelings, and other spirits. We're not just in the present. We are with the ghosts of many moments and I can't help but think that they're there to help us find redemption. And in the moment we find ourselves in, I welcome all the redemption I can. Please welcome Aaron Gilbert. Aaron Gilbert: Thank you. That was really beautiful, actually. Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling? Aaron Gilbert: I'm good. It's nice to see everyone here. Ajay Kurian: You got your tequila. Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, and a room full of people that I'm really happy to have a conversation with. So this is great. Ajay Kurian: Aaron has a show up at Gladstone Gallery right now. It's up until April 19th and I thought we should just start there. The first thing that crosses my mind, especially looking at older work and now looking at the new show, is that a lot of these paintings feel like history paintings in their own way. How does that sit with you? What do you think about the space of history painting? Aaron Gilbert: That's really something I was trying to contend with in a very different way. Probably about six years ago, seeing Diego Rivera's murals at the National Palace in Mexico City for the first time. I was really knocked over by the scope and the scale of that project. It felt like a lifelong undertaking. In a way, it felt like a visual form of Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, and it just made me think that there was a much further reach I could do. There was a much bigger set of questions that I could go for more directly. I think this show was a beginning to me trying to ask and respond to those questions. In a way, I wanted to make like the worst WPA paintings ever made. Not that they're bad paintings, but that they kind of hit at how I feel viscerally about the world that we're living through in relation to what it should be. Ajay Kurian: When you say the worst WPA paintings, I'm trying to see what energy that conjures in the work, because to me, you tow the line between finding something that feels structural but also extremely intimate. And when I think about murals, intimacy is not the first thing that comes to mind. Aaron Gilbert: That's where I take issue with a lot of history painting, or where I have maybe a different way of approaching it. I think mine's kind of an inverse, you know? So if you think of a classic history painting; it's like a top down telling of history. Here are archetypes of the workers and here is this historical figure. But for me, what I'm engaged with is this idea of how can I, as someone knowing all these contradictory and all these facets of myself and my life that are pulling in different directions and that are compromised in different ways. How can I still in some way find a way to be transformative in this world? How do we start with the lives that we actually inhabit and figure out how to move outwards and address these larger societal, historical forces? So it's kind of a reverse process, but with the same set of concerns. Ajay Kurian: In this painting here, there's so many things going on and so many places to start, but in terms of thinking about particularity first, do you find that structure helps you to then start orienting these stories? Or how does a painting of this vast kind of start coming together in the questions that you're trying to tackle? Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, so this is a painting I didn't know how to do before I did it, and I just kind of knew that was going to be the case. The way I approach it is I start making drawings and there's a full size work on paper that's the same scale as this drawing. Initially, the painting started with this very small sketch of the mother, and the daughters staying on the tub, braiding her hair. And I liked that gesture. Then I was thinking the mother would be looking out the window and I didn't know where yet, but maybe there's a courtyard. So initially she was ground level. And then because I'm working on paper, I started to think it was a lot more interesting in terms of the power dynamic of her gaze, for her to be higher up and looking down at someone or something outside. Because it was a work on paper, I was able to cut it and move it up. This was gradually built piece by piece. And the only way I knew to approach it was to start with these small and intimate vignettes, begin to tie them together and think about how to build a full constellation within a piece. Ajay Kurian: That makes a lot of sense. As soon as I see that scene or focus in on it, I'm like, oh yeah, that's an Aaron Gilbert painting right there. But then to see that become a story that unfolds into other stories and then has a larger constellation within it, is something that structurally makes sense to me. In the early work that I had seen of yours, there's an intimacy that's based in a single room. Aaron Gilbert: Right, right. It is a very close, self-contained, tight composition. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, and then in a lot of these paintings, there's something that's happening where there's a zoom-out, there’s different things happening in the same picture, and there’s different gatherings of how people are organizing themselves in different related stories. Aaron Gilbert: With those earlier works, I was always thinking that the power of this work is if I can have this palpable feeling of larger societal and historical forces. So it might just be a couple in the kitchen preparing food or it could be very self-contained, seemingly. But how can I deliver in a way where you feel these larger social forces and you feel that the figures themselves might have one set of intentions, but then the full weight and gravity of what was happening and what they were doing within the scene was a lot more complex. Ajay Kurian: This is a painting that comes to mind, largely because there's so many moments where when I see figures interacting, I understand the intimacy. It is one of the paintings that actually was harder for me to figure out the immediate dynamics. There's something about what's going on between them and what's going on as they function within a system that felt compelling, but also there's a different energy here that I thought was kind of curious. Aaron Gilbert: In a way, this work was part of a bridge from work that I had been making for at least a decade until this recent show. I'd kind of hit a point where I wanted to broaden the scope of domestic intimacy and find equally intimate scenes. The workplace became an interesting place for me. I wanted to bring it more into the public sphere. When you're working with people five days a week for 8 to 12 hours a day, that’s an incredibly locked in scenario where you really get to know each other and your energies rub off on each other. So with this painting; I've been working at a fabrication shop for about five years and I was always really interested in how machines and huge pallets of raw materials would get moved around. In a way, the inside of the warehouse was this shape shifting thing that you're living inside of. If you're wearing safety gear, then the patterns and colors of the safety gear are a continuation of the building itself. All the reflective tape to guide people through the building. So it felt kind of like this parasitic host type of relationship. And I wanted to try to just play with that a little bit. Ajay Kurian: When you started making paintings, what place of thinking did it start with? Did you always have all of these ideas of thinking about how you wanted to make a picture or did it slowly develop? Where did picture making and where did the love of art initially come from? Aaron Gilbert: It's been a gradual development. I'd say everyone in my immediate family is very creative, so I was kind of the last to dip into visual art in a way. I was studying mechanical engineering and I was working towards an associate degree in engineering technology. I was really not in love with it. The culture of it really didn't sit right with me and I just felt like whatever I'd be making would be a part of a larger destructive machine. It just felt really against my spirit in the deepest way in terms of what I'd be participating in. But I definitely would not have been bold enough to be an artist without having something that felt like a stable way to make money or support a family. So I started taking art classes when I was studying towards the engineering degree, and then it was a long four year process from when I started taking art classes to when I finally was able to go to art school. And during that time, my son was born. So I also began painting seriously at the same time that I was beginning fatherhood. Also, the first couple years when I was in art school, I was working multiple jobs. I was getting some time in the studio, but really having to balance it with these different jobs out in the world, was really physically taxing but also kind of really interesting. Maybe one more thing I'll say that was really important is, because of being a father also, I knew I couldn't try everything that I was interested in. I felt right away that I had one shot at this. I have to find something that feels like I can really run with it and I have to go as fast and far as I can with that. Ajay Kurian: And at that moment you thought, I can be a painter? Aaron Gilbert: At that moment, I thought these three years I was at Rhode Island School of Design might be the only time I make paintings. You know, like 15 years later I might be pulling my paintings out from under the bed to show my kids to say this is what I did. So I wanted to really love what I did, and I wanted to really believe it. I wanted it to matter to me, and I wanted there to be enough of me in it. I mean, honestly, I didn't think that people made careers out of this. Ajay Kurian: Taking those initial art classes, I can understand that to have been a way for you to find an outlet for something, or a way to see, okay, what is it that I want to do? But the fact that it really became the beating heart of your creative life — that’s a profound thing. What were those initial art classes? Aaron Gilbert: Oh, it was just like a beginning drawing type of art class. Like a lot of artists, I'm pretty socially awkward and reclusive. I don't like small talk or chatter and like I didn’t want to make artwork that was this doorway to being able to have conversations with somebody out there about things that were rolling around in my head. I just wanted to put something else up for people to sink their teeth into. Ajay Kurian: For one, I think when you're talking about you painting your life and the physical circumstances of everything around you, you never seem to have a problem with putting really personal things into your work. People ask comedians this a lot: where’s the line? What's something that you wouldn't make a joke about? And I was looking at your work and I was wondering if there's something that's too private for Aaron to make a painting about. Aaron Gilbert: I mean, there's many things that are too private. It's also the spirit of how it's made. I mean, I love being alive and I love people. I feel like if there's something I can make that has a meaningful connection with someone else, and I don't even need to meet them, but if I feel this gravity drawing me towards the making of it then I try to honor and follow that. I've definitely had moments more so with music where it felt like a song saved my life, you know? Where it was just like I was in this place of being really alone and something just hit me and there was someone else there with me. I've never been interested in being like an edge lord with my work. It's just not what I'm concerned with. I think there is kind of an openness that I'm maybe not even that self-conscious of a lot of times. Ajay Kurian: I think it's one thing that stood out when you were talking about that was the way that the energy or the spirit in which you paint these seemingly private things, or just feeling the intimacy of a moment. I think what you balance really well is something that feels very quiet, personal and intimate, but there's also something that feels almost mythological about it. That the characters in the paintings are both themselves and the stand-ins. That they're who they are, but they're also maybe shells. Aaron Gilbert: I think there's a lot in that statement. To pull back for a second, there’s this kind of this larger thing I've been thinking about a lot. This idea of what storytelling is and that it's kind of this concept that we don't live in. We live in our narrative of what the