Minisodes

Narrator:
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Alvin Ailey edition. We will be exploring the new Edges of Ailey exhibition or, as curator Adrienne Edwards calls it, “extravaganza,” dedicated to the life, dances, and enduring legacy of the artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey. The exhibition will be on view at the Whitney from September 25–February 9.

Through an immersive eighteen-screen video installation, illuminating archival materials, an ambitious performance program, and wide-ranging artworks by eighty-two visual artists, the exhibition explores a titan of modern dance whose impact reverberates across media and time, and whose beloved company, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, remains a global cultural force to this day.

In this minisode, Edwards takes us through her impetus and vision for the show and some of the discoveries she made along the way.

Adrienne Edwards:
Well, the show really came out of a kind of long-standing sort of trajectory in recent years. There have been so many museums that have done exhibitions about dance. And it occurred to me on multiple occasions, why not Alvin Ailey? There couldn't be a, I think, more international brand in terms of contemporary dance. And so I was really sort of asking that question of our field and also of our institutions.

Alvin Ailey was born in Rogers, Texas in 1931, and dies from AIDS-related complications in 1989. He is among the most important cultural figures, not only in the United States, but abroad. And he had a vision for dance that was incredibly modern, incredibly rigorous, incredibly imaginative, and it was about freedom, it was about love, and it was about excellence.

Ailey comes to New York in 1954, and like so many dancers did at the time, really made his living doing Broadway shows, and then uses these resources to gather a group of dancers to present his very first work that would become known as part of the Ailey Company in 1958 called Blues Suite. It's interesting because I've been going to see Ailey for so long, I feel like I'm actually hardwired with Ailey in a way that I can't actually remember the very first performance that I saw. So it was something I was very familiar with, and I actually thought maybe I was even too close to Ailey to get enough of a sort of perspective on how to think rigorously and critically about the work and who he was. But that all changed once I got into the archive.

Ailey was a copious keeper of journals and diaries, and they include everything from to-do lists to character studies for roles in his dances. What we found that was really surprising is his own short story writing, his own poetry. He also wrote things like “No Leg Warmers,” wonderful notes to his lovers reflecting on their positive and negative qualities. And then you would find just almost things that seemed very positive, like he was reassuring himself. One said, “We teach people to feel, to own their own feelings.” So we could see him unfold as a creative person. And it was just an incredible discovery for me as a curator and a scholar to have access to that.

The other thing is that we found almost 200 videos made during his lifetime alone. And then the question became, how do we present this to audiences? And there are many different approaches, but Mr. Ailey was always about spectacle, loved theatricality, knew that we didn't have the right to bore people just because we might have talent or knowledge. So in putting the show together, we've kept really close to Mr. Ailey and the things that he believed in. And he said, you know, I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be a sculptor. I wanted to write the great American novel. I wanted to be a poet. And that, to summarize, dance somehow could hold all of those things for him.

I've been working with two wonderful filmmakers, Josh Begley and Kaya Liu to basically create a montage across eighteen screens in the gallery that will take you through a kind of arc and evolution of his life by focusing very specifically on key dances and the historical, political, and social context and cultural context that is occurring while he is making them.

And then there are eighty-two other artists in addition to Mr. Ailey who are in the show, some represented by multiple works. The earliest is from 1851 and the most recent are made especially on the occasion of the exhibition, so have been made this year. The ideas in Mr. Ailey's dances—which these artists share although they realize them in different ways—traverse the Black body in dance. Like, what is Blackness in dance? So many artists have made works representing this. But also a kind of Southern imaginary, the South for Ailey and those who preceded him was not only about the Southern United States, but was also very much about what is a Black diaspora. The Caribbean, South America, in particular Brazil for Ailey, but also the western coast of Africa.

So it's almost like a kind of circum-Atlantic history in a way. Southern imaginary also looks at Black spirituality, which is, of course, about a kind of Southern Baptist church or a kind of evangelism within the Black tradition. But it is also equally about Haitian voodoo. It is about Brazilian Candomblé. It is about the way those practices originate in different cultures on the west coast of Africa. So this idea of spirituality as the sustaining force, as a way of speaking to struggles and challenges and also desires is an incredibly important subject. Then there is this question of movement. And when I say movement, I mean like the movement of a people. So we think about ideas about Black migration, which include the Middle Passage from the West Coast of Africa to the Americas, but also even within the United States, thinking about the Great Migration, not only what were the sets of conditions that led to it, but also the unknown of what life elsewhere would be.

I mean Mr. Ailey himself, who was born in Rogers, Texas in 1931, goes with his mother in the early forties to Los Angeles, leaves Los Angeles, goes to San Francisco for a while, leaves San Francisco and ultimately comes to New York. And so he himself exemplifies this sort of migratory pattern that really became about directing us towards possibilities.

And I feel that that's something that Ailey thought a lot about. And then, of course, the openness of what is possible leads us to then demand our own liberation. And so for Ailey, this idea of freedom and how the body becomes the vehicle through dance in which to express that freedom, practice that freedom, embody that freedom, it's really very important to so many other artists. And that freedom is, you know, about a kind of Black liberation. But that Black liberation is also about a Black queer liberation. It is about the sort of acknowledgment of the complexity of who he was as a person. And so there are all of these ways in which there's a sort of sinew, obvious or not, between Ailey and these various artists in the show.

Everyone has an Ailey story, but I think I was surprised by the extent to which so many contemporary artists not only knew who he was, but really had thought about what he achieved and what he stood for. But artists are fundamentally curious people. And for that reason, much like Ailey himself, their interests are broad and deep and incredibly multilayered. And so I think that what became clear to me is that they really saw him as someone who exemplified excellence. I mean, a lot of the conversations were about, wow, can you imagine what it was like to achieve what he did in his lifetime? Like it's not today, we're talking about 1958 at a time where there was one place in New York City where the dance studios were integrated, where you could go to study at the New Dance Group. That's really quite something to contend with because we think about these aspects of American culture and life and politics as being really relegated to the American South when in fact it was throughout this country. And if you look at Ailey dancing, there's something so visceral and vital about the way that he held a stage. And I think that that kind of like insistence on telling his own story, but making it a kind of universal story, if you will, I think was quite an achievement on his part. And I think it's a big part of his legacy and part of the reason that it continues to be so exemplary.

Narrator:
Artists Among Us Edges of Ailey Minisodes are produced by SandenWolff with the Whitney Museum of American Art: Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson.

Narrator:
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Today, we’re exploring an exciting new addition to the Whitney’s collection: Eldzier Cortor’s painting Day Clean. The richly textured painting depicts a pair of figures standing on a porch with day breaking on the horizon. Cortor was interested in depicting Black American life in the South and drew influences from his travels to the Caribbean as well as from African Art, European Surrealism, and American Realism. Here, Associate Curator Jennie Goldstein talks about this painting and its unique path into the Whitney’s collection:  

Jennie Goldstein:
Sometimes works come to our attention almost by accident, by someone reaching out to us thinking that we might be a good home for something that has been in their home.  

