My pieces begin as titles. Titles come to me when I’m washing dishes, or running, or showering. A recent example is Aloha Sadness (2023): I thought, That’s so dumb, but also so real. Aloha means goodbye, but also hello. I asked what would Aloha Sadness look like? I did a little research—looked up tiki culture, watched Lilo & Stitch, played that song “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” in the studio.

I’m driven by curiosity, and I can get interested in literally anything. I’m less interested in judging whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, than I am in asking, What is this thing? Why is this thing? Exhibitions are a helpful way of focusing my curiosity. I can point to one and say, “That’s my oceanography era,” or that’s my how-TVs-work era.

For me, “artist” is kind of like a catchall term. Takashi Murakami’s 2008 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum drew me to art. He was making mugs, pins, paintings… I thought, Maybe I could do one of those. I’m also a writer, but there’s something about the authority of language that feels daunting, whereas in art there’s more wiggle room.

The title of my recent show at Tara Downs gallery in New York was “Live,” and I left it deliberately unclear as to whether I meant the noun or the verb. I wanted to permit the viewer/reader to take it however they want. There’s something beautiful about the state of not-knowing, and I want my viewers to feel curious. I never want it to be, “I’m the artist, listen to me.”

I started making my quilt works in 2013, hoping to combine my love for making with my interest in painting. I wanted to be able to physically pick up colors and move them around. I also love learning how things work, down to the molecular level. If you’re dyeing something, you have to ask, Is this a cellulose fiber or is it a protein fiber? Some pieces incorporate resist dyes using wax. Since wax is nonpolar and water is a polar molecule, the two materials don’t interact.

Recently I was Duolingo-ing Norwegian, and decided to make a Norwegian-language web drama called Svak. I wanted to write a script in Norwegian to explore the materiality of weakness; I’m weak in that language. The project was about carving space for curiosity without utility, learning just for the sake of it.  

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The 15th Sharjah Biennial Does Better At Excavating The Past Than Pushing The Present

The Painter of Modern Life: Kerry James Marshall Aims to Get More Images of Black Figures into Museums

When Marshall graced the cover of Artforum in 2017, inside, artist Carroll Dunham called him “one of the most consequential painters among us.” Around then, his goal was to make seeing Black figures in museums no longer exceptional. By and large, his plan worked: around the 2010s, as critic Julian Lucas put it in the New Yorker, matters related to the representation of Blackness became “a national conversation,” led by artists like Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, and Charles White. Now, the conversation is shifting beyond representation, and as ever, Marshall is two steps ahead. His new commission for this spring’s Sharjah Biennial is not a painting at all. Instead, the artist created an installation resembling an excavation site that engages histories and fantasies of slave trade and colonialism in the Arab world.

It’s rare—and risky—for an artist to depart so dramatically from an approach that’s brought considerable critical and commercial success. But Marshall’s departure is less surprising when you look closely at what he’s doing: his paintings have always incorporated critiques of painting, and even as figures dominate his canvases, they’re also emphatically elusive and opaque. A.i.A. spoke to Marshall about his big pivot.

Why did you decide not to include a press release or any text for “Exquisite Corpse: This Is Not the Game?”

I didn’t want to give anybody a crutch for figuring out the show. I wanted them to really look. It’s become common for people to lean too hard on the press release to try and figure out what the artist is saying. I wanted to break that chain of behavior. I put a lot of energy into doing the work, and it’s not that opaque. The title is a clue to let you know that it’s not random choices being made.

What are some of those choices?

Each exquisite corpse has four segments, and each segment has a different version of my signature. They all represent me at different stages of my development. There are Black figures that look a lot like the images I do all the time, but there’s also some cross-hatching—I don’t use that technique much now, but I used to.

With each piece, I started with a head, then created a body. Together, those segments constitute relationships and meanings. I’ve described myself as a history painter, and that’s relevant here too. I’m looking at history and trying to draw out connections that people don’t automatically make.

What’s an example?

In Untitled (Exquisite Corpse Iceberg), 2022, there’s a man’s head at the top, connected to an iceberg. The iceberg becomes a pair of pants, and his feet are in sneakers on a basketball court. The portrait is of a man named Tippu Tip. He was one of the wealthiest African slave traders. He’s from Zanzibar; some people also describe him as Arab. There are viewers who might recognize him.