universe is and what the world is. It's kind of like living in a tent within a larger universe. And narrative is how we describe the contours of that to each other and the horizon of what's possible. Then I look at mythology or spirituality as an overlaying of meaning onto that. So to have this dual thing between, this is a painting of a specific person I might know, or maybe of two or three people who've been combined into one hybrid character. But then maybe painting moves it towards the symbolic or the mythological. What's in the room is partly the individual and then partly this greater thing playing out that has to do with how they're participating in something that is a mystery, that is cosmic, that is beyond what our daily cultural scene is. Ajay Kurian: Were you the philosopher of the family? Aaron Gilbert: Oh man, no, no, no. I'd say very different ways. Both sides of the family. Ajay Kurian: So that was like the milieu, like you’re surrounded by people thinking about grander ideas? Aaron Gilbert: Grander and worse ideas. When I was in my first semester in undergrad at RISD, I don't even remember what I brought to class, but my work was very rightly being criticized. The teacher was basically saying, I don't see anything of right now in this painting. It feels like you're kind of stuck trying to make something that looks like art, but nothing of this moment is in the painting. I was talking to my mother on the phone after, and she said an artist's job isn't to reflect the moment. She said the purpose of or one major part of a calling of an artist is the prophetic. I think that was something that's really stuck with me in terms of the work that was with anybody. Ajay Kurian: My mother has not said that to me. Aaron Gilbert: And yet here you are. So yeah, similar stories. Ajay Kurian: Of course, mothers are your first coach, confidant, teacher, all of these things. So I'm sure there's something there. But to establish the prophetic so early in the work and in how you understand the calling of an artist, this is purely for my own curiosity, how does one cultivate the prophetic? Aaron Gilbert: I've been thinking about it in different ways lately, but maybe to get back to that conversation of not living in the full universe, we're inside this moment and this age within some room that's been built out of a shared and very flawed story. And I feel like whenever we hit the poetic is where there's a terror in the logic. Because if something's poetic, a linear explanation doesn't really reveal its power. But we feel that some truth has been revealed. It’s something that we can circle around, but the language we have right now doesn't fully deliver what it's delivering. It's this potential. I feel like maybe that's some kind of tear from the other side, penetrating and calling to us to move into a different fuller stage. So I link that to the prophetic in a way. Ajay Kurian: Do you think that those tears always stay open or that they're historically contingent? Jackson Pollock was somebody that I'd seen in every poster in every college dorm, and I was just like, this is so dead to me. Then much later in life, I remember going to the Met and standing in front of a Pollock and I was like, holy shit. It felt like it tore open again. This is a very sort of modest example but it's happened many times. For some reason that occurs to me right now and there's moments when I feel like a particular artwork has opened, and a particular artwork has closed, and that there's almost an aperture towards another place. Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, I can see that. That's what you mean by historically contingent. I don't know that I have an answer to that, but I believe it. Ajay Kurian: Just in terms of your experience, I know that ancient artworks have been really important for you to see how they can stay present for you. Are there times when art feels like it's not living for you that way anymore? Aaron Gilbert: I think I need to think about that, but maybe what's most generative for me to think about right now is the carrying and passing on of a flame and that we're participating in a continuum. I was just looking at Jack Witten's work today at MoMA, and there was no show I could think of that's less timely than that. We're here for a very short amount of time, each of us. And something I think about, also with raising children, is seeing the generation before me begin to pass and die. So we need to grab and hold onto the things that they carried to us and reorganize them and deliver them forward into the future. So I guess I think about that more and I don't worry too much about where something feels. I'm just looking for magic where it is and trying to keep those embers. Ajay Kurian: I remember when I was in your studio that was, I was telling you that I was asking people what they think is missing from art school? And the first thing that came up for you was the fact that we don't really hear from our elders in art school. That it's more like, what's happening now? What's happening here and what's the presence? Being around older artists where there's a different understanding of what present is, felt really important. I never really thought about that. Of course you have older professors when you're in school, but I didn't think about it in terms of a larger continuum of what is being passed on, what's being preserved, what's being understood, and it's a beautiful thing. Aaron Gilbert: Well, I think there's something terrible that happens when you're isolated from generations, both younger than you and older than you. That happens in academia and I don't think that's that healthy. In the arts, the relevance of your work is so connected to a sensitivity and read of the societal moment and by only being around your age, the band of what you're receiving becomes narrowed so much that there's a loss of wisdom. I think that something is sacrificed by that. Ajay Kurian: In thinking about this show, was it in any way different than how you've thought about shows in the past or how you're constructing this story? Because you're thinking about the universe that we live in and that we're just seeing a fraction of the story. Which is almost a way to unpack different stories or narratives that are kind of lying latent. Is that the place in which a show comes from, or is that the place in which the work comes from? Aaron Gilbert: It's kind of hard to decide what came first. When I was making the work, I really wanted it to be this cohesive thing. And I mean, I haven't done a lot of shows, you know, so this was a great opportunity where all of a sudden I had more than a year to work through and develop a full body of work. I didn't know what those images would look like. I knew some things that would be in it. And I knew there was an unknown that I really, really, really wanted to move towards. I had no idea what that was or how I'd get there or what it would look like. But then I would just go into the studio and I would need to make something. So I'd be starting with making a painting or making drawings towards a painting. But I had the benefit of having that time to be able to reject something because it might be a nice path, but I don't think it's the right branch to take. There was definitely a lot of testing different things in that sense. Ajay Kurian: I guess this is the case with every artist, but it's the process of sharpening your deeper intuitions towards a path that consistently feels true and whatever that truth is for you. That’s the basis of so many bodies of work. But seeing this show come together and seeing how both labored and free these paintings feel. They feel extremely precise, but not like there was such a specific plan. Like when I see these kinds of crescent moons up here, there’s a joy there that doesn't feel like it was premeditated. It was just like this image started coming together and then moons were floating and there's nothing left. There's nothing else to explain about that besides the fact that it needs to happen. There's a necessity in the picture. Aaron Gilbert: I think you're hitting the nail on the head. There are a lot of stages that are really developed and worked through. But if something doesn't surprise me by the end of it, then I feel like the painting was kind of dead on arrival. That I must have slept through the making of it and not really been present. Ajay Kurian: How much do you get rid of? Do you destroy work? Aaron Gilbert: I don't usually destroy paintings. There's definitely a lot of unfinished ones. There's a number of ones that probably won't be finished. And I make as many drawings as I can. Ajay Kurian: You have these drawings of SpongeBob in your studio that were so fucking good. Imagine SpongeBob with the weariness of one of Aaron's figures where they're tired, they’re just so tired. Man, I think about it probably once a week. There’s just something that's so accurate about what I feel like everyone is feeling, paired with the manic personality of SpongeBob. That's like what you have to do in the world and sometimes I feel like everybody has to be a laughing idiot just to make it through, and then to come home and the depletion in him in those drawings is, it hit me really hard and I can't stop thinking about it. Aaron Gilbert: One thing I've been thinking about with SpongeBob, like after the fact, is how children are very excited about life and the magic of this world is rejuvenated by the presence of children. They're these messengers from the stars and to them, life should be magical and we should be present and it should be fun. I feel like SpongeBob kind of is all those things. When he arrives at work to flip patties, there's nothing he'd rather be doing, you know? I’m not saying that's how you should feel about your job, but it's just that excitement about being present. I think with the drawings that we're speaking of, it's more like what happens when you’re in your mid forties and that person is in there somewhere, but there's a lot of miles between them. There's kind of a larger project that it’s a part of, and I really can't wait to share with people. Ajay Kurian: The fact that it's part of a larger project now, I'm there. I'll fly wherever it's going. When you're talking about children being messengers of the stars, it made me think of this painting and when I first saw it, put me in the strangest place. I think when I initially saw it, or I initially saw an image, and it was as if the child was like an inflatable or there was something so disembodied about the body. The more time I've spent with it, and I guess it also helps that I've heard you talk about it, but this coming from another place and that there is this alien sense of a messenger from somewhere else. My partner has a son who I've known since he was five, and that was a great time to meet him because there were still these like vapors of other places that you could still kind of be in touch with. And I've heard this from other parents. There's a curator who I was talking to about a show that I'm thinking about, and to the wrong person it would've sounded like a little woo woo. I just didn't know this curator that well yet, so I was just testing it. I was like, this is what it's about, this is what it is, take it or leave it. And she was like, I would've thought that's a little out there, but I have a 3-year-old now and he has had a fully prior life before this, and he’ll tell me about the people he used to meet on his walks home. She was like, I have no explanation, but it is a thorough trip down a series of memories that she can't explain. Aaron Gilbert: That's incredible. Ajay Kurian: She was like, that changed everything. There's these moments where life upends all the rules that you know, and you have to obey the enchantment of that. Aaron Gilbert: That's a wonderful thing though, to have these things that take us from a place that feels tired and constant and predictable into something that reinvents life. Ajay Kurian: It's the funny place that I also see your work sitting in, where there's a lot of really heavy things in this show alone. We can run the gamut and see everything that life has to offer in a sense. I mean, I feel like I don't even need words for this. There's such a weight, and yet I also feel there's still some kind of levity. There's still the fact that this painting is called Hot Moms. It's a good way to orient it. It's a good way to sit with it. There's a slowness to everything about it. There's a slowness in how even time itself is making itself manifest in the painting. But it also gives you permission. The title Hot Moms gives you permission to treat it as both super heavy and super light. And I really like that 'cause I, in a sense I feel like, if you don't know how to be dumb, then I don't know how smart you really can be either. You gotta have both. You gotta be able to just fucking be dumb. And I mean that not in a pejorative sense. Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, I feel you. With this painting, the beginning to me was a small drawing I did of the male figure seated from behind. In my head he was like this older version of myself and I was like, I'll have long, beautiful hair. You know, every morning I'll be looking at myself in the mirror. I'll still have game. I just really want to enjoy this playful and full of vitality vision of a future version of myself. You know, like you have those locks, working on it, and so that was how this started. I just thought it was funny and interesting, but I had no idea what that would lead to. Ajay Kurian: So that's where it started. I mean, it went a lot of places. Where do the floating balaclavas come in? Aaron Gilbert: I thought it was interesting how they kind of look like Pacman heads. They could be containers and I liked that they could double as something else, that could be entered, and I just let it take me there. Then there's parts that to me, were very, very serious. Like the child who's next to the mother. That's a very specific relationship between a child and a mother that's protective and very much, you know, this is my home, this is my world, this is my universe. In my head, it never was settled and I wanted it to stay open. Whether he was seeing himself as a child, if he was looking at a real child, or if he's looking at a child but not seeing the child, and seeing his younger self instead. And I think all those things can be true at the same time. Ajay Kurian: There’s a spectral quality there. I feel like there’s a number of ways in which you use the ghost or the specter of something that either has happened or is yet to happen. There's a haunting that happens and it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. We exist with many kinds of beings and it's fascinating to see how that plays out. Because sometimes it's like an actual figure. There's one painting where there are two circles next to the person's head and it orients you in this way that you lock into that feeling. But it's not explicable as a specific narrative. It's the same way that sometimes color can lock you in. Like seeing that kind of green turquoise of the roller skate wheels, it knocks in a specific feeling, especially since it's one of the coolest tones or it’s so pronounced in a painting of largely warm yellow greens, reds and pinks. You just see those wheels and you're like, those wheels are here to tell me something because of that color orientation. There’s such a fluidity in the way that that happens in a lot of these paintings where it can be the way that something's painted, that it's here and not here. Or it can be the pronunciation of color that just knocks it into place. It's almost like the symbology is medieval. Aaron Gilbert: I think a lot of the painting that I've really been influenced by, in terms of the western cannon, is from Giotto and earlier. So I look at a painter like Giotto, which was this moment of a doorway between two worldviews. One was coming from this world being a place that was still inhabited with magic, where the sacred was still present in living and non-living things. Basically an enchanted world where there is mystery and forces in the presence of the sacred, kind of with this Cartesian philosophy where all matter, all plants, animals, and even humans are raw material meant to be extracted and carved out in service of industry and for profit accumulation. That philosophy was kind of a necessary underpinning if you look at the larger catastrophes of colonialism and a lot of the things that we're looking at now. The oncoming ecological crisis is also a result. It required this very degenerate narrative or story to be sold. And I look at a painter like Giotto as someone who’s, whether he realized it or not, work embodies this doorway between those two moments. Historically, a quote that I talk about a lot is when Mark Fisher was writing on ontology and he states that, when we've hit this terminal point in history where we're no longer able to visualize some positive possible version of a future, we need to look back to these past relics for echoes of other possible futures. So I think there are ways that I'm kind of really looking at and riffing off of moves that were in different traditions of paintings that predate. We've hit this wall, so where are there new doorways to find so we can actually move into something different? Ajay Kurian: In thinking about doorways and symbols, there's ways in which you're using extremely well-known corporate symbols, but I as a viewer believe that there's something more through the painting. And again, just on a personal level, I'm curious if you believe that the corporate symbol, even though it is couched in a capitalist vocabulary in its inception, can transcend that or can become something else? Aaron Gilbert: There's a couple parts to that. Firstly, when I'm using these logos, it's because I think they are something more than what their awareness or intention is. I've been thinking a lot about how commodity fetishism is the metaphysics of our moment now. I'm not more interested in Adidas than any other company, but that logo really hit and struck me. I was walking past the storefront at night, I saw it and I was just really drawn in. It felt so seductive, cold, and it vibrated. It's kind of like a lotus and it's definitely pulling from these conscious and unconscious archetypes deep within our psyche. Secondly, my interest in continuing to play with it is I'm interested in what happens when you read it in the same way you read the religious archetypal image, or religious iconographic symbols. If you look at Catholic paintings, where there's a crucifix or maybe it's 30 other things. When this is placed next to it, I'm interested in what happens. There’s another Mark Fisher quote where he was talking about the National Gallery in London or something like that. If some visiting extraterrestrials were to see all these things laid out, all the different things that humans believe, but we don't believe in any of them. And he was kind of saying that's the power of capitalism as it can consume everything. But it also doesn't believe in it. It kind of kills the belief in that thing. So what happens when you put these logos that are the face of commodity fetish, this is the thing that's supposed to draw us in. Like, if you think about angler fish, where it's got that light. That’s what that logo is, in a way. In my mind, that’s that thing that draws me in to participating in something that's gonna devour you. Devour me and devour everything. But can we take that and then bend it and then what? What does it become? Ajay Kurian: Because I think the bending is really successful. This feels like an aperture to something else. It doesn't feel like an aperture to rapacious capitalism. It feels like it's a window into the conditions of what kind of privation capitalism creates. But it doesn't feel like it lives and dies there, it feels otherworldly too. The fact that you made me believe in the mystical possibility of the Adidas symbol, that's where I was like, well, shit, I guess I like the Adidas symbol. That's not the takeaway though. But this is the angler fish. I'm thinking about the Adidas symbol in a different realm and it adjusted what plane I'm thinking about it on. That's the success for me. Ajay Kurian: I feel like now might be a good time to open this up to some questions. Audience Member: You already talked about this a little bit, but leaning a little bit more into how these spirits or emissaries function. These ghost-like figures appear in so many of your paintings and I'm so drawn to them. Do they function as that terror in the fabric of normal reality that's inviting you to see the world differently and mystical? Do you see them as entities that are coexisting with us? I’d just love to hear how these beings function in your universe. Aaron Gilbert: I think at the heart of it, there's ways that we're all bridges between what we're aware of, what we know and then things that are a mystery to us. I don't know if it's an either or, in terms of a figure being solid or not. Maybe there's a slipperiness between when the same figure is fully in the room and then also being an opening to something that’s outside. Audience Member: The way I see your art pieces, especially the one that you created at the beginning which are so beautiful, are on so many stories all together that to me kind of looks like a cabbage. But if we’re talking about your new upcoming project, is that gonna be a bigger universe with the same intense intimacy, or are you gonna keep the bad that you’re leading towards too at the moment? How is that gonna be in the picture? Aaron Gilbert: I don't know totally yet. I hope there's something in it. I have to grow into making, and I hope that process isn't too painful. But I really believe in the creative act and I think it's something that requires you to let go of what you know to some degree and let go of what you brought into the room to some degree, when you engage with it. The work and the process should guide you into expanding what you’re considering with that piece. I love the cabbage metaphor. It's the first time I've heard that. Audience Member: I really appreciate the way you've spoken about this vigilance you have or heroic posture when it comes to history painting and the things you inherit through painting that you like don't fuck with. My question is about what kind of formal or internal questions you bring to your work. Especially in this body of work, where you’ve scaled up and there's a lot of bigger swings that come closer to the ambition, scale and heroism of some of the pain we were talking about before. I'm wondering how you negotiated that. Is it a matter of keeping room for improvisation while not planning too much? When it comes to making sure you keep your paintings from falling into this heroic posture that you don't want? Aaron Gilbert: What do you mean by heroic posture? Audience Member: I sort of arrived at that language through the way you're talking about murals and how you want it to be a blank or a bad WPA mural, and what you said about keeping close to your life and the domestic sphere helps you stay away from this archetype painting. Aaron Gilbert: I mean, I don't know the context of this piece well enough to speak about it directly, but I feel archetypes lack something. When it comes to the very particular thing that I'm trying to accomplish with the work, and what I'm really concerned with, is this question as a human — how can I actually participate in this world right now in a way that's substantial and meaningful and potent and has a positive impact? I'm really concerned about what is this world that's being passed on to the next generation and what's my role to play in that? So just like tactically speaking, it's important to have the flaws and compromised realities of the characters be foregrounded. Not just flaws, but also the really complex range of who we all are. We aren't these one dimensional like executions of an idea, you know? We have all these different layers to us. So I'm always trying to think of how to develop each character within the image so that, as a viewer, you might walk into it first seeing that figure one way but then also see these other nuances that actually kind of change something about that figure and or change your read of it. So to get back to the first thing about having the presence of imperfections, it's because I think we can't be so fragile that if our own imperfections become visible, we shatter and no longer are capable of realizing our full potential. Just this kind of insistence that whatever is absurd about me when I look in the mirror in the morning, and just being able to see that. To look myself in the face and be like, yes, I see that there's all these things that if I could, I would wish differently, but that doesn't have the final say. And I have this potential to do something that is profound and that's going to be what defines me, whatever my divine cosmic destiny is. Nothing anyone says has a power over that. And I can activate that and articulate that in the world. When I think of the standard social realist artwork, it feels like it's a template that doesn't have the capacity to do that unless these other things are introduced. And