KW We did California for a few months in 1999 when I had the residency at CCAC (California College of Arts and Crafts), the residency was called “Capp Street Projects.” My daughter, Octavia, was fifteen months by the time we got there. This was right in the thick of everything. I had had the MacArthur, and the conferences that happened around the controversies, and the article in the International Review of African American Art. I had this little child in the residency. My husband at the time, Klaus, had a cobbled-together teaching job in California, which he made the best of—teaching jewelry and I think a drawing class at CCAC. That was hard for a lot of reasons. I liked being in California, but I didn’t like not having lived in New York. I didn’t feel legitimate somehow without breaking my back in New York. At the time, in the late ’90s in Northern California, it was the dotcom boom. Everyone was building websites and people I had gone to school with had become paper millionaires, building websites and getting shares of the company as payment, so suddenly there was this attitude of complete security. I met people with some terrible attitudes. The kind of fetishistic culture that made me really annoyed. People would say, “Oh we have this great Tibetan nanny!” Tibetan nannies were some kind of new breed of person. And, “Oh! My children go to school with every different kind of person.” And then start getting really finicky about naming what variety of people they were. I thought, Oh, I can’t stand these people. I always thought that I should move to New York but I was scared. Starting a relationship and wanting to pursue that and my work at the same time. I didn’t see the conflict until I actually moved to New York with a family. Things went quickly downhill. The disadvantages of being a woman artist, to paraphrase the Guerrilla Girls, were imposed on me—as if, somehow, there had to be a division between being a mother and being an artist.
When I was watching a documentary about the artist couple Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, I felt a bittersweet inspiration. They were in the avant-garde living in New York in the ’60s, ’70s. She’s an artist, a wife, and a mother, raises some kids. He’s pursuing his work and getting pretty well known, while she is struggling in the shadows for quite some time. I think they were each mutually supportive of one another. At least that was the retelling in the documentary. It seemed as though he was really understanding of the difficulties of being a woman artist in that climate, which was heavily male-dominated and would not make a lot of allowance for people who were not “the guys.” White guys. Let alone anything else. At a certain point she was making very important work. It made me feel good that it had happened without somebody getting thrown out a window or other kinds of catastrophes in artist couples’ relationships.
My move to New York was pretty fraught from the get-go. I had mentioned to Klaus while we were in Providence that I wanted to seriously consider moving to New York and he said, “Yeah, okay.” Then two years went by and I had a job offer from Columbia University that seemed to round out the security aspect; so it wasn’t just moving like a post-graduate. The acclaim and the criticism around the MacArthur was like being given a gold shield to march into wherever with. I didn’t fully appreciate that, though. It was terrifying to start teaching at Columbia and not know the first thing about teaching, working with graduate students. I felt like I had big shoes to fill in that regard. Then I also had my gallery exhibition commitments and things that I just wanted to pursue with my work. I felt like I had to do it all. I felt like I didn’t get the full range of support from my husband at the time; although, he was trying, I think. You can parse out the details till the cows come home and our relationship would still not have been a good fit when it comes to ambition. I met Klaus when I was considerably younger, twenty-three, a student and an unformed diamond in the rough. (He’s a jewelry designer.) I think that is how he saw me, but I never saw myself as that. I wish I could transcribe all of the ellipses, trailed-off sentences like that. I know that is where the meat is but it’s hard to access sometimes.
LW You said that you didn’t feel that secure about teaching initially but you have been doing it for a number of years now. How do you feel about teaching now?
KW I feel exactly the same. (laughter) I feel (a little bit) untransformed in the world of teaching. A few years into it, the schedule that I got was kind of off and on. I was sharing the teaching load with Rirkrit Tiravanija. He was more adept at taking the time he needed for his wide-ranging practice. He was traveling a lot. That’s how he rolls. I never felt secure enough in myself as a highly fluent professional artist to take advantage of the gold shield. For the first couple of years, I felt that I needed to do more, work harder, go to all of the meetings, be on the committees, make sure that everyone knew I was pulling my weight and was not just a trophy professor. Trophy wife, trophy professor. All the trophies, tokens, that I am rejecting. I was burning out. It is safe to say that from late 1997 through 2001 was like a series of cathartic burnout moments that I kept trying to recover from and then kept running. Like in an animated movie where a person keeps stepping on mines, “poof!” but keeps on running.