All kinds of people have profited from imperialist, colonialist, and commercial transactions, and all the exquisite corpses speak to those complicated histories. Today, you have the NBA and all those basketball players flying around and slam-dunking—this is happening in the wake of that history. History isn’t always tragic, but it is always complicated. My paintings tackle history in its most complex form. Nobody is getting off the hook.

Still, I really tried to avoid making any parts look grotesque, as the Surrealists often did. You can demonstrate how much you care about the representation of Black people by not treating Black people like silly putty that you can make into any kind of form you want. If “exquisite” means anything, it means do the thing well, make it elegant. I will not make monsters; that’s just too easy.

Doing the thing well has always been essential to your work, but at first glance, some of these paintings might look less finished. Have you experienced pressure to keep making art in your signature style?

Yes. Artists are professionals. There’s nobody who goes to art school who doesn’t mean to come out of there and be a professional. No matter what they say, all the things we do are aimed at a certain kind of mission. Part of that mission is to achieve recognition, and to establish the kind of singularity that sets your work apart from everybody else’s—and, in doing that, to try and produce something that might be meaningful. Some artists might call that a careerist position. But I think the moment you sign up to go to art school, you sign up for a profession.

Your project for the latest Sharjah Biennial, Untitled: Excavation, was certainly not recognizably Kerry James Marshall.

But it is consistent with the way I think about everything. The Sharjah Art Foundation asked me if I’d make a permanent installation. The title of the biennial is “Thinking Historically in the Present,” which is what I do. I developed a proposal for land they acquired in Al Hamriyah. In that square, the Foundation is building a café and doing some landscaping, expanding their footprint. I thought I’d do something to interrupt that development.

What disrupts development in that region? Hitting an archaeological site! Suddenly, you have to pause and figure out how to build around it. So I decided to create an excavation site. First I asked if there were an archaeological site in that particular place in Sharjah, what would it be? I had never been to the Middle East, but I did know 1001 Arabian Nights, that set of fairy tales from the Middle Ages based in the Islamic world. I wanted to confront how history is part fact, part fiction, and part fairytale, because people tell stories that sound nice and exciting to them.

The biennial also dealt with the impact of colonialism. Well, the Arab world participated in colonialism too. Egypt was a colonial empire, and today, people speak Arabic in a whole lot of places where Arabic didn’t originate. Egypt has been occupied by the Sudanese, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs—like an exquisite corpse, broken up into four parts. The installation includes a mosaic with four segments. The top segment says “head” in hieroglyphics; then “torso” in Arabic; “pelvis” in Roman; and “feet” in Greek. That mosaic is in an empty pool, part of the small villa I created.

What else is in the villa?

It has three rooms and a small courtyard. You view it from a footbridge that hovers above the site. It’s all connected to the 1001 Nights tales, and to the Arab slave trade out of Africa. Maybe the villa belonged to a merchant. In all the 1001 Nights tales, there are genies, or jinni, as they’re called in the Quran—mischievous or evil spirits. In fairytales, you rub a lamp, and the genie comes out, then gives you three wishes; they’re servants. In the 1001 Nights, they are always Black.

I read an early translation by Richard Burton. In that version, the whole narrative starts when two sultans discover that their wives have been cheating on them with a Black man. Then they decide women can’t be trusted. You marry them one night and kill them the next morning!

It sounds like for you, combining exquisite corpses with history painting is a way to get at the idea of history as a combination of fact, fiction, and fairy tales.

Exactly. I want to undermine that tendency to project a certain kind of image of who we are into the world, and to interrogate our relationship to the struggle, and to the history of slavery. None of it is as simple as it seems.

You were making figurative paintings before the big boom, and now, you’re onto something new.

I’ve always gone against the grain. In 1966 Ad Reinhardt declared he was “making the last painting which anyone can make,” referring to his monochromatic black abstractions. Well, that was just a few years after I was born.

You told an interviewer that when you were applying to school, someone said your portfolio was too varied, that they wanted to see more consistency.

That comment has haunted me for most of my career. I make works because I want to see what they look like. I make works because I want to understand how images operate, so that I can best use those operations to do the kinds of things that I think need to be done. I’m not limited to doing one thing, because one thing never covers all the bases. When Jackson Pollock hit the end of the road—when he couldn’t see himself doing any more of those drip paintings—he crashed his car. Mark Rothko, too [he took his own life]. You can only make ephemeral rectangles for so long.