so my question is, what are those other things that need to be introduced? Ajay Kurian: It felt like this has come up before where you were talking about George Tooker’s, and the institution overwhelming the individual. I think we've all seen in Aaron's paintings that there’s a real struggle there that is not completely subsumed. There's still something alive in the individual or in that kind of human intimacy. Aaron Gilbert: Tooker is a painter who I'm really indebted to. When I started to build what my work could look like, that was like a major influence. Tooker also has this breadth of energy in one painting to the next. But I think overall, the architecture is showing this crushing societal force in the beautiful artworks. I'm always interested in when I find someone who's influencing my work, how do I define how I'm indebted to them? And then how do I define the ways that I'm the antithesis of what they're doing? Audience Member: Could you talk a little bit about the use of color and your color influence? Aaron Gilbert: I think about having the light be chromatic, like having there be a color made of the light and atmosphere and a temperature that's palpable or a heat or coolness. I want the light and the atmosphere to actually be like a major character. I want there to be like a frequency that you feel, you know, 'cause I'm not making future JPEGs. I'm making objects and I'm really interested in this idea of a painting as an object that is singular in the world. It's like this instrument or this bell that rings out and when you're in front of it, it alters the frequency of the room. Color is this place beyond language, and that just seems to be everything that a painting is or can be about. With some of the paintings I made this past year and a half, I didn't know how to make a painting without having that presence of some of the pain that I was experiencing by witnessing the changes that are happening. Color was a way to try to do that. That's not the only thing, but there's a couple paintings where I point to where it's trying to reduce this palette into something that felt almost like the world had been scraped away from the inside. When I talk about the worst WPA painting, it's like this thing that had been eviscerated and there was a shell that was left. Ajay Kurian: That's a nice place to end. We're back to where we started with the eviscerated WPA paintings. I want to end on this just 'cause it felt potent. I know that you've read Carlo Ravelli and have been thinking about time and quantum physics in that regard. I just wanted to know if you had read about this theory on white holes as opposed to black holes. If there's any physicists out here, please don't quote me on any of this. It's been thought that when things go into a black hole, they are crushed into a singularity and it's gone. Their theory suggests that actually it's more of a bounce that happens and that what gets pulled into the black hole emerges from the white hole in a completely different time. So the white hole is essentially the opposite. Nothing can enter the white hole, only things can exit it. Hmm. And it kind of felt like an interesting conduit to think about how the paintings are sort of pushing out these different tears or like making apparent different tears. Aaron Gilbert: That's so poetic. Which book was that? Ajay Kurian: I think it's called White Holes, it’s a relatively new book by Carlo Ravelli. Aaron Gilbert: What Ajay is referring to also is that when he visited my studio, I talked about this book called The Order of Time by Carlo Ravelli. That is really about the way we commonly think of time breaks when you get at the quantum level and that we're left with something much stranger, and how it quickly enters this conversation of the mystery about human consciousness. So I would love to read that. Ajay Kurian: You have five more days to see the mysteries of human consciousness in Aaron's work. So I really suggest you go see these objects, these paintings, these real things in person. And I just wanna thank Aaron again tonight. A round of applause for Aaron. — Subscribe to our channel for more artist talks, critiques, and conversations that push the boundaries of what art can be. 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Ajay Kurian: I've been trying to think of a way to aptly describe what it is that Salome Asega does because the way she's thinking about a practice, artistic and otherwise is something that is hard to recognize if we maintain the terms of our discernment into what an art practice is meant to look like. But once you see what she's up to, you can't unsee it and you start to see how this paradigm is one we need to cultivate. With that in mind. The phrase I've come to is that Salome is a culture gardener. She knows which introductions to make, which bee needs what flower, and she gets that the ecosystems are stronger than individuals, more nimble, less brittle. She also understands that in her words, inclusion ain't shit. What she's after is equity, and that means understanding that specific and specialized needs are met. Like which plants need more shade and which ones need more light? What does it take to create the conditions for genuine growth? And how do we grow together? The growth we're accustomed to is the growth of capital, and that's the world we usually live in. To quote her again, right now, there's a group of cis hat white men in Silicon Valley that are actively working to build a future for us. Without our consent, we are living in their imagination, and I'm very interested in leveraging the power of collective imagination to present counter futures. She's done this in projects ranging from Powrplnt to the Iyapo Repository under appointment as an art and tech fellow at the Ford Foundation. Currently, she's the director of New Inc. The New Museum's Own and First Museum led cultural incubator. And with it, she's planting her largest garden yet. Please give it up for Salome Asega. Salome Asega: That was really nice – thank you. I think you did the artist talk for me. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, we can just drink now. No, it came to me today when you sent me the radio show. But I think, maybe my first question is how does that term feel to you? How does it feel to try that on? Salome Asega: I don't know if I've ever asked you this question, but at New Inc I like to ask people if they're an architect or a gardener. Ajay Kurian: No shit. Salome Asega: Have I asked you this question? Oh my God. Maybe it's a thing we started after you, but are you an architect or a gardener? Ajay Kurian: I'm definitely a gardener. Salome Asega: Why? What's the difference for you? Ajay Kurian: Okay. Actually, I said that impulsively. The reason I said it impulsively is that the very first show that I ever did in New York, was making a kind of garden as the exhibition. The thrust of the show was to almost think ontologically that everything has a dual status as both garden and gardener, so we have the ability to tend to other things, but we also are a thing that can be tended too. That's been foundational in how I think about a lot of things that I do and also how I see the world moving. It's not as totalizing. I think back then, I was a young artist trying to look for the answer. But I'm really curious, now you have me thinking, what is that difference and what does that mean to you? Salome Asega: I always answered that I thought I was an architect because I was more interested in creating the infrastructure for things to exist. But then people would read me as a gardener. They said, for the same reason that you just gave, that I was in a habit and practice of tending to and caring for, right? Letting people grow in the ways that felt natural to them. Ajay Kurian: I think a lot of people have this idea of what architect means, which is this singular genius that feels very male. It feels like it has all this baggage with it. Whereas, considering how you grew up and with all the computer engineers in your background, did it give you a different sense of what architect meant? Salome Asega: For sure. One of our family activities was taking a computer apart and putting it back together again. Engineering, architecture, all these hard skills were never done singularly, they were always done as a group. You'd want to share this with someone you love, right? So I think that's always been part of my practice. I did my MFA in design and technology at Parsons and I learned all these things around physical computing. Then I would take out all these microprocessors and server motors through the back door, and run the workshops that ended up becoming part of Powrplnt, the Iyapo Repository and a lot of the projects I worked on. But it was never about becoming like a singular genius, coder, programmer on my own. Ajay Kurian: What was your first relationship to art? Salome Asega: That's hard to answer because I grew up in a city that didn't have cultural institutions in the way that we have in New York. And so I would count some of my first experiences with art as like my uncles coming over to family gatherings and playing music. And art is just woven through our culture. I also have another uncle who painted a mural for a local Ethiopian restaurant in Vegas. Having to sit there and do my homework while he's painting – these are some of my early experiences with art. But then in terms of capital A art, I remember in high school learning that there was a James Turrell Installation in the Prada store in the Caesars Palace Casino. Ajay Kurian: Amazing. Salome Asega: The performance of going to the strip parking lot, my Toyota Corolla at 16, going through the casino, having the confidence to walk into the Prada store knowing I don't have any money, going to the back and just like sitting there to experience that James Turrell exhibit. And then walking back out through the casino, and being like “I saw art today”. Ajay Kurian: James Turrell was in your orbit at 16? James Turrell was not in my orbit at 16. How did that happen? Salome Asega: I had really good teachers in high school, one of which was Mr. Brewster, who ran the AV club. I don't know if you knew this about me, but I used to write and produce a daily 10 minute show for my high school. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, that adds up. Salome Asega: So I had many late nights where I'd be editing the show with friends and Mr. Brewster would put us onto music. I remember the first album he gave me was a MIA mixtape and he would just feed us art books, so that's how I learned about James Turrell. He also put me onto Marilyn Minter when she did her Las Vegas Billboard project. That’s another experience of getting in the Toyota Carillo and driving down the strip and being like that’s a Marilyn Minter billboard. Ajay Kurian: Did that feel like it had a different kind of cultural capital to you than what you were familiar with before? Salome Asega: It read as New York. If I was to go back to my teenage mind, this felt like validated art because it came from a big city. Ajay Kurian: And you didn't think of Las Vegas as a big city? Salome Asega: No. No. I was alive for our centennial celebration. I was living there at a time where the city was expanding so quickly around me. We lived on what was considered the edge of town, and now if you look at a map, we're like squarely at the center. We'd have scorpions in our backyard. We no longer have that. Ajay Kurian: The only thing I'm genuinely intensely afraid of is scorpions. Salome Asega: They’re so cute. Ajay Kurian: Yeah, we're gonna skip it. Salome Asega: Okay. Okay. Ajay Kurian: The other thing that comes to mind, I remember going to Vegas when I was really young, probably actually around 15 or 16, and I don’t remember why exactly. But I went to a very fancy private school, and to get shit on in so many different ways for so many different reasons and also being brown in a school that was largely white; there was something that I couldn't fully articulate yet, but I felt small in a lot of different ways. And clothing was one of the ways where it was like, even if I can't buy these clothes, I want to be able to walk into these stores and take up space. So I remember Vegas being the first time where I got to see if I could flex that. And my family's just like - what is wrong with you? Why does this even matter to you, you're not buying anything? I haven't thought about this in a very long time. I completely forgot that Vegas was the first time that happened. But you see all those stores, all these spaces, and all these things that don't feel like they're for you, but in Vegas it