ARTIST JEANNIE HUA: THE VIM MAGAZINE INTERVIEW APRIL 15, 2023

Interview and Photos by Jorge Lara

Las Vegas Artist Jeannie Hua current art exhibition ‘Traces And Tracings’ is featuring currently at CSN’s Charleston campus till April 22, 2023 with assistance from the Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. An artist reception is set for Wednesday, April 19 at 6pm.

VIM MAGAZINE : First of all congrats on being a recipient of a 2023 Nevada Arts Council Project Grant For Artists. Your project is your current solo exhibition, ‘Traces and Tracings.’ How did your exhibition come about? What inspired it and what do you hope people take from it?

JEANNIE HUA: There were a number of themes I’ve been working on. One was the question of history, the definition, the formation, the purpose, and dissemination of the discipline. I realized the legitimacy of the documentation and the recordation of events had to do with the hierarchy of perception. Those in power make history. History is not objective. History comprises of events recorded by victors, the conquerers, ones who colonize. But there’s always a ying to the yang. The yang is illuminated because it’s the sun, but the people of the ying remain under the shadow of history.

“But there’s always a ying to the yang. The yang is illuminated because it’s the sun, but the people of the ying remain under the shadow of history.”

— Jeannie Hua

Another theme I’ve expressed through art is allyship. The fact is, Asian American civil rights movement would be nowhere without the support of African Americans. For example, Frederick Douglass opposed restrictions on Chinese immigration; Ida B. Wells and Bishop Henry M. Turner opposed the colonization of the Philippines; Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. opposed the Vietnam War, especially when white soldiers wore KKK robes and carried the confederate flag in Vietnam to express their supremacy over Vietnamese people; and Reverend Jesse Jackson spoke out against the murder of Vincent Chin (murdered by out of work car workers blaming their job loss on the Japanese thinking Chin was Japanese). There’s been a history of allyship between the African American and Asian American communities over civil rights issues for hundreds of years. 

The last theme I covered in my exhibit was my frame of mind during covid. I was thinking about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. He recorded his teacher Socrates’s dialogue with Plato’s brother Glaucon. So the allegory is to imagine a group of people chained together inside an underground cave as prisoners. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the prisoners and the fire are moving puppets and real objects on a raised walkway with a low wall. The prisoners are unable to see behind them. As the prisoners look at the wall in front of them, they believe the shadows of objects cast by the moving figures are real. What would happen if one of the prisoner’s freed? Could that freed prisoner adjust to reality? What would happen if the freed prisoner returned to the cave to try to free the others? Socrates and Glaucon agreed that the prisoners would kill their rescuer since they wouldn’t want to leave the safety and comfort of their false world. 

I felt like I was staring at the cave wall during my period of isolation. But unlike the prisoners, I knew what reality was but instead chose to remain affixed to watching shadows on the cave wall.

VIM MAGAZINE: You graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a MFA from the Low Residency program. How was it like going to school there and what art came from your attendance there?

JEANNIE HUA: I met an amazing assortment of artists at SAIC. I got to meet artists grounded in different disciplines such as sound, performance, video, digital, and social practice. Everyone was supportive of each other’s endeavors. There was a free thinking atmosphere which encouraged generous trading of ideas. The art I developed at the time gave rise to the works exhibited at CSN. I love the fact that my journey included a path out of state and lead me back to a place that I’m proud to call my home. 

VIM MAGAZINE: You were born in Taiwan and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio at the age of 8. Did that move affect you in any way? How was it like growing up in Cincinnati? 

JEANNIE HUA: There wasn’t a day that went by when I wasn’t called a “chink,” “gook,” “slant-eyed,” or “chopsticks” from the age of 8 to 18 when I finally escaped to Chicago where I went to college. A good day would be being called a racist epithet  only once. The name calling wasn’t nearly as bad as the anticipation that tomorrow was going to be like today, to endure an unending litany of humiliating names.

I was reassured that in addition to being of an inferior race, I was also ugly and stupid since I didn’t know English when I first moved to America. I didn’t just experience racism from other children. Adults at commercial establishments would tell me to go to the back of the line when I’ve waited in line already so that white people would be served first. They say the best revenge is to live a good life. To this day, I go out of the way to make sure the people around me will never know what it’s like to be rejected and ridiculed for being themselves. I did that as a criminal defense attorney, and now my art expresses similar sentiments.

More info: www.jeanniehua.art

Meet the attorney-turned-artist who subverts xenophobic narratives, Double Scoop Magazine

Meet the attorney-turned-artist who subverts xenophobic narratives

Meet the attorney-turned-artist who subverts xenophobic narratives

Jeannie Hua reconstructs a world in paper

Delaney Uronen on March 21, 2023

For Jeannie Hua, art has always held a redemptive power. In her childhood, it served as an escape from the racism she and her parents experienced as Chinese-American immigrants. Now, the criminal defense attorney turned fine art collagist uses her artistic practice to reinvent her own life and to amend the incomplete historical narratives that undergird racial prejudice and xenophobia in the United States.

