You can get a print AND help me build my studio.

As many of you know I have had studios all over the city of Boston.  This also means that I have moved around a lot over the course of my career here.

I had a studio I loved in Hyde Park for many years, a condo I bought into.  The developer was, well let’s just say he was motivated by something other than trying to create artist housing.  People had varying or non-existent commitments to contemporary art practice, so there was no dialogue about art, a hallmark of a thriving artist community. The 10+ year lawsuit took its toll on friendships, my art work and my health and once I was able to get the building’s roof fixed (it used to rain in my studio) I decided to sell the place and move.

I have a great realtor (thanks Larry) who was patient, smart, and knew what I needed was a place for a studio.  He helpded me find a house in Dedham that belonged to a retired stonemason. It wasn’t in the best shape (neither am I) but the structure was good and more importantly, it had an above grade basement with a carport that I could turn into a studio.

project

The goal here is to turn the existing basement and carport into a working artist’s studio with appropriate lighting, access, storage, and ventillation. To do this:

1. Upgrade electrical system to code and replace electrical panel to allow for the use of a variety of power tools.
2. Remove and replace inefficient (and gigantic) oil-heat furnace and water heater with wall mounted gas models that with smaller footprints and better venting to increase working space.
3. Remove walls, reinforce joists, remove existing chimney, and regonfigure space to create work areas and storage.
4. Close off, insulate, and build out existing carport to increase working space.

The wonderful Patti Seitz of Seitz Architects has drawn up plans for how this could work.  I’m deeply grateful to her for her excellent work and patience. (Click to enlarge)

The orange outline is what I am currently using for my studio.  The blue is the space that will be available after the project is complete. (Click to enlarge)

funding

I am funding this studio rebuild through my work.  The current politcal and financial moments in this country make accessing credit markets and capital extremely difficult for artists-even those of us with tenured professorships.  The lenders I have approached have advised that waiting for credit markets to relax may result in more favorable lending terms.  Unfortunately, I need a place to work now.

I created a new print project based on the image below.  There are risographic prints, silkscreens, etchings and dye sublimation prints available. These can be viewed here.

There are 12 x 12 inch water colors that are available at a reduced price. These can be viewed here.

I am still represented by Samsøñ.  If you are interested in paintings or sculptures, you can connect with them here.  They know that I am trying to build a studio and would love to work with you if you are interested in purchasing works.

Lastly, I know that my work is not everyone’s cup of tea and I understand that.  So if want to help me raise the funds for my studio and don’t want any of my work, you can connect with me on Venmo and send funds directly.

Feel free to share this link with anyone you think would be interested.  Thanks so much.

I lucked out with Elaine Reichek.  She was in town for the unveiling of her facade project for the Gardner Museum.  It’s taken from the correspondence between Mrs. G. and Henry James.  David and his crew had just finished installing the piece when I met up with Elaine for a talk in the Living Room.  Elaine was the first artist to have a residency at the Gardner Museum and she produced the award winning MADAM I’M ADAM CD rom project there.  I still use the piece with my students. It gives another kind of vision to Mrs. G’s house and sort of foretells the augmented reality phase that is happening now.

Elaine is one of my favorite artists.  I first heard of her when one of my professors showed her work in class.  It was White Brushstroke 1 from the exhibition AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD.  In my education, it may have been the first time that I saw a white artist directly and confidently address their position of whiteness.  I was kind of stunned by the way she just turned all these things that were in the air at that time (appropriation, feminism, craft, text, history, erasure, race, and whiteness) on their heads with a cross stitch.  I remember going to the MFA Bookstore and looking for all the texts I could find about her.

In 2004, I was working as Dean at Skowhegan and Elaine was one of the resident faculty.  We became very close that summer and we talked a great deal not just about art, but about life, loss and the importance of community.