To backtrack, before the teaching in 1998, when Octavia was a few months old, Harvard organized this conference around derogatory black representation in contemporary art. They sort of used my art as the opportunity to have that conversation. I went up to Cambridge to install the show with Octavia in my Baby Bjorn. I had a couple of awkward encounters. Met Bruce Nauman up there. He gave a talk and then dinner with people, and I was drinking a punch that I did not realize was Sangria. Somebody was angrily pointing that out to me long after the fact. It was awful. Everything was awful. I was nursing my baby and drinking Sangria at the table with Bruce Nauman! It became worse. The show was up in the Carpenter Center in Harvard. This conference was being planned during the duration of the show, but Klaus had planned a trip to Germany to have his parents meet the baby. Both of these things are happening at the same time. So I am on the phone saying I can’t really make it to this important conference that is being organized around the ideas in my work because I have a family obligation. I’m sort of conflicted and in the meantime I get really sick. I got mastitis from nursing. I go on antibiotics immediately and then we go to Germany. I miss the conference. While we are in Germany, I wake up in the middle of the night, having a physical breakdown with explosive diarrhea and throwing up. That day was also the day of the conference in Cambridge and I felt like there was bad mojo out there. Part of it generated from me and part of it generated toward me. I felt irresponsible to my work and the ideas in my work to not be at the conference. I was not entirely there for the family either. I was caught in the space in between.
I mention that because I did feel then, and probably still feel now, under a great deal of pressure to make good on the promise of words, accolades, and all of that. When I took the teaching job—in addition to already making good on those large-seeming ideas and promises, I also had to make good on the idea of how to teach whatever it is I know and have learned. I didn’t really get a lot of guidance, and I was intimidated by the Ivy League and the kind of attitude that the art program at Columbia was trying to instill in its graduates. Which was the idea that you could get the right sort of theoretical and critical input in order to walk out of school and have a really scintillating art career in New York. For a couple of minutes that was happening for some of the students there, but I felt that was unrealistic and not really healthy. I could say it was not healthy because I wasn’t all that healthy. (laughter)
LW How did the students respond to you?
KW There are so many of them, coming from so many different points of view. I don’t really look at my teaching evaluations but I guess it’s mostly positive, ranging from indifferent to positive. Really, I think that there is some aspect where kids get really messed up in the program. I know there was one portrait painter who had come from Georgia. Everyone was trying to push and encourage her in a different direction than she was ready for. She revolted and started doing what she had already been doing—landscapes, portraits. I missed out on this, but apparently she said something really negative to some art blog, like the TMZ of the art world. Since I wasn’t reading it, it didn’t matter so much that I heard after the fact that she was apologetic and so sorry that she had said those things. I was like, What things did she say? She thought I was indifferent to her work, which was not true. But for the most part I have met people who always have glowing things to say. They still have contact with me, not as a mentor, but as a peer or a friend even. So it varies. It’s a big, sprawling, and ambitious program. The only time that I felt on top of what I was doing as a teacher, like I really understood what my role was there—not to teach drawing, not as a technician—was when my survey show was up at the Whitney. I was mentally strung-out, but at the same time I felt legitimate—like, Okay, this is what I do. I have everything in front of me and in an organized fashion. On the subway advertising there I was, and I could go over to the university and say, “That’s me, over there, in the museum.” When I walked into people’s studios, I remembered again what it was that I offered.
I think from the moment I started doing this work in my studio, it was huge. Everything that I do starts with an effort in recalling who I am. Crawling through the clutter of who I am supposed to be; who somebody else thinks I am. External constructions of race and gender and height. The more clutter gets added to the pile from outside, the harder it is for me to get to my core of myself. I always tried to find the same balance that you had—between doing your art, and doing the teaching, the chairmanship, the committees—and doing it well. I was trying to do what Dad did. I think I was maybe approaching it all wrong, thinking that I was filling shoes instead of recognizing what I can contribute and what I can’t.
LW Once you discovered who you were, you could just be yourself and go from there, right?
KW One would think that, but every time I step into the studio I have to remember who I am. If it only were that easy. If I were seeing students on a regular basis, then maybe, but it’s more promiscuous than that. Often I would just say a few words and then move on to the next one. Then the next semester it was, “I think I remember you. We met six months ago. I don’t remember what you were doing but—” It’s like starting over. I have to remember what I said and everything. I have not had the kind of continuity and consistency that I think I would want in a professor if I were a student.
LW You don’t have to remember everything you said. They have to remember everything that you said. If you remember their work, you remember who they are. Somewhere along the way I weaned myself from the idea of trying to memorize names.
KW Oh, I don’t remember anybody’s name. I try to remember their work, because their work changes from first semester to third semester.
LW For me, knowing what a student did was more pressing—in order to help them get through, past, or beyond a particular point. It became individual on each level. From undergraduate students to graduate students it was a very different experience. I’ve seen a lot of stuff in all of these years, but I’ve seen some teachers come into a program teaching the graduate class like an undergraduate class and it doesn’t work. And they don’t know it. I’ve also seen teachers come into a system at either level, undergraduate or graduate, who get hung up on the jargon and what comes down from higher administrators about doing things a certain way and being accountable. “Everything that you do has got to be written on paper. You’ve got to be able to demonstrate that this person really moved from this point to that point.” It doesn’t work well with anybody, really, let alone in an art program. One of the principle learning experiences in any art program is the critique session. The dialogue between individuals, students as well as the teacher, is where the learning really comes about for the most part.
KW That’s the problem that I wind up talking about with the grads at Columbia—there are so many crits, multiple crits over the course of the day, so that there is no time to work.