This addition to the Whitney's collection was quite fortuitous. In 2014, Cortor’s son worked with his father to place some works by the artist in museum collections, including the Whitney's collection. We were able to acquire some prints that the artist had made in the 1950s. And this was incredibly exciting to us but we did not at the time acquire a painting. And then one sort of came to our door; a donor who had this painting––something they had inherited from their grandfather and had it for decades––thought of us as a place where this painting could have another life beyond the one she'd lived with it  and the one that her grandfather had lived with it. He came into possession of this painting through barter trading medical services for the painting with the artist, which is not an uncommon practice and one that still happens.  

Part of what was so amazing to us was that the donor lived so close-by, the painting was in the neighborhood all this time. And this was an artist who we as curators here at the Whitney had been so interested in and now is going to be here and on view. Eldzier Cortor is this incredible figure––I mean, imagine being born in 1916 and dying in 2015––he changes, the radical technological innovations, the stylistic shifts and twists and turns. And he saw all that and was steadfast in his devotion to representation and to seeking out this sense of eternal that he was so taken with. 

Eldzier Cortor was born in 1916 in Richmond, Virginia, and a year later his family moved to Chicago. They were part of the Great Migration––millions of Black Americans who moved from rural parts of the country to urban centers seeking better opportunities and fleeing segregation and other forms of racist oppression. He went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid 1930s and, like many artists who came of age during the Great Depression, he was very engaged in Social Realism depicting the lives of ordinary citizens in the south and west sides of Chicago, where he grew up in predominantly Black neighborhoods and thinking about the struggles and financial limitations that so many families were subject to at this time.  

And in the early 1940s, he grew increasingly interested in leaving Chicago and exploring more of the United States and the Caribbean islands. He was deeply interested in connecting to a kind of broader African diasporic history, thinking about the ways in which the descendants of enslaved Africans lived throughout North America and the Caribbean islands. At the time, he was able to receive funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1944 and in 1945, which allowed him to travel to the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. He took two trips and went to St. Helena Island. He was really interested in the Gullah Geechee communities in these barrier islands off the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and into Florida, where enslaved Africans worked on large plantations and were relatively isolated because of the island landscapes, and were able to, as a result of this isolation, retain more of their cultural heritages from the places they came from in Africa.  

“Day Clean” is an expression from Gullah Geechee culture. It means a new day, that whatever happens the day before, we can kind of wipe our slate clean and start a new day clean. So you can see some of this playing out in the composition of this painting where you have these two figures. (04:00): They're both anonymized, they're not identifiable people that he met, and the day is just sort of breaking through the clouds here. When you get up close, you can see pinks and blues and whites peeking through the surface of this composition as the day breaks. So, it is both a kind of literal day clean, a new day is starting, and this more kind of metaphorical sense of the title, that whatever came before, we can start anew.  

In this composition, you can see two figures standing on the porch of a house, probably raised up in this part of Lowcountry, South Carolina. It's very wet and marshy and there are some mysterious things happening in this building; pieces of wood that don't quite connect, a roof that seems to be peeling, but also maybe visceral and bodily, and all this strangeness is echoed in some of the ways that the artist paints. (05:08): When you get up close, you'll see that he adds oil paint in globs where the amount of paint on the surface has a texture to it. (6:13) There are other strange elements of this composition where the architectural roof of this house is flat up against the picture plane deeply pitched. (5:25) This adds to the sense of drama, the sense of mystery that we don't totally know what's happening here as this new day begins.  

He had a deep fascination with depicting women in different kinds of contexts–– as this exemplar of Black excellence––and a deep fascination with Black American experience. But they're not specific portraits. They are in their own way kind of abstracted, but they pull from these lived experiences that he had. 

One of the things I think is interesting is his use of color. You see in both the dripping Spanish moss, which is a plant very common in this Lowcountry of South Carolina, you see certain colors repeat: red from the roof, from the hat, the roof of the small church, the crown that this young man is wearing peaks out from the trees, even though that isn't a color that you would actually find in Spanish moss. Same with the pink that recurs in the sky with the sunrise  peeking through the Spanish moss, and again in the shirt that this woman is wearing. So this purposeful use of color connects the landscape with the architecture and with these two figures so that they're all implicated in each other. The setting that they're in impacts their experience of the world and vice versa. 

Cortor was making art in the 1940s at a time when many American painters were interested in an American version of Surrealism that was often called Magic Realism. The idea here was to pull from some of the tropes of Surrealism, which was a European art movement interested in the unconscious in our dream life, but adding to that this kind of particular interest in American society––whether that's societal ills, poverty, or, in Cortor’s case, a world that was so very different from his own but one that he still felt this kind of connection to. So, the ways in which the elements of this story and the anonymized figures do and don't add up pulls from these surrealist traditions and brings this very American content to it––this complicated, violent U.S. history.  

What's interesting to me about it is how much of it is so clearly from this very specific location––this isolated place that had a mythical and magical pull on the artist. We can just imagine what it would've been like for an artist raised in a place like Chicago to get on a bus, take this trip to a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina. To be in this totally different world and yet feel that connection to this shared trauma, this shared history, and then trying to make sense of all of that. And you can feel the connections that he's making to these different places. They're wildly different geographic locations but he's pulling these threads through.  

Teen Narrator:
Welcome to a special minisode from the Whitney. I’m one of the Youth Insights Leaders, part of an after school program where we work with artists in the Museum’s exhibitions. For this year’s Biennial, we interviewed one of the artists in the show. 

Holly Herndon:
My name is Holly Herndon and I'm an artist.

Teen Narrator:
We talked to Holly about her art, which she makes with her husband Mat Dryhurst. 

Holly Herndon:
So we created this model that is hosted on artport that you all can play with.

Teen Narrator:
artport is the Whitney’s internet art portal. When you open Mat and Holly’s project up, you see a box to enter text. Below that, there’s a grid of AI-generated images. The pictures are mostly people and other creatures with long, ropey, orange braids and thick bangs. A lot of them are wearing puffy green suits. Most of them are female. They’re kind of like distorted versions of Holly. When you play around with their work in artport, you get more of these AI-generated images. 

Teen Narrator:
Sometimes they’re a little off. Like we asked for a claymore, and it was just a regular sword. And the program didn’t seem to know what a Mega Chad is. 

