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︎ February 12th, 2019

When Westerners Debate Mexican Art

In the Spring 2020 semester, I took a class on Mexican muralism. A large portion of the required reading was written by James Oles, who I quickly took issue with. The following are my notes on his essay, Rivera’s Trophy, which is about the 20th century Mexican artist Diego Rivera. I also compare these observations to a recent exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art, titled, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art. 

The first thing that stands out in Oles’ writing on Mexican art is the title of the exhibition discussed, Picasso & Rivera: Conversations Across Time. By introducing Picasso first, I interpret this as an indication that the exhibition organizers view Rivera as a secondary figure. James Oles, who writes in the exhibition catalogue, immediately reinforces this dynamic. As early as the third paragraph, Oles describes Picasso as the 'movie star', and condescendingly refers to Rivera as the forgotten 'fan' (183). This exemplifies a trend in 21st-century American interpretations of leftist modern Mexican artists: outsiders like Connecticut-born James Oles position themselves as 'experts' in Mexican art, yet build their careers by discrediting revolutionary Latinx artists. Shockingly, Oles refers to Rivera’s colleague David Alfaro Siquieros as 'anti-Semitic' (150), but offers no context to back up such a caustic accusation. I tried to find additional sources on the internet that could further explain why Oles would label Siquerios, one of Mexico's most famous artists, as a bigot, but my search inquiry did not reveal evidence to support Oles’ random claim.

What comes to my mind next is an unrelated example that describes a similar issue: during the New York City teachers' strike of 1968, the predominantly white teachers union spread rumors that Black liberatory educators were anti-Semitic by taking a few narrowly selected quotes out of context, and building a toxic narrative around them. The union’s sole motive was to undermine public support for Black-led ‘community control’ over schools in the highly segregated neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville. Whether discussing art history or teacher unions, this behavior is common in American educational spaces. This strategy uses inflammatory rhetoric to gaslight Black and brown people, without supplying concrete justifications for the virulent claims made by whites.

The trend was also perpetuated in a ︎lecture I went to at the Whitney Museum on February 9th about their new exhibition on Mexican muralism. The lecturer, Ayanna Dozier, a brilliant Black scholar, led the discussion. While I appreciate her analysis that connects working class struggle to the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, the overall tone of the talk was ‘on brand’ for a white institution like The Whitney. Dozier mispronounced Rivera’s name as ‘Riviera’ throughout her entire sermon, yet felt qualified in her assertion that Rivera was an illegitimate communist, using this so-called ‘hypocrisy’ as a foothold to belittle the muralist movement. 



The lecture audience at The Whitney was mostly white and old, despite the fact the subject was exclusively about Black and brown radical artists. The irony was not lost on me, considering Dozier’s central critique of the Mexican muralist movment was about lack of accessibility for working-class and minority populations. I noticed The Whitney’s audience did not relate to the struggles named in this lecture: many people rudely walked out of the talk before it finished, leaving behind empty seats that could have better served a different demographic, if only The Whitney made real efforts to be an inclusive space.

Instead, this museum seems to perpetuate the same class and racial divisions it pretends to critique through its ‘progressive’ curatorial programing. The Whitney supports the optics of having a young Black scholar, Dozier, lead their official communication about an exhibition on Mexican art, despite this woman openly admiting that Mexican art is not her field of expertise. And it showed. I felt like this was an insult to Dozier, who specializes in Black muralists in America---not Mexican art, the topic she was tasked to explain in front of a bland, unmoved audience. The best parts of her lecture were the moments when she interweaved her own specific passions and artistic focus, which served a strong conclusion to an otherwise rocky lecture. Another observation to note about The Whitney: the leading curators of this exhibition are all white Americans. 


Back to James Oles: this writer’s characterization of Rivera as an opportunistic cafe-dwelling womanizer who was completely disinterested in the Mexican revolution and only pretended to care years later, is highly dubious. I found a missing piece in Oles’ claim that Rivera was not an authentic supporter of the Mexican Revolution. Oles briefly mentions another cubist painting by Rivera, a portrait of Martín Luis Guzmán (156). It turns out Rivera painted this portrait the same year he created Zapatista Landscape; the painting that Oles scrutinizes for signs of Rivera’s insincerity. Oles conveniently leaves out the fact that Martín Luis Guzmán was one of the finest Mexican writers of the revolution. Guzmán also served as an officer under the legendary general Pancho Villa. Oles fails to identify Guzmán’s proximity to the Mexican revolution, perhaps for the sake of preserving his argument about Rivera’s fake patriotism. Again, both paintings were created in 1915. This proves that Rivera was thinking extensively about the Mexican revolution, and had deep sympathy for the peasant fighters. What most likely happened was that Rivera, feeling alienated and misunderstood in Paris, was appealing to his eurocentric audience through his painting Zapatista Landscape. Even Oles admits, ‘few in Paris would have known or cared about...’ Emiliano Zapata (160). In order to communicate with an indifferent audience that had only a superficial understanding of Mexico, Rivera conceded by white-washing his portrait of Zapata. Now, what we see unfold approximately a hundred years later, is the aftermath of Rivera’s compromise.

︎ Works Cited

Oles, James. “Rivera's Trophy.” Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time, Prestel Publishing, 2016, pp. 146–161.


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︎ October 4th, 2019

Notes on Jeffrey Deitch

Yesterday in my class History of the Art Market, gallerist Jeffrey Deitch came to speak to us. Deitch is a Harvard business school graduate who runs his own gallery and had a controversial stint as the director of MOCA Los Angeles. After class ended and Deitch had left, students shared their feedback and impressions of our guest. Some of it was positive, but I found the critical commentary to be more interesting and memorable. One woman suggested that Deitch seemed bitter. This analysis was proposed because Deitch strongly expressed dissatisfaction with how the media portrayed him. The gallerist spoke about feeling demonized by his dissenters.

We also reflected on Deitch’s use of the word ‘radical’ as a way to self-reference. One of my colleagues observed that while Deitch may be radical in the way he cultivates spectacle and in pushing the boundaries of a white-cube aesthetic, ultimately Deitch is not radical in any economic sense. Another colleague explained that Deitch further reinforces a hierarchical system of power over artists by perpetuating artists’ dependency on the business sector’s wealth and influence. It was helpful for me to hear these sentiments, and they contextualized what I was trying to express in my writing assignment for this week’s class, summarized here:


“In an interview we read about Jeffrey Deitch, the gallerist is celebratory of capitalism in a way that is becoming increasingly obsolete. He applaudes consumer culture with praise for the massive ‘engagement’ of Nasty Gal, a now-bankrupt clothing company that used a fast-fashion model of production widely considered heinous for its brutal wastefulness of ecological resources. If he had instead referenced Depop, which is a company popularizing a decentralized way of disseminating sustainable fashion through the reselling of secondhand goods, I would be more inclined to trust Deitch’s sensibility. Moving on to discuss his curatorial projects in Los Angeles, Deitch credits Latinx communities for their role in street art and acknowledges ‘cholo graffiti.’ However, he doesn’t question his role as a capitalist praising his artists’ college degrees. I have respect and admiration for Deitch, but I find myself disappointed that the image he promotes of street art still prioritizes educated, white, male artists like Shepard Fairey. This image compliments the authority of the institution as a gatekeeper.” 