LW Oh.
KW They have the opposite problem. A visiting critic from New York Magazine comes in and a resident artist comes in for the same week. They have a mentor group. Some of them will go off with that mentor for a week and they come back exhausted. It’s complete overload. I walked into somebody’s studio the other day and there was another visiting critic sitting in there.
LW Who programs all of that?
KW We have a graduate director for the visual art program, working along side our chairperson. With fifty thousand plus students a year, with not enough financial aid and fellowship and scholarship money, most of the students that I have talked to feel resigned, like this is what they have signed up for. You can have a lot of alone time in your studio after that. What is two years of the non-stop barrage of critique? You have to remember to not get lost in the overload. In moments when they lose their sense of self or feel defeated and bowled over, they have to take a stand, even if that stand is against the very program they enrolled in—they can engage in a larger critique of the nature of their personal ambition and desire.
I think that that was rolling back to my own grad school experience. I wound up rolling back into a critique within my own art practice, which is the nature of my desire. What are my goals here? If painting is associated with all of these terms of being a legitimate part of—why do I feel excluded from it? Why am I trying to sidle up next to it? I thought I would try to remove the image from the canvas altogether, cut it away. The first few years at Columbia I felt like they just wanted people with big names, fancy galleries, and a cultural cache to come in and be flashy.
LW Frequently in some programs where they have a big name or several big names, the names help draw students to that institution, but unfortunately only some students get the opportunity to work with that big name. A case in point was Wayne Thiebaud. His name was associated with UC Davis for years in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80’s—although often his schedule was such that he really didn’t have time to be in the classroom with the students who anticipated that they would be with him.
KW It’s a conflict. Do I really want to be used to add to the pile of identity questions that I already have to wade through in order to make a picture? (laughter) The four text portraits that I did a couple of years ago and that you saw—block texts that were biographies of creative, black American women—they were all just tragic models of overextension, emotional breakdowns, physical violence. It’s not funny. I wound up trying to figure out how to reflect the over-extended creative woman.
LW How do you see your work shifting in another five or ten years?
KW When I start teaching elephants how to paint? I guess they already know how to paint. We have to work on horses now. Well, since I have been working on my actual calendar for the next five or six years, the calendar suggests that my work cannot change at all. I feel like I am always trying to push things in other directions at least, so I can do the things that I am interested in doing and try to find new ways to think about moving around subject matter. I don’t know about five or six years out. Next year I have a show that I am curating at the ICA in Philadelphia, that is around a theme I’ve been writing about that is mercurial and hard to articulate. I have been thinking about modern architecture and the way space is distributed unequally. Architects have this exalted position in the modernist landscape—it’s not that they just make environments, but they use theories of modernism to make sometimes ugly environments happen, irrespective of the needs of society (housing projects and the like). Anyway, I am trying to explore the way space and power are reacted against and undermined and rebranded by badass urban dwellers. I call the show “Ruffneck Constructivists” and it features eleven artists whose work I think elaborates on the fugitive impulse that fuels hip hop and the violence that underpins modern urban design.
Did you find there to be a conflict between teaching and being a studio artist?
LW Both are challenging: teaching, in particular on the college level, and being a studio artist at whatever level. They pull from the same energy source. The creative energy that one expends in the production of an art piece is not unlike the creative energy that one expends trying to figure out a way to get a class of students to move from point one to point two. They can both be exhausting and taxing. They are also very exciting. They can be done together, or they can be not done together. I think I was fortunate to be able to combine both of those things in a way that was satisfying over the years. If anything suffered it was probably, not so much the production of the artwork, but the sharing of the artwork in the larger context. That could be for a whole variety of reasons. Maybe I didn’t have the right contacts. Maybe I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ve been living in backwater places. There are a lot of possibilities in there. Never will I accept the notion that the work wasn’t good enough. Because I think it was. I’ve had people ask me things like, “Wow. This is really good stuff. Why isn’t your name up there with so-and-so’s?” I said, “I can’t answer that question. You have to ask someone else.” I have also heard someone say, literally, “curators make artists.”
KW I don’t know. I had somebody ask me not too long ago if I thought I had peaked, which I thought was the cruelest thing any human being has asked me. She was on the board of a museum or a chair and I just thought, You don’t want to ask an artist if they have peaked. That is not in the artist’s interest. I’m still making work and generating ideas, regardless of whether the interest in my work has tapered off. I’m not interested in the sale value of my work.
LW That might be an indication that it’s time for me to sell what I have.
KW Right! (laughter) Now that you are not teaching anymore, would you like to be showing more and maybe having a wider conversation?
LW Some other folk have asked whether I want to do that. Some are pushing me to write my memoir. Somebody else is saying, “You should do a book,” which I have also been thinking about. Someone should do a book about me, if not me, somebody else. So I’m interested in that. I’m also exploring things like what to do with all of this stuff.
KW Isn’t that my job?