“Chinese American Sold”

Hua and her parents emigrated from Taiwan to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1975, when she was 8 years old. During this time, she says, when daily encounters with racism left her and her parents depressed, art provided Hua with a much-needed refuge. “The only way I could block out the voices of the kids calling me awful names was by drawing—I could be lost in this world I created,” she said. “I was burying my pain. I was burying my parents’ pain. I wouldn’t have survived my childhood had I not had my art.”

Hua left Ohio to attend the University of Chicago, where she received a degree in Art History. While art was her passion, Hua’s parents wanted her to work toward a life of financial security for herself and her family. A career as an artist did not fit this vision. Hua made a deal with her mother: she would spend a year in Taiwan after graduation and return to the U.S. to complete a graduate degree in a more lucrative field. Hua decided to study law, and attended Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon in the early 1990s.

Jeannie Hua

Hua relocated to Las Vegas after graduation. After she had worked in various roles, including as a public defender and with well-known Las Vegas defense attorney Bucky Buchanan, she opened her own criminal defense practice. This venture proved professionally and financially freeing, until she fell into a severe depression and began to experience suicidal ideation. “My husband saw what was happening and said ‘You know what, honey? You’ve always wanted to be an artist. Why don’t you return to art?’” Hua said. 

After practicing law for 20 years, Hua closed her firm and enrolled in art classes at the College of Southern Nevada. While at CSN, she attended the Chateau Orquevaux artist residency in France, where she learned about low residency MFA programs. Upon return, she was accepted to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated with an MFA from the Low-Residency program in late 2022.

Around the time Hua closed her law practice to focus on art and her mental health, she attended a collage workshop with her children. “It was really mostly for my kids, but I felt such a pleasure in shredding these ads designed to produce consumerist desire and set unrealistic beauty standards,” she said. “Even though you’re destroying these images, their shreds still retain the trace DNA of their original function, design, and purpose. When you place them in a new context, you complicate their meaning.” 

“Workers”

At this challenging stage of her life, art remained a way for Hua to pick up the pieces and make sense of what was happening around her. “It was kind of my way of reconstructing my world, which had fallen apart and into chaos, by reconstructing a world onto paper,” she said. “There was a therapeutic component.”

When the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic sparked anti-Asian hate across the country, Hua turned once again to her artistic practice. This time, it proved not only a place of personal refuge, but also a potential site for the amendment of dominant historical narratives. 

“When I was getting glares at grocery stores, it made me think of the people demonstrating against the removal of Confederate flags and monuments,” Hua said. “A huge reason for the basis of their claim to being ‘true’ Americans is the fact that they have ancestors who fought in the American Civil War. But African Americans, Asian Americans, and many other people of color fought in the American Civil War, too. So by their own argument, they are also supporting our claim to being true Americans. And that inconvenient truth is powerful.”

These oft-forgotten facts of American history are symptomatic of an established historical narrative that is at best incomplete and more often intentionally exclusionary. Just as the pandemic would prove ongoing, so too would anti-Asian discrimination and violence, events that placed the stakes of historical narratives—even as they unfolded in real time—into stark relief. 

“There’s a long history of rebellion and subversion that comes with collage— politically, not just personally,” Hua said, citing the use of the medium in the Modernist movement and in 20th Century African-American art. “When you rip these aspects of society and reanimate them in your own configuration, you’re showing how the world could be construed, instead of the way colonialism and patriarchy has made us perceive ourselves.”

“Chinese Landscape”

As an artist, Hua recognizes the powerful role that art, and collage in particular, can play in attempts to amend these shortcomings and create a more equitable future. “The contributions of Chinese Americans have often been devalued or omitted,” Hua said. “It makes me think about what we base our knowledge of history on. How legitimate are records made by those in power? They’re not objective. It’s what people record that is passed down. I have no choice but to make tracings out of the traces of history that I glimpse and add them to that record.”

Hua’s first solo gallery exhibition, Traces and Tracings, interrogates these historical limitations through collages of exuberant color and energetic composition. One piece, titled “Did You Know Chinese Americans Fought in the Civil War?”, poses a poignant question, while her series “Socrates’ Allegory of the Cave” considers the way that historical narrative can only ever be a shadow of the past itself.

Hua’s first solo exhibition, Traces and Tracings, is on view at the College of Southern Nevada.

“I really like the philosophy that everything, everyone has a second chance,” Hua said. “That just because something started out as ephemera— something assigned a purely utilitarian or temporary value, like magazine advertisements— could be turned into something more eternal, into art. Historically, when labor was needed, Chinese immigrants were welcomed into the country. But once our labor was no longer necessary, we were disregarded through xenophobic immigration laws, disregarded like detritus, like ephemera. But there’s value in people and objects beyond mere utility.” 