Some younger artists have expressed skepticism toward the rise of figuration. It’s less a critique of a work itself, more an uneasiness toward the tokenism institutions bring to it. They’re also wary of the way representation gets conflated with material change. Such criticism is only possible because of the work that artists of your generation have done: now, it’s no longer so exceptional to see Black figures in museums. But do you share any of that skepticism?

You can’t be all that worried about what other people might do with things that you produce and also reap the benefits of making them. It’s all about finding a formal solution to whatever problem of representation you’re trying to address. The market forces people to look for a gimmick, but those things won’t last long. Novelty is not that interesting, but for a moment.

The best way to sum it up comes from the avant-garde jazz musician Cecil Taylor. An interviewer asked him about how he felt watching younger artists, who seemed to be capitalizing on his innovations more than he’d been able to. The interviewer asked if he was bitter. He said [paraphrasing], “Bitter?! I am not bitter; nobody asked me to do this.”

For me, I’m just doing what I think needs to be done. I do the pictures I want to. I always have. If they have an impact on people, that’s fine. 

Art in America’s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, sculptor Catherine Telford Keogh explains how she conglomerates trash and landfill into striking sculptures.

Hardgood & Dolly (2023) is a piece of compressed landfill I extracted from Dead Horse Bay [between Brighton Beach and Fort Tilden in Brooklyn]. In the Industrial era, it was also home to fish oil factories, and garbage incinerators. In the 1950s, a series of highways decimated a number of low-income neighborhoodsin Brooklyn, and they moved all of those folks’ goods to Dead Horse Bay, then used them to extend the shoreline. The trash and their belongings were compacted, then covered with sand. Recently it’s been eroding.

Because this was the 1950s, there’s more glass than plastic. I extracted a hunk of landfill that included all these products that have been vitrified over time. It contains rubber, cement, plant matter, packaging, sand, and other miscellaneous objects. My students helped me drag this piece back, and it spawned my most recent show, “Shelf Life,” at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.

Another piece in that show, Compost Index 3 with Volumes 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 (2023), involves repurposed tiles I got from Marble Expo on Facebook Marketplace. The onyx tiles were originally extracted from Karachi, Pakistan, and brought to Marble Expo in the Bronx, which then sold them to corporations, a bank, and a Best Western. I purchased the leftovers. The multicolored onyx has all this depth, so you can really see the earth processes that happened over eons. I wanted to position them [on the floor] so that they signify earth or ground, but also a countertop at the same time. I waterjet-cut different advertisements in the tiles, borrowed from things like moisturizers that promise a healthier or more efficient body. I also sandblasted images of things that I found on the ground in my neighborhood: lottery tickets, gum, cigarettes, Modelo beer cans. I photographed them, turned them into stencils, and then sandblasted them into the tiles. Sandblasting is almost like a mechanized geologic process, but it also creates this ghostly or fossilized image of the waste.

I also remade plastic vessels in glass that you can carry around—like detergent bottles, milk jugs, or motor oil containers. I work with containers a lot. I’m interested in how they promise space cordoned off from temperature, climate, and decay, but are also everywhere in landfills. Positioning vessels on the onyx tiles, I wanted to point to deep geologic processes that have happened over years and years.  —As told to Emily Watlington

Other sculptures—delicate and glassy, hearty and crystalline—sit on plinths that are made of dirt, yet perfectly rectangular. Upstairs, she’s showing photographs made from an astrophysics archive. As art-science crossovers proliferate in the art world, Akashi’s stunning work stands apart as it cultivates wonder, humility, and awe for the beauty and complexity of the natural world. Below, the Los Angeles–based artist discusses how curiosity and chaos inform her approach.

A lot of people pointed to the wads of chewing gum and asked me, is that bronze? Is that glass? But no, it’s just gum! I was drawn to the idea of mastication, and to having this unnamed material—saliva—as a crucial component. I tried to choose pieces of gum that had visible tooth marks, impressions of the body. Actually, I had a nice chat with [artist] Haim Steinbach, who also shows with the gallery, and he called the gum “sublimely offensive.” I thought, well that’s a nice summary; I think I’ll borrow the term.

The plinths are rammed earth, an ancient building technique where you use tools to stamp and pound dirt and Portland cement into layers. The cement works as a binder; without it, the dirt would just crumble once it dried. With this and other materials, I wanted to play with ideas of permanence. The gum might seem like the most temporary material in there, but in actuality, it might be the most archival material I’ve ever used. Some of these sculptures feature a broken friendship necklace as well.