LW I’ve got a lot of my own work, plus your mom and I have a fairly large and growing collection of works by other artists. You reach a certain point in age when you start to ask, “What am I going to do with this stuff? Where is it going?” One of the things I will not do, I will not donate the works to a university or school that does not have a legitimate, bona fide museum connected to it. Most art programs don’t have the means to do anything with the work other than store it. I don’t want that to happen to it. If anything, it would be nice to have the work seen occasionally or used in some educational context so that somebody gets the chance to learn something from it. I have not zeroed in on anything specific. I have been toying with a lot of ideas.
KW What if we just made a museum of you, for you, and we housed the work of your collection and then had a gallery space that showed other people’s works, student shows or whatever.
LW Oh, that would be wonderful!
KW I just created a museum for you. Where should it be? University of the Pacific, Wayne State, or Georgia State? I’m getting donations now! (laughter)
LW Back up. Back up. I can’t even think about that. One of us needs to win the lottery first. That would solve a lot of problems. The question of was or is there a conflict between teaching and doing one’s work—I never really felt the conflict. I did feel that there were certain obligations that I had at the university and there were certain obligations that I had relative to my work, but if push came to shove I was always able to put the work into a context that was workable. For example, I was chair of the art department at the University of the Pacific in Stockton for seven years. After leaving that position and returning strictly to teaching; I also had a grant from the California Arts Council. I was writing articles—art reviews—for the Stockton Record and I was also painting. I was showing in places. That was going okay but I came to a point when I really missed being an administrator. Maybe I like being in charge of stuff. I figured if I wanted to do that, I needed to look for someplace else to be rather than trying to repeat the role at UOP. I looked around and I wound up with an offer from Georgia State University in 1983. Atlanta was not Stockton in the eyes of the art world. It had a much larger reputation. The program I would be going to was also larger than the one that I had been in—with more students, more faculty members, a graduate program, and more opportunities. They were offering me twenty thousand dollars more a year than I was making. That made some difference too. You put all of these things together and say, “Well, look. If I take the position I may not be able to produce as much stuff as I have been producing, until I learn the ropes.” I was willing to accept that for a year or a year and a half, I might not be able to do much art. Which happened to be about the time it took to get back into my work on a gradual basis. I would work in the evening, sometimes during a school break. I was also teaching while I was doing the administrative thing, but as a result I was able to reduce my teaching load. As such I was teaching two classes a year and I had the winter quarter free of course work. At any rate, it worked out so that I could manipulate my timing in such a way that I could produce some works. It may be that, had I not been teaching, I might have produced more during that time. One of the other things that became interesting was that working with older students, particularly grad students, the ideas flowed a little better. You could explain better what you were trying to do and grasp better what they were trying to do.
KW Do you think your work changed between California and Georgia? When you got back into the studio, how was it different?
LW Initially it didn’t change, because I had like a year and half or so when I was in a hiatus. When I took up my work again in 1984-85. I started where I had left off in California. That was during the Figurative Series, which started to evolve and became the Blindfold Series. The Blindfold Series was spearheaded by the fact that an eye exam inadvertently revealed that I had glaucoma. Contemplating the notion that I might go blind at some point in time, I started doing these figures that had blindfolds on. In another series, I did figures that had no eyes. I had also started the Wall Series before I had left Stockton. In Atlanta I started using panels and worked in diptychs. The materials started to shift to something a little bit more durable. Heavier materials. Wood. Metal attached to the panels. After I gave up the directorship of the school and just stayed on to teach, the work expanded even more in terms of numbers and sizes and so forth. I think the work got better as it continued to develop.
KW I thought that when we were in Stockton after your mother passed, you had work that was really reflective of the city, of New York, in particular.
LW Well, yeah. That was part of the Wall Series. Prior to the Wall Series, I was doing two other series. One was the Trucks Series—the backs of trucks. Only a few of those. The other series I called the Remnant Series. They were mostly acrylic abstractions. They had some little remnant from a torn piece of paper, torn ticket stub or whatever, which got laminated into the painting. The questions that I started asking myself were: Where are these ideas coming from? What is this about? In 1982 I went back to New York purposefully to look around because I suspected that some of these images and ideas had grown during my childhood there. I walked some of the streets I used to walk as a child, went back to some of the places I had been, and kept looking, and made a lot of discoveries that some of these things did indeed come out of my New York experience. The graffiti marks, both the legitimate and illegitimate graffiti. Legitimate graffiti being painted numbers or “do not enter” notices. Illegitimate graffiti being spray painted graffiti…names, messages, etcetera.
KW Yeah, early ’80s.
LW I saw one building, for example, that was abandoned. The windows were all broken out, most of them, but you could see through the window and what you saw was a brick wall. The window had been bricked up to prevent people from getting into the building. In this case the notion of an interior space and an exterior space were both viewed as barricades. Signage, street vendors, and displays were also intriguing. I took a photo, I remember, of a street vendor’s stand with oranges and apples and other fruit arranged in front of a poster that included an image of Ronald Reagan and the slogan “Reaganism = genocide” or something similar.
