On the power of saying no

I love the texts that you use in your work. I’m curious to hear how you developed that as part of your practice. What does that process look like?

I was making representational work in grad school, and the critiques that I got in response to the work I didn’t know how to respond to. All of the work had been about American history and racial identity for a while. And so the critiques I got were personal questions versus actually being about the work and I wasn’t sure how to respond to them. So I actually started taking that language from those critiques and writing it obsessively, repeating it, and that’s how I uncovered the formal threads that still exist in the work today. They come from that attempt at figuring out, what are you really asking me? And where’s the problem in the language that I can feel it, but I can’t pinpoint, I can’t name it yet?

And then if I repeat it long enough and obsess on it, can I transform the language into something more for me, beautiful? Beauty is often what I’m aiming for. I want to go from problem to beauty.

And this continues into my work with The Odyssey, something that feels unwieldy and not mine, by the end of it, can I make it mine too? I’ve stopped using personal language because I’m less interested in sharing biography. I look for much more historical documents.

It’s so hard to connect to The Odyssey in a personal way.

I enjoy the series because I’m still interested in why other artists are so in love with this text. And maybe by the end of the series I’ll get there too. Not so far. It’s not my fave.

Interesting. I assumed that you were working with texts that you enjoyed specifically… I guess that there’s some emotional response or attachment there, but can you articulate what that response is?

I came to the The Odyssey after the 2016 election, and I’d been reading all that apocalyptic literature, a lot of which I enjoy reading. Then I read an interview by Emily Wilson because her translation came out in 2017 of The Odyssey, and she was the first woman to translate it. What caught me first was her articulating why she felt like a new translation of The Odyssey was necessary. She mentions that the first line of the text has already been translated 36 different ways. And from one word we’ve gotten 36 often opposing, contradictory translations. The word has been translated to mean that he’s adventurous or cunning or shifty or restless or mysterious, tossed to and fro by fate. It’s positive and negative.

And she finally translates it to say he’s just a complicated man. And in that one word, she manages to encircle all the other translations that have come before her. So that caught me.

And then in Book 13, Odysseus finally reaches his homeland after 10 years of war. He finally stands on his own shoreline, looks around and doesn’t recognize where he is. And that felt like a metaphor for America post-2016. That your homeland can feel really familiar and also deeply estranging simultaneously.

Definitely.

So when I say I’m not enamored by the text, I mean that the reading of it is not like a pleasure read. But that metaphor felt like a bomb in that moment. It gave language to what that feeling was like.

Since 2016, how has your relationship to Book 13 shifted?

When I first started working with The Odyssey, and especially in the aftermath of that election, every time I would talk about the series, it would catch in my throat. But by the time it stopped catching in my throat, I knew that the series was ending. Each series has a natural death embedded in it. They will not last forever because language is always changing.

So I actually thought it was almost over. But in this era, the second Trump administration, I’ve been thinking about Book 13 again. He’s just rambling at Athena and he says, “Are the people here, are they cruel and lawless or unjust? Are they wild? Are they barbarous? Are they arrogant? Or do they love strangers?”

He set this paradigm: you can be all of these horrible things but the only other parameter to be a good person in the world is how you treat the stranger. I think I’m going to return to it for those because it feels unfortunately apt for the moment.

Have you felt people push back against your mode, which feels like it isn’t about self-expression, and is interested in these historical texts?

My work is a balance of form and concept. It’s not satisfying unless both of them are palpable. So I usually have some sort of limitation that involves the body. And to me, that’s the self-expressive part. Whether it looks like it or not, it’s still in there. And it requires some sort of obsessive endurance test of the body on my part. And it may or may not be visible by the end.

In my Southern Review series, I kept getting this question about, oh, what does it mean to be a Southern artist? I had never thought of myself as Southern until then. So I found the Southern Review Journal, started taking out the pages and filling in the body of each page’s text with this really sooty, deep charcoal.