The exhibition I am referencing is Art in the Streets, curated by Deitch in 2011. Images of the show can be found ︎here.

In my writing for class I go on to say,

“Considering our climate crisis and intensifying financial corruption in both politics and the private sector (this line now blurred by neoliberalism), there are legitimate reasons to disdain commercial art enterprises. These reasons should not be discredited as intellectualized pretensions. Art practices that are not self-aware of their carbon footprints or the ethics of their labor will have to adapt to preserve their public approval, as a greater shift toward sustainability occurs in our western consciousness.”

In readings assigned for next week, several texts reinforce both my criticisms and those of my peers regarding Deitch and the role he plays in the art market. Similarly to what my confrères suggested in class, Pierre Bourdieu writes in an excerpt from The Production of Belief about an ‘ideology of creation.’ An ideology of creation focuses on the creator of a cultural object. This is achieved by emphasizing the charisma of the artist as well as the artist’s ability to convince the culture industry that she is not interested in profit derived from the commodification of her artwork. This ideology of creation conceals the fact that the cultural businessman (Jeffrey Deitch) exploits the labor of the artist by trading in the ‘sacred.’ At the same time, the cultural businessman consecrates an artwork by putting it on the market, by exhibiting it, publishing or staging it. The culture industry supports the belief that the businessman ‘discovers’ art. In this economy, artwork is thought of as a natural resource until the businessman legitimizes the artwork by turning it into a product. The art trader is the agent who gives the work commercial value by bringing it into a market; he is the representative, the ‘impresario’, who defends artists because he allegedly loves art for art’s sake. Conveniently, he is also the person who proclaims the value of the artist he defends by investing his prestige in the artist’s cause, acting as a ‘symbolic banker’ who offers as security all the symbolic capital he has accumulated (which he risks losing if he backs a ‘loser’). This creates a ‘charismatic’ ideology: cultural businessmen are believed to be inspired talent-spotters who, guided by their ‘disinterested’ passion for a work of art, have ‘made’ the artist, or have helped her make herself, by encouraging her in difficult moments with the faith they have in her, guiding her with their advice and freeing her from material worries. Bourdieu also exposes the field of production, defined as a system of ‘objective’ relations between agents or institutions. He notes that these relationships form struggles for monopoly over the power to consecrate (and continuously generate) the value of artwork.

What does Bourdieu mean by the ‘sacred’ quality of an art object? In an excerpt from Collectors and Collecting, writer Russell Belk explains that in relation to the art market, something sacred is simply extraordinary and capable of generating reverence. Belk observes that people singularize items by enshrining them in collections. These objects are removed from their sphere of product exchange and their ordinary utilitarian roles, for example by transitioning an item from the status of a ‘used’ object to an ‘antique’ item. Collectors remove an item from the undifferentiated realm of commodity, and ritually transform it into a personally and socially significant object. According to Belk, bringing together items under the rubric of a collection is the most basic transformation into an art object. Under this organization, the sacrality of each artwork is enhanced. The container (Belk suggests a box, envelope, or room) chosen to house the collection defines a sacred space. Conventions for handling the collection and schedules for interacting with it provide the ritual grounding for maintaining its sacredness. 

Theodor Adorno also writes about the culture industry (he coined the term), in an excerpt from Culture Industry Reconsidered. Adorno describes culture industry as a paradox. The culture industry standardizes art objects by rationalizing distribution techniques, employing machines, and separating laborers from the means of production. Yet, at the same time, each product retains a sense of individuality that is interpreted as a sanctuary from ‘immediacy’ and life. According to Adorno, culture is industrialized not only in a commercial sense. Even when nothing is being manufactured, like in conceptual art, industrial forms of organization such as office work are often still present. Interestingly, Adorno believes that the more dehumanized these processes become, the more we see emerge “great personalities...and heart-throbs” (31). Essentially, the culture industry is the collision of individualistic residues (and adapted romanticism) with streamlined hardness (and precision). 

Adorno points out that critics of the culture industry are often accused of taking refuge in arrogant esoterica and ‘snobbism.’ I also hint at this in my writing assignment, as quoted above. Like Adorno, I understand that “to take the culture industry as seriously as its unquestioned role demands, means to take it seriously critically, and not to cower in the face of its monopolistic character.” This is why I repudiated Deitch in my writing assignment. However, I must admit to also being a devil’s advocate. Ironically, both Adorno’s Culture Industry Reconsidered and Bourdieu’s The Production of Belief veer into obscure, academic jargon. Maybe the texts are just bad German and French translations. Nevertheless, the ideas these academics propose are difficult to access because their language structure is dense and unwieldy. It is precisely this style of rhetoric that the culture industry takes great satisfaction in rejecting.

While I recognize there are problems with exploitation in the art world, I don’t agree with these writers’ blanketed disdain for the market in its current form. I don’t take issue with agents of the art market building up the value of artwork through ‘incessant, innumerable’ struggles to establish authority through social credit (Bourdieu, 43). The art world may be chastised for being too focused on social relations, but even Bourdieu admits that maintaining a place in its center requires real passion and effort. Call me old fashioned, but I firmly support the integrity of a strong, determined work ethic. Yes, art world social exhanges are adversely impacted by freeloaders, capitalists, and generational wealth, but this does not negate the existence of a wide base of support from everyday working people who find meaning and empowerment in this field. We must acknowledge that this other mindset still exists amidst all the problems in the culture industry, and make an effort to support it.

Belk writes critically about rituals, as if they are all infected by capitalist bastardization. I disagree. Rituals also form a pure and inventive realm of child’s play, long before children develop the participatory skills to be economic consumers. Also, most Indigenous cultures view rituals as essential ceremonies that develop a strong sense of purpose, personal responsibility, and maturity. Rituals in the art world could be something positive. Unfortunately, Belk’s analysis does not leave much room to imagine what this might look like. Also contrary to Belk, I believe collecting can serve the ‘noble’ purpose of generating knowledge, preserving fragile art, and providing those who see it with a richer sense of history. The questions that should be asked, in my opinion, are: whose social credit is being authorized? and whose history is being enriched? This is where the art world could benefit from greater diversity.