KW Do you have those photos somewhere?
LW That particular piece wound up in the collection of Atlanta Life Insurance Company. I may have a copy of it someplace but I don’t know where exactly. The whole display was quite incongruent.
KW The fruit is all life and health.
LW When I came back from that 1982 New York trip, the Remnant Series evolved and took on a different attitude and format, with the introduction of a brick pattern, textured surfaces, and collage elements. The paintings became simulated wall surfaces with graffiti marks, collaged posters, peeling paint, and other textures often seen or experienced on urban walls. One of the early paintings in this Wall Series included a deteriorating drawing with an image of my mom, who passed away later that year. Back in those days it was not unusual for me to get the painting started, to get the brick texture set up. Then have kids in the neighborhood scratch names and whatever they wanted to in the brick pattern.
KW I know. They were all over. The kids kept coming back to scratch more into your work. It was kind of fascinating if you think about it. I was growing up with the one dad who had the weirdest thing going on in the garage, in Stockton in particular. You weren’t working on a car. No oil stains. You had this painting studio. It seemed perfectly normal to me. Back to Georgia, I was wondering if there was an influence of Georgia on your work. What did you discover coming here, what has been informative outside of academia?
LW Being in Georgia is a whole informative thing in and of itself.
KW I know! It was for me.
LW And will continue to be for quite some time. The greatest influence or impact of moving from California to here was having a different relationship, or sense of relationship, with my family. For one, I had never been around my brother, Howard, much, nor my sister Clyde and her daughter Alyce. We got hooked up with the family reunion group, which is the Walker-Zachary combination thing. I started meeting cousins and it was interesting how it linked up with me. I don’t think that has had any impact on my work, but it was a different experience. It was also different to live in a state that was predominantly Republican in comparison to where we came from. There are also a number of old-line cliques and stoic positions.
KW Do you think that those cliques are drawn along racial lines or economic lines?
LW Probably a little bit of both. Probably more economic now than racial.
KW When we moved here do you think it was racial? That was my feeling as a teenager—that things were pretty starkly drawn along racial lines. There were no in-betweens and there was only black or white.
LW Well, yeah. That was very evident in contrast to where we came from and probably still is.
KW Church-going.
LW But the economic thing is a major factor also, because what they call the Atlanta area seemed to be predicated on those who have less. There is a whole section of Atlanta up in the “Buckhead” area; there’s a lot of affluent people up there and then there’s little pockets in other places, north, that have very affluent folks. They don’t really associate with or know much about the rest of Atlanta, because they don’t participate in it. When you come into Atlanta from the airport or by train and you get off at Five Points, in downtown you see black faces all over the place. You might say, “Oh. It’s a black city.” One could also think that because the last several mayors have been black. Council members have been black and people you see predominantly on the streets in major parts of the area are black. While it is not fully a black city, it looks like and feels like it is. But I don’t think it is a factor that has influenced my work.
KW Do you think it has affected your ability to show your work? Do you think that there is a black community that is active in art and culture? I always think of Atlanta as a business city. As long as it’s good business to buy art, then that’s okay, but it’s not really a felt feeling for art.
LW I’m sure some of that is true here, but it’s said that some of the real “collectors” here in the Atlanta area, if they are real collectors, they take their money and go to New York to buy something instead of buying it from Atlanta artists. I’m sure that that was the case at some point. It may still be a factor for a lot of people. The business of selling or not selling work here in this area—there are a number of collectors in the Atlanta area, black and white, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve been gobbled up by the most affluent collectors, or the strongest collectors. Some of the strongest collectors remain under the radar. They just collect their stuff and they go about doing their thing. Those seem to be the ones that go to New York and buy.
KW When I moved here, there was a little bit of an underground art scene that was Nexus, and then Nexus became legitimized and became The Contemporary Art Center and then it became “The Contemporary.” I don’t know if it has shortened its name any further.
LW Now it’s called “The Contemporary.”
KW (laughter) Now it’s just “The C’” or something. When I come here, I wonder where the really burgeoning, vital, messy art forces are that are generating things. Even when I was a student, there was a show at Nexus that had a work of Adrian Piper’s in it. I had one of those moments that you were describing when you were in school, I was supposed to write a paper and I told my teacher that I really wanted to write a paper, preferably, on a black woman conceptual artist. They said, “Umm.” Similar reaction but they didn’t send me packing. They said, “Well, you could look at Adrian Piper.” I think that was a turning point for me. It was really important and amazing that her work would have wound up in the Nexus show, which is inexplicably without any…well…I don’t know. Art’s got to be around to generate ideas and not just income or cash flow. Is there a place for that in Atlanta anymore?
