On not forcing it

Former bodybuilder, Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, St. Louis, MO) creates sublime sculptures and installations using paint skins and found metal. Rooted in the visual language of Abstract Expressionism, Action, and Color Field Painting, her work pushes the boundaries between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, the surreal and earthbound. Deeply influenced by Daoism and theosophic ideologies, for Yanko, the cyclic repurposing of materials alludes to the infinite possibilities for their reinterpretation. In the process of making, she becomes a conduit for renewal and regeneration.

Yanko is currently featured in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, “In Minor Keys,” curated by Koyo Kouoh and has been included in significant exhibitions at the Albertina Modern (2024); Brooklyn Museum (2022; 2024); CFHill (2022); Parrish Art Museum (2022); Rubell Museum (2021), where she was the 2021-2022 Artist in Residence and first sculptor to hold the residency; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019). Her work is held in numerous public and private collections across the U.S., Europe, and South America.

Your materials–metal, paint skins–carry a lot of physical weight and force. What does strength mean to you?

Something I’ve always found powerful is courageousness, trust, and audacity. And I think that strength is actually fluidity. My background is in Daoism, so I’m always surrendering to materiality and allowing it to direct me.

How do you know when something is worth surrendering to versus resisting?

If it’s just not clicking. It’s like when you’re on a first date with someone and you’re like, “This is just not it.” I try to not push things too far. I’m very quick with knowing if things are synchronizing or not.

In a previous interview you said your philosophy is to flirt with life.

It’s just about a certain kind of playfulness. We’re here to experience both good and bad, so I try to keep a childlike attitude, where everything is experimental. Even when things don’t go the way they’re supposed to, or I’m in a really challenging place, I know I’m learning.

What is the most vulnerable part about becoming an artist?

That’s a loaded question. The most vulnerable part is having to find trust in myself and the universe–especially when what I’m doing is taking me off the beaten path and I’m literally digging through junkyards. It’s like, how do you get there?

As an artist, you’re always on your own path, so you’re the only one who knows what the vision is, how things are weaving together. And sometimes that takes 15, 20 years.

When I moved to New York, I wanted to learn from the best artists in the world–to immerse myself in what it means to have a rigorous practice and build a life around making. Mentorship is so important, especially having different mentors for different things. All my relationships with artists have been special because they make up my cohort. These are the people I’ll be growing with over the next 50 years: we’ll see each other go through so many different evolutions of our practices, our families, our lives. It’s an ongoing dialogue. There’s a certain understanding that we all care for each other and can meet each other where no one else can. Not a friendship, not a relationship, not a lover. Artist to artist is a space I’m so grateful to have.

What’s the best and worst piece of advice you’ve ever received?

I was on a panel once with someone speaking to a group of young art students, and this person said, “Oh you guys, don’t feel rushed. Take your time. You’ve got plenty of time. Just focus on your practice, da da da.” And I was boiling inside because this was, number one, not a practicing artist. This was someone else within the ecosystem of arts-making. Two, at that point I was maybe 33, 34, and I’d just spent my 20s hustling, trying to make a pop. And I was like, wow, that’s really terrible advice. The truth is your 20s are where you lay the ground for what a lot of the rest of your life might look like.

Obviously we’ve got amazing people like Vera Wang who started Vera Wang at 40, and it can happen later and it often does. But if you know what you want and you’re focused, it should be unwavering. I didn’t want to be running around like that at 37, at 40. I don’t have it in me now, and a part of me knew that.

It makes sense that a non-practicing artist’s advice would be less than relevant…

It was just dumb. In your 20s you have energy. You need to use it. And if you’re not married with kids, that’s space to really build your shit.

The best piece of advice I ever got is to just really understand yourself. Move to your own compass, because getting through to the other side of people understanding you usually comes much later.

What does your daily ritual look like?

I do my best when I’m moving my body every day, and offering myself moments of stillness throughout the day. Meditation allows me to move with a certain amount of clarity. I love to wake up in the morning, smoke a joint, write in my journal, and read a book.

I’m always impressed by people who can meditate and dwell in their thoughts.

Well, I’ll say this about meditation: it’s never quiet. The reason we never want to do it is because we actually have to listen to our dumbass brains talk. And it’s terrible. It’s not nice, especially going back into it after time away. It’s one of the hardest things to do.