I was trained in photography, which got me thinking about time, and how to make fleeting moments permanent. But as my practice has grown, I’ve been playing with longer timescales and different ideas about permanence, trying to get outside of the human perceptions of duration. My first step into deep time involved working with fossils. Now, in this show, I’m working with images of different objects and phenomena in outer space—these exist on their own timescale, too.

In the galleries upstairs, I’m showing images taken by researchers using telescopes. I made contact prints of these from glass-plate negatives housed in an astronomy archive in Pasadena. They have 100 years of glass-plate negatives, and someone made copies that I was allowed to borrow and take into the dark room. When you make a contact print, you lay the negative directly on the paper; you don’t use the overhead enlarger.

I trained in the dark room, in analog, chemical-based photography. I graduated in 2006; and by now, that equipment barely exists any more. So I was forced to figure out what was important and meaningful to me about that way of working. I really liked the idea of creating such a direct image. And, some aspects of those processes are similar to making molds and casts.

In the archives, I was initially trying to find images of phenomena in outer space that I thought would mirror different kinds of interpersonal relationships on Earth. There’s one photograph of a galaxy merger, which occurs when a larger galaxy latches onto a smaller galaxy and starts to pull it into one of its arms. It’s also known as galaxy harassment.

I used to always say that I liked materials I could have conversations with, and I still believe in that. But more and more, I’m starting to think about my process as containing both control and chaos. I’ve realized more and more that I’m using control to figure out how to talk about that entropy with other people through sculpture. I’m not premeditating a form and then executing it precisely—there’s always an engagement with chaos.

My work is often about encouraging people to look at things in broader, less human-centric perspectives. It’s not about forgetting about humans entirely, but considering where humans fit in a much bigger system. I’m after that feeling of being humbled and experiencing wonder at the same time. I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything, but I do I have a certain sensibility, or a particular approach to existence, that I am trying to get across in the works.

—As told to Emily Watlington

Art in America‘s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, painter Madeline Peckenpaugh explains how she creates her beguiling paintings. Her show “Farsight” is on view at Alexander Berggruen through May 17.

I start by mixing a palette, and as I mix, I get an idea of what the painting will be. I’ll have a general sense of the palette within a few minutes: they usually involve interactions between earth tones and bright, saturated colors. But I spend a lot of time figuring out the light and contrasts, and a palette can take a sharp turn quickly if it’s just not feeling right.

Lately I’ve been starting with the background, then working my way to the surface of my paintings. I like making the background look like it was the last thing that happened, even though it was first. I’m often building up thick paint, then wiping it away, and the wipes leave marks. But I change the process up from painting to painting—I always want to stay surprised and spontaneous.

I mostly draw imagery from everyday experiences: memories, places I’ve lived, things I see on walks. Sometimes, I’ll see something I liked in one painting, and then I’ll try it again in the next one.

For Convergence (2023), I started off building up layers of dark acrylic dye washes. But I couldn’t figure out the space at all: it was too abstract and looked almost underwater. Eventually, I flipped the canvas over and started painting on the back. You see the stains from the reverse side at the top, and at the bottom, I painted over them in oil. The harsh horizon line helps both parts feel like they’re in the same space, even though, material-wise, they’re very different.

I keep paint skins in my studio, made from paint I took off old paintings. I’m often holding them up to canvases to see what needs them. Sometimes I’ll throw in paint from another palette. I almost want it to feel like you could just peel it off.

Usually, I’m working on four or five paintings at a time. It’s helpful to bounce between works. I can finish a painting in one day, and usually I find those to be the most successful—it means I got the full idea out and I don’t have to go back in and fix it, which sometimes makes me feel on the verge of “designing.” For me, it’s always about spontaneity. —As told to Emily Watlington

How long have you been at the Pompeii Archaeological Park and what does your role entail?

It has been 22 years. I worked with a private company as a conservator for 10 years, before starting at Pompeii. I specialize in fresco restoration, but I also work with anything that has to do with stone, including mosaics, sculpture, carvings, and architectural elements like stucco. I have colleagues who specialize in organic materials. We have six conservators on staff and the rest of the work is contracted out. I organize the work and try to cover all the necessities of the site. It’s important that everything is covered and cared for by a conservator. I also do interviews, such as this, and I’m responsible for all the storage areas as well.

What was your involvement in the recent restoration of the house of the Vettii?