does. Because it's so glitzy. I'm wondering like. Was that also a place where you were like, okay, I just want permission for all of these spaces? Salome Asega: Yeah, Vegas very much is a playground. I think for that reason it’s a place that is studied by designers and architects, because the city's design allows for this kind of performance and fantasy. You can be whoever you want there and the architecture encourages that actually. So I think combining that strip design with the kind of fantasy of the desert itself, the spiritual aspect of the desert, which is also a place where you can metamorphosize. You can be whoever you wanna be. I think I was encouraged by design to experiment and play, based on where I grew up. Ajay Kurian: That, in a sense, makes it feel like it's possible to integrate the spiritual and the material. Salome Asega: I feel like I know what you're gonna pull up. Ajay Kurian: This project came to mind. One, because it's treating technology in such a different way, which feels foundational to the way that I see you treating technology routinely. Disembodiment towards embodiment, it's always to take you back to your body in a different way. It's always to extend yourself, but it's in a way that feels generative that I don't know if people always think about it that way. Could you talk about how this project started to come about and where this came from? Salome Asega: I think I started these VR sketches called possession when I was in grad school and I was given one of the first Oculus headsets, like it was a dev kit and it didn't even have a fancy name yet. It wasn't on the market, it was meant for artists to just play and experiment with. Ajay Kurian: How did that happen? Salome Asega: I got it through Parsons because I was a student there and taught there, so I would just play with it. Ajay Kurian: That's amazing. Salome Asega: No one was using it, so I was like, let's see what this does. Then I started developing these underwater scenes that were thinking about what Mami Wata’s home would look like. Mami Wata is an Orisha that shows up in Caribbean and West African spiritual traditions like Santeria and Yoruba. And when I was looking at possession sculptures around Mami Wata, there were all these figures that had this kind of blobby Orisha, like over a figurative human head. It was as if the orisha was mounting the person like the same way that you would put on a VR headset. So that's why I started working on these sketches that were thinking about the headset as an Orisha that you put on and then it takes you to whatever realm of the spirit. This ended up being part of a show that the curator Ali Rosa-Salas, who runs Abrons Art Center now organized at Knockdown Center, but it's since grown. So these images are just sketches, but there's a full VR film where I interviewed spiritual practitioners who've had experiences of being possessed by Mami Wata herself. In the film they recount their experience, what it felt like and where they were. Many of them were near bodies of water, and that's where they felt her spirit and felt called to the water. Two of the practitioners in particular said that they felt lured underwater to her palace and were promised attractiveness and great wealth. So yeah, it goes through that narrative with them. Ajay Kurian: Wow. That feels like Vegas too. Salome Asega: Yeah, that's true, very slot machine. Ajay Kurian: That there's a pull and it takes you somewhere that feels like it will make you more. Salome Asega: Then I worked with a musician, Dani Des, to score the film. You hear one of their beats and it's very undulating and wavelike, and then feels like it's pulling you under the water. Ajay Kurian: So this takes shape when you're at Parsons. Salome Asega: Yeah, when I was an instructor. Especially in the early years, I was just like, what can I get out of this program? I think that's why many artists who work with technologies continue to teach, because that's where you get access to all the emerging tools. So I stuck around for five, six years. Ajay Kurian: It's interesting that you went through an MFA program. That's unexpected for me in understanding how your practice has developed since then, and how distributed it is. Because the MFA is something that normally consolidates an artist's output. Yeah. And turns it into a kind of product sometimes, for better or for worse. But you've avoided that and it doesn't even seem like it crossed your mind that's what you needed to do. Salome Asega: No, but I did a very untraditional MFA program. I did design and technology at Parsons. Ajay Kurian: So you weren't in the art program? Salome Asega: No, but there was a crossover and some instructors who taught between two programs. That was pretty common at Parsons for there to be some overlap between all the programs within the school. Ajay Kurian: When you were making this, did you make a distinction between Art with a capital A or cultural production? Salome Asega: No, I was thinking about audience, but I wasn't thinking about how this will be a job, if that makes sense. I was just having fun following my nose, driven by total curiosity and was like thinking – how can I ask stronger questions? I'm looking at American Artist because we both taught in that program for a while too. It's unusual for that program because most people go in there with commercial endeavors. Like they want to work for the big studios. But there’s like a handful of us that are like, we are freaky and we wanna do artsy things. Ajay Kurian: Yeah. I felt The New School, that was where I met more of the misfits. And the history of that school is unbelievably polluted at this point. But it starts with people that are fleeing and they're the intellectuals of Europe that are making The New School for social research. That felt vital. Was that the community or was it really just the design nerds and the people that were like, okay, we wanna do something different. Salome Asega: Yeah, I think it was more design nerds and then again, a small handful of us. But some incredible artists have come out of that program. That's how I met Elise Smith. She was a year ahead of me in that program. And we were both like, what are we doing here and let's talk about our work and create a smaller community within this program. Ajay Kurian: Okay, so you're not thinking about jobs. But when you graduate, what's your first job? Salome Asega: I'm still not thinking about jobs. What did I do to make money? I hustled. Because I had all these coding skills, I started working with different music venues to design stages and wearables for musicians. Weird, weird stuff. If you go deep on a YouTube search, you can find these propeller hats I made for a band. Do you know L’Rain? Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Salome Asega: So before Taja Cheek started L’Rain, she was in a band called Throw Vision. I would do set visuals for her and make wearables, and I would create interactive apps for attendees and party goers to control the stage lighting and the visuals behind them. I would spend so much time doing this and barely was able to pay rent, but I was like, I'm hustling. It's the New York thing. I was also part of the team that put together that lighting grid in the back of Baby’s Alright. That was all made on processing, like open source free software. I'm sure it's crazy advanced now, but in 2014, if you peeked behind, you'd be like, this is not safe. Ajay Kurian: So you really do follow your nose. It really is a generative place where this leads to this and this is exciting. So what's the next thing? How does that start to translate into the next project for you? Salome Asega: At that point, I was working on a few small projects and then I started collaborating with an artist named Ayodamola Okunseinde. He also came out of Parsons and we spent a summer doing research, throwing ideas back and forth, came up with Iyapo Repository, applied to a residency program with Eyebeam and did that for a year. That residency came with significant support, and from that I was able to hop around fellowships and residencies with this project. Ajay Kurian: This is a project that particularly grabbed my attention, specifically this artifact. So if you can just give some background of what the Iyapo Repository is and then we can get into this particular project. Salome Asega: Totally. So Iyapo Repository is a resource library that exists in a non-descript future. It houses a collection of art and artifacts made by and for people of African descent and how we design and develop those artifacts. It happens through a part series of participatory workshops where we invite people to think about the future in different domains. So we developed this card game, with PJ who works at New Inc now. He ran a wonderful print studio called Endless Editions, which still exists, and you should print things there. But we developed this game where we would give people these cards and then they'd have to determine artifacts. If you were given this set of cards, you'd have to come up with a revolutionary tool, an educational tool that somehow incorporates a motor. So you have a design direction, right? A domain you're designing for, and then some physical quality the object must have. It was always so fun doing this with kids because they'd be like “I don't know”. And then they'd come up with the wildest ideas. So you sketch your artifact design on this manuscript sheet, you describe it, you sign it, and then we collected all these papers and archive them in what we call the manuscript division. There are over 600 of them at this point. We've traveled all over the country and some international places doing this . This in itself was such an exciting part of the project for me. The ones that we can materially realize, we work with people to build out. Like that suit you saw sketched out, someone was thinking about their personal and historical relationship to water. She wanted to build a sensory suit that gives you the calming sensation of being underwater. She's thinking about the transatlantic slave trade experience. She's thinking about a lot of things. So then we built the suit to her standards. It’s fully functioning, there's motors at each one of these cuffs that are tied to tidal patterns of the Atlantic Ocean. So you get this nice undulating vibration on your body. There are these pipes that are whirled around your limbs and you can actually hear the water whirring. Then we make films with all of the artifacts because when you see them in exhibition context, they just sit still. Ajay Kurian: I watched that film and on the one hand it was magnificent to see that drawing come to life. The other thing that felt interesting and perplexing was to think about the transatlantic slave trade and then to have a design suit that also feels like shackles. It felt like a really charged, complicated work where the thing that's giving you life and giving you peace, also has this shadow of something that's much darker. Salome Asega: Totally. These are all things that come up in our workshop conversations. Once we draw these artifacts, we talk about them. And for her, she didn't see them as shackles. She saw them as almost like seaweed, like getting trapped in like coral and seaweed. But I hear you, there's so many ways to read this image. Ajay Kurian: There’s a complexity to it. It doesn't fulfill what we think about design objects or like design artifacts, which is it has a purpose, and it serves it. This is loaded and layered and maybe contradictory. Maybe it does have the sense of something wrapping around you and envelops you, but also what else can that mean and what are the histories that are applied here. What part was more interesting to you? The conversations or the object coming to life? Salome Asega: The conversations by far. These objects are a nice output of what transpired over the course of weeks and sometimes months with a group of people. But this is a conversation starter for me. You see this, and then I'm like, let's do the workshop together. Let's play the game and see what you come up with. I was never really interested in just touring the objects. They needed all the context. And actually oftentimes when these were in exhibitions, there was always a table for people to continue to contribute to the manuscripts. Ajay Kurian: Oh, wow. The card game itself is a very specific thing. To understand how to create openness and create parameters that allow for that openness to be generative. A lot of times, especially in interview context, people ask things of artists and they're like, what do you think about AI? Like where do we start? It stops