I admitted to my peers that I enjoyed hearing about Deitch’s recollections of ︎Nest, the exhibition he created with Dan Colen and Dash Snow in 2007. This was considered problematic by my colleagues who viewed Nest as a glorification of vandalism by privileged rich kids with drug problems. Deitch was criticized for both exploiting and consecrating Nest as a work of art. As further evidence, one of my colleagues cited how Deitch did not mention that Dash Snow died of a heroin overdose a few years after the exhibition. (Although later I checked Deitch’s website where the gallerist writes, “One of the saddest chapters in the history of the gallery took place two years after the Nest, when we heard of Dash Snow’s death at the age of twenty-seven.”)

In truth, Dash Snow reminds me of a more recent artist who tragically died of a drug-related accident: Lil Peep. 


Lil Peep (left) and Dash Snow (right)

Both artists are known for their charisma and reckless dedication to dark, yet honest, self-expression. While I recognize and agree that these figures had immense privilege that propped up their respective careers, I am reluctant to ascribe scorn to individuals for being products of systemic issues surrounding wealth stratification and the way America treats addicts. I’m glad that artists like Dash and Peep achieved recognition for their determination to be unapologetically flawed creatives.

Overall, my attitude toward these people is a mixture of admiration and ambivalence. I love strong personalities, debauchery, challenging the status quo... and art that is made with this energy. However, I also see that as a culture there is an urgency to move away from hedonism. When it comes to people like Jeffrey Deitch and the types of artists he supports, I don’t feel threatened by their success. But more importantly, I do not wish to emulate it either. In a general sense I may think to myself, “if they can do it, I can too” with ‘it’ being the ability to define success on one’s own terms, and being rewarded for taking risks as a defiant and authentic person.

What I have learned about the world is that people enjoy having leaders to look to for guidance. The pejorative side of this social phenomenon focuses on toxic celebrities, authoritarians who abuse their power, and people who reinforce white supremacist hegemony. What this reveals is that there are problems with not only the system, but with the people who the system prioritizes. If the art market made real efforts to be inclusive of Indigenous tribes, LGBTQIA voices, people of color, immigrants, poor people, uneducated people, disabled people, anarchists, women... there wouldn’t be such a pervasive concern with competition or elitism. The classic European academics we read in class make some valid points about corruption in the market, and Deitch’s curatorial contributions have been novel, but the way forward should involve new voices. All this to say, I agree with my colleagues who criticize Deitch. I just think that instead of tearing down what has already been done, we can build upon it to reimagine a truly egalitarian future.

In excerpts from Conspicuous Consumption and Pecuniary Canons of Taste, economist Thorstein Veblen attributes all consumption in excess (of the minimum required for subsistence) to the ‘leisure class.’ How we think about consumption conforms to traditions established by this leisure class. The leisure class has been one of the greatest influences on our society, and any departure from this standard is regarded as “an aberrant form, sure to be eliminated…in the course of development.” As a result, the aim of innovation is the higher efficiency of improved and more elaborate products for personal comfort and well-being. Evidences of wealth become honorific in a way that implies that failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.

Artists have the ability to challenge this dogma. I have wondered extensively about how I can personally make a difference. This has led me to take a vow of poverty, which I aim to uphold until I die. What that looks like at every stage of my life will depend on my immediate circumstances (and of course my earning potential), but the overall aim is to assert fully that there is dignity in poverty. The concept of living intentionally in poverty is not new (I look to Saint Teresa de Avila for guidance), but in our current times its radicality seems forgotten; to some it’s even repulsive. Despite society’s efforts to criminalize, ridicule, and oppress the poor, I believe in honoring poverty for its simplicity and resourcefulness. Poverty, redefined as a conscious choice, has the potential to be meditative and to transcend pressures to conform to the consumer drive of the leisure class. In an equitable world without stigma, conscious poverty could even liberate ‘innovation’ from our obsession with maximum ‘efficiency’ and personal comfort (and redirect ‘innovation’ toward environmental stewardship, community networks, and spiritual cleansing). As an artist, every day I challenge myself to imagine a world where this mindset is entirely possible and appealing. 


︎ Works Cited

Hulst, Titia. (2017). “A History of the Western Art Market A Sourcebook of Writings on Artists, Dealers, and Markets.”

Adorno W., Theodor. Excerpt from “Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1975), in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 2001). 

Bourdieu, Pierre. Excerpts from “The Production of Belief” (1980), in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. R. Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

Veblen, Thorstein. Excerpts from “Conspicuous Consumption” and “Pecuniary Canons of Taste,” in The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York and London: Macmillan, 1912). 


Belk W., Russell. Excerpt from “Collectors and Collecting” (1988), in Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. S. M. Pearce (London: Routledge, 1994). 


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︎ Summer 2019

Correspondence

It is a blessing to have a thoughtful, intelligent network of support for my phrenic explorations. Recently, my friend Will sent me a rousing response to my essay A Heroic Defense for Metaphor. I am excited about the example Will gives of radical science fiction writers concealing their politics through fantasy and hypothetical thinking. I am doing the same in art. 

When it comes to my paintings, I don’t intentionally hide my political messaging --- however, I admit these undercurrents are not always obvious either. Ultimately, I believe the times we live in are distressing and call for brave and bold intervention. What becomes the most obscured in my paintings is my personal narrative. This feels appropriate to me. With time and distance from my experiences, internal space opened up where my history found room to grow into a deep, sensitive mythology. As a result, I focus more on my moods and feelings, rather than specific events. I have come to terms with the realization that sometimes my work is not meant to be seen by anyone but myself, or only my most trusted friends.

I too am invested in studying the “mechanics of metaphor,” due to my own desire to create artwork that challenges, but does not confuse the viewer. My paintings are not always successful in meeting this objective. Unfortunately, I am also familiar with that ‘tenuous’ feeling that appears when one cannot make sense of the visual elements of a pictoral surface. Sometimes it takes me a long time to even understand my own decisions within a painting. But if I stick with the work for long enough, I find the reward is often great: suddenly breaking through my own emotional barriers, some conclusion will emerge that guides me to a new way of thinking, or reminds me of an important forgotten truth.

Thank you, Will, for connecting my interest in metaphors to your own knowledge of literature and science, and for your words:

“I agree wholeheartedly with the thesis that art must encourage reflection, and should challenge the audience to connect what they see to the world. I'm not used to reading or writing essays that connect their themes so deeply to the author, but it's refreshing to read.

Your framing of metaphor-as-concealment makes sense to me. Your essay focused on how metaphor conceals you as the artist, but metaphor-as-concealment also has an invaluable political purpose--masking ideas that challenge the audience. I'm thinking of the 50's-70's science fiction that I grew up with, here. Those authors were intensely critical of the Cold War and Vietnam War, but they set their stories in far-off galaxies to avoid censorship and to play with dangerous ideas more freely. By writing parables for real-world horrors, they created a new space where the reader can reflect ---but only if they engage with the metaphor and actively make connections.