After graduating with her MFA late last year, Hua, who still occasionally practices law, is currently an adjunct professor of art history at the College of Southern Nevada. She will also teach a workshop at Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan this summer. “I hope that when people hear my story they realize that it is never too late for new beginnings,” said Hua. “There’s something very joyful about that.”

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Photos courtesy of Jeannie Hua. You can learn more about Jeannie on her website.

Jeannie Hua’s solo exhibition Traces and Tracings is on view at the College of Southern Nevada Artspace Gallery through April 23, with a reception at 6 pm April 19. 

• Posted in: Featured, Las Vegas, Profile

Posted by Delaney Uronen

Delaney Uronen is a Northern California-born writer and UNR graduate who now lives in Reno. Art, community, and landscapes keep her bouncing between both places.

Maria Gaspar

Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Chicago. She uses different mediums including installation, sculpture, sounds, visual arts, and performance in her practice of social justice art.

In 96 Acres Project, Gaspar’s project doesn’t just incorporate different disciplines, the project is also purposefully long term in time. By using various mediums and choices in individuals of varying ages, cultures, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds, Gaspar is a conductor over a symphony of voices and instruments. Her success lies not from manipulations over the musicians, but her ability to listen and encourage the formation of coalition once she's chosen her ensemble and the mediums used for exploration, ie, radio, workshops, internet, animation, zines, films, theater, and visual arts.

96 Acres is a project centered on the Cook County Jail and the impact of its presence in the neighborhood. The project has the following components, (1) a website that ties all the parts of the projects together; (2) community advisory committee; (3) workshops opened to the community; (4) interviews with inmates, their loved ones, and people who live in the community broadcast over Lumpen Radio (105.5 FM); and (5) site specific art events that incorporate visual art, sound art, and video art.

Gaspar recognized the impossibility of public art without the public. So instead of a large-scale sculpture or mural on the side of a building, she chose people, her audience to be an integral part of her public art. By engaging different segments of the local population, the teachers, the social workers, the artists, the adults, the teens, the children of the neighborhood and the nonprofit groups, Gaspar served as a conductor that harmonized the different citizens and factions of the neighborhood yet highlighted each to illustrate the complexity that is the Cook County Jail.

She could’ve concentrated just on the inmates and their lives. She could’ve simply honed in on the employees of the jail and the danger they face. She could’ve focused on the criminal justice system. She could’ve explored the history of criminology. But instead, by using the different segments of the local population and different mediums, she presents a multilayered narrative against the static backdrop of Cook County Jail. Further, by allowing public engagements containing the different mediums to occur along a long span of time, she’s using time as a parallel with time as a sentence to be served within the jail. So the project is never the same from one moment to the next. It moves with the community.

1. Website

The Website that devotes to 96 acres has its logo on the upper left-hand corner. To the right of the logo lists in columns, the facets of the project. Under the logo are photos shown as slides illustrating aspects of the facets, ie. workshops, personal stories, site specific art events, etc. Under the photos is a button to contribute. The opportunity to contribute tells the viewer that the project is ongoing and invites the viewer to be part of the project. Inviting the viewer to be part of the art. Under the “donate” button are the links to various social media sites.

When the viewer clicks on the list next to the 96 acres project logo starting with “96 Acres Project,” the viewer is introduced to a summary of what the project is about and its mission. Immediately the words such as “diverse,” “committee,” “community,” “stakeholders” are repeated throughout the description of the mission and the history of the project. The emphasis is on people populating the project. The key “ingredients” in the project consist of “An advisory group of community stakeholders, which includes educators, activists, artists, violence preventions workers, community leaders, the formerly incarcerated, youth, and parents was established to engage in a critical dialogue…” Credit is given to individuals responsible for the collaboration. Instead of concepts described, the people, their names, and their roles are listed for the viewer to understand what this project is about.

When the viewer clicks on “Cook County Jail,” a one paragraph description containing the physical location and the statistics of the jail is listed with a link for further information. This section is the shortest page on the project, highlighting the fact that the project about Cook County Jail is everything but the physicality of Cook County Jail. “Supporters” list the funders, stakeholders, and partners of the project. The list includes politicians, nonprofit organizations, art foundations, theater groups and social service programs, seemingly disparate in focus but singular in purpose in terms of their involvement with this project. Clicking on “News” serves as a listing of events. The events chronical art events that incorporate sound, ie, recorded stories of inmates and locals living in the area, projected animation, theater, community discussions.

Click on “Education” and the viewer can see workshops offered to the community engaging in dialog about the personal, for example, physical and emotional effects of incarceration and being around monuments of incarceration as well as the public, for example, how urban designs affects space. Click on “Listen to Stories” and the viewer is turned into a listener, a listen of stories by inmates, lawyers, people who live in the neighborhood. These stories are produced by people of all ages, reflecting validity of all views, regardless of color, age, creed, or economic status.

