(soft music) - Welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. I'm Tyler Green. We're heading toward the 4th of July, so we've got a holiday clips program for you this week. It features artist Keon Williams. Williams' work is on view in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which is at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through August 11th. And it's also about to go on view at Art Omi in Get New York. On July 6th, Art Omi will present Keon Williams Vertigo. That show features large-scale works, including Vertigo, and also 2022's Ruins of Empire, a reimagining of Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom, which was installed atop the U.S. Capitol Dome in 1863. Ruins of Empire debuted at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York as part of the Public Art Fund's 2022 Black Atlantic Exhibition. This program was taped on the occasion of that show, and Williams' Art Museum debut at the Hammer Museum when they received a Hammer Project show. As ever, you can find the artists' Instagram on the show page at manpodcast.com. If you enjoy the show, please give us a five-star rating and a review wherever you subscribe to it. Thanks very much. Keon Williams, after the break. (soft music) (soft music) Modern Art Notes is supported by Getty. On view through July 7th, 2024 at the Getty Center, 19th Century Photography Now explores early photographs through the work of 21 contemporary artists. Organized around five themes dating back to the mediums beginnings, the exhibition considers how many of the conventions established during photography's earliest years persist today. Featuring works by On Me Lee, Carry Me Weems, Paul and Poggy Supoya, and Wendy Redstar, among others, the exhibition invites us to re-imagine these early pictures while drawing connections between photography then and now. Learn more and make free advanced reservations today at Getty.edu. For more than three decades, Arthur Jafa has crisscrossed the worlds of art, film, and music, taking viewers on a powerful journey through black expression. With a selection of works you won't want to miss, Jafa's newest survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago underscores his unique approach to art making where the lines between popular and high culture blur and the personal collides with the political. Plan your visit at mcachicago.org. Located in the heart of downtown Berkeley at the edge of the University of California campus, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is one of the nation's leading university art museums. A locally rooted, globally relevant institution that connects audiences with the most exciting artists and filmmakers of our time. Uniquely dedicated to both art and film, BAMFA hosts more than a dozen art exhibitions, hundreds of film screenings, and countless public programs each year with a growing emphasis on contemporary work by black, Asian, and Latinx voices. To see what's on view and plan a visit, go to BAMFA.org. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles presents Refashioning, showcasing transdisciplinary artists and fashion designers, CFGNY, and Wataro Tomanaga. The exhibition features garments, accessories, and textile works, examining the ways in which these two practices, one based in New York, the other in Tokyo, challenge preconceived notions of gender and identity. And in particular, what the artists describe as, quote, vaguely Asian aesthetics. Now on view through August 4th, visit hammer.ucla.edu for more information. (gentle music) And we're back. Keon Williams, welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. - Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. - The primary material within between Star Shine and Clay, which is the work at the Hammer, is dirt. So we'll talk more about where you source your dirt in a moment, but what brought you to, I guess, first, being interested in dirt sounds much more insulting when I say it out loud than when I typed it in my notes. What got you interested in dirt and what brought you to using it as a material within your work? - The first artwork that I, in which I used earth as a primary material was entitled unearthing. And it was a performance piece in which I sort of buried myself in a mountain earth and like waist high and appeared to be emerging or growing out of the soil which I had sourced from an unrecognized burial ground of enslaved Africans in New York City that is in the Bowery area. Not far, actually in the same kind of area where the new museum is located. And I didn't know it at the time, but what compelled me to both touch the earth, but also to work with earth site specifically was this idea that earth holds history, it holds memory. In particular, it holds memory and history that isn't or cannot be represented or remembered in traditional historical documents because of historical erasure or various reasons. And so one reason I began to work consistently with earth was because of this conceptual idea of it being an alternative archive for black life, for queer life, again, the lives of people who are not represented in traditional historical documents. And so that's one kind of broad conceptual entry point. And then another entry point is what speaks to like my own family's sort of experience in the US. And so I was born in North New Jersey, my grandmother migrated to New York and later New Jersey from North Carolina, where her and her family were sharecroppers. And I remember on our trips back to the plantation where she grew up at in rural North Carolina, one of the most vivid memories I