It was rainy when we started talking, but it cleared up.  Elaine and I talk about a lot.  We discuss her move to Harlem, gentrification, whiteness, maintaining a career, loss, love, food, galleries, and a bunch of other stuff, if you can believe it.  We went way over time, but it was worth it.  I love Elaine a great deal.  At this time in my own studio practice when things are so unstable and fraught, it was good to sit down with a friend who knows how to keep the work moving forward.

In this talk, Jen and I discuss the trajectory of her career, but we also get into teaching, learning, the role of advanced degree study and the importance creating the space for conversation.

I hope you enjoy this show.

PS: It must be said that Jen makes the best barbecue sauces I’ve ever had.  Ever.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has a Living Room and because they are and have been so wonderful to me and many other artists, they have allowed me to come to Mrs. G’s house, and sit in the Living Room and have talks with artists and whomever else. This is my first one and I could not have chosen a better guest.

Maggie (not Margaret) is an artist, educator, curator, and the mind behind, within and through out Alter Projects.  Because of her varied ways of participating in the art world I thought it would be great to talk to her about publics, practices, Boston, and engagement.

I loved talking to her.  She’s brilliant.  I hope you enjoy the show.

Memorial to the Murdered Members of the Reichstag. Designed by Dieter Appelt, Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Justus Müller and Christian Zwirner.

At this fraught time, it is imperative that we demand accountability and action from our elected leaders.  We have to tell them what we expect of them and then hold them to those expectations.  Petitions are great, but they overshadow the important work of individual citizens going directly to their elected representatives for a redress of grievances. I don’t think acts of individual kindness to strangers are bad, either.  But what we face is not interpersonal, it’s systemic and it must be fought systemically.

I understand not wanting to put a target on oneself when an autocrat is coming to power but I think of it this way: I am a queer, black academic.  I’m already targeted by the incoming regime, so what the hell?  I am certainly not going to go out like a punk-ass.

So I sent this letter today.  If you are in a red state or a blue state, I think you need to do the same.  It is completely acceptable to demand-from GOP and Dems alike-to know how they are going to defend the Constitution that they have sworn to uphold. 

It really does matter what side you are on.  It really does matter what elected officials do and it matters if you remain silent while they are doing it.  It really does matter if you see what is going on and you are too paralyzed to act. It really does matter if you choose to only do things that make you feel better personally. It really does matter if you put yourself at risk to help others. 

It really does matter.

Dear Senators,
Thank you for your consistent and principled advocacy for the people of Massachusetts.

We face a real danger in the policies and people being brought out of the shadows and into a Trump administration. In addition to the know-nothing character of the President-Elect, our nation is being turned over to avowed white supremacists, Islamophobes, education privatizers, climate change deniers, and anti-choice zealots. I do not exaggerate when I tell you of the fear I feel for my safety as a gay black American. Hate crimes against African-Americans tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center have spiked since the election. The vile, racist underbelly of the nation has been legitimized. It is becoming abundantly clear that the President-Elect is ginning up hatred on social media and undermining our elections and our civil discourse.

This is not ordinary. And as President Obama said, “Where does this stop?” I think mass violence against immigrants, people of color, or Muslims is no longer a specter on the horizon. We are one tweet away from pogroms.

Senators, what are you and other elected officials across the political spectrum going to do to prevent the rise of fascism in our beloved country? I need to know that you will not participate in support or normalizing a Trumpist agenda that will enshrine the values of the KKK in the White House and our courts.

Over 2 million more Americans voted for Secretary Clinton and the President-Elect called all these people “illegal voters.” This is disgusting, dangerous, dishonest and a direct attack on our voting rights. Trump is not to be supported or coddled. He must not be allowed to use the Federal government for the enrichment of his family’s fortune. He must reveal his financial and political ties to foreign actors. His appointments must be held to scrutiny and denied and their racist, misogynistic views must be repudiated at every level. And principled statesfolk like yourselves must fight against this hateful agenda and ensure that Americans who will be the victims of racist Trump supporters are protected.