Under “Listen to Stories” is a link is “Submit Stories.” This link transforms the listener, the audience into a participate, a fellow artist, a fellow community member. This project that builds a community beyond the physical remains dynamic by building its own community within the project by invitations to donate, and to submit stories. The rest of the lists are extensions of opportunities to participate by finding future events on their “Events Calendar,” “Contact,” “Subscribe,” and “Support 96 Acres.”

2. Community Advisory Committee

The video at the bottom of the “96 Acre Project” link on top of the home webpage shows a meeting of the community steering committee. The members consist of residents in the neighborhood, “educators, activists, artists, violence preventions workers, community leaders, the formerly incarcerated, youth, and parents.” The first thing I noticed is that all voices are equal regardless of age or profession. Again, the importance of collaboration and respect between people being key ingredients in this project is highlighted. Every perspective is a valid perspective. When equality is established, the burden is lightened for the conductor to direct and control the impetus of progression. In Gaspar’s own words, “I’ve been involved for more than 15 years in public art projects and the most important aspect of the work is the process—test things out, evaluate, reflect, dialogue.”

3. Community Workshops

The workshops offered utilizes artistic expression through visualization, acting, playing, singing, devising, constructing in finding personal empowerment and alternatives to incarceration. The workshops are designed to give voice to those who feel voiceless in the community they live in. The workshops also serve to validate personal experiences and to find ways to change their circumstances. The focus of the workshops vary from the interior to the exterior. One of the workshops that focus on the interior is called, “Body Scanning: Mapping Spaces of Healing, Memory, and Collective Reflection/Freedom.” The workshop recognize that bodies are vessels that retain trauma and how from writing and art can the script of profiling be flipped and recognition that people of color deserve recognition of worth instead of false perspective of propensity for criminality. One of the workshops that focus on the exterior is “Infrastructures of Control: Space, Design, and Mechanisms of Power.” This workshop deals with prison designs and how the same type of designs permeates urban space. By recognizing the issues of lockdown mentality in design, solutions are explored in the workshop.

4. Stories broadcast on Lumpen Radio (105.5 FM)

This facet of the project is multi-purposed. The main purpose is to give voice to the community within and without the jail. But it also serves as a learning experience for the stories’ young producers. This part of the project “puts its money where its mouth is” because young people’s voices weren’t just heard in the advisory steering committee, but power and discretion were given to them by giving them the autonomy to produce stories for the project. The stories are told from the inmates, their loved ones, and the people who live in the neighborhood’s perspectives. When the listener listens to the interviews, each voice from within and without Cook County Jail sculpts the landscape of the community, giving solidity to the reality of the political and socio-economic situation of the jail and its surrounding neighborhood. Letting people tell their own stories instead of telling their stories for them adds authenticity and immediacy to the project.

5. Site Specific Art Events

Listed in the “News” section of the website are site specific art events. For example, one was called “Portraits of Resolution” where artists, William Estrada, Anthony Rea and Erica Brooks set up a mobile portrait site outside the Cook County Court house and asked people if they wanted to write how they felt about the justice system on the wall and pose next to it. People posted powerful messages and their faces showed their conviction that there must be something better than the justice system that currently exists. Just like every facet of this project, the individual is highlighted and valued.

Another event took place outside of Cook County Jail. It was a collaboration between Goodman Theater’s Department of Education and 96 Acres project. The Visible Voices Ensemble made up from previously incarcerated women did a body sculpture performance then invited children and adults to make kites with messages of support for the inmates. Then they flew the kites so the inmates could see them and know they’re supported and not forgotten. This project is multifaceted. The first purpose was to show support to the currently incarcerated. The second purpose is for the previously incarcerated women to be able to express themselves and empower them by having them help newly freed women. The third purpose is by encouraging children to write supportive messages and draw pictures on kites for the benefit of the incarcerated, they’re introduced to the idea that the incarcerated are people like them who need and deserve support just like anyone else, removing or mitigating the stigma surrounding incarceration.

Gaspar continues her collaborative art with the event “Radioactive: Stories from Behind the Wall.” She worked with a group of inmates to make digital animation and audio and project the image accompanied by sound on the walls of Cook County Jail. Gaspar duplicates her process with the inmates that she used with the steering community advisory committee. “My goal was to create a curious, trusting relationship, to provisionally disassemble any hierarchies between us.”

By forming a coalition for her public art project, Gaspar merged the distinction between artist and audience, subject and creator, participant and consumptor. The website serves as a map for the project as well as an entry as a participant through donations and opportunity to submit stories. The way Gaspar creates public art isn’t by large scale sculptures or installations, her ultimate medium is people. And by collaborations between individuals and organizations, her public art is continually in motion and changes with the development of the community through their citizens.