have is my grandmother pulling over on dirt roads. And with this sense of exuberance and excitement and wonder, telling me stories of growing up, cultivating various crops, cantaloupe, melons, vegetables. And that was like a strong sense of pride and also memories from her childhood that she shared with me, the few of them that she did share, in which she articulated and had this sense of reverence for the land of touching and working with the earth. And that sense of reverence for the land, I also witnessed and her garden in practice, she always maintained and continues to maintain, and despite living in, having lived in really big urban metropolitan cities, she always maintains a garden that has various kinds of vegetables, arugula, kale, she's growing tomatoes right now. And so she really inspired in me this, again, this sense of reverence and working the land and growing one's own food and cultivating this relationship and a sense of self that observes as an in tune with like the natural world and the seasons. But that transcendent and exuberant sort of experience or relationship is also deeply tethered to this sort of historical and systemic violence that has shaped American life. And in particular, black American life. And that is the history of sharecropping and shadow slavery. And so one of the reasons why my grandmother and her family left North Carolina was to escape the very brutal and impoverished system of sharecropping. And so there too is this deep history of both trauma and transcendence that I believe black people have with, or that Americans have with, you know, the land we inhabit. And those sort of complicated and very sort of entry points are what continue to like compel me to return to earth and dirt as material, as metaphor, as sites of inquiry, as places through which to experiment. And, you know, as questions about the sort of foundational origin stories of America. - Is it important to you where you get dirt from and does that vary from project to project? - For my own personal practice and kind of the mythology of my own practice, like what sort of compels me, it matters, but it does it because America is sort of shaped by settler colonialism and shadow slavery. So anywhere you go, you know, is a site through which, you know, peoples have been dispossessed or displaced. And so I guess like the overarching or like the larger project is sort of grappling with these larger questions of settler colonialism, shadow slavery, systems of extraction and like land extraction, being a part of it that are embedded in every aspect, in every point of the American landscape. But I do, I am inspired by like visiting specific sites and collecting earth from different sites. 'Cause there's something about the process, right? That energizes me and that ultimately leads to like, you know, what I end up creating and that leads to the artwork. So I guess I'll say that the process, one of the really central parts of my process is like, traveling to a site that has a history that intrigues me and just walking and being in the environment and like sensing the environment. I travel a lot to historical sites that now have some type of like state sanctioned or institutionally sanctioned, like didactic around the history of the site. And so I'm often like responding to that didactic. So like I'm reading sort of what an institution might write about a particular location and then I'm like being in it and trying to like sense a sort of subterranean, if you will, presence or get present. And part of that process for me is quite literally like getting my hands in the earth touching it, you know, having this physical and haptic and embodied experience that for me is a source of like a way of forging connection. And then sometimes often I bring some of that earth to my studio and you know, kind of from there I'm compelled. I'm either like, either create forms based off of the, like, you know, the landscape for like sculptural installations or sometimes I just like bring it to the studio and it becomes kind of what it needs to become. And so I guess to answer your question, site specificity matters as a part of like my process of like being in the world, engaging the world, going to different sites, walking, touching earth as process and as like sensing, like as a way of like opening myself up to the world, which I think as artists, that's kind of like what we do, we respond to the world around us. And so that's kind of what I do to open myself up and then come back to the studio and, you know, alchemize and try and like transmute all of that data experience that I've picked up. - I've got one more question about the foundations of your practice before we get more specific. You did an interview with Aaron Christoval in the gallery publication that the Hammer published to accompany the exhibition there. And it seems like in every darn answer, you cited the importance of a residency or a research trip to Virginia, to California, to wherever, to the development, not just of individual works, but to the development of your entire practice. And I think the thing that really came through that interview is that when you have a residency, you aren't sitting on a chair in an indoor studio, but that you're everywhere but that studio, everywhere outside. And it got me wondering how you approach a residency or a research trip, you know, when you're in a different or new place, how do you approach or think through what it is you want to do in that place and find in that place and be in that place? - When I'm in a new place, I try and find three places first. And this