LW Going back in history to the ’50s and before, there was—not just here but in various cities—a separation of works done by black artists and works done by white artists. White artists showed in some galleries and black artists showed in others. Rarely was there a mix in all of that. It only started happening gradually with certain juried exhibitions. I think here in the Atlanta area, it probably overlapped in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Part of it was that there was the separation that existed. The black group was centered around the black institutions (HBSC) in town—and the contributions made by Hale Woodruff and several other artists and institutions.
KW You mean Morehouse?
LW Yeah, Morehouse and Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College. They all had certain bits and pieces of collections. Spelman had an African art collection, for example. Clark Atlanta University used to sponsor juried exhibitions. They would buy things from the exhibition for the college collection. Over the years, they amassed a fair number of pieces and at this point it is a well-known collection that is fairly stable. There was also Atlanta Life Insurance Company that used to have their annual exhibition. The High Museum, Nexus, and other groups did their own things and there was no real overlap with other art venues. On the black side, there was Hammonds House Galleries which evolved I think in the early ’80s—just before we came to the area. Anyway, I was on the Hammonds House board for a number of years and one of the things that I used to stress was, “If you want to be an institution in the city of Atlanta that works, one that draws from all of the people in Atlanta, you have to have a different approach to attract people. If your collection is predominantly African-American works then you have to couch the way you present that to the public in order to get a diverse group to come. You can’t just say, ‘We’re an institution with works by black artists and we only want black people to come to it.’ That won’t work.”
KW Has anyone from the Hammonds House taken a visit to The Studio Museum in Harlem to ask how they approach even the idea of what “Black Art” means? I know there might have been artists who are not necessarily of African descent. Who are coming from other places, but whose work dovetails with the aesthetic or concerns once termed “Black Art.”
LW I think over the years they’ve shifted a little bit. They’ve made some modifications in their procedures. They had to. They wanted to be a museum as opposed to a gallery. They still want to be a museum, so they are using a museum name, Hammonds House Museum, but they have to put some other things in place to become a certified, fully operational museum. One of the things that they were doing a year or two ago, they had an annual auction, which is a fundraiser for the place. They sent out an announcement, which is different from the one they had the year before that. When I was on the board, I convinced them that the auction should not be limited to African-American artists. You have to go after some other people. And we did that for a while. I would make sure the faculty members at Georgia State were aware of it and could contribute something. All the art groups in town could contribute something to it. I thought that was working pretty well, but this was a couple of years ago and I have been off the board for a while now. They sent out an announcement about the upcoming auction. I don’t remember the exact wording; it looked like it was an invitation for African-American artists only. It had the words “Black Art” in there somewhere. It didn’t look like it would be something that would appeal to the whole, to many communities, so I called them on that and told them that was something they had gotten past and gone beyond. Why go backwards?! The Board reexamined the wording, agreed, and they changed the wording to attract a more diverse group of contributors.
KW You’ve been on a lot of boards.
LW I have. To name a few past board memberships, not including ones associated with academia, I have been on the board for Art Papers, the DeKalb Council for the Arts, the Contemporary, and I am currently on the Board of Directors for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Georgia.
Contributing artwork for various auctions is becoming a concern for a number of artists.
KW It’s a problem across the art world, right? There are all of these institutions and they do good work. They have auctions. They have benefits. They try to raise funds from benefactors, and artists are constantly being asked to contribute. Sometimes it is like auction season when you get five to ten requests from places you really like. You can’t give all your work away. It’s been a real problem. It’s one of those things where I wonder about the lifespan of institutions and even the viable lifespan of being an artist professionally. Is there a statute of limitations for how long you can be producing work? Running an art magazine or a nonprofit art space?
LW Unfortunately, some artists have bought into this thing and they feel that, “Hey. By having something in one of these auctions, it’s doing me good because someone is recognizing my name. My name gets printed on such and such.” I can’t see that.
KW If you have any thought about slavery and slave auctions, you know that that is really false. (laughter) Well, you know. It’s got good teeth. What else are we looking at here?
LW I limited myself to only a few.