I spent a lot of this essay wondering how much Sontag influenced art theory, and to what extent Against Interpretation is in the mainstream among art scholars. Your essay title implies that it is. But Sontag's concept of modernity as the loss of sensory experience is very bizarre to me in 2019, and restricting art to pure feeling seems like an intellectual dead end. Again, maybe my expectations for art scholars are too high.

The backlash against postmodernist critical theory in the 90's is an interesting comparison. Postmodern literature and metafiction were taking over, subverting the realist tradition and injecting academic debates about the nature of literature into their work. David Foster Wallace and other critics argued that so many levels of self-reference were just creating ironic detachment; he wanted a return to single-level metaphors and ideas that challenge the reader instead of confusing them. But no one was even considering Sontag's position, that art should aspire to being pure sensation without introspection. Maybe this is another example of the gulf between painting and literature?

(Tangential computer science history below this line... )

In the 80's, artificial intelligence research was all about metaphor. One of the main schools of thought ("neats") held that cognition arose from some combination of symbol manipulation, metaphor, and self-reference; to them even consciousness is our minds making metaphors about themselves.

The AI field abandoned this direction in the 90's due to the lack of concrete progress. A few heroes like Douglas Hofstadter still carry the torch, exiled to the cognitive science department. His book Godel, Escher, Bach is a deep exploration of metaphor and self-reference in math and philosophy, and it's one of the reasons I became interested in programming.

Hofstadter also writes about the mechanics of metaphors --- how closely the behaviors of the metaphorical object match the real object, how well you can reason about the real object using the metaphor. Cf. this bit from Feynman:

[T]he mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball) --- disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t true for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, ‘False!’

I can see some parallels to your essay --- you have to choose how to conceal yourself without obscuring the theme or making the metaphor ring false. This is often where I struggle with visual art --- I'm not familiar with the symbolic language, so metaphors that are obvious to the trained eye feel tenuous to me.

You might enjoy Godel, Escher, Bach. I have a copy somewhere.”


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︎ Spring 2019

A Heroic Defense for Metaphor



Metaphor is the least direct way of speaking about anything: it is a mask, a shield, a distraction. But as many artists and writers know, when a metaphor is crafted with eloquence, it can say things beyond what would be understood if the narrator just gave you the facts. Metaphor allows me to define a place for myself in art and point to what is important to me. I am using metaphor to create distance, while retaining a sense of privacy. There are things I want to express without having to explicitly state them. I can speak about what makes me feel the most vulnerable, while preserving my dignity in the face of a largely apathetic and unsentimental society. My self-preservation is greatly tied to the way I move forward in my life committed to the belief that parts of me are not meant for others.


In her book Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag rejects metaphor in an attempt to resolve major issues with making and looking at art. Rather than accomplish such an ambitious task, she further complicates the relationship between object and meaning in a way that makes it clear that interpretation through metaphor is a valid thought-process.

Her issues with interpretation, and metaphor, stem from the following discourse. She believes, “the modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one” (6). Sontag claims that interpretation of art both impoverishes and depletes the world “in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’” (7). What exactly is being eradicated from the world by metaphor? According to Sontag, we lose sensory experience by focusing on the intellect. She ruminates:

“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life --- its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness --- conjoin to dull our sensory faculties... what is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art… our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all” (14).

Clearly our capitalist industrial world is defined by excess, and the correlation between overproduction and desensitization has been long established by sociologists and neuroscientists. Within this context, artwork that is purely experiential also runs the risk of becoming lost amongst the ‘material plenitude’ of advertisement and entertainment. There is nothing radical about artwork that convinces us to not think, or communicate, but to just feel. This is the crux connecting escapism to privilege in philosophy, as well as a stark attempt to convince us of a specific attitude.

Sontag prizes the visibility of an art object as some false mastery over storytelling, stylization and generalization. She tells us “it is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else” (10). Sontag harbors a deep concern that ideas replace each other, which unfortunately leads to a highly frugal and condescending mindset.

Instead, I align with the way William Kentridge thinks of art as “floating connections rather than a programmed, clear progression” that forms a “multi-layered highway of consciousness, where one lane has one thought but driving up behind and overtaking it is a completely different thought” (Kentridge, 9). It makes more sense to imagine thoughts as vehicles of varying speeds all journeying together along a path wide enough to accommodate movement and flow. This analogy is much more relatable than the destructive imperialist anxiety that has driven Sontag to the belief interpretation destroys experience. On Sontag’s highway, only one vehicle has right of way: a party bus convinced that the only way forward is by crashing into every other moving object in its path. This reminds me of the scarcity model followed by most developed economies, that ultimately amounts to nothing more than a state-sanctioned myth. Simply, Susan Sontag does not accurately describe the sophisticated brain, which is capable of receiving stimulation while simultaneously inferring its function.

Sontag castigates the notion of art having usefulness “for such purposes as inquiring into the history of ideas, diagnosing contemporary culture, or creating social solidarity” because truth and morality are values that should exist outside of art (Sontag, 21-22). She compartmentalizes extensively, stating “justification is an operation of the mind which can be performed only when we consider one part of the world in relation to another --- not when we consider all there is” (28). But what happens when we really consider all there is? Surely the Thought Hierarchy that Sontag believes in is not inclusive. Metaphors will continue to exist and help people, regardless of how severely Sontag sensationalizes their dishonesty. Ultimately, objects of the mind that humans both understand and enjoy feel real like any sensation. To create a realm of criticism that negates the validity of an entire figure of speech is both absurd and sabotages history.

There are some moments where Sontag and I arrive to similar conclusions, but through entirely different means. For example, I also believe art “returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched” (28). However, unlike Sontag, I don’t attribute this phenomenon to the fact an artwork is vibrant or magical. Rather than seeing artwork as a place of detachment from the world, I see it as an opportunity for connectivity. External reflection of one’s life does not lead to alienation from our experience and humanity, but rather creates space for our minds to establish command over our internal perceptions. It is not the inanimate art object that enhances our consciousness, but our own minds resounding off the face of an image that compels us to bring our own thinking forward. In an excerpt from a book by Arthur I. Miller that compares Einstein to Picasso, this writer explains,

“In network thinking, concepts from apparently disparate disciplines are combined via the proper choice of mental image or metaphor. The intense desire to solve a problem can produce stresses that in turn cause associations that are not possible in conscious thought --- in other words, the mind brings up the problem in all sorts of unlikely contexts… Finding the proper image or metaphor… catalyzes the illumination, the nascent moment of creativity” (Miller, 5).

This astounding self-generating mental activity is precisely what Susan Sontag resists through her lament that metaphor “makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories” (Sontag, 10).