is, it doesn't matter where I am. I try and find like the main street or like the town center, if you will, so like a big city. Most residencies I do are in more like remote rural places. I try and find like the center of the city. And when I'm going to the center of the city, I'm specifically looking for a library, like the public library. And the public library, the downtown area, which generally is where like government buildings are housed. And I'm interested in those places in particular libraries, government buildings, you know, post offices, a city or state or federal buildings because the architecture of those places kind of reveal something about like, they communicate something about the city. It's history and libraries in particular because I get kind of like a cross section of like the composition of who lives in the city. And that is useful because I'm often always interested in questions of like diaspora, displacement, belonging and libraries or places that people who live in inhabited city frequent, like libraries or post offices give me that sense of like, oh, this is who lives here. And that becomes like a springboard for me to then be like, ask about questions about how places are founded and how communities are founded. And, you know, where people traveled from to arrive at a new place that they call home. I look for a body of water, river, a lake, a coast, bodies of water, being near bodies of water are really important because they similarly like tell, reveal things about a city, right? Bodies of water typically are like, or were able to be like major transportation hubs but particularly in like the 19th century. And bodies of water and where they meet the land are like these fascinating zones for me, like that kind of contact point. In the interview that I did with Aaron, I shared that like it was through watching the Pacific Ocean just crash against the coast and carve out these large sort of stone islands is what compelled me to like begin wanting to give shapes to Earth. And so I guess I look towards, I look at like that contact zone with Earth and land, be it out of river lake or a coast. For movement, for like forms, for like how shapes are made but like in kind of like a over geological time. And so government buildings, bodies of water in the bar. (laughing) - Priorities. - Yeah. - I relate to the knowledge that being physically out and about at a site in a manner that is mindfully investigative rather than sightseeing is a kind of labor. I mean, you're trying to think of everything you know about a site, you're trying to bring to a site knowledge you have from other places or other sources. Yeah, the bar is important. (laughing) So in a lot of your work, especially between star shine and clay, the work at the hammer and in other works like sentient ruins, heads are important. Faces are important, but they are often dwarfed by the rest of the sculpture in that the heads seem smaller than they would be at human scale in regards to the rest of the work. And they're really dwarfed by the entirety of an installation. - What work do you think of those heads as doing within your work, especially I guess in the work of the hammer? - Heads in my sculptures and sculpture installations are often the only or most recognizable figurative element in the works. And those are important to me because they articulate the relationship between a body or a figure. And these other non-human, non-figurative, abstracted forms that I'm arguing or articulating like have a relationship. They like, you know, earth and like thinking about people and humans and myself having a relationship like kind of destabilizing or dissolving that imagined boundary between like human nature by like inserting like a head into an otherwise but figurative element into an otherwise like abstracted form. In the case of the hammer to be specific, I was inspired by like cosmic forms. Like I'm thinking about like a body, like a cosmic body, a planet if you will, like imploding or like, or dissipating or being suspended in gravity. And so the abstracted form or the main form of that, well, between Star Shining Clay sort of takes up the shape of a sphere composed of all these kind of rock like elements. And then at the top of the cosmic body is a head and also arms or hands rather. And so I often insert a face ahead into these sort of other forms to try and articulate a relationship, I guess. Or to suggest that in the case of the between Star Shining Clay also, so my approach to figuration or using figurative elements in my work draws on an aesthetic practice that queer studies scholar Jack Halberstam, who is my mentor in grad school, describes and observes a month's contemporary trans artist in this sort of visual language or aesthetic practice involves figuring a body beyond like the language of realism or figuration, but approaching and thinking about the body as fragments that are built and unbuilt and that constitute a sort of larger constellation, if you will. And so in between Star Shining Clay, I see these sort of fragments of eric rock like forms as a way of like building and unbuilding a body and so including the figurative element, in this case, a head and arms, our ways to suggest or like get a viewer to like, you know, to suggest that this form could be read as a figure. - You know, one of the things that's interesting about that is I had my notes to ask you if the heads or the figures and to be clear in my live images on manpodcast.com, of course, you're suggesting figure more than you are filling it in. - Exactly. - Are the heads or the figures, so to speak, do