Bibliography

Gaspar, Maria, 96 Acres Project, Maria Gaspar, https://mariagaspar.com/96-acres-project, 12/20/2021

Gaspar, Maria, Body in Place, The Art Assignment, All Arts, https://allarts.org/programs/the-art-assignment/art-assignment-gaspar/12/20/2021

Gaspar, Maria, Visualizing Abolition, UC Santa Cruz Institute of Arts and Sciences, https://barringfreedom.org/artists/maria-gaspar, 12/20/2021.

Quiles, Daniel, Interviews, Art Forum, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/maria-gaspar-discusses-her-collaborative-work-with-incarcerated-communities-76597, 12/20/2021

Yeapanis,Stacia, OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Maria Gaspar, OtherPeoplesPixels Blog, https://blog.otherpeoplespixels.com/otherpeoplespixels-interviews-maria-gaspar, 12/20/2021

Case Study on Mendi and Keith Obadike

Introduction

Mendi and Keith Obadike are interdisciplinary artists. They incorporate sound, video, texts, artifacts and public spaces in their art. Their practice is collaborative, with Mendi’s background more text and speech driven and Keith’s practice being more sound driven. But both of their practices are steeped in history, politics, anthropology, religion, economics, music, and literature. Their public works are essentially giant installations, instead of constructing a stage or a display that incorporates sound and light, they use public space, buildings, historical sites as their installations.

Thesis

Mendi and Keith’s interdisciplinary art duplicates the conditions in which racial judgments form in the thought process, the way seemingly disparate data as perceived by the senses from our everyday experiences are neurologically connected and gives birth to racist judgments. Through duplication of conditions by formalistic manipulation and juxtaposition of data, Mendi and Keith’s work sow the conditions for the viewer/listener to traverse the same thought process but rather than arriving at the conclusion of racist judgments, instead, question the formation and role of racism in the status quo.

Mendi and Keith recognize that racism is an artificial and irrational construct with random associations that cross between different senses, within sources from politics, art, economics, literature, music, history and common objects. These disorganized associations lead to random clusters of recognition. The artificial environment they construct duplicate that process of racism but diverts the conclusion of racism to one of elucidation and questioning towards a hopeful utopia or at least a society cognizant of its fallacies. The Obadikes called it racial logic. (1)

Reasons and Processes, Generally

The majority of Obadikes’ art is about racism, Black history, and Black presence. They are advocates for awareness and understanding of the legacy of racism, where Blacks are in current society, and the need for Black history to be integrated into American history. Their work comes from conversations together over the years, from continuance dialog from ideas that came from listening, awareness, and paying attention. The recognition that music can be spatial and architectural runs through their work. Because of that, they’ve incorporated public space into their work with site specific sound installation. Working on many projects at once, they’re able to draw from seemingly incongruous elements to make a cohesive work because they don’t think linearly. They have a network overview of concepts that’s enhanced and encouraged by their collaborative process, each with their own perspective. (2)

“lull: a sleep temple”

“lull, a sleep temple,” originated from their need for rest after going through and still going through the pandemic. (3) And if they needed it, so did their fellow human beings. Their process involved research in Egyptian culture where sleep temples served as a place for rest and meditation. They also researched the Igbo culture, which is Keith’s heritage where dreams are a way to connect to a place beyond our conscious minds. Their research included musical history as well, including 1960’s and 1970’s transformational music of John and Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. They also researched other sounds that reach another level or place of consciousness.

link to lull

They used acoustic and electro-acoustic live instruments, an old Juno 106 and Moog 32 analog synths, and vocals to make their sounds for the project. First, they recorded multi-tracked pieces where they layered guitars, piano, Rhodes, bass and vocal harmonies. At times, they would combine bowing on their bass with cello from an orchestral kit. They also drew from archival recordings of Keith multitracking phrases and songs to 24-inch analog tape. Then they’d stretch out the recordings. They stayed in triadic harmony to keep the sound simple. They composed in chunks that were assembled into the large piece. After assemblage, they performed over the large sections in a dub-like fashion with vocal and processing choices made contemporaneously.

In composing the text, Mendi researched and drew ideas from a book written in 1275 BC on dream interpretation as well as an ancient story from 1401 BC. Because their intended audience included the conscious and those lapsing into or already unconscious, they used repetition. Lull is an example of their use of sound to transport their listener to other planes and levels of awareness.

American Cypher

On the left image of the bell Jefferson gifted to Hemings. On the right, image of Keith recording the ringing of the bell.

link to American Cypher at Bucknell Univ.