the conversation. It ends openness because it's just too vast. But giving parameters and giving a sense like of where you really want to go and what that can spark, that's a really specific skillset. Salome Asega: There's a term in design for this, it's called scaffolding. You can't just throw people into the deep end, but you really need to create some kind of structure that guides people to a place where they feel safe enough to then be explorative. Ajay Kurian: That makes a lot of sense. I'm glad I now know that word. So does Powrplnt grow out of these kinds of projects? Salome Asega: Yeah, absolutely. The first year I did this, I gave a talk at New Inc before it was officially New Inc. And that's where I met Angelina Dreem and Anibal Luque. They were in early conversations about starting Powrplnt, which is a community computer lab. At some point we were calling it a digital art collaboratory. Do you remember when collaboratory was like “the” word? Ajay Kurian: I don't remember that ever being the word. I'll take your word for it. Salome Asega: There are these words that start to trend in education and then it's the year for collaboratory. You're like fully in this space now so you'll start to hear it. You're gonna start catching the trends, the words that trend in arts education. Ajay Kurian: All I can think of now is phonics. Salome Asega: Inquiry-based learning is another one. Ajay Kurian: I probably heard that before. I should probably know more of these. Salome Asega: So the thesis with Powrplnt was how can we hire our friends, or mid-career, or established digital artists to teach the next generation of artists who were coming up in New York so that they didn't have to make the same kinds of mistakes we were making. We were starting to document how an artist sustains their career. We ran workshops that were everything from professional development, legal basics for young artists to deliverable based technology workshops. A really popular one we did was how to make a logo and it was a way to trick young people into learning Illustrator. Ajay Kurian: Oh wow. Salome Asega: It was sick because all these people would come out with logos and some of which turned into short-lived brands. So I'd be wearing this shirt or hat that says like hottie. We also ran a really popular music series called Ableton Live, where we would partner with local DJs and musicians to teach the Ableton interface to young people. As part of that, we would sync a bunch of computers and we'd route them through the same mixer. It became an electronic drum circle, all building collectively on one beat. Then we'd strategically place different producers into the circle so they'd hop around and build this beat together with you. Ajay Kurian: I can't tell if it's because you're in the mix or do you attract that energy? Salome Asega: What energy? Ajay Kurian: The energy of doing things together and no one's left out. That there's a way to do this that's fun and exciting, where everyone's included. That's an ethic that even if you're starting a project, even if you're starting an organization and say that's the ethos of what they do. It doesn't always come through, but I feel like every project with you, it always comes through that. Salome Asega: That's nice to hear. Ajay Kurian: I mean, it goes with that saying I think anybody in this audience would be like, duh. But I guess the pointed question would be, were you the one saying we should do this, or do these things just bubble up because that's the energy? Salome Asega: I think it goes both ways. I think as a team at Powrplnt specifically, we were really good about hearing from our neighbors through constant serving and polling, talking with friends, serving them, and creating a program that was responsive to what we were hearing. But also, I think I also have a “let's just try this” energy. Let's just go and throw spaghetti at the wall. It doesn't hurt to try things. And I don't like to do things alone. It's just more fun to test things with friends or co-conspirators. Ajay Kurian: I was talking to a friend of mine, and she'll be doing a talk with us at some point, Tamika Wood. She considers herself a cultural anthropologist of sorts. Something that she’s had a hard time with is when spaces are too collaborative and there's no leadership at all. We're all just contributing, but we're not, so what are we contributing to and where's the vision? That's another thing that I think you handle really deftly. There's a vision of what is meant to happen. But when to take a backseat or when to guide. How do you figure out the balance of how to step in and when to step in? Salome Asega: Yeah, I have a personal anxiety around wasting people's time. I'm just like, it's the New York Minute, everyone's hustling, they're grinding. Ajay Kurian: I love this small town fantasy of what New Yorkers are doing. Can't waste their time. Salome Asega: Oh my God, I've been here for 18 years and I still feel that. Or maybe it's 'cause I'm precious about my time. I know how much time I have to do things, right? I think for that reason, I come to potential collaborations with some scaffolding. An idea, some goals, some potential other collaborators. And this can all be edited, but I just wanted to get us started. I think that's important to building cooperative structures. Having some clear goals and targets in mind ahead of just getting people in a room. And then knowing that all of those things can be reworked as people develop trust and get to know each other and the world changes. There are all these external factors that can continue to shape a project, but you need to come in with some sense of why we're gathering. Ajay Kurian: In that sense, do you feel like you have a relationship with music producers? Like when I hear Rick Rubin talk about the way that he thinks about production, he's a specialist in nothing, and you've talked about being a generalist. What he sees is the essence of a project and then how to shepherd that towards the end goal. I always wonder, why aren't there more? Why isn't there more of that vibe in the art world? I've seen plenty of bloated shows where I'm like if only there was just a place to workshop that show before it comes out. And in the projects that you do, that's the role that you seem to have. Salome Asega: There's so many things I wanna respond to in what you just said. Do I have a relationship to music producers? I wish I had more. I feel like they're all in their studios, they're working, it's hard and it's a very solitary practice. But I do think that there is something about the way musicians collaborate generally. I'm thinking about the kind of orchestral experience where you need everyone to make the song. There's a term in jazz called comping that has actually stayed with me since I was just a student at Parsons. Comping is this tradition in jazz where when you start to feel one person in the band slow down or they're slacking, the other musicians will fall back. They'll do that to give that person more space to get their groove going again. And so they'll give them the solo. I think that's how I'm interested in working. I don't need to be the solo all the time. I'm okay with falling back to make sure that the whole band sounds good. Ajay Kurian: That's amazing. I love all the new terms I'm learning tonight. Salome Asega: Let’s make a little dictionary, Ajay Kurian: Takeaways from Salome’s talk. Normally we are in positions where people are pressuring us to speed up, and that in a condition where someone is slowing down, they're either cut or pushed. To give someone space is such an act of love and it allows for such a different kind of creativity to happen. I can't imagine a better way to describe how you create this process. That's really beautiful. Salome Asega: Thank you. But now you'll notice this. When you go to a jazz show, you'll see they don't even have to say anything to each other. They don't even have to look at each other. The musicians will just slow down. They'll get quiet to allow for someone else to get loud. It's an encouragement. It's your turn. Ajay Kurian: I really do love that in jazz where the sense between collective and individual is not a contradiction. It's one that's always in motion. So you give that person their solo and then they move back into the collective. And then somebody else has a solo and they move back into the collective. It's a way of thinking, like how is it wrong to shine? There's a way that it can happen where it's still collective energy. So you're building these things with Powrplnt, it seems like you're still not making distinctions. There's musicians coming in, but also visual artists, and there are people that are thinking about graphic design. That's the space that you're beginning to foster. But then you're also thinking about professional development, which feels like it's more for what we would understand as a professional development for all kinds of artists. Salome Asega: For anyone. I think when we were all younger, we'd probably tell people, “when I grow up” or “I wanna be”. The beautiful thing about Powrplnt was that a young person would come in and wouldn't say, I aspire to be X, Y, Z. They would very firmly declare “I am a fashion designer, I am here to build my brand – Can you help me take some photos?” I'd be like, yes, here's the camera. For that reason, I think it was easy to support young people 'cause they were so clear about what they wanted to do. It encouraged us to think with latitude about how to make sure that they were gonna make this sustainable. Even if they didn't wanna go to college or pursue some kind of professional program on their own. Because they were so clear that there were ways for them to easily access the education they needed to make this thing a viable business for real. If that's like getting in touch with an IP expert, a lawyer, we got you. If it's about setting up an LLC, we got you. We can teach you how to do all these things. You don't need to go into debt or go into school if you don't need to. This can be the alternative. Ajay Kurian: And this is still functioning without you, it’s completely independent? Salome Asega: Totally. I've been away for probably six years at this point and there's a whole new group of young people who run it and do all the programming. Ajay Kurian: I want to get to NEW INC, but I feel like the Ford Foundation also plays a role in terms of how you developed, how you understood how art and technology can cohabitate and the space that you can build and foster for people that are thinking in that space. Salome Asega: Working at Ford was a wild experience. Did I ever tell you about how I got tapped to work there? Ajay Kurian: I think you were working on a project or was it a consulting thing? Salome Asega: It was a consulting thing. So I had just given a talk about Iyapo Repository at the Walker. And this person came up to me after my talk named Jenny Toomey, who I know is a really awesome punk musician and was fully in the Riot girl scene. So I'm like, oh my God, it's Jenny Toomey. And she was like, hi, I work at Ford Foundation, I'm a funder, I work on tech and society. And I'm like, what? Okay, maybe it's not who I thought it was. But we connect and we do the email exchange. Then I learned later that it was that Jenny Toomey. There's actually a really strong history of nineties punk musicians working and transitioning into tech policy work, because punk subculture was always invested in decentralized systems. And of course, tech policy is also invested in decentralization. Ajay Kurian: This is such a touched story. You happened to meet the people that really just sprinkle this perfect magic dust for the next thing. It's so nice, like energy meets energy. But what are the fucking odds? Salome Asega: I know, I was fangirling the whole time and I was like, what does the Ford Foundation really do? So she wanted me to do a very small consulting project with them. Like I want you to write a two page report on the landscape of art and technology, because we're thinking about how the arts and culture work can start to support artists working in these ways. I overdeliver and write almost a six, eight page memo. She like, it's great, but it was two pages for a reason because people would not read anything longer than that. So I'm like, okay got it. Ajay Kurian: This is before the New York minute understanding. Salome Asega: Exactly. So I sent it back and she's like great, now I want you to present it to the director of the Arts and Culture Department. Who at that time was Elizabeth Alexander, another one of my heroes – an incredible poet. I presented and