Even Sontag admits, “in some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past” but she does not specify what distinguishes this context from “other cultural contexts” in which interpretation “is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling” (7). Her inability to differentiate where an ‘appropriate’ context starts and ends is a result of her flawed attempt to position artwork as an outsider against “discursive or scientific knowledge” --- e.g., philosophy, sociology, psychology, history” (21). Art that I identify with binds itself to these disciplines and makes tangible observations about both the internal and external world, with the intention of making sense of (and not contribute to) life’s dulling experiences.

Art is the substrate that invigorates the enzyme of life. It is intrinsically, indispensably useful. To denounce the usefulness of this purpose is to rob art of its true power to activate and unite. As Kentridge wisely states, “life becomes a collection of contradictory elements. Somehow this state is not so terrible or strange when it’s named, fixed through its representation” (Kentridge, 10). Good art describes something about the world, otherwise, the ‘experience’ of viewing it is meaningless.

In the spring of 2019, I invented a group of works titled What Happened?, consisting of four paintings of horses. This subject: horses, great beasts of burden, animals that facilitated the development of mankind, is a conduit for my relationship to the female body. We’ve carried the weight of other, our bodies have been taxed, and our spirits are pushed to breaking point… yet we still stand.

My horses are front and center, rearing themselves up towards the imagined sky. By bucking, we project power and tenacity despite being gripped by fear. Though the same image is repeated across all four paintings, each one is unique, painted using different methods and materials that reflect the work’s story, meaning or feeling. My pride and pain, the emotional content, is in every stroke, every scratch and energetic scribble. It is in the coarse paint rubbed into the flat white canvas, transforming and claiming the picture plane. It is in the synchronistic color palettes I use across each piece.

I refuse to tokenize my experiences and I am searching for creative ways to retain control over my narrative. As a result, my paintings only offer mediated access into my emotional state and personal history. I could make a painting that directly points to how alcoholism has destroyed parts of myself that were of value, but instead I made a painting that references a clay horse sculpted by Leonardo da Vinci that was destroyed by drunk French soldiers invading Milan in 1499 (Shlain, 81). Yes, the horse painting inspired by this historical anecdote is a metaphor. Reflecting on it helped me make peace with my own traumatic past, without having to expose the tortured features of my life to an audience hungry for voyeurism.

By painting myself as the horse, I feel comfortable running the image through different scenarios, attaching personal memories to the piece. I return to specific violences I’ve experienced, depict these as acts of mutilation, and establish a new, necessary connection to personal triumph.

If we can see how a single portrait of someone never fully captures the life nor individuality of that person, it is reasonable to expect that a painting depicting a single moment, either abstractly or representationally, can never fully express all of that moment’s implications. I avoid making paintings that succumb to the failure of trying to explain too much. I find more meaning and honesty in mystery. The details of what I’ve lived through truly do not matter --- what has stayed with me is the shock, fear, and disgust I felt coming to terms with the barbaric force of man. There is not a single moment I can point to that best sums up this sentiment. Instead, I aim to create an image that is strange, cumulative, and reflexive.

︎ Works Cited
Arthur I. Miller. “Creativity in Art and Science: A Model for Creativity.” In Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc. Basic Books, 2001.

Susan Sontag. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Picador, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. pp, 3-14.

Susan Sontag. “On Style.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Picador, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. pp. 15-36.

“William Kentridge in conversation with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev.” In pressPLAY: contemporary artists in conversation. Phaidon, 2005.

Shlain, Leonard. Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light. HarperCollins, 2007



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︎ Spring 2019

Artist Statement: Spring 2019 BFA Application

Life is about adaptation to constant change: events, people, and revelations. In order to respond, art must evolve: expand and contract. I have my own ideas and I must produce them relentlessly without stop, even if society does not sustain an artist’s way of living. Maybe the world never allowed for this existence. I am here in this beautiful place, divine in creation, but still feel my heart collapsing.

I am trying to find my own language: I tell myself to be me---I must be me. I am currently in the fight of my life to be me. With every painting I pray that God nurtures my spirit, protects my gifts, and helps me grow. I have been called to question, search, struggle, make mistakes, and gain speed in this mission to figure out exactly who I’m meant to be. I am coming to my purpose.

Artists react to and guide society. I make art about disorganized truths and organized lies. For me, the most passionate things are the most honest. I believe in the power of dreams, trauma, love, joy, fear, pain, and seduction. My main concern lies in these raw human experiences, but I also investigate broad ideologies and power dynamics within politics, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and science. While still important, these social structures seem less credible and I often address them with satire and skepticism, as demonstrated by the text sewn into my collage Blanket. I relate to the natural world, and spend a lot of time thinking about animals, climate change, childhood, and violence. Sourcing my references from all these different spheres allows me to tell stories, express pain, confront fear, imagine a better world, explore new possibilities, make friends, and connect with my family.

I have many opinions about how the world can be better, but for now I am focused on being my best possible version. I am determined to treat myself the way I want to be treated.  I will wholeheartedly give to each painting everything that I desire for it to give back to me. My paintings return to me what has been mine all along. But I can’t take all the credit, of course. Thank God for generous people who have shared with me ideas crucial to my growth. With the fullness of gratitude, my art will always belong to others as much as it belongs to me. I am grateful for influences like my favorite artists: Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Tiepolo, Francis Bacon, Goya, Géricault, Yun Hyong-Keun, Ross Bleckner, David Salle, Anselm Kiefer, Kevin Beasley, Stephen Hannock, Miró, Frederic Edwin Church, Ana Mendieta, Peter Doig, George Bellows, Winslow Homer, Turner, William Blake, Sondra Perry, Monet, Vermeer, Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

This is a sporadic, time-traveling list. This list makes sporadic, time-traveling paintings. I believe the past should be built up, not destroyed. My fantasy is that my paintings are emanate and retentive. For example, in Woman Bathing I use sundry paint handling and collage to make Tiepolo, Matisse, and my body collide in a fictitious narrative inspired by John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. I love painting with oil because of the range of possibilities that this medium allows. It seduces me with its gifts of limitless color and soft malleability. Paint is hypersensitive to my touch and emotion. This material offers a duality: it easily defers to my will, but when I let go of control, it also surprises and delights me. Paint directly corresponds to the way I approach life and how life approaches me --- there are moments of rigidity and fortitude; yet life is pliant and constantly inventing itself. I negotiate these turns in my day-to-day, then process them at the easel.