I was responsible, with a colleague, for overseeing the conservation work. I directed the operations and made sure everything was handled in a careful and prudent way—and with the right methodology, of course. One private company worked on the architectural aspects, while another focused on the house’s decoration such as the frescoes and sculptures. Everything had to be delicately reintegrated, but finally it’s beautiful again.

I think the biggest transformation was cleaning the paintings. It was evident that they were important. The house was protected from the beginning of the excavation with a big roof constructed overtop. The paintings were in good condition, as a result, but they previously endured a lot of poor conservation techniques. Conservators used to put paraffin wax on the walls, which helped the colors appear brighter and made it easier to read the surface of the paintings. Over time, however, it became very thick and opaque, not unlike dirt sitting on the surface. We couldn’t see a lot of the colors or the details anymore. So, proper cleaning treatments were very important to the overall restoration.

We also recently restored frescoes at the suburban villa of Diomede, located just outside the city walls. We completed the villa of the mysteries, which was another luxurious residence, prior to that. We are soon going to open the house of the silver wedding, which is another very beautiful house in the middle of Pompeii. There have been many new discoveries, so there is a lot to see.

How have some of these discoveries impacted your work?

We are constantly looking for new solutions as problems emerge and shift. In insula five, for example, we found this beautiful fresco of Leda with the swan. In the same room there were fragments of an intricately painted ceiling, but it collapsed likely during the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius. When archaeologists collected the pieces and restorers reconstructed the ceiling, we realized that it actually would have been vaulted. We had to calculate the curvature and construct a new support for the ceiling. It was very difficult, but the result is beautiful. It is now in an exhibition at the Palestra Grande.

What are you working on now?

Now that I’ve finished directing the restoration at the house of the Vettii, I’m focusing on a big restoration in insula occidentalis, which was part of the richest houses on the western side of Pompeii. They would have overlooked the sea, which at the time was much closer. There, we have these richly decorated residences like the house of the golden bracelet and the house of Fabio Rufo. This part of the city is currently undergoing restorations and will open to visitors again. I also visit exhibitions around the world where artifacts unearthed at Pompeii are on view.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing you in your job right now?

The biggest challenge is trying to slow deterioration because Pompeii is not a museum with a controlled environment, but a natural park open to all the elements. There is rain, cold temperatures, snow, ice, sun, salt, humidity, and wind—all of which is very dangerous and chemically aggressive on the materials. We do our best to control these deterioration factors, along with general wear and tear on the site.

As told to A.i.A. I started this in the fall of 2019. Before that, I was primarily making these cutout paintings that are larger-than-life figures, like 7 feet tall. I still paint those a lot. I hadn’t really painted before on a rectangular canvas, other than in college. So this was like my reentry into a more traditional format for painting. 

Clothing is a point of inspiration for me. I started painting people wearing different clothes and masks and headwear that are a bit fantastical and are at varying levels of obstructing the faces. This was pre-Covid: that hadn’t really entered my world yet, so I don’t know exactly what prompted me to start depicting masks. But, obviously, they soon became much more relevant. There’s also a sort of superhero-fantasy vibe to the painting, which comes from me learning to draw by tracing comic books and this X-Men encyclopedia I had as a kid. 

The figure in the center changed over time. As you’re painting, especially if you’re spending months or years on something, characters start to develop a personality. When I began this, I went through a breakup. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but that character sort of took on the persona of the person I’d dated. That figure was the hardest to finish. It was a bit of a battle. I hesitate to articulate some concrete meaning or interpretation of what he’s supposed to convey. But I will say he was emotional to flesh out. There’s a calm kind of fear to him, and I think that’s connected to what I was going through while I was working.

The head pieces obstruct the figures’ faces in ways that hinder or maybe enhance them in some decorative way. Wearing a mask affects the way you communicate with someone, especially when their face is obscured too. I was thinking about fashion and adornment and decorating yourself to attract or repel interaction. Sometimes you want to attract, but other times you might want to repel, maybe by creating a force field around yourself for protection.

Backgrounds and settings are not the fun part for me. I’m not sure where these people are exactly, but I get the sensation of weather, a feeling of the air and wind and movement. It feels like a bit sexual to me, like a party, but also kind of ominous. I want it to be a little unclear.

Everyone’s dressed in this kind of real-but-unreal way. It feels related to other stuff I’ve done, with gay guys and weird outfits. It’s like a version of a gay bar, some exaggerated version of a real place. But it is quite different from my other work. I feel like this is maybe a world that I’ll go back to.  