Senators, my great-grandfather was murdered by the Klan in Georgia. I know of what I speak and I know the things of which these people are capable. I do not think them minor and I do not dismiss them. No one in government should collaborate with them. They do not respond to reason since they do not believe in our shared humanity. The only thing they can be is defeated.

Please, let me know your strategy for resisting and opposing the Trumpist agenda that is so clearly anathema to our beloved nation.

Steve Locke
Dedham, MA

There is a Reading Room set up at Gallery Kayafas as part of my exhibition there called Family Pictures.  These are the texts I included:

• Going to Meet the Man (stories) by James Baldwin
• Without Sanctuary Lynching Photography in America by James Allen, essays by Hilton Als, John Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, and James Allen
• Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror by Equal Justice Initiative
• Black Misery by Langston Hughes
• The Inaugural Address 2009 by Barack Obama
• Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon
• Blacks by Gwendolyn Brooks
• Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester by Joseph Boskin
• Riot and Remembrance: America’s Worst Race Riot and Its Legacy by James S. Hirsch
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
• Violence: Six Sideways Reflections by Slavoj Žižek
• The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
• Free at Last a History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the Struggle by Sara Bullard
• On Lynchings by Ida B. Wells-Barnett
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Other Works by Frederick Douglass

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

― David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

I went on sabbatical from teaching last year.  It is one of those things that I, a kid of working class parents, could never have imagined when I was younger.  My institution was enabling me to take time off of work to concentrate on my artistic development: to focus on my studio the way that I have been focusing on my students for the past 10 years.  This time was hard-won, precious; I was looking forward to it opening up for me.  I had a lot of ideas that had filled my sketchbooks over the years.  Also, I had bookcases of texts I could not wait to devour.  It had been so long since I had read anything for pleasure that I was so looking forward to curling up with all the tomes I had purchased that work had not allowed me to open.  Also, to be perfectly honest, I was looking forward to getting some rest. I purchased supplies and cleared out my studio for new work.  I was cleaned up my email and finished up school business.  I got to a clutter-free place. I thought about what was possible.

Then Michael Brown happened.

While news channels kept showing his body lying in the street for hours, we found out about John H. Crawford, III.

And then Ezell Ford.  And Dante Parker.  And Kajieme Powell. And more.  And many many more.  Some captured on grainy videos replayed on television and computer screens.

In the studio, I could not stop thinking about this march of death.  I painted almost every day and every day this parade of killing was on my television and radio and social media feed.  Some of the dead became Twitter hashtags.  Some did not, but they were no less dead.  Why were some people more important than others? Did people think that some victims more worthy than others of not being shot to death, or tased to death, or run over, or beaten to death by the state?

I was on sabbatical, so I had time.  Time to create turned into time to think, and I couldn’t think about anything other than death.  I didn’t read any books.  I painted.

It’s summer (July) and I’m at dinner with a friend.  We are in a bistro with televisions all over the restaurant and bar area.  The sound is turned down but the images light the entire place.   The video of Officer Daniel Pantaleo choking Eric Garner to death plays over and over and over interrupted by silent talking heads. I wonder why are they playing this man’s murder on a loop? People eat, drink, laugh, walk about.  No one seems to notice that a man is being choked to death on television.  Then I start to think that maybe they do see it and that it doesn’t bother them.  This is the first time I witness this, a black person being killed on television.  It will not be the last time.  Not by any measure.

Over my sabbatical, I saw black people shot to death on television over and over again.  News casters and pundits would issue verbal warnings that the video they were about the show might upset “sensitive viewers.”  I tried to imagine a viewer that would not be upset about seeing someone like Walter Scott shot to death (or that his killer, Officer Michael Slager, planted evidence on his corpse).  Or Tamir Rice shot to death.  I wondered why they didn’t tell the “insensitive viewers” to hook up their DVRs.  When I am in the studio, the images fill my head.  I jump when cars backfire.