Holly Herndon:
I'm trying to change who I am in public AI models, what my embedding is in public AI models. An embedding of a bottle would have a bottleness—like an essence or a certain bottle-like quality that we kind of all as humans understand is the core essence of a bottle. And then to extrapolate from that, when you get to more abstract concepts, that gets more and more blurry and gray. And so we were able to actually do some reverse engineering and look at my embedding, and it really turns out that I'm kind of like this just blob of orange hair and bright blue eyes. These models are trained on the open internet. So any images of me that are tagged with my name, that's basically what creates the concept of me in these models. And the way that these systems work is I actually don't have any control over who I am. It's just this kind of aggregation of images that other people have uploaded. So I was kind of asking myself, "How much agency can I have in this system? What can I do with it to push back on this a little bit?"

So I made a costume with a giant haircut. So I basically just turned myself into my pastiche, just turned myself into my haircut. And then we made a model that people can navigate on the artport site. The data that goes into it is kind of ranked according to trustworthiness of the source because going back to the original idea of trying to find this objective truth, even though that's of course a very, very problematic thing to try to reach, but that's how these systems work. So anything that shows up on Whitney.org is going to have a higher ranking than something that's on my random blog spot somewhere. So then the next time that a model is created, we have to kind of wait and see, but we're thinking that my public embedding will be infected with this kind of character that we created. 

Teen Narrator:
We asked Holly about what kinds of creativity she could express using AI.

Holly Herndon:
Every project that I've done with AI has been extremely manual. It's not just some automated process where it's type in a few words and art is done. It's usually very laborious, many decisions made. I think there's this perception that it's this fully automated thing, and it can be for some people, but for my practice it's really about getting into the bones of the model, understanding the training data, understanding the broader systems that the model is situated in. 

Teen Narrator:
We also wondered what she thought about the future of using AI in art. 

Holly Herndon:
I think that we're on this precipice of things dramatically changing because media will become kind of infinite and really easy to produce. I think it's going to change how we think about intellectual property, which is basically authorship because these systems are inherently collaborative. So you can collaborate with other people directly, but you can also collaborate with the entire human history, which is kind of a weird thing to wrap your head around.

So I think it asks us to question some of the things that we take for granted from a 20th-century approach to artmaking. I think it puts everything in question. I think that's really exciting. I think we're going to see artists using machine learning models as an art form. Whereas painting is a category, I see models as a category because they're these kinds of worlds that are infinitely navigable and generative that you can create a world and your audience can then create work through you or with you and kind of dive deep into your world in a really interactive way. And I think that that's very rich territory for artists.

That approach of humanizing these really technical systems has been there from the beginning of my practice, and I hope that it remains and I think that it remains. I think a lot of the things that we talk about with the work is a focus on the training data and a focus on how these systems aren't these alien intelligences, but they're just like aggregate human intelligence. It's actually a really remarkable human accomplishment, AI. I don't see it as this alien accomplishment. It's like us all together, and that's something to be celebrated if we can see the kind of humanity in it.

Teen Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This episode was produced by teen Youth Insights Leaders: Hale, Kiyan, Jinhaohan, Gabryellah, Brigitte, and Sahara. Production support was provided by Whitney staff. 

Teen Narrator:
Hi! Welcome to a special podcast minisode from the Whitney. My name is Sia and I’m a Youth Insights Leader, along with Renata, Celise, Alannah, Sasha, Kathleen, and Zuzu. We’re part of an after school program where we work with artists in the Museum’s exhibitions. For this year’s Biennial we interviewed artist Kiyan Williams about their two sculptures on the Museum’s terrace. 

One sculpture is a huge, slanted, neoclassical building covered in medium brown soil. It almost looks like it’s sinking into the terrace’s floor, and sticking out from the top of it is an upside down American flag that waves in the wind. Nearby, on another part of the terrace, there’s a chrome sculpture of the gay rights activist Marsha P. Johnson. She’s close to life-sized and faces the larger earth-covered work. 

When we spoke to Williams, we wanted to know why they put these two sculptures together. 

Kiyan Williams:
My name is Kiyan Williams. My pronouns are they/them/theirs, and I am an artist in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.

These two sculptures—one a neoclassical building that appears to be sinking into the earth and a cast aluminum sculpture of a historic figure—stand in opposition to each other. And what I would describe as different formulations or articulations of symbols of power. Upon a closer view, the viewer sees that the structure is built primarily of cracking earth, of various shades of earth tones, all of which I made by hand by the way. 

Teen Narrator:
Reflected in Marsha P. Johnson’s shiny silver surface is the other, larger sculpture, which is actually called Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master's House. It was modeled after the front of the White House.

Kiyan WIlliams:
I'm always just thinking about the kind of mess that is America in this contemporary moment, and always thinking about how I can make more visible or refuse or critique what is happening in America. Upon arriving on the terrace, one encounters the facade of a neoclassical building that is slanted fifteen degrees to the right with ionic capitals, which is the specific design of flourishes that are at the top of the columns. 

Teen Narrator:
I noticed Williams was very careful to use the words “land” and “earth” when referring to materials instead of dirt or mud.  

Kiyan WIlliams:
The reason why I use land and earth is in some ways that's how I'm framing that I'm speaking to this art historical movement and discourse.

I first was introduced to land art through the work of an artist named Ana Mendieta, who is known for making these earth/body works wherein she immerses her body into a physical landscape and does performances within environments and documents it through photo. I largely encountered art previously through, no shade to these people, painters and sculptors or traditional painters. And so encountering Ana Mendieta's work opened up this whole new possibility of what art could be and what materials you could make art out of. 

Teen Narrator:
We noticed their long acrylic nails that they would occasionally tap on the table.

Kiyan Williams:
I will describe my nails. They are coffin-tip, acrylic, see-through, brown, with a chrome outline, that I got done specifically to match the sculptures on the terrace. So the brown earth, with the brown matching the earth, the chrome to match the chrome. And in addition to punctuating my speech with them, I also built that sculpture with them. So they also have kind of functional tools or extensions of my hands. And I use them as tools, as extensions of my hand to push things around, grab things.

Teen Narrator:
Earth is actually a material that Kiyan Williams used in other artworks before. 

Kiyan WIlliams:
One of the things I love about working with earth is that I think of it as a collaboration in a sense that the material has its own agency and response to weather and other conditions. I often think about the earth as holding history of a site, of a specific place. Ideas of belonging, what does it mean to belong to a country, for example, whose very existence is precipitated on the oppression of your people? So those kinds of questions are embedded in my use of earth. I think about the earth's capacity as a catalyst for the cycles of decomposition and decay and regeneration—that things go back to the earth to be broken down and repurposed and reconstituted to become something else, so it becomes a metaphor. I like the way it feels in my hands when I'm sculpting with it. 

Teen Narrator:
And what about the slant of the sculpture here in the Biennial?

Kiyan Williams:
The slant is specifically fifteen degrees off axis, the slant for me is significant because when it's fully realized, it makes it look like the building is sinking into the ground and off axis. But I also realized recently that what I enjoy about the tilt or the slant is that there's a way . . . 