you think of them as being gendered? - So I don't think of the heads or the figures as being gendered and part of my approach to like including figures of elements and specifically like excluding parts of the body through which we read or embed through which gender is like embedded. So like genitalia, breasts, like those, the sort of body parts that we encode and read gender on don't show up in my work. So I do not think of my, the figures that I make or the sculptures that I make as gendered or the heads as being gendered and part of the reason why I don't make like, fully realized forms or figures, but I include like fragments of figurative elements amongst like more sort of abstracted compositions and forms is my way of trying to sort of circumvent including elements of the body through which we read gender on. - The other major work you have on view right now in the United States is a work called Ruins of Empire. It's on view in Brooklyn Bridge Park as part of a public art fund exhibition for people who don't live in New York or who live outside the US. Brooklyn Bridge Park is of course, well, maybe not of course, but it's on the Brooklyn side and it faces almost due west, which means that it often provides a spectacular view of the Statue of Liberty. So this line of sight sets up a conversation about the 19th century between your work and the Statue of Liberty. So this is all kinds of fun for a 19th century history nerd like me. So let's start with Ruins of Empire. It's informed by a sculpture Thomas Crawford started in 1855 that would eventually be installed atop the US Capitol dome. It's there now and a plaster version of it or a plaster model for it is in the US Capitol Visitor's Center. I love Crawford. He's hugely important in American art history and in the development of the idea of the American nation but he's massively under known even by art history nerds. How and why did you come to consider or care about this work of his several hundred feet off the ground? - So I first encountered the Statue of Freedom over a decade ago. - So let me jump in really quick. A decade ago it was a sculpture much easier to see than it is now as we are recording this in the summer of 2022. There are all kinds of barricades and difficulties to accessing the site now that were not in place a decade ago. - Absolutely. And I was in high school. I was a page for the House of Representatives. - Oh my gosh. - And so I spent six months of my junior year in high school in Washington, D.C. essentially as like an internal male delivery system for Congress people. But I had this really intimate experience in the U.S. capital building. I worked here every day. I spent so many hours in the halls of the building but as a page I had one of my jobs was to raise and lower the flag above the capital building. At the beginning and at the end of each congressional session. And that gave me, that put me both in like physical proximity to a lot of the sort of symbols of American democracy, including the Statue of Freedom. So I recall being a teenager and both going on a tour of the capital building and going up to that highest rotunda and you know, having my first kind of close up. Look at the statue and then also having a view of it as I was raising and lowering the flag. And that was my first really like, that was my first close encounter with Statue of Freedom. But it wasn't until years later that I would revisit those experiences in order to like reflect on both my relationship to American nationalism, but also more broadly in my creative practice as I was like unearthing and engaging some of the foundational myths around which the country is built. The Statue of Freedom became such a potent and rich symbol to work with and to engage. Part of what compelled me to the Statue of Freedom as a symbol to appropriate and work with is the kind of, again, the kind of subterranean the cancer story that is around, that surrounds how the statue was built. So Thomas Crawford is the artist who designed and is attributed to making the sculpture, but there were many enslaved laborers involved in the fabrication of the sculpture. One of them being an artisan named Philip Reed. Philip Reed was a really skilled artisan and sculptor. I believe that Reed was enslaved by the sculptor who's foundry casted the Statue of Freedom, but the idea that the Statue of Freedom was fabricated in part using enslaved labor, for me, underlies some of the inherent, you know, contradictions of how freedom is thought of and was constructed within the American project. And one of the sort of underlying, sort of, I think, notions that I'm always returning to and unearthing and getting happy. And so those were all the reasons why Freedom became, but Freedom, like, you know, fascinated me as a symbol of American democracy. - One of the things about your ruins of empire that stands out to me is, you know, it's 10 or 11 feet tall, and you have, you know, your sculpture kind of ends, it's not full length, like the Crawford on the top of the US Capitol. It kind of cuts off where the figures, you know, maybe a little bit above where the figures waste would be. And one of the effects of that is that you, at least to my reading of it, which admittedly is via JPEG, is that you kind of deny the figure, the gender that Crawford gave his, was that intentional? Or am I reading in something that isn't there? - No, absolutely. You know, that's a reading that hasn't come up often in my public conversations around the work. So I'm very excited to think about this. I don't necessarily have a word land that will arrive at a sort