I try not to create obscure images, and I often include a “key” to unlocking my paintings directly on the canvas, like in my work Tenochtitlán. This move is for my imagined audience; firstly, myself. I have too often stood alone at a painting in a museum or gallery, and felt incredibly isolated by the experience. I like to read about artists, but sometimes I find myself stuck on the same page for hours. I hope I never make someone feel like they want to throw a book against a wall. Instead, my paintings invite exploration. They are proposals, not demands. I emphasize this approach with my use of repetition, drama, and humor. I hope these elements convey my personality. My paintings are as much about who I have been as they are about who I aim to be. They are my way of throwing myself forward into an uncertain future. I make space to include my aspirational whims. Some of my paintings fail to meet my expectations; this happens when the appearance of the work is unable to cohere with its content, or when I cannot make sense of my own purpose. However, these efforts are still valid and informative. Ultimately, each painting is a playscape revealing a chimera that only I can conceive, but I hope that others too will believe in.

A position in the BFA is imperative to my growth as an artist, something I’m committed to pursuing for the rest of my life. I admire that the art department places great emphasis on philosophy, an attribute that my friend Nailah pointed out to me in one of our lengthy talks about Hunter College. From a personal assessment of my development, I realize that I lack adequate comprehension of the philosophical and conceptual frameworks that inform art theory. I hope to dive into this material, and gain knowledge that pairs well with my interests in art history and technique. With this intellectual support, I can better direct my work toward The Goal: creating powerful, honest, lasting, emotive images. I anticipate that the BFA will help me refine my focus and figure out what is the most relevant content and subject for my artistic explorations. My mind wanders endlessly, and for this reason so do my interests in art-making. I would like to learn how to make the most of my adventurous spirit, but also avoid drifting off into generalizations about myself and society.

What I would contribute to the BFA is a strong, determined work ethic. I take my education seriously, and I would encourage my peers to do the same. I am motivated to help others, and readily show support for emerging artists’ crazy, experimental dreams. I believe in having fun and getting through the day with laughter and kindness. I feel sensitive to the needs of others, and strive to maintain a compassionate attitude toward most situations. As a student, I am opinionated, observant, critical... but always with good intentions. I am eager to share resources and ideas. I am here to defend art, care for art, respect art, encourage art, and create great work.


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︎ Spring 2019

Artist Statement: Informal Pilot

Artists react to and guide society. I make art about disorganized truths and organized lies. For me, the most passionate things are the most honest. I believe in the power of dreams, trauma, love, joy, fear, pain, and seduction. Structures that seem less credible but still important to investigate: politics, science, technology, education, wealth, poverty, travel, immigration, exploitation, sport, leisure, commerce, history, heritage, religion, and philosophy. I relate to the natural world, and spend a lot of time thinking about animals, pregnancy, mothers, childhood, violence, disease, and climate change.

Reasons why I make art:
To tell a story
To send a message
To express pain
To confront fear
To imagine a better world
To explore new possibilities
To make friends
And sometimes I just make paintings that I believe my mom will love.

World-building and self-organization:
I must lead with art, or insecurity will compromise my judgment.

The painting has to be amusing. I have to be able to amuse myself. I am constantly coming up with puzzles, games, rituals, stories, simulations and hypotheticals. Internally, I keep a record of these initiatives. Through art I find ways to drag, or coax my imagination to finally cross over with me into adulthood.

BREAKING NEOTENY: This is a coming of age story.

A short time ago I cursed God for leaving me with so many open wounds and burdens, but now I thank God for the opportunity to be me.

I don’t feel alone anymore, and I am shocked to find that sometimes I wish to still be. Perhaps because I’m no longer afraid of isolation, of being misunderstood---of what I’ve come to realize is the inevitable. I liberated my demons and asked them to pose for me.


Methods, Influence, and Functions:
1. Cut-out
Quick repetition; assists in executing decisive compositional judgments; transcribing the outside and bringing it into the painting.
2. Collage
Corresponds with my desire to be accurate in the way I depict or reveal something. Collage conveys meaning with efficiency and economy. 
3. Objet trouvé
Objects that are found and appropriated for personal elaboration. Natural objects, not originally intended as art, but considered to have aesthetic value for the artist.
HORSE - self-portrait, organizational tool, a metaphor for the female body
LYNX - fear and play, predator and prey, captivity / freedom
FIRE - scorching anxiety
PELT - I have a personal connection to fur that crosses multiple generations of my family. Wearing fur makes me think of my grandmother and her sisters. My family talks about how these women carefully preserved their fur coats, treating them as lifelong investments. Due to this prudence, many of their garments remain in excellent condition and were passed down to my aunts and cousins. How can I contemporaneously interpret this mythology that originated deep within my ancestry? It is time to create a new legacy for fur in my family. In the only way I know how, through art.
4. Resisting the “white cube” aesthetic
The standard gallery space is too sterile to stimulate the spirit of adventure or mystery that I wish to develop in my artwork. I do not align myself with the belief that the bright, white gallery is “limitless” or an incubator for radical thinking. This place is too easily commodified by capitalist values. The space should be conducive to generating ideas, not revenue. If office cubicles could be installed where the artwork hangs, and the room still makes sense, it is far too functional in a commercial sense. I am searching for ways, both subtle and bold, transformative and rebellious, to protect my art from these lifeless interiors.
5. Ambiguous feelings
- The Drama Queen, influenced by telenovelas and mysticism
- Leaving intentions undefined, mixing sincerity with drama, embracing melodrama, expressive theatricality
- Playful and bitter, love/hate, cynical and optimistic moodiness...


Will we be remembered as the society that elevated humanity or destroyed it?



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︎ Spring 2019

On Richter

My paintings open up complicated worlds for me, stimulate meaningful conversations with God, reveal my unconscious fears and desires, and generally teach me so much about the way I perceive things.  I usually start with a general concept, and find that as the painting progresses I’ve built several layers of metaphor into it; each one steeped in rich memory and self-generated logic. I spend a lot of time thinking about each painting as I’m making it, trying to figure out why each move exists the way it does, and interpreting as I go. My paintings make a lot of sense to me. The only time I feel like a painting is bad is if I can’t make sense of what I’m doing. Don’t get me wrong, I love to explore too. I love having an uncertainty about the painting when I’m making it, because that creates an anxiety in me that pushes my hand to be more inventive and dynamic. But if I’m approaching the end of a painting, and I still don’t really know what I’m doing, I can feel it. Visually, it’s not working out. The painting is weak because it hasn’t found its purpose. The painting might need some adjustments, and I usually try my best to save the image through a process of problem solving that combines troubleshooting, risk taking, and maintenance. Sometimes I am successful, but other times I simply can’t enter the painting because something is “off” that blocks me. My own image will stand defiantly in front of me, resistant to my manipulation. In that moment, it doesn’t feel mine anymore. Call me a control freak, but once I’ve been pushed out of the painting, there’s nothing left for me to do with it.