Teen Narrator:
They were taking their water bottle and showing us the fifteen degree slant with it… 

Kiyan Williams:
. . . even if I took this and put it upside down, it's like, okay, now it's upside down. The act of twisting something, bending it, taking it off its axis, it does a couple of things—it destabilizes it. Typically I'm taking these structures of power and dominance and tilting them off axis to destabilize them of their power. And I think there's a kind of magic in it. It's like, "Wow, how is this thing standing up and it looks like it's toppling over?" And then recently I came up with this realization that, oh, it kind of reminds me of when I'm standing and I'm standing with part of my weight on my hips, as opposed to standing straight up. And so there's a way in which it mirrors the way I hold my body and what I would call Queer embodiment: hand on hips, being off axis a little bit. I'm like, oh, that's how I move through the world, off axis, but on balance. 

Teen Narrator:
So, we wanted to know about the second sculpture. Marsha P. Johnson was a Black trans activist and artist and one of the founders of the modern gay rights movement. She participated in the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, and lived much of her life in the Village and the Meatpacking District in downtown Manhattan, near the Whitney’s current site. 

Kiyan Williams:
One thing I'm always interested in is I think a lot about the history of a particular site. And so as I was walking around, I started to think about the history of this neighborhood, the Meat Packing District—who lived here, who made a life here, who hung out here before it was gentrified. And because I studied history in college, I was very aware that this neighborhood used to be predominantly where artists, where Black and brown queer and trans people congregated. 

And once I kind of got down that line of thinking, I was like, "Oh, this project that I had already been thinking about, making a monument using Marsha P. Johnson as a subject. And it just kind of clicked. It was like, "Oh, this used to be her hood, she used to hang out here, she used to be in these streets." And unfortunately she was found in the Hudson River. 

I do think of her as a witness. So in many ways she's bearing witness to the kind of ruination, the sinking of the structure, but she's also witness to the people who are looking at the structure. So as they're having their moment and taking selfies, she's just on the side watching everything. Conceptually Marsha's title, Statue of Freedom, references a historic bronze monument that's on top of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, DC. And so in me naming her after this historic bronze monument, I'm really kind of proposing that Marsha is a more ideal embodiment of American values and that she should be a replacement for this statue called Statue of Freedom, in Washington DC. 

Teen Narrator:
Marsha P. Johnson is holding a sign in WIlliams’ sculpture that says “power to the people”. This specific image of her was actually captured by a photographer named Diana Davies, who documented Johnson at a protest. 

Kiyan Williams:
And I remember in high school, I encountered this photo of Marsha that was taken by this photographer. And she was just chilling against the wall at a protest, smoking a cigarette. And it was something about this image that spoke to me so deeply. And that has been a source of inspiration since I was probably seventeen. 

Teen Narrator:
Usually, historic American monuments put figures up on high pedestals. Williams didn’t want to recreate that style for their depiction of Johnson. She stands at average height on a low platform.

Kiyan Williams:
I wanted Marsha to be human scale because I think that in many ways when someone is put on a pedestal, like a figure, it dehumanizes them.

I didn't want to recreate that sense of spectatorship with Marsha because she was the people, she was in the streets, she was on the ground, she was one of us. And so those were the reasons why I made her human scale, not on a pedestal. I came to aluminum because I wanted there to be this reflective aspect where you look at Marsha, but you also see glimpses of yourself and the world around you. 

Teen Narrator:
They said that to them, Marsha P. Johnson was the architect of movements against police violence, which has taken many forms. And they see the Black Lives Matter movement as stemming out of her work and her life too. Right, and so we have this person whose life was so impactful, looking out onto this sinking building that looks like a White House. It really tips the scales of what have traditionally been symbols of power. Williams reflected on the earth work again. 

Kiyan Williams:
I will say that the scale is the largest thing I ever made in my life, and it was the hardest thing I ever made in my life. It's huge, it's like twenty-one feet high, it's 6,000 pounds, there's a twenty-foot by twenty-foot earth installation around it. 

And so I think this work is a clear, or a more, I've gotten better as an artist from when I made this work, to the last work I made. I did my big one.

Teen Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This episode was produced by Renata, Celise, Alannah, Sasha, Kathleen, Sia, and Zuzu. Production support was provided by Whitney staff. 

Kiyan Williams:
It's just one of those things where people are like, oh my God, how do you do anything with your nails? And I'm just like. Literally, and I just pull up a picture, I'm like this, I built that with these nails.

Narrator: 
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. For us, this spring and summer are all about the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Over the course of the exhibition, we’ll be sitting down with some of the artists to talk about their work and what it means to be making art in the present moment.

Today we hear from five artists who together form the collective People Who Stutter Create. For their contribution to the 2024 Biennial, the group mobilized the Whitney’s exhibition billboard at 95 Horatio Street, across the street from the Museum and the south end of the High Line. The artists, all of whom stutter, created a public artwork that celebrates the transformational space of dysfluency, a term that can encompass stuttering and other communication differences. In this minisode, we hear from all five artists about their artwork titled Stuttering Can Create Time.

JJJJJerome Ellis: 
Our group is called People Who Stutter Create and we are five people who stutter who have come together to create a billboard at the Biennial. I'm JJJJJerome Ellis and I feel so lucky that I have been able to collaborate with these these four amazing people over these past few months. 

Kristel Kubart:
So my name is Kristel Kubart. I'm a speech therapist. I live in New York City and I'm a very proud person who stutters. It hasn't always been that way, I used to be very ashamed of my stuttering but helpful speech therapy and being a part of the stuttering community completely changed all of that when I heard that maybe it's okay to stutter and just have it be a part of how you speak. 

Conor Foran:
My name is Conor Foran. I'm an Irish practitioner based in London and I work across art and design and a big part of that is stammering. So I kind of use art and design for stammering activism.

Delicia Daniels:
My name is Delicia Daniels and I’m in North Carolina. I would have to say that stuttering appeared for me out of the blue, so to speak, in middle school. And I had to train myself to just talk slowly because, you know, I was ashamed of it, I wasn't used to it. And so every single person on this panel, you know, gave me the opportunity to, you know, to welcome new energy and new vibes around stuttering and around scholarship connected to celebrating words that repeat. 

JJJJJerome Ellis:
Hi, Jia, welcome!

Jia Bin:
Hi hi JJJJJerome! I am—compared to all the leaders in this group—I would say I am newer. I was born and grew up in China. Stuttering had always been my big biggest shame growing up. Everything I do is trying to hide hide my stuttering throughout my entire life. It's it's been a journey. I'm I'm just so so thrilled that that my my biggest shame seems to have become my biggest blessing.