I think people are looking for some kind of euphoria, but it’s not about that. It’s about bringing yourself into the present moment–and there could be techno music down the street. I come from a formal practice, based on composition, color, form, and the movement of what’s happening visually. So beauty is really important to me.

The repetition of moving my body to create things grounds me as a human on this planet. Painting and making art on a daily basis is what makes me feel like I can exist in this world. It gives me balance, and opens something up inside of me.

You’ve called yourself a sensory artist, but also that you wish more people talked about the metaphysical side of the work. How do you balance both–the feeling and the intellect?

Conceptually, I have a very deep research practice. When I was 15, I had a studio practice while I was painting, and I also started studying and teaching qigong, which is energy work. And so wanting to understand more about the metaphysical world, the energetic world, and how it relates to our physical body, our energetic body, and our etheric body–these are things I’m thinking and reading about all the time. When I’m looking at a flower, watching the wind, swimming in the water… I’m studying, and I’m reading my life experience.

Those things come through while I’m making the work. If I’m really interested in something and I’m building a body of work, the work morphs into these concepts. Each show carries a lot visually of what I’m thinking about philosophically.

And it’s fun. I think that’s what I do best as an artist: transmute emotion into a material and a medium.

I know, I love so many of your titles… “Postcapitalist Desire.” I don’t know if I totally know what that means, but it sounds right.

But you know what it means.

Haha yes.

Postcapitalist Desire was the title of Mark Fisher’s final lecture. He was an accelerationist. It came at a really interesting time during the pandemic when I was asking, “What are these stipend checks? Where’s this money coming from?” I wanted to understand economics more, so I started studying and realized that economics is just our behavior. During that show, I was also reading adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism, which is all about refusal versus reform, and reclaiming our bodies in relation to industry. So the whole show was about our bodies and our desires, whether it’s sexually or the lives we want to build. They’re all chosen for us by the economic tides, or the needs of the economy. It shows us the malleability of our minds.

And the work looked like that. It looked like the body and industry. Abstraction is a playground for me to explore a lot of ideas that I might not have concrete answers to. That’s the power of it. It’s a place where scientists don’t have to be right, where we can say things we don’t understand about our consciousness, and explore it in a silly way, through purple or pink or yellow.

Your abstraction is powerful also because it doesn’t come from nowhere; it’s very much grounded in research.

Yeah, and I want to see more blending of the two. With science, if you can’t prove something, it’s wrong. But everything they’re curious about is based on things that aren’t “right.”

You’ve been mentored by many people, and you’re actively mentoring young artists. The wisdom going out versus coming in –are you passing on the same advice people gave you, or do the generations above and below you have different needs?

I’m definitely passing information on, but my approach is to ask a lot of questions and really try to understand what’s going on with the person, or what they might not be able to see. It’s less prescriptive than it is helping them find where they might have a blind spot. But also there’s so much legacy coming through me. I wouldn’t have the confidence or the knowing of how to do this without having the artist before me.

What gives you the continual courage to be hopeful?

It’s making, and it’s my life. I approach my life as my greatest art form every single day. In the actual act of making, I have to go through so many obstacles of figuring something out. It’s very empowering to learn something new every single day, or do something scary every single day. Eventually it just becomes a part of who you are.

I love how self-renewing that is.

Well what’s the other option?

Choosing fear.

Listen, I’m scared too, all the time. But just getting out of bed, going to the fucking studio, walking around in circles, and going to that white room every day… even if I don’t know what I want to do, I know how to get myself out of those holes.

Do you make your best work when you’re emotional? You’ve mentioned rage as an impetus to start making. Does emotion precipitate the art?

I’m living my life, and every year, every month, has a different thing that’s going on. I put a lot of whatever’s happening in my life into my work. And of course you’re going to make an amazing show when you’re going through a breakup, but I also make great work when I’m feeling good. I’m just consistent about making. I go in whether I’m inspired or not. I’m really trying to develop a visual language for myself over the period of 20 to 40 years. So it’s not just about what I’m feeling, it’s about what I’m building. And that contains all different parts of my life and myself.