they're like, this is fascinating, we didn't know people were working in these ways, we should be more invested. Then they reach out a couple weeks later and if I want to work there full time as a fellow? And I was like, let me think about it 'cause I was really worried about leaving a studio practice and becoming a funder. I didn't know what that would mean for me and how people would read me in that work. Ajay Kurian: But what was your studio practice at that point? What did it mean to have a studio practice then? Salome Asega: At that point I was bouncing around residences, I was giving talks, I was teaching, and I had cobbled together this life that felt to me creative and it was on my terms. As opposed to commuting to Midtown every day. So I fully blew off the deadline to apply and then Jenny is back in my phone and talked through it a bit more and she was like, I'm an artist and Elizabeth's an artist. Of course you can do this work. So I took the role and it was an incredible four years where I was able to do research with other foundations, the NEA, and help build a landscape study around how artists are making with emerging media. We launched all these incredible grant programs for, for artists directly, but also for arts organizations run by people of color who are experimenting with technology. Ajay Kurian: Wow, I feel like that's probably when we met, like right around then? It was this round table on cultural appropriation that we were on together. It was you, me, Homi Bhabha, Jacolby Satterwhite, Michelle Kuo, Gregg Bordowitz, and Joan Kee. It was quite the lineup. Salome Asega: It was a good group of people. Ajay Kurian: I was reading through it a little bit and it's a fascinating conversation. It's interesting to hear people's perspectives. Salome Asega: You read it recently? Ajay Kurian: Today. Salome Asega: Does it hold up? Ajay Kurian: There's some interesting problematics that are introduced. I don't even think this made it into the round table, but Greg said something that I still say to this day. He's been an educator for so long and he said that artists come in with their habits and then we turn those habits into a practice. It's just such a beautifully succinct way to talk about how you can really listen to someone and how you can really see what they're up to. So I remember that staying with me. But anyways, that's when we met. I'm thinking about POWRPLNT to Ford to NEW INC. It feels like almost everything has prepared you to take on a role like this and to really start being the architect. The thing that I'm really interested in here and something that I don't think it's addressed enough is that we are training artists to be stars and not architects. And the star kind of can be manipulated by the architecture. But if we have architects, we can actually build something to develop a whole new idea of what stars look like and what the solo looks like for the collective. I feel like that's what you're interested in and I don't meet that many people that really are interested in that. For instance, like when I started NewCrits, I was talking to EJ Hill a lot. He was the first person that I was talking to a lot and he loved where it was going. He was totally in and totally on board. I said we can do this together but he said he couldn’t do that. He didn't want to be a part of that structure because he didn't have the bandwidth and that's fine, I'm not putting anything on him. But it became more and more apparent that most artists don't have the bandwidth or that's not the energy that they're looking for. So I'm curious how you've continued to surround yourself with people that are looking for this energy, that want to create these futures differently? Salome Asega: I don't know. I feel like I've been to these sites where people who are interested in this mode of thinking already gravitate toward. Being a faculty member at Parsons, the students are there to think about new ways of making, doing, and existing. Then at POWRPLNT, young people bring such optimism and ambition to an idea that it gives me a new perspective. It gives me fuel and fire to think about the world in a new way. And then at New Inc, people are there because they are doing the most courageous thing, which is saying “the thing I care about, the thing I'm passionate about, I want to be my life's work”. I get so emotional at work. My team would tell you, I get weepy all the time 'cause it’s so cool that this person is digging their heels into this project or initiative or business. They're doing it for real and they believe that it should exist. It needs to be birthed into the world and we're here to support them. I'm a little spoiled because I have found the pockets where people are already gravitating towards that. Ajay Kurian: We were talking about the Laundromat Project [https://laundromatproject.org/]. For people who don't know, the Laundromat Project is an incredible organization. One of the people of the organization was telling me that they do bridge loans for artists now, which is unbelievable. The way he was talking about it brought tears to my eyes just because there's so many artists that have money coming; $3,000 is coming at the end of the month, but for that month there's no fucking money at all. So what do you do? How do you make this work? And so they give a bridge loan. They just give you the $3000, no interest. Once you get the money, you pay it back and they have a zero default rate. It's like those structures where it actually changes the game completely. Like all of these hugely precarious projects can happen. People are thinking, okay, if the system doesn't do this for us, can we just make it? That's the people that I wanna be around. I want to be in rooms with those people. I want to talk to those people. I wanna learn from those people. Salome Asega: Yeah, it's happening. I feel like that community of people is growing and it's growing very quickly. I think there are a lot of people who are doing work to make sure that artists are involved in larger movement organizing around labor and the economy. I think we're all feeling the pressure and we're all finding each other slowly, but that Laundromat Project example is so good. Those are the kinds of risks and experiments we need Arts organizations to take right now. Ajay Kurian: Once, they went to a financial institution and they were like, none of this is viable. But they were like, it's our money, so we're just gonna do it. Taking that leap of faith and then realizing, if we love on our artists, the artists will love on us, and we don't have to worry about this. And that feels like a new system. Salome Asega: Are there other things you're seeing that you're like, this is exciting, like other structures for support? Ajay Kurian: This is, in a way, a plug, but the Ruth Arts Foundation [https://www.rutharts.org/]. I think they’re setting a bar for what foundations can do and how they do it. The level of hospitality and understanding it's not just about throwing a lot of money at somebody and being like, we've supported them and like we can put them on our roster. Now it's beginning to end. You are a part of a community now. It's the only time where, if I'm ever asked to do something – One, I'm super excited to go 'cause I know I'm gonna be so happy to meet everybody and there's not gonna be one shitty person there. Which is like impossible most of the time. And the other part of it is that they always pay. There's never a time where you're not compensated for the intellectual labor that you're putting into it. There's just such a grace to it. They'll pay for your travel, they'll pay for your hotel, and then there's a stipend. Everything is considered. There's transport – how you get from A to B, how you get from B to C, how you understand the day, who's there to lead you through, what is the onboarding? All of those things matter. And it's not just perfunctory, I think it's aesthetic too. It's a practice in itself. That's part of why I was so excited to talk to you is that you exemplify all these things. Like this is your practice and I think people have a hard time understanding what box to put you in or what your practice is. But looking at how New Inc has grown, what it's turned into, and every part of how it functions. It's so fucking hard to do that. It's so hard. Salome Asega: Oh, that's so nice. Ajay Kurian: The level that you're doing it at, you are setting another bar and it means a lot to everybody. They don't know how much it means yet. It is an undiscovered entity that is coming into existence. And so what's happening around it is, you're growing, you're sprinkling the dust, you're participating in this kind of longer stream of what's to come. This is the reason why I wanted to share what Salome shared with me. Salome Asega: This is how our New Inc brain works. [Unfortunately we could only show this in person, but imagine a visual board of information that maps out the year through events, travel, initiatives, onboarding, and more.] Ajay Kurian: Because these flows are like a customer journey. Maybe you have a better way of describing this, but when you're thinking about how somebody enters your organization, like if you're making a show, how does someone enter that show? What does that feel like? Is the floor different? Is the light this way? What is the first thing that they're seeing? All of that is what people who are running organizations think about, especially if they're doing it at the level that Salome is doing it at, where every part of that is considered. There's a real practitioner, there's a real thinker, there's a real artist behind what's happening here. That's why I wanted to show this. Salome Asega: That's really sweet. This is a really fun, collaborative exercise to do as a team where we think about what the full year looks like. Actually last year we did this just around the corner on this floor. We took over an office space for three days and just mapped out the year. We call this a program arc. So when New Inc members kick off with us, we do a week-long intensive called camp, where they get a feel for all of our program offerings. And then, in the fall, we go through some foundations of our program and specifically our professional development and mentorships. The thematics of the year are drawn up based on member enrollment information and what people say they wanna focus on during their year with us. And in this example here, the New Inc members wanted to focus on business foundations and ecologies of care. And then there's a cultivating connect track, which is thinking about how to deepen audience connections or marketing digital strategy. So we do all of the foundations in the fall and then by spring you can focus on one area. That's when all the programming starts to splinter and you can focus on the one thing you really wanna achieve. Throughout their moments for strategic planning, you can get one-on-one co consultation. This year we brought Sheetal Prajapati, she's a consultant who's helped all kinds of organizations in big moments of transition. She's worked at Pioneer Works and Eyebeam and, but anyway, it's nice to have access to someone who's built a strategic plan for organizations that are like 10x what you're about to start. Ajay Kurian: These are things that I think about now. We're trying to figure out systems for ourselves and to construct the institutions of tomorrow. Because yes, it is one thing to create in a way where you're either making objects or installations, and that's a beautiful way to practice. But I am highlighting it because I feel like people don't understand this as a practice and they don't understand that artists should be thinking about this. That this is a space where you can continue the practice, continue the things that you make, but we can also participate in other ways that will put us more in control of what tomorrow looks like, so that it's not run by cis white dudes that have a limited imagination. Salome Asega: Totally. I did a residency at Project Row Houses in 2017, and at that point I was just starting Powrplnt. I was able to live in one of the row houses in Third Ward and every morning to get stronger wifi, I'd bop down the street to the official Project Row House's office. I'd see Rick Lowe bike into work every morning and I'd get his feedback about starting things like Powrplnt and get his advice on how you balance having a personal creative practice with running an organization. Something that really sunk in for me was that he didn't see Project Row Houses as dissimilar or separate from his creative practice, and that everything fed into each other. I appreciate what you