Conor Foran:
So the billboard is basically three lines of text that hang from the top of the billboard and it's in Spanish, Chinese, and English. And in English it reads, “stuttering can create time.” And and the text is all black and it's on on a kind of a calm green background I would say. And in terms of the design decisions that went into it, we used my typeface, Dysfluent Mono, which emulates or represents stammering in typographic form. So the Spanish has a gap, and the Chinese repeats, and the English is stretched. So that was us kind of representing each form of stuttering essentially. So I think overall it's stammering pride coded. It doesn't say "stammering pride" but but you can definitely get that from the billboard. And yeah, just on the color as well—we wanted to add some kind of color. By adding this green—the color green has been used by the stammering community for years and years and years as a point of representation—we thought that maybe that would be the most appropriate. And it gave the billboard a bit more color and a bit more warmth and a bit more vibrancy. 

Kristel Kubart:
I know people will listen to this who don't know that much about stuttering. So repetition is when the first couple of sounds repeat like, just like that. Prolongation is when the sound gets stretched like that. And a block is when a person experiences a lot of tension and just no sound is coming out. So those are the three types of stuttering that we represented on the billboard. And then in those moments, sometimes people who stutter have to make a choice, you know. Are they going to let the stuttering out? Are they afraid to stutter in that moment? And they might try to switch words or, you know, pretend they forgot what they were going to say. So that's why this idea of stuttering pride can be so powerful—you're actually saying what you want to say even if it comes out, you know, repeated or long like that.

Conor Foran:
And also I forgot actually to say that the bottom half of the billboard is completely empty, which some people might be wondering why we did that, because it's like, we’ve been given this really huge space, but our statement only takes up a bit of it. But we did that intentionally because it does play with this idea of pauses and hesitations and expectations. 

Delicia Daniels:
Working in a public space I think is important and essential because a lot of times people who stutter feel unseen and unheard. And I feel like this platform, you know, raises the volume for people who, you know, tend to, you know—I used to sit in the back, and I'm quiet, don't say much, and be very brief. You know, as I feel something coming on, I'll stop.

Jia Bin:
This is something new but at the same time the power I think the power of of the the visuals and the power of art will trigger some discomfort, maybe, in the people who stutter who are still on the journey of moving towards acceptance and maybe the public would say, “Why?! You know, this is the worst thing to be put out there.” So I feel like this is a very loud way, even through the silent words, to put the message out.

JJJJJerome Ellis:
I'm I'm moved by the way that that that that that that all of y'all throughout the process have have had such such care careful attention to the weight of each word. As as as you're saying, Delicia and Jia, about the volume. And it has personally helped me think about this experience that that many people who stutter have on a daily basis—feeling like they are wasting time or taking up too much time or not communicating in the amount of time that is allowed, you know.

Jia Bin: 
So when we were doing our discussion, we also mentioned how it takes two to stutter from the listener’s perspective. Like stuttering creates time not just for the people who stutter perspectives, but from the listener’s perspective too. We we open the space, we we create time for the listeners, invite them to our communication styles, invite them to become better listeners—deeper listeners—to build this human connection through a unique way of communicating.

Kristel Kubart:
Personally, I'm just so excited about the fact that there's going to be a stuttering billboard. It warms the heart to know that it will be seen, that it will challenge people’s ideas about stuttering because stuttering is something that is still very stigmatized and not very well understood. And I think the billboard kind of poses a new way of looking at stuttering and it's going to create a lot of conversations about stuttering in places that normally wouldn't exist. 

JJJJJerome Ellis:
I'm glad. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm glad that that that it all feels good for everybody and I and I could not be more, just more grateful and lucky to, you know, just to be a part of this this group of amazing people.

JJJJJerome Ellis:
I just wanted to also honor the work and creativity of Zoe (Yu) Cui who helped us as the typography consultant.

Jia Bin:
Oh, I do want to add one more name—Angelica Bernabe. She she helped us with with with the Spanish translation as well.

Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson. 

Narrator:
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. For us, this spring and summer are all about the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Over the course of the exhibition, we’ll be sitting down with some of the artists to talk about their work and what it means to be making art in the present unfolding moment.

Today we hear from Maja Ruznic about one of the two paintings that she has in the Biennial, called The Past Awaiting the Future/Arrival of Drummers. The painting is huge, over twelve feet wide, and more than eight feet tall. Figures and shapes painted in rich seductive colors move in every which way across the crowded canvas. Here’s Maja Ruznic: 

Maja Ruznic:
My name is Maja Ruznic and I'm a painter and I live in Placitas, New Mexico. I don't normally work in this horizontal orientation. Usually, my paintings are smaller than this kind of giant format. My palettes are colorful and I'm really in love with highly pigmented color. So having something like a cadmium red light right next to a cobalt green turquoise, it's supposed to make your eyes almost have a seizure. So I'm really interested in color level and how color can operate and have encoded meaning that is not available to our rational mind. 

And I really believe that through our senses and when our body is really affected, great changes can happen. And I think that's why people like to go to cathedrals, even if you're not religious, or mosques, there's a sense of awe that can fill the body. And I know there's a lot of research about how awe is a very restorative and opening emotion and how we need it as a species and how it differentiates us from other species. So the kind of awe I like to create with color and form and figures like this female figure here who is both crying, but she's also in a way the most powerful. She's the only one confronting us. 

I think my history has colored me in a certain way where I have certain preferences and I think sadness is the one thing that my body has remembered and I've learned to love. I find beauty in sadness and I do think that has a lot to do with my background. I don't know if I would have the same love for all things full of pathos if I had a different upbringing.

Narrator:
Ruznic grew up moving from country to country after she and her mother fled Bosnia when war broke out when she was a child in the 90s. Eventually, they landed in San Francisco. 

Maja Ruznic:
When you think about a conflict, most wars that are fought are often trying to reconcile or undo some past injustice. So that's the war that I fled from. It was the Serbs trying to undo the injustices of the Ottoman Empire. And I think there's something so strange and absurd about the desire to cleanse the past by doing something now that is equally damaging. So there's this sense of constantly pulling the past in order to “fix” or to amend. But I think there's always something dark and violent that arises out of that desire to fix that we may not even be aware of at the time. We can only tell that in the future.

So this piece is really about that. It's thinking about how the past is being dragged and how there are victims of the present that are somehow being used to undo something from the past. Yet time is kind of always marching on. So I think of all the feet in this painting, and most of them are in profile. Some of them are moving to the left, a couple of them are moving to the right, and some of them are facing us. So that was me trying to fuse the sense of all times existing in this one plane, collapsing the sense of actual moving time, and freezing it in this moment.

I think my figures if you really look at their expressions they're quite sad and things have happened to them, but they're survivors. They're kind of these wounded healers who are only as powerful as they are because of the stuff they went through. In alchemy, they talk about the transmutation of materials. The alchemist works on that in their lab to get to the gold. In Jungian psychology, they talk about all the different stages that your psyche needs to go through in order to achieve this kind of unified state. And I think I as a person and I as a painter am working that out as I paint. I'm constantly trying to make something moving for others out of these sad little parts that are inside of me.

Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson. 