Quick-to-See Smith spoke with Art in America about how she began making memory maps, the importance of Native languages, and bringing different communities together.

How did you start making memory maps?

I started making these kind of abstract landscape maps from fields of fireweed and mustard—things that I would see on my reservation—when I was in graduate school. In the early work from the 1970s, you can see these abstract maps with bars of color intermixed with pictographs. For roughly the last 50 years, I’ve been collecting books on pictographs, petroglyphs, and glyphs, and I visit sites. I’ve always had a long-running interest in how we Native people each see the land because we come from various terrains and geographical areas, all with different foods, housing, traditions, and origin stories. There are 574 federally recognized tribes and hundreds more that are not recognized.

One thing I discovered was that most of us didn’t make a horizon line. I really didn’t know why, but, in talking to people and thinking about myself and how I work, I believe it’s related to our stories, which portray a holistic world: the sky above and the land below, groundwater recharge. Everything is connected. Our stories are often interwoven with things that come down from the sky, particularly in relation to water. Near my house, there’s a site that’s at least 1,000 years old or older and, if I go down in the kiva, all the images inscribed onto the wall—the catfish, the river, a woman giving birth, the eagle with water spray coming out of its mouth sharing with the cactus—center around water. Water is life. Now we’re in a drought, so that makes it even more important.

How have your lived experience and research influenced the making of these maps?

In my research, I’ve found that each community has petroglyphs specific to them. And that’s how the memory maps got started. I was documenting different communities in the United States by looking at petroglyphs or pictographs in each area so that the markings tie into each community’s stories and language. It’s grown from there. I also discovered in doing this work that, though it’s been claimed that we have no written language, we had so many ways of documenting. Of course, our history books and school curricula don’t tell us this. But in our cuneiform writing and objects like quipus—colored ropes and twines with knots used to communicate messages—we can see how our ancestors communicated. These languages carry our culture, our land, food, housing. Our languages are so embedded in the land and, when the Europeans invaded, they took all of this and moved us off of our land, where we had lived for thousands of years. It created a genocide that’s still ongoing.

Without this language, a whole part of our culture is missing. What I’m doing with my art is extracting what I know is relevant information in today’s world. Each piece tells a story and it revolves around this genocide and what has been taken away from us. Scholars and advocates like myself have had to go back to retrieve this information. A lot of us are also involved with trying to change public school education in this country because our history has been left out. I’ve been writing to the state board of education in New Mexico. In Montana, we have Native American history and current events in the kindergarten through 12th-grade curricula. In my work, you will find a reflection of this—both our history and current events.

Taking all that information and looking at your memory maps, those symbols that we see are representing different Native communities?

That’s exactly right. They are from specific places, whatever is left on rocks or walls. Some of them are in the open, while others are inside of caves.

How do you go about selecting which ones to highlight on your maps?

When I do the research, I get so involved in considering the terrain and whether there are still Indigenous people living in that area or nearby. In general, I focus on figures or the number of tribes, but I’ve made big maps tracking where the tribes are located.

Before computers, I used to search newspapers and cut out articles of what Native Americans were doing state by state. For example, there would be a woman’s health conference in Florida and a gathering on food in Indiana. It stood out to me that everything was about survival. So many of these gatherings centered around basic needs for heath, food, housing, and childcare. The Native communities, whether there was a reservation or not, were coming together to work on such issues as that. And just because there wasn’t a federal reservation doesn’t mean that there aren’t Native people and communities.

That’s a lot of research to do without modern technology.

Yes, it’s like being a super sleuth or detective. I remember one research project that [multimedia Indigenous artist] G. Peter Jemison and I did together a long time ago. We found there were 57,000 people that we knew were recorded as living there, and something like 75 tribes. Native people would come into the city for the arts. Jemison founded the American Indian Community House, and people would gather there. It brought all these Native people out of the woodwork to a place where we could meet each other and share information.

A lot of the artists today—like Jemison, Cara Romero, Jeffrey Gibson, Marie Watt, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Jolene Rickard, Julie Buffalohead, Edgar Heap of Birds, and Emmi Whitehorse—are doing research like I have been.

How do you plan to continue incorporating such findings in your art and activism work?

Every time I do research, it opens Pandora’s box. I have piles of notebooks where I’ve documented this research. I think about all our artists who are engaged with this and how, when we come together, we share this information.