American Cypher was a project about DNA, stories of how identity is encoded and the role of DNA. (4) For “Stereo Helix for Sally Hemings,” part of the American Cypher project, The Obadikes researched Thomas Jefferson and Sally Heming’s story by interviewing the descendants of Jefferson and Hemings as well as the staff at Monticello. They researched the artifacts at Monticello and discovered the last known possession of Hemming was a servant’s bell, given by Jefferson. Keith recorded the ringing of the bell and used it as part of the sound. They also used numbers from Thomas Jefferson’s and Sally Hemings’ descendants’ DNA to tune the bell recording. The DNA analysis gave them a pitch to set for the composition.(5) They mixed the score with the bell ringing and field recordings of ambient sounds from Monticello. They then used movable speakers and projected the sound in the stairwells in Monticello. From the use of artifact, oral history, DNA sequence numbers, and architecture, Stereo Helix is a network of neural experiences giving the viewer/listener a haunting sense of what came before and what continues to linger within the backdrop of racism in America.

The Obadikes in Time Square.

link to a video about Compass Song

Compass Song

Mendi and Keith created an art app to engage with Time Square.(6) The original idea came from them visiting Time Square, watching how people occupy the space, and noticing how people walked with their headphones on. They wanted to give the people walking through Time Square something to listen to during their walk to give meaning to the place they’re inhabiting.

They researched the history of Time Square, back to when Indigenous people lived on the land. During the time they spent walking around the space, they realized it was a crossroad. With the idea of crossroads, came the concept of navigation and the role of the compass. They liked the idea of a compass in a more mystical way. They recorded ambient sounds around Time Square. The songs and verses of myths and stories were all drawn from their research on the history of Time Square, how the land in that location was used hundreds of years ago.

When the app user walks through Time Square, they’d hear recordings of sounds of the city, songs, and stories. One constant song throughout the app is the song “Walk with Me,” an old spiritual that was sung at protest marches during the civil rights movement. This project is an example of their use of sounds to create space; their use of space to enhance the sense of time, and their conceptual use of landmark.

Number Station

The Obadikes performing Number Station.

video of performance of Number Station

Mendi and Keith became interested in stop and frisk statistics when a whistleblower cop recorded his superior pressuring him about conducting more stops.(7) Their interest gave rise to Numbers Station. Number station is about the number of stop and frisks from each precinct in NYC from ACLU. Mendi and Keith took the statistics and turned the numbers into sound because they wanted the listener to “feel” the numbers, feel something that’s abstract in a visceral way.

In their research they engaged with the notion of pliancy and fallacy of data. For instance, they noticed missing data regarding police shootings in certain precincts. In others, they noticed that stop and frisk data have been massaged by under and over reporting. The peaks and valley in the recordings gave a sense of the number of stop and frisks.

From the translation of stop and frisk numbers into hertz, the listener can feel the synergistic energy of each precinct. The sine tones were generated by the statistics. For example, if 134 people were stopped by one precinct in a month, then they turned that number into 134 hertz. They overlapped the hertz variations with voices reading the statistics. They also researched The Red Record by Ida B. Wells. It’s a tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892-1894. They incorporated the statistics from that book into the sounds as well.

Conclusion

By duplicating the network of conditions that give rise to racist attitudes, Mendi and Keith reveal that humans experience the world more synergistically than realized. Considering the reality of people suffering from racism in the world yet the reality remains abstract from those free from such suffering, the tool of synergy while complex, gives hope to awakenings for a public that occupies public spaces. In our world where people seem to exist in extremes, people exposed to sights and sounds of racial logic in public spaces seem all the more important as part of the process of reconciliation.

For more information about their wonderful art, their website is http://blacksoundart.com/about

Footnotes

1. Mendi and Keith Obadike, An interview with Mendi and Keith Obadike, Aria Dean, Rhizome, 05/17/2017

2. Mendi and Keith Obadike, Artists on Art, Listen Notes, Lenore Metrick-Chen, 04/14/2017

3. Mendi and Keith Obadike, 5 questions to Mendi and Keith Obadike, Tristan McKay I Care If You Listen, 4/28/2021

5. Mendi and Keith Obadike, Lenore Metrick-Chen, Artists on Art, Listen Notes, 04/14/2017

6. Mendi and Keith Obadike, SO! Amplifies: Mendi and Keith Obadike and Sounding Race in America, Sounding Out! 10/06/2014

7. Mendi and Keith Obadike, In Conversation with Mendi and Keith Obadike about ‘Compass Song,’ Hannah Lee, Time Square Arts

Bibliography

Dean, Aria, #000 is a Color: An interview with Mendi and Keith Obadike, Rhizome, 05/17/2017

Guevara, Julian, Mendi and Keith Obadike Interview, Rragazine

Lee, Hannah, In Conversation with Mendi and Keith Obadike about ‘Compass Song’ Time Square Arts

McKay, Tristan, 5 questions to Mendi and Keith Obadike, I Care If You Listen, 4/28/2021

Metrick-Chen, Lenore, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Artists on Art, Listen Notes

Roe, Tom, Mendi and Keith Obadike discuss their “Numbers Station” exhibition, Wave Farm, 09/12/2015

The Burton Wire, American Cypher: Mendi and Keith Obadike Talk Race, DNA, and Digital Art, 06/08/2013

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Case Study One on John Reed

David Reed was born in 1946. He grew up in California. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Reed College in 1968 and after graduation, studied with Philip Guston in New York.