Narrator:
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. For us, this spring and summer are all about the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Over the course of the exhibition, we’ll be sitting down with some of the Biennial artists to talk about their art and what it means to be making art in the present unfolding moment.

Today we hear from Cannupa Hanska Luger about his Biennial work. The piece takes the form of a tipi inverted and hung from the ceiling of the gallery. It's made of a translucent material in rich pinks and burgundies and looking up at it from below has a kaleidoscopic effect. He mentioned to us that he uses the word tipi both literally, and as an acronym for Transportable Intergenerational Protective Infrastructure. He coined the phrase but said that “the phrase has always been what a tipi is in one way or another.” Here’s Cannupa Hanska Luger: 

Cannupa Hanska Luger:
My name is Cannupa Hanska Luger. I am Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota. And an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold. And I'm a ceramic artist. I have a background in ceramics anyway, and I do a lot of mixed media material.

The piece is called Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta, a Lakota phrase that says, “the fat-takers world is upside down.” There are aspects of this piece that are embedded, there are aspects that are visually experienced, and then there are concepts that with Indigenous knowledge or upbringing there's a deeper understanding of some of the work. But what you physically see is a tipi, full-sized, constructed out of crinoline which is a mesh material. So it has a transparent aesthetic to it. The skin surface is a hot pink and a black. It has trim and structural components that are made out of nylon ribbon. 

We've inverted the tipi and presented it from the ceiling pointed down. It's got a strong physical space, you get this tension of the tipi’s inversion overhead. And I think that imposes certain sorts of tensions that we have trouble describing presently. And really just thinking about the weight of Indigenous knowledge on our present culture, present community, our present world being inadequately described and demeaned through erasure and omission redaction from our history lessons. It allows the scale and the weight of that to impose the room in a way that we haven't been allotted presently.

There's a model in physics around the space-time continuum, and it's two cones that invert and it's like a geometric model of the space-time continuum that is embedded in the tipi and its form and its purpose from a long time ago. It is a lens. It's often times described as a lens that recognizes the entire universe and the place that we stand being the same. 

I'm interested in how we present a future look that isn't saying, "This is the way the future is going to go,” but “this is a way that the future doesn't narrow into a point that it actually expands in the other direction.” So what we're imagining today potentially and probably will become our distant future realities. And so recognizing that trajectory, that gives you a little bit of agency in time. "What do I want to carry from my past thinking about ancestral knowledge? How do I reassert that in the present by imagining its application in the future?" So this allows me to imagine futures that I'm actively participating in its creation presently by gathering information from the past.

I also see the tipi being co-opted by Artsy and Etsy and all of these different components that diminish the actual importance and the power of the tipi where you can get tiny versions of it for your children. You can get tiny versions of it for your dog. There are all of these iterations of that form. It is a form that you see repeated across the globe in different ways. But I think it's really important to understand the wholeness of its design outside of its form. And that access to the tipi should be an exchange and a recognition of all of the context, then you enter a tipi with the same level of humbleness. So presenting the tipi in a way that you cannot access it is a part of that conversation. So as an artist, I'm like, "Well, how do you present this work? Share that knowledge, but not slip into providing total access?" And so presenting it with this crinoline material, it allows you to see into that space but never actually physically be inside of it.

But then by inverting it and putting it on the ceiling, I can express that the present we are in is upside down. The tipi is not upside down. The tipi is actually in the right positioning, in right relationship in a right way in the world if the world isn't as upside down as it is presently. And so it could be accessible, but we need to flip everything that we value and consider as value in our world. The leap that we need to experience is like, "Oh, the tipi is not upside down. I'm upside down. Everything here is upside down." That's actually in right relationship.

Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson. 

Narrator:
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. For us, this spring and summer are all about the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Over the course of the exhibition, we’ll be sitting down with some of the artists to talk about their art and what it means to be making art in the present unfolding moment.

Today we hear from Dala Nasser. Her work in the Biennial is titled Adonis River. The work is a space created from tall wooden structures—columns and cubes—draped with heavy fabric. The fabric is covered in rubbings taken from rocks at the Adonis Cave and Temple and then the material was dyed using iron-rich clay from the banks of the nearby Abraham River on Mount Lebanon, north of Beirut. Although it is now called the Abraham River, it was once called the Adonis River. Here is Dala Nasser.

Dala Nasser:
My name is Dala Nasser. I'm a material and process-based artist. Essentially the story of Adonis and Aphrodite is based on Sumerian history. So in ancient Sumerian tablets, there was a story of the goddess of fertility and her mortal lover and his untimely death and the mourning practices that developed throughout the region commemorating this sort of loss. And it moved on from Sumerian culture to Babylonian to Assyrian and to what you know now as Adonis and Aphrodite. So the names started to change as time moves by. So my interest in the story itself is how it's timeless and how it's morphing slowly and slowly.

And for me the interesting thing around this is the location of this tale in a cave in Mount Lebanon. Every spring as the snow melts off the top of Mount Lebanon, it goes through this cave and out into a river. The reason why they called it Adonis's River is that every spring, when the water would come gushing out as the snow melts, the water levels rise and mix with the very iron oxide-rich soil of the area. The river takes on a bit of a red hue. So the locals and everyone around the river would say that this river turns red with Adonis's blood.

I took fabric to the cave and the temple and I produced charcoal rubbings on site on the rocks of both of the locations. And after that, I dyed them with iron oxide-rich clay that's made out of the soil that surrounds the river. And the final step was I washed them in the river. When I started working the way that I work, which has now been, I don't know, over ten years now, it developed from just a very basic idea where I was sick of doing drawings and I knew exactly how I wanted them to end. And I thought to myself, how can I produce work that keeps changing beyond the artist's hand?

Lebanon had a fifteen-year civil war which was split between political factions with religious sects as well. And the location of the cave where Adonis was killed is commemorated across all religions here. This location is where people go and pray in different sorts of religions. So it's a very spiritual location. To work on it, I have to hike to get to the cave. You're in a place where people go on pilgrimages and you just look around you and you see young couples, old couples, babies. It is, it's very spiritual.

And it still very much exists within the current present-day psyche. This is history and myth kind of intertwined. Its importance has not faded, and the general reason that I say this is because this story resulted in mourning practices and mourning practices are far more than just tradition. You see them today. Mourning practices are exactly the driving force behind organization, like group mass organization. My interest in doing this work was very much to show it in the States where you know the civil rights movement was so fueled by this sort of organization. It's happening literally all the time. So the reason why I find this so relevant, and not just for Lebanon itself and the location that I worked in, is that this theme is ongoing and we know that now more than ever I suppose.

This idea of this ancient story of Aphrodite and Adonis and their lost love is not some ancient myth in the sense that we are surrounded by mourning. And it's not necessarily for a single person or a life. We mourn the future we thought that we were going to have. For example, you mourn a loss of a location, the landscape, your city. It's a way of dealing with loss but goes beyond just a physical life. And so my interest in this is that it exists, we are surrounded by it, we feel it. 

