On the relationship between love and labor

When did you start working as an artist full-time? And how did you come to design in particular?

Art has always been a key part of how I experience and process life, but it was never seen as a possible or legitimate career. I was raised with the scarcity trauma of most immigrant families, and art was not an established path towards getting healthcare.

I studied international relations in undergrad. My thesis was on the fragmentation of the armed opposition in Syria. I was mapping what some have called the “10,000” armies of the opposition, and it didn’t make sense for it to be in text. Text is very linear. It’s from point A to point B. But when it comes to really complex systems like armed opposition groups, that doesn’t make sense as a medium for communication. All over Syria, across the different provinces, within every individual city, there were people individually deciding to take up arms, people who had been a dentist the day before and were now joining a militia. It was impossible for text to capture the complex simultaneousness of what was happening.

Moreover, I had started to become aware of how deeply text locks people out. I often say that text is elitist, which I say with love as someone who deeply loves reading. My mother’s second language is English. She has incredible professional English, but it doesn’t come naturally. It’s very laborious for her to read. My grandmother didn’t learn how to read and write until she was an adult. I feel like I’ve always been around people who are extraordinarily intelligent, but locked out of this fortress of information barricaded within text. So I turned to design.

When done right, information design allows us to access crucial understanding of the world around us. Design has the ability to communicate information intuitively, no matter if English is someone’s first or second language. It gives you multiple entryways, pathways, and options for communication.

As I started working more and more with design, it became very clear to me that what I loved so deeply about the complexities of the information I was working with was the people and their stories. I was deeply concerned with representing their humanity on the page.

For The Warehouse, I wanted every single page to feel very human. I wanted to make the book out of materials and mediums that were available inside prison walls. I wanted the reader to always remember that within these pages of statistics are tons and tons of individual stories, individual lives, individual tragedies, individual victories.

I handpainted most of the book. I chose to draw thousands of individual silhouettes for one of the infographics, rather than copy and pasting. There is a thread throughout my body of work that relates deeply to labor. I have been thinking recently about how there is no love without labor, how I use labor as a way to offer care and respect, to hold vigil over the stories I am trying to tell.

I sometimes have the urge to ask viewers if they think it was worth it, if the amount of labor I put into a piece shows. But this is besides the point. The means are the ends, especially because the means take up the bulk of life. If you don’t value the process, the thousands of moments within the making, then the whole thing doesn’t make sense.

I feel like the body is so central to your work, whether it’s the freedom of the body in BANG or the confinement of the body in The Warehouse. Is that something you’re consciously thinking about in your art making? What do you think has drawn you to that theme throughout your work?

I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at five years old, and I always knew that my life would be shaped by my body’s condition. I remember learning that because I was diagnosed with diabetes, I would live on average 15 years shorter than the average person without diabetes. I think when you learn something like that at a young age, you start to understand the fallibility of the body, the fragileness of the body, but also the humility of what it means to exist in this fragile meat case that we’re all walking around in. I think when you understand how much of your existence is tied to your body, it grounds you in a place of empathy for other humans.

I truly believe that my experience as an insulin-dependent diabetic is part of how I came to the work of prison abolition. I have experienced many times in my life where my wellbeing, whether I lived or died, relied entirely on a decision made by a faceless businessman that cared more about his bottom line than me. It is one thing to understand power and injustice intellectually, another thing entirely to understand it with your body.

How do you start a project? Why do you decide to work on certain things? Where do those ideas come from?

There is a moment when I am struck so strongly with this sheer conviction that something should exist. It happened with BANG and it also happened with The Warehouse. I remember the exact moment I identified the issue that The Warehouse is designed to address—-the lack of visibility of the impact of incarceration, the way that prisons disappear people, as Angela Davis says. I felt so strongly that visual arts could help chip away at this boundary, especially given that it’s so hard to get photographs in and out of prison. The moment is characterized by this feeling of overwhelming conviction and gut instinct. If I was more Homeric, I’d probably say that this is the moment when the muse thwacks you on the head. But really, it’s simply this deep feeling that I can make something that needs to exist in the world.

Your work is incredibly interdisciplinary. It spans writing, visual art, and activism. How do these different disciplines talk to each other? And does working across forms create friction? Or do they feed each other, or both?

I was quite anxious growing up that I didn’t have a specific calling. I was decent at math, but I wasn’t a math superstar. I loved learning many subjects, and could never tell you what I wanted to do with my life. I envied the certainty of having a singular superpower, the certainty of knowing your purpose and destiny.