of conclusion, but I think that is part of the ruination of, like, my translation of the work is ruining the gender of the work, but interestingly enough, when I was fabricating, when I was sculpting and modeling the piece, one area that I continue to return to around how should I shape it with the rest of the sculpture. And I ultimately, like, de-emphasize the shape of the bust. So it's not like a one-to-one recreation of the actual sculpture, but part of that was from a conversation that I was having with a colleague and a friend, was that I specifically, that my choice in doing that, and like, rendering the bust in a certain way, was to kind of stage of an intervention on the gender of the final, like, my version of the statue. - One of the reasons I thought of it is because of the proximity of Frederick Auguste Bartoldi's Statue of Liberty, which I mentioned can be seen from Brooklyn Bridge Park. Were you interested in a potential art historical or other relationship between the two allegorical, originally female figures? - Absolutely. I specifically cited the project because I wanted that conversation between the both statues monuments to be present, or like, that was an important part of the project. And I specifically, like, when I conceived of the project and was invited to the exhibition, I chose to do this specific project, which, you know, was kind of in a list of many projects that I sort of am working on in a way to realize. But specifically because it would be, it would have and be in conversation with the Statue of Liberty. And for me, part of it is also, you know, thinking about engaging in a conversation about public art and monumentalism, which continues to be, you know, a really, really fervent conversation within the US, but from the vantage point of the park, when you look at my kind of earthen sunken statue, and then in a sight line, immediately you see, you know, the kind of figure of this sort of proper, patina monumental Statue of Liberty in a distance, through that sort of relationship, you see, like, what emerges in my translation. And for me, what is important that comes through in that translation is like one that, you know, ruins the empires on the ground and close proximity to the public. So, like, people really can get close to it in ways that, you know, you can't get to the Statue of Liberty, the Statue of Freedom on top of the capital building, or even, like, the Statue of Liberty, 'cause it's just kind of so towering and on a really high pedestal, you can go inside of it, but you can't, like, be next to it, if that makes sense, or like... - It totally, I remember the experience from years ago, and that's exactly how I remember it. So, I think that makes total sense. - Again, yeah, the relation, the placement, and the relationship within the sightline of the Statue of Liberty was really important to me, because it really sort of articulates how I'm engaging with sort of tradition of, you know, monumentalism within the United States. - There are a bunch of things that come to mind as a history nerd that I wanna try and tie up in a couple sentences here. The painted terracotta and tin model for Bartoldi's Statue of Liberty used to be in the collection of the U.S. capital. The capital transferred it to the Smithsonian American Art Museum some years ago, and for the first time in a long time, first time I can remember in decades, it's on view right now at Sam in downtown Washington. You mentioned a moment ago the role of enslaved labor in making foraging Crawford's statue, his sculpture. I wanted to also note that enslaved labor helped build the capital itself, including quarrying the stone used for its floors, its walls for the columns in the front and at the back of the capital, enslaved people also saw a wood used in the building of the structure, and almost certainly enslaved labor was involved in brickmaking and laying in the capital, and probably carpentry too. One of the reasons all that interests me other than the obvious, I suppose, is that I wrote a little bit once upon a time about one of California's first U.S. senators, a guy named David Broderick, who's the son of Irish immigrants, and his father was one of the masons who built the steps leading up to the capital. Because of the way whiteness was constructed in the 19th century, there were pathways for David Broderick's father to achieve citizenship that were denied the black laborers who were every bit involved in the construction of the capital, and so when I see the plaster model or the piece atop the capital dome, the Crawford atop the dome, or your work, or think of them in relation to each other, that all comes kind of rushing forward. You mentioned a few minutes ago that you worked in the capital, we've had a whole lot of artists on this show over the years, and I don't think I've ever heard one of them have that experience. In 2021, so I guess last year, you made a work called twice fried flag or double fried flag. Was that piece informed by your experience working in the capital, or am I over reading one flag to another? - Oh, the flags that I use in that work were previously flown over the capital building, and the whole reason how I knew how to obtain flags that were flown over the capital building previously is that when I worked for the House of Representatives, one of my jobs would be to deliver these previously flown flags to the offices of congresspeople who would then ship them out to constituents who purchased them as memorabilia. And so there's absolutely a connection, and part of that connection is, you know, me engaging in a different