This is not just a simple kind of love lost or innocence lost, which you see in the story. What it created was a practice of mourning and obviously, this practice of mourning is all around us and it's something that we exist with and live alongside and there's a lot of power that you can get from this. You are not defeated. You're supposed to feel empowered. When you mourn and when you mourn as a group, you are exponentially empowered.

Obviously we're watching the news. I'm watching the news, you know what's happening. Like this is the power of the people and people that mourn together. It's not just about one thing. It's about mourning now, what's happening right now. It goes into the history of mourning of all of the sort of inherited trauma and mourning what our grandparents and their family and our ancestors all dealt with and what we want for ourselves in the future. It's all tied together.

It's very important when people say, "Not in my name. Not in anyone's name. My grandparents didn't do this for this . . .." This means something you know. This means something much more than just me and you. This means that we all come from a legacy that is connected and mourning is . . . we do it together. You don't do it alone.

Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson. 

Narrator:
Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. For us, this spring and summer are all about the 2024 Whitney Biennial. The Biennial is the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States and takes place here at the Whitney every two years. For over ninety years Biennial curators have traveled far and wide to bring together artists whose distinct and varied voices probe some of the most pressing issues of the current moment. Over the course of the 2024 Biennial, we’ll be sitting down with some of the artists to talk about their art and what it means to be making art now.

Today we hear from Eamon Ore-Giron who talks about two of the three artworks he has in the Biennial. The paintings are part of a series titled Talking Shit in which he reimagines deities from ancient Peruvian and Mexican cultures in a contemporary context to explore the idea of a living ancestral past. Here is Eamon Ore-Giron.

Eamon Ore-Giron:
My name is Eamon Ore-Giron. I'm an artist who lives in Los Angeles, California. The works are focused on deities from the Americas, primarily, right now, Mexico and Peru. This piece is called Talking Shit with Viracocha's Rainbow (Iteration I). And it is made up of essentially a two-headed serpent. So if you follow on the upper left, the head of the serpent is facing outward and the body coils around the canvas and makes its way down to the bottom, comes up again, does a little tumble down, and then comes back up to reveal another head facing the opposite direction. 

The title Talking Shit for me was a way to bring the ideas of sacred symbology and mythology closer, like a way of bringing it closer to my life. This body of work deals with the ways in which these ancient symbols and deities have been interpreted and their meanings have kind of evolved over time depending on the context. I read a quote in a book called The Stone and the Thread and it's about the roots of abstraction in the Andes. There's a really beautiful quote, it's by Octavio Paz, who's a Mexican writer.

Narrator:
Octavio Paz wrote about Mexican identity in the twentieth century by interpreting Indigenous artworks. In doing so, he pointedly critiqued how Spanish colonizers had misunderstood the art, languages, and beliefs native to the area. 

Eamon Ore-Giron:
And he's talking about a goddess, Coatlicue, which is an Aztec goddess and two-headed serpent that wears a skirt made out of a splayed body and snakes. It's a really powerful symbol. And he talks about how the statue of Coatlicue was at first considered an abomination and was reburied into the ground and then it was rediscovered during the Colonial era and then placed in a convent with a sheet over it because everybody was afraid of it. And then in the Modern era, it was brought out and now is the crown jewel in the collection of the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. I really loved that illustration of how symbols can change through time and the collective experience that we have allows for that evolution and mutation. So for me, the Talking Shit series was a way to explore my own ancestral past and connect it to my life now with a lot of room for me to interpret these forms. 

Viracocha is the god of creation in the Andes. And Viracocha is also known as teacher of the earth and then the other more vertical painting is an amaru, a version of an amaru, which is a mythological creature from the Andes. The amaru was born from the rainbow that Viracocha created. It was born from the chest of the rainbow. And so to me, it's really cool that these two pieces are existing together in the exhibition because they're related in that way. 

The first forms in the series are pulled from sculptures in the pantheon, the Aztec pantheon, because I started the series when I was living in Mexico. But I've moved the body of work into exploring more of the Andean mythologies. And in the Andean mythologies, it's a little bit more difficult to find specific examples of certain deities. There's a lot more room for my interpretation and my understanding of how I want to create this creature. 

One thing that stands out when I think about this bringing the sacred closer in some way is in Peru near my cousin's house there's a pyramid there, they call them huacas. And just as if it was just a crumbling building in the middle of a neighborhood. They're all over Lima. And actually a lot of the archeological objects that are in museums now come from these huacas that have been looted. To me, it's like the past still is here. And so for me, the “talking shit” element to the series is me literally looking at the form and imagining the form in my own way and maybe digging into my own past in my own neurological pathway, in my imagination, but also thinking about our current relationship with the past—especially in Latin America—is very present. It's all around us. And sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes it's not a great thing, but it’s a way for me to make that intimate, to draw it in closer, and to think about these forms.

Narrator:
Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Kyla Mathis-Angress, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson. 

Narrator: Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Today we hear from artist Kambui Olujimi who has two paintings currently on view at the Whitney. His works, Your King Is on Fire and Hart Island Crew, are included in the exhibition Inheritance, up through February.

Kambui Olujimi: My name is Kambui Olujimi, I'm from Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. I'm an interdisciplinary artist and I like to make things. These paintings are part of a collection of works that I'm calling the Quarantine series, because I made them when I was in quarantine during the lockdown of 2020. Both Your King Is on Fire, the triptych, and Hart Island Crew.

Hart Island is this little island right across from Rikers and for a little more than a century we've been burying the unclaimed dead there. This painting is a horizontal painting that has six figures dressed in white hazmat suits moving coffins around in a mass grave. The grave is open and the landscape is kind of hilly. In the distance, there are a few figures that are silhouetted. Two have guns and two have a kind of cap that reads as a correctional or law enforcement hat. Then in the distance you can see the sun setting over the hill. 

So during the pandemic there were these refrigerated morgues that were mobile because New York City had so many fatalities. And so it made me start to think about all of the loss that we were going through and suffering through without having a real space to mourn or to grieve. People weren't allowed to gather. And so it led me to Hart Island because a lot of people were unclaimed. There was maybe not family, or family was in a place where they weren't reachable. And there's a place—pretty much everywhere there's a potter's field is what we call it—where you bury unclaimed dead.

And as I started to do some research on Hart Island, a lot of the labor that was done there was performed by incarcerated folks at Rikers. Over the years, the incarcerated were asked to absorb a lot of this grief. They're the only mourners for bodies that are buried there. So unclaimed dead from the AIDS epidemic, from just living in New York, from crack, from Covid, there are these waves of deaths that happen in any urban space. But in New York, and as a New Yorker in particular, this was my black hole. I feel some kind of way about New York. These are my folks that are unclaimed. And so it started to pick away at me or tap me on the shoulder a bunch.