said about New Inc being part of my work in a deep way. Because it doesn't feel like the job I go to as a nine to five, it’s part of my artistic expression. Ajay Kurian: There's the outward facing element of it, which is job. But it's almost like Clark Kent being Superman. You have to just be both. There's a way in which that's just cover for what's actually happening. But maybe what I'm trying to do, and what I hope that we're getting out of this conversation is that you don't have to think of them as strict jobs in this way. There's a different way to think about it and let's actually just reformulate all of it. Let's find a way to actually do it. These are the systems that are eating us alive, so how do we make them so that they work for us? And what do we have to learn to make them work for us? And I'm really glad you're doing that work. Salome Asega: I'm having fun with it. If you zoom out and go all the way to the left, there's like a pink mural board. I think. You gotta two fingers pinch out. Yeah. And if you go to the left, This is where it gets wild. This is everyone who's in the program this year. We map out what they do and what they've told us that they care about doing during their year with us. Then we start to build pods of what kind of learning these people need. Ajay Kurian: This feels like Skowhegan. Sarah Workneh does a similar thing where everything is so beautifully orchestrated that you have these uncanny moments where it's wow, they knew. Salome Asega: It's about building a culture of hospitality and care, right? We are so lucky that you've chosen to spend a year with us. We have to take that seriously. Ajay Kurian: Pay attention everyone. I want to open it up. This feels like a good moment to see if there are questions? Audience Member: Can you tell us more about what New Inc is? Salome Asega: Totally. We didn't do that. I'm still learning what it is too. but New Inc is a cultural incubator that was founded by the New Museum a little over 10 years ago, and we support about a hundred people annually in launching ambitious projects, nonprofit organizations, and businesses through a robust professional development mentorship program that also includes community events and a shared workspace. We throw an annual festival called Demo that takes place each June, and that's like the culmination of a year with us, where you get to see what people have been working on alongside other creative practitioners. Audience Member: Is it similar to the Whitney ISP program? Salome Asega: You've the Whitney ISP, American. What happens there? American Artist: It’s a lot of reading and lectures, so it’s a little different. Audience Member: So at New Inc, do you have an idea and a facilitator that will help you? Salome Asega: Yeah, totally. You get to work one-on-one with a dedicated mentor. You're also assigned to a track of other projects who are doing similar things to you, and you convene once a month to do monthly crits. Then you have access to a pool of 80 to 90 mentors that you can call on for 30 minute appointments to get targeted feedback on something. You get access to seasonal professional development workshops that function more like working groups or more lecture style. In the lead up to Demo, the festival, there's a whole preparation program that helps members get stage ready and media trained. Audience Member: I love what you said about young people coming to Powrplnt, and I was wondering if you follow the alumni of that program? Salome Asega: Yeah. Actually I just checked in with the team a couple months ago 'cause they are trying to plan an anniversary moment. And someone we identified that I think is so cool is Mike, you know, the rapper? He used to be in the lab making beats, when we were a popup at Red Bull Studios, but would use our computers for Ableton and would also like film stuff. Yeah, I love Mike. Ajay Kurian: He's great. He's from Brownsville, right? Salome Asega: He used to come from Uptown, but maybe he's from Brownsville. Audience Member: So you have businesses that are part of the events program as well? Salome Asega: Yeah, we have a mix of people intentionally because that's how we think the network gets stronger. So I actually incubated Powrplnt at New Inc in the third year. Inception. We needed a logo and some kind of brand identity, and there was a graphic design studio next to us and we were like, can we do a work trade? And so they helped us build our first website and dev designed our first logo so that they could put that in their portfolio to pitch. They were developing a portfolio, so they needed us too and that's the kind of stuff that can happen when people are de-siloed, right? Ajay Kurian: I think people don't even know that they can ask for things like that. Ithink artists know that they can trade work, but doing a work trade where it's – you need this, I need this. Can we figure something out where we can figure out different rules? That opens up a lot of doors 'cause people don't have the money to do that. There's other ways. Salome Asega: I think that was what made New Inc so special is that you were in a community of people who were like, this is my grind year. I wanna get all these things done and how can we grow together and accomplish all of our dreams together. Audience Member: S I’d love to get a peak into the future, as the New Museum enters a new chapter, everything that you’ve learned so far at New Inc, and personally, what are some ideas that you are excited about? Salome Asega: We’ll just have so much more space in the expanded museum. So I'm thinking about other kinds of programming I can do, even outside of the New Inc sphere. I wanna introduce a regular music series. I wanna do some screenings in our theater. I wanna start bringing in, like this past year, I've been doing studio visits with a bunch of emerging furniture designers. There's a whole scene of design galleries that collect and support furniture designers, but there aren't institutions to show or present this work. There's some curators around the city that do a good job with this. Alexandra Cunningham at Cooper Hewitt does this. Because our museum has been so invested in architecture and design through the expression of the buildings, I wanna see if we can start to be a home for that kind of exhibition making. So maybe some design salons. Ajay Kurian: I love that, that it's always a thing that's in between, or always the thing that doesn't fit the perfect category. Audience Member: I was curious about the image on the invitation, could you tell us about that? Salome Asega: Yeah. So I started doing research when I was at Ford, where I was interviewing black tech policy writers. I was asking them about risk assessment and these newly formed algorithms that cities were purchasing to make all kinds of decisions around social service deliveries. So things from your probation, sentencing, to your welfare benefits, to your public housing subsidies. We’re all being determined, either fully or co-determined by algorithms. And as you can imagine, there are all kinds of very obvious biases. There was this funny term that kept coming up when I was interviewing people where they'd call risk assessment tools rats, because they're these pesky things that have infiltrated risk and social service delivery. So I drew this rat. I first built it in AR. I'd have it propped up in different places and it would play a soundscape of interviews I was doing with those researchers. And then the city of Toronto commissioned me to materialize it, to make it for real. So I spent six months going back and forth to Toronto and making it. I met with some truck drivers, which was really cool. I learned that the most expensive part of building a monster truck is actually the engine. So it's not drivable, it's more sculptural. But it is forever in Toronto until I can afford to add an engine. It was so funny because it was parked on the street for a weekend and then we moved it to a plaza area for a month. It has these red beady eyes and you turn the corner and you're like, what is that? Is that a monster truck? And then you start to sit in the plaza and you hear the conversations and I would immediately see people's body language shift, 'cause what they were hearing felt like the wildest podcast. Ajay Kurian: What made you settle on the monster talk truck as the form? Salome Asega: Because it was coming fast. Cities were adopting these instruments with lightning speed because it was cheap. We're seeing this now, this year already, the way federal employees are getting cut. And tech policy folks were nervous about how quickly certain departments were shrinking and how people were being replaced with these tools. Ajay Kurian: And you saw Monster truck shows when you were growing up? Salome Asega: Yeah. I have a really good photo I should have sent you of my dad and I at a monster jam in middle school. He worked for the MGM Grand Arena, and so it was his responsibility to pick me up from school and then I'd have to hang out at the MGM until my mom got off of work. So I would see the arena turn over for all kinds of things like Janet Jackson concert one night, and then Monster trucks the next. Ajay Kurian: You grew up in a flex space and now you just keep building up. Audience Member: good I’m curious, as a multihyphenate, how do you decide what to do next, what to commit to and when to move on? Ajay Kurian: That's a good question. Salome Asega: Oof, I'm not good at it. But I think that I am now in a position where I need to say no, but I say yes to things that my friends invite me to do. That feels like the most fun and most rewarding to me right now. Ajay said come through and I said, okay. Salome Asega: But I wish I had a better answer. I'm just like, do what feels good. Go to places where you feel love. I just think right now, we need to do things that feel healing. We need to be moved by spirit right now. Ajay Kurian: I don't even know if this is true, so don't quote me on this 'cause this is from Instagram, but apparently a cat's purr is a frequency that helps with bone regeneration. So when your cat's just purring on your body, it's healing you. Salome Asega: Whoa. I hate cats. But that makes me wanna give them a chance. Ajay Kurian: I'm not a cat person either, but I'm like, one of the people in New Inc will make a purring machine. Salome Asega: True. Next application cycle we'll put that in there. Ajay Kurian: This has been wonderful. I wanna thank everybody for coming! I want to thank Salome so much for doing this. It always means the world to have people that are engaged and interested and want to have these conversations. I always feel lucky to be in conversation with great artists. So thanks again. Salome Asega: Thank you. View draft history Settings Jan 23, 2025 Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

NewCrits provides one-on-one studio visits, portfolio reviews, and mentorship with some of the world's most visionary artists. This week on NewCrits, we sit down with artist and educator Sagarika Sundaram, whose textile-based sculptures and installations blur the line between human and nature. We explore her early training in Batik, the detour into graphic design that led her back to fiber art, and how felt-making became central to her practice. Sagarika reflects on artistic sabotage as a creative tool, the tension between sustainability and artistic freedom, and her evolving relationship with video work. Plus, a deep dive into Rasa theory, the power of disgust in art, and the role of intuition in her expansive practice. Sagarika Sundaram creates sculpture, relief works, and installation using raw natural fiber and dyes. Drawing on natural imagery, the work meditates on the impossibility of separating the human from the natural, suggesting the intertwined nature of reality. Sundaram’s work has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Art, NY; Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, Boiceville NY; the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX; British Textile Biennial, Liverpool, UK; the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center, Garrison, NY. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times (Roberta Smith, Martha Schwendener) ARTnews (Alex Greenberger) and has been featured by Artnet and Juxtapoz Magazine and PBS. Sundaram graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons / The New School, NY. She studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and at MICA in Baltimore. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute. Sundaram lives and works in New York City. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]