In conjunction with my show, the Whitney is sponsoring the first and only event that I know of for an all-day Native American convening on May 19. We will have Native American artists and panels where we will discuss how our art intersects with the land, because all our languages recorded everything in the land.

On that note, you’re the first Indigenous artist to have a retrospective at the Whitney. How does it feel to be recognized in such a way?

I’m just so grateful. In the beginning, I began talking about things that I would like to do that would reach a broader Native community so that this would be a celebration that would go beyond me, like ripples in the stream. I hope that it will open the door so that other Native artists can have exhibitions there and elsewhere.

When I began working with the museum, I wanted to open more doors to bring in more Native people because once they see them and hear them, they’re more inclined to work with them. These interventions are important. And what it’s doing is, it’s making them feel comfortable with Native people.

The project has two parts—a video installation, currently on view at both the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Momentary in Arkansas, plus a live performance, premiering at the latter venue on April 21. The green screen’s presence in the performance is especially unusual, as no after-effects can be added live. In the hour-long video, performers move behind green scrims or are cast in green light. It’s easy to imagine them disappearing, but they remain decidedly present.

Below, Rawls talks about the green screen’s meaning. —Emily Watlington

With [siccer], I wanted to make a stop motion film of a dance, which is almost never done! It highlights impossibility of truly capturing a dance. The technique allows you to pause and restart, to tailor what exactly gets captured. It also means the camera operator is kind of dancing with the performer.

Stop motion draws attention to what is missing from an image, and what happens between the frames. The project is very much a product of the pandemic, of continually asking, how do you keep something alive?

I’m often trying to collapse the labor of stagecraft into dancing. I wanted to draw attention to the labor of production, which often involves as much of a choreography as dances themselves. Usually, green screens are made to disappear, along with the labor of the people involved in the production.

People say the color green is supposed to look bad on skin, but that’s predominately true for white performers: so much of stagecraft has been calibrated to look good for white skin, but brown skin can look really beautiful in green. Still, green is thought of as sickly, alien, witchy.

The video includes a Ray Charles cover of Kermit’s anthem “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Ray Charles appeared on Sesame Street with Kermit, so even Sesame Street was thinking through Blackness and the Blues in relation to the color green. I’m a child of the 1980s, so my imagination was really formed by these kinds of playful meetings of the animated with the real life. Sesame Street segments often involve significant teaching moments.

The title refers to [sic], which is what you use when you’re quoting something that is not standard English, or is misspelled, or is in a dialect. The gesture proves your credibility as a good writer by pointing out that you know your source is incorrect. I’m always interested in the relationship between language and performance, and I was thinking about how, when you repeat a phrase or a gesture over and over, it often starts to fall apart. Also, citations followed by [sic] are usually pulled out of context, and that sort of decontextualization is analogous to what mass media does to the gestures and creativity of Black people.

[Siccer] is a title that applies to two works of art: I’m trying to undo what a single title points to, in terms of the object referents. The title is a nerdy grammatical reference, but it also alludes to the question of who gets sicker in the pandemic. The stop motion technique alludes to who gets lost in this attempt for continuity, this demand to keep going.

At the MCA, I installed speakers along the spiral staircase, so the sound sweeps up and down. The film is kind of a portrait of the making of the film. It has five individual portraits, one of each performer, and a then group portrait. Each character has a special effect moment, but it always snaps back to reality. In Katrina Reid’s, her body becomes pixelated and then comes back together. I’m really excited about pixelation as an aesthetic because it’s the moment when the image starts to lose its integrity.

The film also has “behind-the-scenes” footage where you see the film being produced; these scenes are their own aesthetic experience. I re-organize the footage for each installation, which is my way of trying to keep it alive.

In three drawings comprising a series titled “BX Mixtapes” (2021–22),Rodriguez’s sampling of references is even more explicit: large pieces structured around a scaffolding of neon-colored lines, they remix elements from early hip-hop posters produced by Buddy Esquire and Phase II. The “BX Mixtapes” overflow with figures from the neighborhood, international revolutionary slogans, and allusions to both hip-hop and art history. They are constellations of scenes from the Bronx as seen from a bodega window, refracted and lit up by the LED glow of the ubiquitous storefronts. The artist is also hosting teach-ins throughout the exhibition’s run, some in collaboration with the radical thinkers pictured in the drawings. —Andreas Petrossiants

Can you tell me about the portraits?