virtual, if you will, or a different practice around my relationship to the flag, from having engaged in this very patriotic gesture and ritual of raising and lowering it every day during the beginning of the congressional sessions to frying it and cooking it and battering it and engaging it in a very different way. One that a gesture that I approached for both kind of humor, but also subversive approach as a way to articulate a different relationship to nationalism. - Two more things. I also wanted to talk about a work of yours called "Reaching Towards Warmer Suns," which is a work you installed in Richmond, Virginia, along the James River, which runs through more or less downtown Richmond. And it's a site that was a colonial era slave dock of major historical import, and not only of major historical import to Virginia, but to Massachusetts, too. And that's a work that involves dirt and nature in ways that we've talked about already, but it's also a work that engages time and the passage of time, maybe in a way that's different than some of your more recent work. And I wonder if, including within your work, the action of time, whether that's important to you and whether the importance of the action of time has changed or is changing within your practice. - Time is so significant. I mean, I think about time and my work. What I try and articulate is like, time is just really collapsed. That history isn't linear or always like progressivist, but that the past is always sort of animated and the present gesturing towards the future. I think that past, present, future are always collapsed in a lot of my work, which is why the idea of a ruin is really exciting for me because it exists at that kind of paradox where it speaks to us as an object that remembers a past that has since gone and no longer exists in the present, but it also has this kind of element of futurity to it as then it's becoming something else and it's still actively ongoing or engaged in processes of transformation. And so yeah, I think about time a lot. And I specifically think about, again, I'm like, the work is always thinking about taking and unearthing, excavating the past. That informs the present as a way to gesture towards or cultivate, you know, in otherwise reality, so be that like a future or like using the past and the present to forge an otherwise future. - The last thing I wanted to ask is not something that had been in my notes originally, just to kind of peel back the curtain a bit. Keon and I were scheduled to talk many weeks ago and events got in the way. And in that inter-seeding time, I've been doing research at a number of state capitals around the country, Virginia, Massachusetts, a few others. And one of the things that's really struck out to me about the art programs, the commemoration programs, sometimes that's architectural, sometimes that's artistic, sometimes that's decorative. You know, of places like the Virginia and Massachusetts state houses is that they are sites of acute erasure. They are sites that completely fail to acknowledge black labor and the black experience within the construction of the state or the American nation. And as I got to thinking about your work after having these really intense experience in those state capitals, I got to thinking about how in almost every project you manifest, the black role in the construction, the physical construction of the American nation is present. Do you think of that as being a core interest of your work as something you're trying to bring forward or is it simply coincident given that you are very good at taking on national sites, such as Enrichment, such as in Washington, D.C., such as New York Harbor? - I mean, I think it's both. I do think that part of my approach to art making is trying to stage certain types of interventions through the artworks that I'm creating. Sometimes I'm intervening on things like, you know, historical erasure. And I think that art is uniquely able to do that in ways that other forms of cultural production or to do that in tandem with other forms of cultural production, but in my creative practice, I think I get to engage in this type of intervention in ways that are perhaps more immediately accessible to people who may not be seeking, you know, that out in the case of like, have making public artworks. And I also think that it allows me to like cultivate a visual language through my relationship with materials, through like the forms that I'm creating that open up that conversation in different ways. But I do think those are like some core ideas that undergird my recent body of work. But I guess the addendum to the last question is that, like I don't think of the practice as commemorative in the ways that like a monument is, like a monument for a person for places. Like I'm not making monuments of historical figures as a way to remember them. But I think that I am interested in like staging public intervention at sites to create a different kind of experience with the landscape and with an audience then what might exist and would be articulated through traditional means of commemoration or which sometimes tend to be like overly progressiveist and in our built to like re-emscribe the power of the state. - Kian Williams, thanks so much. - Thank you for having me, such a joy. (gentle music) - That's all for this week's show. The Modern Art Notes Podcast is edited by Wilson Butterworth. Special thanks to Steve Rodin who created the sound for the program. The Modern Art Notes Podcast is released under a Creative Commons license. Please visit Modern Art Notes for more information.