Since then, I’ve come to the belief that we are all very good at many different things, and in fact our brains need many different forms of stimulation in order for us to function as people. Capitalism very much has instilled this idea that we are supposed to have only one thing and excel in it, because it makes organizing the workforce easier. But that is a delusion entirely divorced from the wide breadth of any individual.

There is a deep tension between our inherent urge to categorize people for efficiency and the effort or patience needed to understand each individual’s multitudes and complexities.

I’ve always been drawn to making things with my hands, and yet there are some stories that call me to text as a medium for their telling. I now feel very lucky for the wide range of tools availed by being multidisciplinary in my search to tell each story well. More than anything, living multidisciplinary is characterized by organizing different parts of your brain. It is both an essential need and an opportunity.

There’s a lot of beautiful monotony in producing visual art. I love the devotion of it. I also feel very lucky for the space it offers to ferment my writing in the depths of my mind. During that time I can almost feel the words of that morning’s writing percolating and fermenting in the back of my head. It’s like switching to a different language.

What has working inside prisons taught you about creativity?

I think that if anything, prison shows the extremes of humans. You see people at their best and at their worst inside the impossible conditions of prison: whether they are incarcerated there, employed there, or visiting.

Prisons are a font for creativity and art. My co-author James [Kilgore] wrote four out of his six books in prison, two of them with little golf pencils. It is so clear to me that the desire to create is innate in every single person.

People often say, “well, you can’t eat a painting.” Perhaps this is true, but it is still essential sustenance for survival. Art offers clarity. It offers insight. It offers the ability to transmute the confounding chaos that is life in this world.

Can you walk me through your day-to-day process?

I will start by saying that leading up to The Warehouse exhibition, there is no routine left. The routine has gone out the window. Except for sleeping. Sleeping is my one stalwart place of sanctity. I try to go to bed by 11 and I usually wake up around 7 or 7:30. I have never been someone who can survive on four hours of sleep—-those people baffle me.

When I’m not in such a big push, I try to write for two hours when I first wake up. For the exhibition, I’ve had to let that go temporarily, because when the writing ferments and stays with me throughout the day, it costs a lot of energy. But now that the art in the exhibition is up, I’m slowly returning to the routine.

The creative cycles are not dependable. I’ll have these bursts of intense activity where I have these massive deadlines and am painting and painting—-and then nothing. So for example, for this exhibition, I was painting about 10 hours a day for 3 months straight, which was a bit too much. Now, I’m trying to relearn how to rest. It has never come easily to me, but especially after a long push, it requires a lot of patient retraining of my mind and body. And I give myself a gold star every day that I eat lunch.

How do you avoid burnout?

The world we live in is designed to burn us out. Burnout is by no means a personal failure. Burnout is a natural response to the crisis and chaos we live in, in a society where our needs as human beings are not being served or prioritized.

Sometimes all I can do to care for myself is avoid the small stressors. I try to respect myself as a fragile little being. I find that large crowds and loud noises burn me out quite a lot. When I’m in times of deep intense work, I avoid subways as much as possible, and try my hardest to stay within walking distance of home. I try to sleep as much as I can. I’ve learned to take naps, which was also not something that came naturally to me, but even just putting a pillow over my head for 10 minutes after a long call is revolutionary.

For me, burnout has a lot to do with two factors. One, overwhelm-—a ton of demands that exceed your comfort level. Two, a lack of clarity. So, when you can’t get rid of one, perhaps you can try to decrease the other. What has been so incredible about this exhibition is how much clarity I have in why I’m doing this and what I’m doing it for. And because of that, even though the demands have been very high, I think that that has helped to lighten the load.

What are the rewards of your creative work?

Perhaps some people imagine that I am just crying into my paintbrush all day long. And true, it’s very heavy work. It often feels like I spend my days gazing into the abyss. But the people that I find next to me in this abyss are incredible. They know the abyss, and they still choose everyday to hope and try to dismantle it. I encounter so much joy and inspiration and wonder every day.

There is a radical honesty to this work. It acknowledges that the world is a very difficult and often cruel place. And it still takes it on.

Perhaps this isn’t the question that you asked, but this is how I’ll answer it. What keeps me going is knowing that I get to die. This sounds so dark, but it’s not. We’re very small. The pyramids of Giza were written about in the Quran because they are that old. We are so small in this long, long line of humans and all we have to do is try our hardest, make some friends, see some sunsets, and then we die. We don’t have to fix everything. We just have to try.