The portraits are of radical scholars, some of whom are depicted next to stacks of books that I organized when I photographed them. I wanted to highlight inherited genealogies from liberation struggles, rooted in the Black Radical tradition and histories of Indigenous resistance. While someone like Ruth Wilson Gilmore might not appear in the scenes from my neighborhood that are in the show, her abolitionist and materialist thinking is present in the way that I think. And others too. Revolutionaries like [historian] Walter Rodney and [anti-colonial thinker] Amílcar Cabral are there, even if they’re not pictured or referenced.

Other drawings include scenes of struggle or collective life. In Coco, Cherry, Tamarindo, Parcha (2022) and Uncle’s Jack Fruit Hustle (2022), for example, you show street vendors who cater to migrant communities in the borough. In BICOPs on the Third of May (2022), we see, per the clever wordplay in your title, a young kid being interrogated by four cops “of color.”

In BICOPs, I’m pointing to the reality of what police look like right now … which is us. I mean, we have a Black cop mayor in New York City. For liberation struggles to be effective, we have to be honest. I think we’re at a pivotal point, moving away from liberal Black Lives Matter rhetoric that pushed the 2020 counterinsurgency following the George Floyd rebellions. This rhetoric often held up the white cop as a straw man, and ignored the fact that the police were looking more and more like us. This comes, in part, from a kind of exploitation of the working class.

If you look closely, the kid being held up by the cops has a Los Deliveristas Unidos [NYC coalition of app-based delivery workers] sticker on his scooter. I didn’t add that. This was the scene I saw and photographed.

BICOPS is the only drawing where you see explicit confrontation. But, even when it’s not pictured, we understand that confrontation always looms. In another drawing, On the Subject of Defiant Mobility (2022), there’s a kid popping a wheelie on an ATV next to a delivery worker on a scooter. With the former figure, I’m highlighting the audaciousness of the Biker Boys who take the streets undeterred by NYPD’s futile crackdown. Here, defiant mobility references the presence of migrants remaking their worlds inside the empire, despite the violence and death inflicted under what Harsha Walia calls “Border Imperialism.”

The title of The Common Denominator (2023), a drawing of an isolated steam radiator, reminded me of how, in New York, you find these devices in rent-controlled buildings, Section 8 housing, and fancy co-ops alike. How do you see that drawing fitting in with the others?

Who’s living with these radiators in the Bronx today? I see them in the homes of descendants of the Great Migration, Puerto Ricans from Operation Bootstrap in the 1950s, the Dominicans who came to New York in the ’80s, the Albanians and Cambodians who migrated in the ’90s, and so on. All of this is forced migration. How is it that we can organize and build collective power to confront predatory landlords, police, and so on? That conversation starts with the radiator when it breaks down and the landlord is nowhere to be found. It’s like Fred Moten says, “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us.”

Let’s talk about the three “Mixtapes”drawings.

Hip-hop is constantly shape-shifting in order to live and survive. My work is rooted in these techniques of sampling and remixing, and so I remixed frames from Esquire’s style—he called it Neo Deco—into colors that borrow from the lit-up signs outside bodegas. I borrow references from art history, but also indigenous, local, and global histories; African spiritual traditions; old school hip-hop slang; poetry; music; incantations; love spells; radical pedagogy; and secret messages and cultural references communicated in the many languages spoken by the migrants and diasporas that make their home in the Bronx. My drawings form containers where past, present, and future are held.

The exhibition brochure diagrams all the references in the “Mixtapes.” In BX Third World Mixtape no. 4, Caminos (Slow and Steady), 2022, there are people from your neighborhood walking along different paths, but they are connected by the borough, and by the images and texts that float around them. For example, at the very bottom, you’ve drawn a turtle indigenous to New York to situate us. What are some other elements you’re remixing here?

That composition was informed by Paolo Uccello’s painting Hunt by Night (ca. 1465–70). All the figures in that piece are walking diagonally, like in the Uccello, where he uses hunting dogs running in different directions to organize the space. In mine, there’s that horizon line as well, but right on that line there’s the spiral caracol, a Maya symbol employed by the Zapatistas. And there’s Caravaggio in all the pieces too, in the use of everyday figures and models off the street. Of course I’m sampling from the canon of European art; it’s inside me whether I like it or not, along with all the debt that I incurred going to school to learn that history! I’m always in solidarity with the artists. The people hanging on the wall didn’t do shit to me.