He’s an American contemporary artist and his influences range from Renaissance to New York School. His paintings are known for images of large brush strokes and bright colors although he did paint in black and white as well.

The choice of shape and hues of his vertical and horizontal paintings mimic celluloid films, channeling engagement between physicality of the paintings and the illusion they create. Through formalistic qualities, Reed plays with layers of time and memory, the actual and virtual.

David Reed wrote about his experience in his early twenties when he was drawn to the landscape of the Southwestern United States in his article “Media Baptisms.” While staying in the desert, he went on a hike and found a cave. He took a drink of water from a small spring running along the wall of the cave. Just at that moment, he had déjà vu and realized that while he’s never been in the cave, his memory of the cave was from the film “The Searchers” by John Ford. This discovery made him aware of authentic versus virtual memory and play of reality.

He likes the format of the film because it captures the uncanny. And in his paintings, he captures the same. And what he means by the uncanny is what the film captures. Any normal experience, once captured by the medium of film becomes uncanny, or significant because of the existence of the tool of recordation.

Reed drew from Tzvetan Todorov’s study, “The Fantastic, a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre” for three requirements for the fantastic. The first is unresolved ambiguity between the supernatural and a rational explanation. In his paintings, there’s an ambiguity between the physicality of the painting and the illusionism. The second is an identification of the reader with the hero’s hesitation between interpretations. Reed calls entry into the uncanny at the cave a “gesture.” The gesture that gets the viewer into his paintings is through the eyes. The eyes are greeted by ambiguous gestures or shapes that suggest movement and Reed hopes will lead to the uncanny or the fantastic. That is why his paintings are vertical and horizontal extremes because the viewer can’t take in the whole painting at once. When the eyes are focused on one area of the painting, the peripheral vision moves.

The third requirement for the fantastic is that the work not have poetic or narrative interpretations because it’ll lose its ambiguity. If there’s specificity in the subject of the painting, then the experience becomes the rational rather than the fantastical.

The viewer is drawn in by the colors and shapes of seemingly quick brush strokes. David Reed refers to his brushwork as gestures. But in carefully planning and designing these gestural shapes to bring out materiality and to give the appearance of movement and spontaneity, Reed ends up doing the opposite of what the Abstract Expressionists did. Abstraction Expressionists emphasized the physicality of the act of painting over the painting itself, where the act of painting is the artwork, and the resulting work is the circumstantial evidence of the art that existed before the genesis of the painting. By painting spontaneity with deliberation, Reed is playing with time. He’s giving an illusion of a moment in time by taking months and years to complete his paintings. Similarly, the use of the medium of celluloid film is also a play on time, filming a movie on celluloid takes time and planning to give an effect of spontaneous depiction of action and motion.

It’s not just the illusion of abbreviated brush strokes that he plays with time, it’s also back to the shape of his paintings. With his extreme horizontal and vertical paintings, he’s referring to the shape, materiality, and purpose of celluloid films. With the extreme vertical and horizontal paintings, it’s impossible for the viewer to focus on the entire painting. And it takes time for the viewer to sequentially, take in different spots of the paintings at a time. When the viewer looks at one area of the painting, there is movement in their peripheral vision. Where there’s movement, there’s passage of time, even if it’s a moment.

With the movement in the periphery, David Reed takes the viewer back to the purpose of celluloid film, depiction of movement and passage of time. Similar to film, the effect of light in his paintings is artificial. He does this by using hues instead of value in his paintings.

His TV size paintings offer a multi-layered approach to depiction of the materiality or lack of in media. With the series specifically entitled TV-size paintings, he’s referring to the television screen we’re accustomed to seeing in the context of our domiciles. Adding an additional consideration is that many films released in the theater are later shown on TV, the viewer either harkens back to memory of seeing the same movie on a public movie screen, and adjusts to the viewing through a personalized smaller screen, or if the viewer is watching an old film for the first time on television, then their perception of the narrative and depiction are a different iteration of the original film. This brings into the question the original intent of the film maker as well as questions of authenticity of the authorship as well as the viewership. Viewing the same film on a public movie screen versus on a privately owned television is similar to how a personalized pan pizza for one is much smaller than a large pizza designed to be consumed by many.

David Reed’s paintings are just so darn pretty. The movement of the bright colors and artificial light are entrancing, similar to the entrancement the viewer experiences in a theater or by watching television. The eye is drawn in through the gesture of purposefully designed movement. David Reed’s recollection of drinking water in a cave was from “The Searchers” is a memory recall from another’s fabrication, another’s vision. I’m reminded of a lecture on filmmaking about “The Wizard of Oz.” The lecturer discussed Dorothy’s yearning and quest to find her home. But the home in the Wizard of Oz is one of artificial construct. In watching, empathizing, and identifying with Dorothy, the viewer too yearns for home. But the home that the viewer yearns for is not their own, it’s for a home that can only be found on screen. And in that sense, Hollywood is manufacturing consumers to return to the screen again and again, in search of a home they’ll never find.