People would ask me how my sabbatical was going.  They would say, “I hope you are taking advantage of this time.”  They would tell me how lucky I was.  They would ask, “What is going on in the studio?”  I wondered if they watched the news at all.  I wondered if they know about what was happening.  I wondered how they felt about these images of black people being killed.  I posted about this stuff on social media and it is ignored for the most part. Ferguson explodes.  Social media does not believe in tears.

In August of 2015, two reporters are shot to death on live television.  Alison Parker and Adam Ward are killed by Vester Lee Flanagan, II who uploaded video of the killing.  Immediately, the television station, Facebook, and social media erupted with requests for people not to view of share the video.  To maintain the dignity of the victims, people begged the public not to watch the video.  It would be a terrible thing to give the killer satisfaction by watching his murder of the reporters.  

I started to wonder why black people are allowed to be killed on television.  Why we are allowed to be transformed from subjects to objects and left to lie in streets for hours?  Why is it acceptable to show the end of a black life on television?

I start to make work about the historical impulse to turn violence against black people into part of our domestic structures.  People continue to ask me what I am doing on sabbatical.  I think of Neruda and I wish I knew Spanish.  (“Come and see the blood in the streets….”)  I decide to make a work about all the people killed by police while I was on sabbatical.  I dismiss the idea as too agitprop.  I talk to my mentors.  One of them tells me, “Make the work.  Just don’t trivialize.”  I work with a friend and learn how to make photographs.  It is harder than I imagined.  I finish this work, Family Pictures.  I show it to a few people.  I finish my sabbatical.  I’ve read few books.  I feel surrounded by ghosts.

I paint everything I think.  I don’t trivialize.  I realize a new body of paintings.  My studio is full of murderers, victims, liars, and accusers.

I return to work in September.  In December, I am hassled and detained by the police.  I write about the experience.  Many people want me to come and talk to groups to “raise awareness.”  I decline.  They seem to be unaware that I would not like to relive a traumatic experience in public. People want me to talk about #BlackLivesMatter.  The college intervenes and offers to handle calls from the press for me. I am deeply grateful because this allows me to concentrate on my job and my students.  CNN calls the college and wants to know if I will talk to Don Lemon.  I tell the school that I will talk to anyone at CNN except Don Lemon.  I get hate mail.

Lisa Tung, the Exhibitions Director asks me what work I want to put in the biennial faculty show.  I decide to make the piece I thought was agitprop.  I call Carmine, my neon fabricator.  I want him to make a sign that mimics police light that spells out what is lost.  I research police killings of unarmed civilians.  I find no central list.  I find no definitive list.  I find no government statistics.  I rely on activist sources.  I rely on The Guardian.  I make the piece.  It is installed in the faculty show.  It is a timeline.  It’s information: date, name, gender, city, state, method of killing. I title it A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed by Police or who Died in Police Custody During my Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2014-2015. 

There are 262 names.

A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans who were Killed by Police or who Died in Police Custody During my Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design 2014-2015

People tell me that they look at the wall and measure time.  They lift up the people in their thoughts.  Someone asks me if I am influenced by Maya Lin.  I answer that we all are influenced by Maya Lin.

Someone will say their names and they will be alive a little longer.

Prototype of button designed by Girl Scout Troop leader Shelly Kang of St. Louis Park, MN

I received a lot of feedback in response to “I Fit the Description…”  Some of the emails and comments were down right hateful, so much so that I shut down comments on my blog and I stopped reading the emails.  When I finally went back to them, I found a couple from a Girl Scout Troop leader in Minnesota. She wrote to me about what she was doing with her girls in response to the blog post.  I want to share part of our conversation.

 Dear Mr. Locke,

My name is Shelly Kang, and I’m a stay at home mom to two girls, and a troop leader for fourth grade Girl Scouts in St. Louis Park, MN (an inner-ring suburb to Minneapolis).  

I know you’re busy. I know that you probably don’t want your life defined by the moment you described in your “I Fit The Description…” blog post. I’m sorry to pester you. I e-mailed you a couple weeks ago about my plans to share your story with my Girl Scout troop, and I wanted to follow up with you to ask once again if we could chat with you briefly – or if maybe you’d be willing to talk to me briefly about what we’re doing. 