A lot of the work that I was doing at the time was interior. I was in small spaces. I was thinking about small spaces, and this one is much more expansive. You can see the figures in the far distance, these silhouettes, ominous silhouettes, guards who are holding guns and forcing this process to happen or ensuring beyond choice that this process would happen. And the sky is a sunset, sort of romantic in a classic sense—a romantic sunset that is beautiful. When I was a kid, my mother was big on primary material. So we watched actual firsthand footage when my mother would talk to me and my siblings about history. And I remember being struck one time by footage from a concentration camp being liberated at the end of World War II. There were times when I was like, “but it's just so sunny.” It didn't seem like this could be a thing that could happen on such a beautiful day.

This painting is a tryptic titled Your King Is on Fire. It pictures a statue of King Leopold on fire. King Leopold was the king of Belgium. Belgium was a colonial power and colonized the Congo and did it most brutally. It's estimated that during this period up to fifteen million Congolese were murdered. There's not a lot globally in terms of the response for years around these actions. And it's only recently that it's beginning to be talked about in a wider context, a wider Western context. In Belgium, there have been protests around the sculptures of Leopold for some time. 

And so, while in America we were having conversations around Confederate monuments and their removal, you see that this is not just happening with regards to Lee and Christopher Columbus, but also Rhodes and Leopold. And so the lockdown really collapsed space in a way where these struggles that were happening here were having shock waves throughout the globe. And the statue in Antwerp was set on fire and eventually removed. 

There was a joy in seeing this sculpture removed for me. There's no way you could ask for redemption in light of these kinds of mutilations. And even as a young person, there's a doom that gets put on you. Because I'm not them, I'm not Belgium, I'm not Leopold, but we are human. And so as a kid, I was very much into space and the universe, and we can make all these artificial lines here on this planet, but you go anywhere in the universe, y'all all just humans. Just like I can talk about being from Brooklyn and how different that is from being from Queens and this and that. But I go to Senegal, I'm an American. I'm an American and they want to know why my country has gun violence on the level that it does. They want to know why my country…and I'm like, “they don't really listen to me like that.”

The further away from home you go, the more that home gets consolidated. And so that's a way of thinking of it now. But as a kid, I was just like, “we are all human and this is what humans be about,” and there's a doom to that. To see that there was a reconciliation, or at least steps towards that, or steps towards taking that myth of the monarch down or chipping away at it, and I mean this specific monarch, it was joyful. 

Narrator:  Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson.

Narrator: Welcome to Artists Among Us Minisodes from the Whitney Museum of American Art. On the occasion of the exhibition Ruth Asawa Through Line, we sat down with artist Virginia Overton to hear about what she finds so interesting about Ruth Asawa’s work. Asawa is widely known for her wire sculptures but, in this exhibition, it’s her dreamy works on paper that take the spotlight. Overton speaks about three pieces. One is a print made from the body of a fish. The other two are ink drawings, one showing the cross-section of a redwood tree, and the other of the curly leaves of endive lettuce. Here is Overton on Asawa.

Virginia Overton: Gosh, I'm trying to remember when I first saw her work. It feels like such a part of art for me that I don't really remember when I first saw it in-person for sure. Of course, I'd seen it in books and publications prior to seeing it in-person. But part of what interests me is her dedication to process—a continued investigation, a very rigorous practice. Seemed like she was always doing something, making art, gardening, taking care of family, cooking. But it was always an integrated process for her, art making was part of life making.

So the fish print in the exhibition really intrigued me because twenty or thirty years ago, I made a fish print and it felt like there was a similar energy in her print and mine. Hers is obviously a print from a fresh whole fish that hasn't been scaled or fileted. Mine was actually a fish skeleton with the head still on, so it had been fileted. But in each case, it's like there's this immediacy of needing to get to print and there's no time to waste. And so the paper you see in her fish print is clearly rapidly gathered and taken to make this print rather than a very slow, steadied process. There's an urgency to it. And the fish print that I made was on a brown paper sack. It's all I had, and black porch paint. And so it was the combination of those two things that allowed me to get the print of this object— this fish—before it disintegrated back into the earth.

For Asawa I would imagine the pattern of the scales would be something she'd be very interested in. For me, it was like that too. But I was seeing the structure or the armature on which a fish is made essentially. So it's like a sculpture in that sense. There's an internal armature, and then these components that create the whole thing. 

Being a sculptor, I'm looking around at the world and everything is potential material. Human-made materials, organic materials, new things, old things, detritus. I mean, everything is a potential material or a potential way to investigate an idea sculpturally. So maybe it's a temporary material that's going to disintegrate, but it still has potential for being a sculpture. I think with Asawa's work, she captures these things at a certain a moment in time. 

So in this drawing, one of the things that struck me initially was whether it was a drawing of an actual slice of a tree or a drawing of the idea of a tree and what a tree is. And so looking at it, I could see it both ways. But it's interesting if it is the drawing of the idea of tree, it does such a succinct job of capturing that.

Asawa starts with a really small inner circle, and then she copies it over and over and over again until they fill the page so much that there's no more space to draw circles. And it was like she would draw until she couldn't draw anymore, until the end of the page ran out. I work with wood so much and seeing this drawing really evoked something emotional in me almost. I'm very familiar with and connected to all types of wood, and I remember seeing my first redwood in California when I was in my twenties. It was such a massive, massive tree, and it was just shocking to see something that was so old and still standing and still thriving.

So when I saw this drawing of Asawa's, the fact that it's 356 rings suggests quite an old tree, and then this convergence of her hand replicating that feeling of such age in a tree really captivated me. If you're capturing those rings at that moment, that's one snapshot. Or with a head of endive, it looks like that for a moment before it wilts. If you've picked it, and then it's sitting there, it has a certain look, but after some time, it will change and decay. So there's an urgency in her work. I mean, there's a rhythm that exists in her drawings and sculptures that I'm really attracted to as well. And I think that those mark living time in a way. So the drawings definitely feel like they record time. They definitely record her hand, pencil to paper, and I find that really intriguing.

That's the compulsion of being an artist is that you're always investigating, whether you're literally making art, physically drawing, or making a sculpture, or if you're just walking around in the world. All of these things become a sort of visual inventory that you can then draw from when you're making work.

In doing more research about her, I got really interested her, so I watched videos and looked at just everything I could find. There was one scene in one of the films that I watched where Buckminster Fuller comes over and they walk up to the front doors of her house and then you walk through her house and she's surrounded by her world, which is her family, her garden, her community, her art. I mean, just, it's all woven together like her sculptures are woven together.

Narrator: Artists Among Us Minisodes are produced at the Whitney Museum of American Art by Anne Byrd, Nora Gomez-Strauss, Sascha Peterfreund, Emma Quaytman, and Emily Stoller-Patterson.