In an 1993 interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Richter thoughtfully refers to spontaneity as “the found object, which you then accept, alter, or even destroy---but always control. The process of generating the chance event can be as planned and deliberate as you like.” I definitely use this model to sort through the carefully orchestrated “chances” that emerge in my paintings. Best case scenario, I accept the action. If not, I must alter. Eventually if these alterations do not lead to some fruition, the painting falls apart. Without intentionally trying, I have destroyed it.

But if a painting is good, I can tell stories through it for ages. I can think about it for hours-days-weeks-months-years, returning to familiar passages and then suddenly rounding an unexpected corner I discover something new that hadn’t been visible even a second before.

I don’t know how to stimulate this kind of exploration in others yet, and that is the worst thing that I confront when I show work. More than any particular thing, I really hate to hear nothingabout my work.  This means my paintings, as they stand now, are shooting blanks. In the sense that something about the work is firing off --- I’m able to both create a trigger and press it. Awesome! Then the smoke clears and it’s obvious that the reaction itself is impotent.

When fired, the blank makes a flash and an explosive sound (report), and the firearm’s action cycles from the recoil, but the wadding propelled from the barrel quickly loses kinetic energy and is incapable of inflicting any damage beyond an immediate distance…

Maybe this is why my paintings feel more like simulations than anything that’s real.
However I am really excited about my most recent finished painting, of the horse. It’s the only one that comes to mind when I read Gerhard Richter: Legacies of Painting. Wow this interview reads like a dramatic scene in a play. When the interviewer’s pressure really mounts, Richter reveals a “yearning” that I relate to deeply. When asked, “What kind of picture?” He states, “One that represents our situation more accurately, more truthfully; that has something anticipatory; something also that can be understood as a proposal, yet more than that; not didactic, not logical, but very free and effortless in its appearance, despite all the complexity.” I also am led by a faith that “something will emerge that is unknown to me, which I could not plan, which is better, cleverer, than I am, something which is also more universal.”

Another thing I don’t like is being told that I treat my paintings too preciously, which I believe is a mischaracterization that emerged quickly in my earlier, more finely crafted explorations. I’ve been finding ways to redirect this thought, into something that I align with more: I like things done in particular ways. My preferences are specific.

Critics of Richter’s work stumbled over this artist’s unapologetic oscillation between representation and abstraction. This created a lot of confusion. For example, in Legacies of Painting, Buchloh tries repeatedly to impute a cynical sense of ‘bankruptcy’ into Richters’ work. This critic pressures Richter to say that painting is invalid; that by combining both representational  and ‘self-reflexive’ elements, this artist intended to negate the power of painting through perversion. But from what Richter is really saying, (“...I know for a fact that painting is not ineffectual. I would only like it to accomplish more.”) I believe that Richter is working from a hopeful and intuitive place. Richter’s aim is to nourish each painting by giving it what it needs, without allowing the strident limitations of any ideology to diminish his spirit. This allows for a freedom of expression that is directly responsive to its own conditions, and refutes enslavement to any particular order.

My goal is to balance this expressive liberty with my highly cultivated sense of perfectionism. Not only am I very tolerant of my meticulous, tunnel-vision perfectionism, but I have fully embraced this as my approach to analysis and detail---despite abundant protest from others. My perfectionism serves me well. I know where it comes from, I know what it’s doing, and I’m getting pretty good at honing it so that I can reap all its benefits without getting too caught up. A badass conviction that I love, which describes Sue Coe’s work, appears in Dead-End Kids; Gerhard Richter’s Political Masterpiece: “Go ahead and hate it. Explain why it’s bad. It will still punch your face in.”

︎ Works Cited

“Gerhard Richter: Legacies of Painting.” Interview by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. In ArtTalk: The Early 80’s, 1988.

Gerhard Richter. “Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist.” In The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, 1993.

Peter Schjeldahl. “Dead-End Kids; Gerhard Richter’s political masterpiece.” The New Yorker, December 11, 2000.


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︎ Spring 2019

Mira Miro...

I am creating work that aspires to function in ways similar to Miró’s postcard art of the 1930s. In Jordana Mendelson’s text, “Joan Miró’s Drawing-Collage: August 8, 1933: The ‘Intellectual Obscenities’ of Postcards,” she explains that Miró’s series is “a public display of the productive use of mass culture” that “presents the viewer with a uniquely constructed world within a frame.” She believes these works are violent and playful, erotic and innocent, calculated and full of chance (25).  These three distinct dualities often appear in my own work as pillars upon which I construct self-expression. I find interesting that the Drawing-Collages are informed by Miró’s connections to the worlds of art and spectacle. Through this sensibility, questions emerge about the significance of the avant-garde’s fascination with forms of cultural production that perform the spectacle of modernity through sentimentality and nostalgia. For example, “Why bring private collections and desires out into the public, especially when the bad taste and decadence of the of the middle class kitsch characterized the objects and images from these collections” (Mendelson, 25)?  Like the Catalan avant-garde looking all around itself at the turn-of-the-century, I am invested in (my own time) taking stock of my collection of millennial ephemera.

Even though Mendelson resists a formal critique of the Drawing-Collages in favor of one that is more intimately tied to the artist’s heritage, I relate to the feeling that critic Zervos describes as “the moment when the picture attains the most intense poetic expression without the discipline of the plastic arts losing it’s privilege” (Mendelson, 26) With this mindset, I confront deficiencies in art as the medium, without sacrificing any of my love for the discipline. I enjoy creating things that are degenerative, sincere and raw, but also beautiful, youthful, and intricately familiar with our contemporary cultural climate.

I anticipate my work will be criticized in ways that relate to how Clement Greenberg dragged not only Miró’s use of unorthodox materials, but also this artist’s attachment to the decorative. According to Greenberg’s standards, the way that “Miró puts a better face on a threatening world by presenting its terrors innocently and decoratively” is a biting criticism, whereas I embrace this mode of visual softening. In my relationship to what I make, my favorite pieces are those that sustain robust introspective and world-conscious thought, despite being made with vernacular elements or superficial materials. Stickers, doodles, emojis, feathers and glitter all live comfortably among my ideas on politics and my love for history. Closely aligned is my admiration for how Miró “drew lines of contact between the poetics of taste and the politics of the avant-garde” (29).

According to the critic Gasch who Mendelson mentions, there is a divide between artists that use postcards to create cerebral sensuality, and those artists like Miró who reveal personal connections to the places and personalities in their postcard collections. This way of thinking splinters my work because I actually try to do both simultaneously: reveal my personal drives while also embracing what is referred to in the text as ‘intellectual obscenity’; that is a combination of “lofty pretensions with the most debased of materials and subject matter” (30). Here I can suggest the alternative way of interpreting intellectual obscenity---rather than thinking of this image-making as a pretension, I prefer to interpret it as a proposal.  