My girls were very moved by your story – it would have been hard not to be moved. We are going ahead with our project to make pin-on buttons to share our feelings in the anti-racism/hating/discrimination movement. Your story resonated so deeply with us – and the part of your story about your friend in the red coat – it connected in my brain with the Fred Rogers quote about looking for the helpers during a crisis. In case you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about – here’s a link to the video of it – yes, I’m talking about Mr. Rogers from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

I think we’re going to use a phrase something like “I’ll be your Neighbor”  on the buttons, but I think it would also be really cool to put the image of a red coat in the background to symbolize the power of a witness who cares. I had the girls brainstorm ideas of what to put on the buttons, and they came up with lots of enthusiastic ideas, but their innocent brains settled on the unfortunate phrase “Everyone Matters” which is such a simple, loving thought when taken literally, but in the context of the backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement, it is the opposite of what we intend to convey – and we really are hoping to simply share our love and acceptance for everyone rather than to focus on the hateful reasons for the need for our support.

I’m really hoping that we can make a small-to-medium to even semi-large or really big movement out of this, at least in our region. I want to help my girls get enough people wearing our buttons that we can get some press coverage and spread it even farther. If that happens, I would want to feel free to talk about how your story inspired us, and how we came to the meaning of the red coat as a symbol…but I would want to make sure you’re ok with that first before we start printing up a bunch of pins and potentially holding you up as an icon. I’m visualizing how cool it would be to live in a community where you can’t walk down the street or go to the grocery store without seeing our pins on strangers and knowing that we are all working together to share light and love. Our cookie-selling season is coming up in February, and it will be a great opportunity for us to hand out the pins and explain our project while we are selling cookies too.

If you’re not comfortable with it, we can just leave off the red coat and use some other symbol or no symbol at all. But it would be really cool if you’d be willing to connect with us briefly and give us a thumbs-up, thumbs down on our idea. We’re going to work on some version of this for the next few months at least no matter what, but your participation would add fuel to our spark.

Whether I hear back from you or not, I want you to know that you have made a huge difference, that your words were incredibly powerful, that I am grateful to you for inspiring me to take a step beyond just feeling awful about the situation and trying to actually do something.

Thank you.
Shelly Kang

P.S. Oh! and yes, you have my permission to post about our exchange on your blog. You can use my name too – just if you notice any bad grammar or misspellings please feel free to correct them for me! And if I said anything that you found offensive, please let me know personally rather than share it with the world. Anything I said wrong would have been through ignorance and I’m always willing to learn!

Dear Ms. Kang,

Thank you very much for writing to me.  I have to apologize for not responding sooner.  I was very focused on getting my students through the end of the semester.  In addition, I started to receive a lot of email and not all of it was as supportive and positive as your message from you on behalf of your charges.  The hostility in some of those messages made me decide to take a break from email.  While that was the right choice for me emotionally, I regret that it caused a delay in my responding to you and your Girl Scout Troop.

As I am writing this, a grand jury in Ohio has refused to indict anyone in the murder of Tamir Rice, a 12-year old African-American boy.  Officer Timothy Loehmann shot him within 2 seconds of rolling up on him in a park where he was playing with a toy gun.  Some of your girls may be close to his age.  

On 23 December, a grand jury in Texas refused to indict anyone in the death of Sandra Bland, an African-American woman who was forcibly dragged from her car and arrested by Officer Brian Encinia for refusing to put out her cigarette during a traffic stop. She was found dead in her cell days later.  Officials in Texas say she committed suicide.

I bring these current developments up because I want your girls to know something that is very hard to hear.  What happened to me happens to black people every day in this country.  Every. Single. Day.  I think it is vitally important to talk with your girls about why this is the case and how did it get this way.  When and how did it become acceptable to treat people like criminals based on the color of their skin? 