And I was trying to keep them super clean and precise until I realized the good shit was my fingerprints all over the surface, all the mistakes, the human part of it. So my body is literally part of the work by the end. And all of that, to me, feels like it’s about a kind of mastery of language that felt unwieldy and outside of my control. It didn’t involve me. It felt like something else. And by the end of it feels like mine. I am at least part of the story.

Has it been hard to get people to understand what you’re trying to do?

I feel like it’s been a slow burn. I teach at the University of Chicago too, and sometimes students have a material or a process that they’re wedded to and it means everything for them. And sometimes no one knows what it means yet, so either you can alter it to get your meaning across, or you’ve got to just stick with it for 10 years until people catch up to your language. And either is a route. I think by now I’ve got a body of language that is more easily decipherable. It’s my glossary. It’s more easily understood, but it’s taken a while.

How do you structure work and your art life? How do you balance it?

I slam my classes that I teach on one day a week back to back, so it’s really long day and then the rest of the week is studio time. But I try to say “no” more.

That’s hard to do.

I’m 40 now and it’s been easier to say no every year. This didn’t use to be the case, but these days I have more ideas than I have time. I want to do what I want to do as much as possible.

Well, there are worse places to be in artistically.

Yeah. When I was in residence at Studio Museum, I went to dinner at a really good Sichuan place and Greta Gerwig was sitting next to me and I kept eavesdropping on her conversation. The interviewer was like, “You’re really hitting your stride. How’s that feel?” And she was like, “Am I ever going to not feel like this is the last thing I’ll ever do? Everything feels like it might slip away from me.” I don’t know that for creative people that feeling ever goes away.

Do you have a support system of artists that help with those moments?

Yeah. I know people who are at different places, some who are overwhelmingly busy and others who are in a really quiet spot and waiting for the next opportunity.

I grew up in Alabama and I got my BA in Alabama and then my MFA in Atlanta. When I got to Studio Museum in Harlem, I remember feeling like everybody already knew each other and I was the odd person out. And so I did a couple years of residencies just to fill the gap. I was meeting everybody, curators and artists, collectors. But I had to travel around the country to do it. It felt like my other MFA program. And then I picked Chicago because there was a really nice group of Black artists who were here. That was seven years ago. Chicago has been really good to me.

But I also feel really envious of artists who can live and work from home. When you leave, there’s such a dearth of a different kind of resource. Knowing that you can call on a community that is your home base. You don’t have that when you’re the new person in town. It has other advantages, big cities. I feel jealous sometimes of artists who can make it back where they’re from.

What are you working on right now?

I think I’m going to do a new suite of circular scores. I’ve been working with different versions of these patriotic anthems in order to do that. There are certain songs where the melody stays consistent, but then the lyrics have been rewritten over time for different political causes.

“Star Spangled Banner” has been rewritten for native sovereignty, revolution, temperance. There are suffrage and confederate versions. There’s abolitionist versions of the song. Versions for labor movements. There are Klan versions as well. And so they track American history, as the lyrics shift and different authors are rewriting it.

I started this series by researching a hundred versions of the Star Spangled Banner, binding them together in the same hymnal body and then burning the musical notation away, because that’s the thing that holds all these different versions together. Then only the declensions remain.

I think I want to do one for “Stars Fell on Alabama” next. The song comes from a meteorite shower that spread across North America in the 1830s. It was in the southeast, and then highly concentrated in Alabama. And a lot of people who witnessed it thought that it was the end of the world, the apocalypse. People started to fervently pray, to make confessions. So a lot of plantation owners told enslaved people on the plantation where they had sold all of their family to. They confessed all of their sins. And then the next day, everything is fine, the world goes on, and the song eventually becomes this little romantic ditty.

Wow. That is fascinating.

Isn’t that weird? I don’t know what I want to do with it yet. But it encapsulates the beauty and horror of the South and now the rest of the nation too. It feels apt.

I think there is something oddly hopeful in your work. It’s an act of faith to me to return to these texts and see commonalities, even when it feels like they might be so alien to us now.

I think so. It’s as hopeful as I can get—that maybe it’ll turn out better this time.