KW Before you talked about Hammonds House, it sounded like you described a separation in Atlanta culture into a black Atlanta and an unknown white Atlanta, this very rich, outside-of-the-city-center Atlanta. It made me think of this essay by James Baldwin called, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen.” It’s an essay about the Atlanta child murders in the ’80s and the local political reaction to that. I’m probably getting the gist of the essay wrong, but Baldwin describes Atlanta, or the description was Atlanta’s motto: “The city too busy to hate,” which is a really strange motto to have. He described the black political machine, such as it was, or the black political elite, scrambling because it was not only a tragic and terrible crime spree but also a really bad image problem for the city—murdered black children. A lot of people speculated that there was an expediency to the necessity in finding a black culprit to ward off the possibility of any racist hate crime mucking up the works of the New South. That was something that was always on my mind when we moved to Atlanta. The number of times I got sent home from school because of inappropriate dress. I mean the first week I think I had shorts that were two inches above my knee and I got sent home because the rule for shorts was that they had to be at the knee. I got sent home and I was walking along the un-sidewalked streets in these highly wooded corners of Decatur. It was quite pretty in a way because of the leaves at the side of the road but there is also this deep forest. It was just so easy if you’re panicky, and for me to imagine being lost in there, or being thrown in the ditch at the side of the road. Being found. That combined with having a volatile, bipolar brother at home—I internalized a lot of the stress in those early years. Some of it was internal and some of it was external. It was definitely present for me. It was like segregation is a topic that gets talked about but is not really felt. There are these discussions about race in politics and society, but what gets lost sometimes is that feeling you were talking about in your paintings. When I reflect on your paintings I think about the feeling of barriers and the feeling of people striving to push past those barriers. I used to imagine what you were describing. I think I didn’t quite know until today, that your thinking about barriers went from this horizontal line in The Microscapes, and ballooned into to the parabola shape. I always went straight to the Wall Series which to me was as if you were the flipping that horizontal line into a vertical, physical barrier. Painting a brick wall is kind of a blunt representation of the limits of painting! I discovered through that work of yours that I’m interested in the viewer’s spatial relationship to the art object or the painting—I think I appreciated painting as a space that one has to struggle to get through. Which could be why I had to put painting aside to get beyond it. It's funny realizing now that the moment I really rejected painting was when I finally moved away from home!
Larry Walker, Urban Composite Acrylic/Collage, 51 x 58 inches, completed 2011
It’s nighttime now. We’ve been at this since ten o’clock in the morning or something. I’m sad and tired now.
LW Now we can go think up some more questions.
LW Kara, what would you say are two or three of the most significant influences that you have had in your life relative to your work?
KW Well, we talked about you being the influence for making work—for the idea of being an artist. For the work itself—it’s funny—I feel like I know the answer and then I don’t know the answer at all. It might be more than two or three. That might be the deal.
LW Probably.
KW Being exposed to Adrian Piper’s work as an undergrad was significant for me in terms of thinking about how to approach my work. I did a little performance piece on her by way of a paper. I realized that there was a mode of address that I wasn’t considering in my paintings and the mode of address was that the audience, the viewer of a work, has a history and a point of view that directly impacts how work is received. That was important for me to begin to realize. Then there were some artists from the German Expressionist Period: Otto Dix, George Grosz, and a couple of others who I thought were really important when I saw some of their work. It was the rage that was in there and also the attention to details, the subjectivity—they were attentive to their own subjectivity in relation to the world around them. When I started to tackle ideas around race and gender—stories, jokes, and pop culture that inform the way we talk about or fetishize race in this culture—I would say these are influences. But there are counter-influences. People like Betye Saar and the Black Art Movement artists. Considering what limitations some of these artists felt hemmed in by, or the ways they contributed to the strict dogma of the Black Art Movement ideology. I had this cathartic moment when I was still living at home in Atlanta. I was thinking of my role as an artist as being akin to, or being equated with, a kind of colonialist impulse. As an artist you are assumed to be the master of your domain, the master of the canvas, or screen, or whatever. That was kind of comic and problematic for me, painting as “manifest destiny.” I thought there was something ironic in declaring myself the master of this terrain and then asking whatever I put on there to do my bidding. I think that is where I started approaching the master-slave dialectic from my own agency. The problem was being able to accept my own agency. There was a sculptural piece that Betye Saar had done, maybe in 1970, a constructed box, with a Mammy doll holding a broom and a rifle, looking like an ironic play on the subservient versus the militant. My critique of that was that she was still making Mammy do her bidding. (laughter) Mammy was still playing a submissive role relative to the artist. I thought maybe one of the things that would be more likely to happen, although impossible because I’m aware that I am talking about inanimate objects, would be to have them unleashed. To have derogatory figures from history be set loose on the world to do their own thing. They would not necessarily conform or obey my intentions or wishes, or my conceits and concepts. In that regard I think of artists like Mike Kelley, early on when people were thinking about psychology and a relationship to objects. If only I were better at talking theory and psychoanalysis and all of that. I never really fully became that person. I know there is a theory in there around objects and probably a child psychologist like Winnicott who talked about that. I know the names, but I can’t fit it all together in a sentence.
LW In terms of the various projects that you have pursued over the years and the successes that you have had, including a number of awards and accolades presented by various writers and so forth, what are the two or (again another one of these “two-or-three” questions) three experiences that you have had during the last fifteen years or so that have been significant in your mind?