In Akron, Ohio, not far from where Tamir Rice was killed, a white man named Daniel Kovacevic walks around the neighborhood with an assault weapon on his back in full view of everyone.  Ohio, like Minnesota, is an “open carry” state. When a local barber shop owner called the police to tell them that a man was walking through the neighborhood with a loaded rifle, he was told by the police that Mr. Kovacevic had the right to carry his weapon.  Deone Slater, the man who called the police, is African-American.  He said, “They (the police) were more concerned about me than him, as if I were the threat,” he added. “It it were me with a gun, they would have shut the whole block down.” http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2015/12/ohio_barber_confronts_white_man_walking_around_black_neighborhoods_carrying.html

With the demonstrations happening as we speak at Mall of America, there are people in your area who are thinking deeply about the way policing happens in this country.  I am certain that there are people in Minneapolis who could have written “I Fit the Description….”  

I think the girls need to ask themselves and others why white people are not treated the same way by the police.

Ask the girls if they think the police are there to help them.  Ask if they feel like they could go to the police if there was a problem, or if they were frightened.

Ask them if they are afraid of the police.  Ask them if they think they, like Tamir Rice, could be killed by the police.

This is the crux of the difference.

I understand the girls’ wish to put positive and inclusive messages in the world.  They are mature enough to know that public messages are received in a larger context.  If I yell, “Who wants ice cream!” it could be a great invitation to enjoy something great.  But if I do that in a context where everyone is allergic to milk. it can come across as self-serving and insensitive.  As an artist, I think about audiences a lot.  I think not just about what I want to say, but I also have to think about what other people might hear.  That’s what makes a public message harder to manage that a message among a group of friends who all share the same ideas.  Of course, “everyone matters,” but to say that in this moment, in this larger context when black people are being targeted and sometimes killed, it will be seen as insensitive and careless at best; the exact opposite of how you and your girls feel about the situation at hand.

It is very uncomfortable and scary to talk about race.  That is just fine. Nothing worth doing is ever easy and nothing important can be solved in a day.  It can make people feel guilty and scared of saying the wrong thing and can sometimes feel terribly personal and shameful.  But this is the work we have to do together if we are going to change anything at all in this nation.  But please know that you are part of a great legacy. Women have long been on the front lines of the fight for racial justice in America.  Some of them you all may know like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King.  I would encourage your girls to learn about one of my heroines when I was growing up.  Her name is Viola Liuzzo.  She was part of the march in Selma and she gave her life in the fight for racial justice.  There are many people like her, white and black, who did the right thing against incredible odds and at great personal risk.  

I do not know much about Girl Scouts, but I do know that Citizenship is an core value.  I think your girls have a tremendous opportunity to talk and demonstrate what real citizenship is in this crucial time in our country.  Issues of racial justice are at the core of what it means to be a good citizen.  Badges like Public Policy, Truth Seeking, Behind the Ballot, Inside Government, Independence, Celebrating Community, My Best Self, Making Friends, and Giving Back sound to me like they are deeply linked to the work of justice that has long been the purview of women from the Progressive Era (when the Girl Scouts were born) until now.  

I am deeply touched by the girls’ desire to do something public about the issue of racial profiling I wrote about in “I Fit the Description..”  I think their heartfelt and beautiful gesture must be honored and supported. I love this idea of them watching out for each other and watching out for the people in the community who may be marginalized or under threat, like the lady in the red coat did for me.  I remain deeply grateful that she stood by me.  Standing by each other is something that we can all do.

If you are not familiar with it, I would like to recommend the work of Jane Elliott (http://www.janeelliott.com).  Her very simple “Brown Eyes/Blue Eyes” exercise is enlightening and powerful.

I will reach out to Trina Jackson, the “woman in the red coat.”  Also, thanks for allowing me to put our exchange on my blog.  You have said nothing at all to offend me and even if you had, I think we need to risk offending each other if we are going to get to any kind of deeper shared understanding. 