According to the text, the postcard “dedicates itself to the lyrical automatism of every generation… [it is] popular poetry born of chance… it is anonymous innocence. It is the marvelous in reach of the multitude (36). By this definition, all of my paintings regardless of size and dimension, are postcards. Interestingly, in order to explain the nostalgia in Miró’s Drawing-Collages, Mendelson states that it seems “as if anxiety created a fold in time whereby the gestures and images of the turn of the century overlapped with the political, economic, and artistic crises of the late 1930s” (37).  I too can sense a time-collapsing anxiety in my work, which I believe descends from sources so ubiquitous they become impalpable in the world. My art attempts to give form to these forces in order to reveal something that others can relate to.

Jordana Mendelson. “Joan Miró’s Drawing-Collage, August 8, 1933: the ‘Intellectual Obscenities’ of Postcards.” Art Journal, Spring 2004


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︎ Spring 2019

Five Artists

The exhibit I most wish to see again is the Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective shown at the Brooklyn Museum a few years ago. I am very interested in how O’Keeffe created her own definition of what it means to be an artist. She is my favorite example of a woman who blossomed with elegance, style, and grace. She gives me hope and inspiration that I too will develop an excellent mature style. I see Georgia as an artist who overcame many obstacles, including a tumultuous partnership with Stieglitz, the hyper-sexualization of her work, and the stereotypes of old age. A few months ago at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art sale, a painting by O’Keeffe went to auction that I still think about all the time. “Sky with Moon,” painted in 1966, resonates with me as a triumphant statement. This milky, pale seascape reveals the profound and stabilizing effect of strong, yet peaceful emptiness. There is nothing obstructing Georgia’s view of the horizon, and this painting joyously celebrates that. This work is a testament to O’Keeffe’s clarity of vision. The moon, drifting above a streak of rosy cloud, flickers in and out of the viewer’s perception. This clever optical trick invites the viewer to dance, in order to catch the effect of light and replay it with varying momentum. I too wish to make paintings that people can feel with their entire bodies. The fact this painting can be both dynamic and calming is exceptionally interesting to me.

When I was 20 years old, I drove 10 hours in one day to see an exhibit of Frida Kahlo’s work at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale. Frida is the most prominent example of another artist that comes from my cultural background. I am naturally eager to recognize and elevate the few Mexican female artists that are known to me. My ability to create multiple personal and ethnic connections to Frida’s art is a testament to the power of storytelling. She confirms my faith that figuration can become a vehicle for personal growth. When I first learned about Kahlo as a child, I thought she was weird. I had never seen anyone like her before, and it took me a while to make space for her in my understanding of reality. As I became more accepting of myself, I grew curious about Frida too. I studied her life with a desire to connect with her history. I eventually started thinking about personal acts of defiance. Kahlo resonates in this thread due to the poetic, masochistic, and ritualistic ways she reacted to the burdens of her world. Kahlo’s stylized depictions of pain resemble self-inflicted mortifications of the flesh. Her unique way through self portraiture reminds me of the intense, scrutinizing self-reflection that St. Teresa of Avila constantly challenged herself to confront in 16th century Spain. My middle name is Teresa, given to me in honor of my eldest aunt, who is named after my grandmother, who was named after this saint.

I like that I can apply my painting perspective to Sondra Perry’s art, despite the fact none of her work is made in a traditional medium. I mostly know Perry for her video art and installations, seen at her eponymous exhibition at Bridget Donahue in early 2018. I love how every piece is different from the rest. I anticipate she will be creating even greater, more ambitious projects now that she has expanded her access to financial resources with the 2018 Nam June Paik Award and MOCA Cleveland’s Toby Prize. The most recent work featured on Perry’s comprehensive website is a large scale print that delivers the punch of a painting, as well as a surprising optical effect. This work, titled “Typhoon Coming On,” is lenticular, meaning the image is composed of two stills. Perry’s website elaborates, “as the viewer sees the print from different angles it reveals one image, that then smoothly blends into the other.” The content of Perry’s art appeals to my political sensibilities. I also greatly appreciate that she shares so much of her work online. This is truly a generous decision on her behalf. A comparison, for example: I liked the artist Jordan Wolfson for a short time, after watching his video “Raspberry Poser” at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies. At this time, you could still access a handful of Wolfson’s video and audio works via his website. However, eventually these pieces were removed. Now it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find Wolfson’s older work on the internet. Unfortunately, there are only screenshots of these videos on his gallery’s website. My cynical perception makes me suspect that this artist’s practice subscribes to an elitist hierarchy. Perhaps he sold the videos. Ultimately, this move has diminished my desire, and has made it difficult to keep up with, Wolfson’s art-making. Contrastingly, Perry has gifted her audience with an immersive archive of material that contributes to a sense that she is truly developing her own world. I hope Sondra Perry never unlinks the videos on her website so that people like me can keep going back to look at them.

My favorite part of the Met is the Tiepolo room. I am fascinated by the idea that the small sketches and studies displayed in this room are just tiny fragments of Tiepolo’s much larger, ambitious projects. The way these materials are arranged make them look like easel paintings, but these works actually correspond to huge architectural masterpieces that Tiepolo was famous for decorating in 19th century Europe. I enjoy that Tiepolo’s work can be scaled up and down. Even in its most reductive forms, we still are able to experience the magic of this artist’s touch. I have yet to see his life-sized frescoes or decadent ceilings in Italy and Spain. I think about how most of Tiepolo’s work was received by candle light throughout his lifetime. Intuitively this has become my favorite kind of light with which to see my own paintings. Tiepolo encourages me to see past the dingy, corporate aesthetic of museums and contemporary galleries, in order to imagine a setting for painting that is much more sublime. I find myself often gravitating toward warm, glowing, radiant light. Tiepolo painted with dexterity and speed, often improvising on the final versions of his masterpieces. The way he doesn’t overwork the paint or let it build up too much is particularly appealing to my sensibility. My favorite Tiepolo paintings are buoyant and airy; created by networks of lyrical brush strokes.

There are many artists I could mention here that I love but none seem like adequate keys to unlocking my own art. I am looking for an artist that is not yet known to me. This artist has figured out how to make art that changes the world. Art that is clever and sincere. Art that cares about more than just painting. Art that understands there are forces at work in the world that would be naive to ignore. Art that weaves justice, optimism, and empathy-building into a discourse about color, light, shape, texture, and size. Art that reads the temperature and sets the tone. Art that does more than hold space. Art that offers solutions. Art that makes people think. Art that is glorified. Art that resists commodification. Art that isn’t tossed around like a trinket by the upper crust. Art that is not about sport, or leisure, but solely focused on leading the way forward. I hope that eventually I will find this artist --- maybe in a book, or at a museum, or dinner party. If not, then I will try my best to become her.


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