Similarly, by utilizing the motifs of celluloid film and television, David Reed entices and entrances the viewer to enter his works by the gesture of deliberate brushstroke designs, making the viewer lose a sense of time, similar to watching media in a theater or on television. In our world defined by media and our reality experienced on screens of all sizes and shapes, David Reed’s paintings remain relevant and questioning in their beauty. If you wish to see more of his art, link to his website is David Reed Art

04/01/2021

More mixed media inspired by my “Sculpting Space: Design, Architecture, and Sacred Systems in Africa and the Diaspora” class at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

03/17/2021

Another mixed media work inspired by my “Sculpting Space: Design, Architecture, and Sacred Systems in Africa and the Diaspora” class at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“My Private Lexicon,” collage, magazine paper, acrylic, gel medium, 24”x18”x0”

03/04/2021

I took a wonderful class during my spring semester at School of the Art Institute of Chicago called “Sculpting Space: Design, Architecture, and Sacred Systems in Africa and the Diaspora.” I was inspired by the cultural interchange from trade between West African countries and China. I also started researching cave art found in China to discern the parallels between China and West Africa. This is one of the collages I made as part of my class assignments.

“If nothing is permanent then everything is permanent,” collage, magazine paper, gel medium, 26”x18”x0”

02/18/2021

“Air, Water, Sun,” collage, magazine paper, acrylic, and gel medium, 26”x18”x0”

Why don't normal people like contemporary art?

When I started creating my collages, my friends loved them. It was at their request did I start selling them. But when they asked about my art, their hesitation in even asking the question made me sad. Why are perfectly intelligent people intimidated by art? Even by bad art? I suppose all the brouhaha started in the mid 1800's when artists like Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne started to paint whatever the hell they wanted instead of what the rich and the royalty wanted. It was supposed to be giving art back to the common people. And art became more personal instead of political or religious.

Then Marcel Duchamp's "R Mutt" introduced the idea that art is what you make of it. That you can find aesthetic beautiful in a vacuum cleaner, or a urinal. Art no longer is limited to art. But all this freedom and the idea that post modern art is mostly conceptual art, or the idea that the idea is more important than the physical part of art, can be alienating. No longer can a normal person walk into a gallery, look at something and know what the hell is going on. No one likes to feel stupid, even when they're obviously placed in a situation where insufficient information is given. Conceptual art cannot be understood without explanations, without the use of words. There are even art movements who celebrate this codependency, i.e. the Art and Letter group. 

The reality of this evolution of art is if you want to understand the art you're looking at, you have to attend the opening of an art show in hopes of meeting the artists. Then go up to various artists and ask what the hell are you trying to say through your art. If you have balls that big than good for you. But for the rest of us mortals, it's intimidating.

Why do you have to go to the openings and get the info from the horses' mouths? Because galleries lack materials that enhance and educate the viewers about the works in their galleries. Have you ever entered an art gallery? The reception you get varies, but overall, the curator or the receptionist can be unfriendly once they size up your clothes and decide you can't afford their art. This is not the way it is in Vegas but it sure is in the bigger cities.

I don't have solutions for the normal people other than to go to the openings and enjoy the cheeses. I do have solutions for the galleries though. Have more educational materials on the artists you're featuring. Even rich people need to know what the hell they're buying. Art isn't inaccessible. It's the surrounding culture (galleries, the market place that dispenses art) that has nothing to do with the substantive art that's preventing the public from enjoying the aesthetic riches available to us in our towns.

I've been obsessing about Louise Bourgeois' mother

Louise Bourgeois had based her art works on her personal life. She had problems with her philandering father and her mother provided the love and support she needed. Her most famous works are of these giant spiders that Bourgeois explained depicted her mother, how she protected and supported Bourgeois.

I understand that spiders play a far more beneficial role in our ecosystem than us humans. But the size, material and style of the spiders Bourgeois chose seem to show a darker side to maternal love. Protection is a fine line from sequestration. When you protect, you can keep out as well as keep in. Further, nurture can be a fine line from suffocation. Feeding and giving have nuances depending upon quantity. Too little feeding and giving is to be cruel, too much makes the recipient fight for air, also cruel.

If Bourgeois really wanted to show maternal love, which is comforting and warm, she could've turned to fabric, which she had used to great success. For "Spider" at Modern Museum of Art, she used something as heavy and impenetrable as bronze. And she chose to make the spider large. The spider has thin legs like bars on a jail cell and they surround the center, where a beautiful bird cage like structure sits, housing a chair. Many a great and campy horror film have been made over a mother's love, because it is primeval and raw. I have no doubt Bourgeois' mother loved her and sustained her. But I'm not sure I would've wanted to meet her.