Ms. Kang, you are very fortunate to be working with young people with such a deep sense of justice and empathy.  I am humbled by their simple desire to do public good.  They are amazing and I am so glad that the world will be in the hands of such capable citizens. 

Thank you for standing by me,

Steve

My conversation with Ms. Kang continues.  Recently, Trina talked to the troop via video conference.  She’s going to send me some buttons when they are finished.  Also, I let her know that my blog was open to her and her girls if they wanted to talk about their experiences in working on this project.  

Steve Locke:  It’s weird because I knew you before I knew your work.  I think it was the Yvonne Rainer/Rob Storr talk at BU.  Afterwards, we had a bit of a chat and you told me about PAPER MONUMENT and were sweet enough to send me a few copies.  Because of that, I thought of you as a critical theory/curatorial sort of voice and this got reinforced when we (with Colleen Asper, Anoka Faruqee, and William Villalongo) worked together to create a response to the writings of Ken Johnson in the NYTimes.  I didn’t really know you as a painter until your project at the deCordova Biennial with Roger White.  It was the first time I had seen one of the Plaid Paintings, and I really responded to the way it troubled some of the ideas I had been fed about abstract painting.  I spent a lot of time looking at them and I could not figure out why they were so potent and so humble at the same time.  They so clearly have these references to domestic things like tablecloths (that I think you enhance by not stretching them).  They made me think of Mary Heilman where she presents something that looks mundane and upon closer inspection reveals a complex series of decisions that belie the simplicity of the image.  Like her paintings, the Plaids are really matter-of-fact and directly painted.  They don’t have pretensions of heroism and they completely deflate the notion of the “gestalt” that is promised by Modernist Painting and in this way, they start to tackle some of the same territory as Daniel Buren and some of the other artists in the Supports-Surfaces movement in France.  But beyond that moment, your paintings seem to be engaged in something much deeper that the limits of what painting can (and should) do.   I see tensions through out the work (between public/private; modest/heroic; institutional/domestic).  Which leads me to my question:

How does conflict play a role in what appears to be a deeply structured practice in the Plaid Paintings and how does it inform decisions about the separate but conjoined acts of painting and presentation?

—

Dear Steve,

Plaid , 2013, acrylic on acrylic, 18×42″

I’m so glad you asked me about conflict in the plaids! At first I thought that was too strong a word, but you’re right—the various conflicts are always there.

Of course, on a material level, plaid emphasizes the interweaving of warp and weft, so in this sense it renders the conflict/confluence of fabric visible. This is what I like when I’m looking at plaid. Each area of color emerges from the two sets of threads, so any adjacent hues are of necessity half the same, half different. For me these ramifications are interesting precisely because the rule is always explicit, inherent in how the thing is made. The pattern is surprising because it’s programmatic. I read every plaid I see like a vernacular Sol Lewitt.

And then with plaid there are also the interwoven, so to speak, questions of location and origin, issues that occur in a different register of intersections and coordinates but are nevertheless part of the pattern. Many fabrics reference or evoke a place, but plaid is a special case because it is both so ubiquitous and so commonly associated with “clans”—Scottish and otherwise. Actually, the earliest known examples of plaid are from 3500 BC China, but most people think plaid comes from Scotland, so that is itself notable. And the Scottish part of the story is complex because the famous tartans came to prominence as part of a (ongoing) conflict with England. At the same time, plaid became such a dispersed pattern because the Scots helped colonize India, where cotton “madras” plaids were produced for distribution throughout the British Empire. And of course now we live in a global age where plaids are made all over the world and depending on the context and their particular qualities can reference a range of places from honky-tonks, country clubs, grunge shows, the board room—all the while signaling membership in various groups. So the conflicts present at that level interest me, too.

I came to Ohio from Ecuador at the age of six, so for me the encounter with plaids is bound up with realizing that it was a prep-school pattern. My mom taught second grade at a private school, and I got a lot of my clothes from the thrift store there, and I think it was a way for me to fit in with kids that had a lot more money than we did. Wearing the right plaids was a way to disguise both my foreignness and my relative poverty, so I experience plaid as a kind of camouflage as well, a way of fitting in. So the pattern carries all those conflicts for me—of class, of origin, of group membership and assimilation—in a personal way. Over the years, I amassed a large collection of plaid shirts, not all of them preppy, and came to wear the pattern almost exclusively, but for decades I was merely a collector, a self-taught connoisseur.

Plaid, 2015, acrylic on acrylic, 18×24″

So I had developed a certain expertise, but deciding to paint plaids didn’t come from that so much as from sensing that there was a kind of joke in it, something funny about a painting that was plainly abstract but also utterly recognizable. I enjoy the category conflict. Somehow if you go from monochrome to stripe to plaid, even though the progression makes perfect sense, plaid ends up being the punch line. If you picture it with Buren, and he is repeatedly calling “scene!” with the stripes, I just keep going, adding stripes in the other direction.

And I like how the representation doesn’t function in a straightforward way either: Is this plaid a painting of something? An artist I admire—someone who doesn’t associate his name with his work—was making copies of Mondrian paintings, after Mondrian had died, arguing that paintings of abstractions could not be abstractions themselves. As I did with Buren’s stripes, I wanted to take that question to a different place, to where it involved patterns from everyday life.

In terms of re-presentation, which was how my teacher Robert Reed insisted on pronouncing it, the painted plaid is a peculiar thing. You can’t actually interweave the paint, so the illusion of plaid involves layering, transparency, and a lot of guile in the way you choose and organize the colors. Eliminating the canvas was essential to this, as it allowed the paint itself to serve as its own ground. All my plaids are acrylic on acrylic, and I paint them front to back, so the first things I put down are the first things you see, and the gesso goes on last, to seal the back. (The reverse of conventional painting, where you cover things up as you go and the last thing you put down sits on top.) There is a tricky illusionistic system at play, but it’s also just overlapping paint presented directly, where everything I do is evident in the final result. So here too, in the process, I think the conflict between illusion and material reality is the generative force.

Works in the studio of Dushko Petrovich

Born in Quito, Ecuador, Dushko Petrovich is a New York-based artist, writer, editor, and teacher. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his M.F.A. from Boston University before going on to serve as the Starr Scholar (Artist-in-Residence) at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He has exhibited his work at venues including the deCordova Museum, in Boston; Rachel Uffner Gallery, in New York; the Suburban, in Chicago; and the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen.

His writing has appeared in periodicals such as Bookforum, Slate, Modern Painters, and the Boston Globe, among others. Petrovich is a co-founder of Paper Monument, where he has co-edited many publications, including I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette and Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. He also chaired the n+1 Foundation’s board of directors from 2013 to 2015. Petrovich currently teaches at Boston University, RISD, NYU, and Yale. His newest project, Adjunct Commuter Weekly, made its debut at ICA Boston in July.

This is the fourth in a new series of poems commissioned for Art and Everything After.  Poets chose from a selection of new drawings called companions. Ms. Andersen selected the image above.  A full size image can be seen here.

HELL

The little screens glow inside the rural house.
I know the place in inches: My head’s a dead knock,
my feet are filled with water, my daughter has been
waking me for weeks. It seems that all the gods

are fast asleep. She’s heard that the world
will soon be underwater, so I tell her how to shoot
and how to swim. She grins. Swedish experts
describe hell as permanent separation from God—

as a concept, it seemed acceptable. But now the nights
are past collapse. The house is full of electric blood.
The milk cools, untouched. Another child has woken up.
I’m surrounded by wireless fire. The loneliness is hell.

Kirsten Andersen is the author of Family Court, a chapbook collection of poems forthcoming from Q Avenue Press. Named the 2014 Anthony Hecht Scholar at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Kirsten has received fellowships from Stanford University and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  She is a National Poetry Series finalist whose work appears most recently in Canteen Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Tin House, and The Believer. She received her MFA from New York University.