KW There have been so many significant things. It feels like a blur at times. Not really a blur, but from 1994 when The Drawing Center show happened (that was major and I often think about it as a game changer), and in 1997—with the multiple shows and the MacArthur, and Octavia being born, and the letter writing campaign, and the resulting problems that the whole confluence of activities brought for me— that was significant. I think about those years often, because in some ways so many things branched out from those points. There were problems in my marriage. There were problems of figuring out where I wanted to be to make my work and who I wanted to be in conversation with as an artist, looking for colleagues and wanting to be in New York where I might be among colleagues. That branched off from there. More shows branched off from there. More opportunities to talk about the controversy around my work, which became repetitive and redundant. There has been an ongoing flurry of activity and I do not take a lot of downtime to consider things, but I remember moments when I really had a chance to just sit with my work and think things through. There was a moment in 2000 when I felt like I just needed to write for several months to see what it could do and if it could generate possibilities. After that I did very small paintings, very tiny, with cutouts. The combination of those writings and those paintings was an incubator for other ideas. I think of that moment often. It was also a moment, coincidentally, when my husband had gone on a residency, I was just home with the baby and she was in daycare. I made a very clear plan: I’m going to work here at the kitchen table from nine until three. I think the boundaries and perimeters gave me a weird sense of possibility. What else? The show at the Walker Art Center in 2007 that traveled. That brought out all of the work that I had produced in the previous ten years, not all of it but a good number of types of work I had produced: drawings, collages, paper pieces. That was significant and one of those things that people still talk about when they talk to me about my work. That show had an impact on them. That show created another branch of difficulties for me, as far as thinking about repeating myself or not wanting to feel trapped in the oeuvre that was mine.
LW You have a very active studio program going and you have a number of people who work with you in the studio.
KW No. I only have one.
LW One assistant?
KW Yeah.
LW How important is that person to your everyday activities, to the nature of the work that you do? Do you need to have more than one?
KW Probably. I’ve had, from time to time, multiple people. It’s usually on a project basis—like with the film-video work and sometimes with the letterpress pieces I was making. I’ve found it really hard to work around people. I really have to trust them on a deep level. I have made the mistake of hiring people who were students of mine at Columbia who I thought were alright, and they were alright. However, being a studio assistant isn’t what I would hope for them to be. I want them to pursue their work and feel free in that pursuit so I get quite self-conscious around them. It’s hard for me, because my work is generated from a rebellious, libidinal place and I don’t really want to share that with most people. My studio assistant, Cindy Daignault right now is really managing the studio. She takes care of the emails. She handles the schedule and the taxes. She is also an artist and a painter, so she knows what kind of space or materials I might need to be able to feel okay to produce my work. It is always a learning curve for me to have people around. She has hired other people to occasionally handle things for me, to do the heavy lifting. I know there are artists who have lots of studio assistants. I am often curious as to how that goes. Sometimes I wish I had held on to a studio assistant longer, so they could have really been a part of the process. That may happen in the near future with upcoming projects. I think it has become increasingly important for me to accept the help.
LW I understand that you now have two galleries. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that works? Do the two galleries interface? Do they not interface?
KW The Victoria Miro Gallery in London just approached me earlier this year and I was kind of hemming and hawing over whether that was something I could do, would do, could handle. More galleries mean more work for me. I have been exclusively with Brent Sikkema since I started, really since 1995, technically. Brent has referred to his gallery as “the house that Kara built.” We work well together. Adding another gallery felt like a big conversation that we would have to have. I was dreading it like one might dread talking to one’s father about leaving home. In the end, after much stalling on my part, we had a good conversation. I said, “The idea of having a gallery in London is that my work has not had a lot of exposure in Europe or overseas.” A little bit here and there, but it’s really important to have someone on the ground across the Atlantic who could oversee those things. Brent knows one of the gallery directors from Victoria Miro. It is a pretty big gallery. They have a large staff. When I was in London last month showing at Camden Arts Centre, every five minutes someone would come up to me and say, “Hi. I’m so-and-so from Victoria Miro. I do such-and-such.” I said, “How many people work there?!” There were so many new faces and each one had a different set of responsibilities. It feels like a brave new world. It also feels like growing up and for once accepting my reality of being an artist instead of questioning it.
LW Do you have to reconcile that one piece that you create to be shown in this gallery might ultimately be shown at the other gallery?
KW I’m trying to keep them separate as best I can. The arrangement that I made with Brent was that Brent Sikkema is my house gallery. They have my archive. They have archival works. That kind of relationship. With the gallery in London, I have not specified their role except that the work I created in Camden Arts Centre last month is the work that they can now have, manage, and deal with. They have to be in communication with Sikkema Jenkins & Co about all the details as to how this work is sold, exhibited, and what have you. Right now, it is a working partnership. The finances are separate and the works produced are separate unless something really radical happens. I don’t think I will share too much. I don’t want to create too much tension.
LW What happens in different situations where you have had some prints pulled from print presses and so forth? How does that work in conjunction with the galleries?
KW I don’t know that I know yet. The prints that I did—not the most recent prints, but the suite that I worked on with Greg Burnet—were generated through Sikkema Jenkins because Michael Jenkins and Meg Malloy run the multiples section of the gallery. They suggest a printer and if it works out, like it did with Greg, who was fantastic to work with, that’s a work that they have to sell.
LW The value of this oral history is that it will be kept in an archive so that researchers, students, and curators—
KW Presumably other artists—
LW —Can look up material and grapple with the issues that are there and relate this to images that they find or have seen. Perhaps even produce books or papers.
KW More books and more papers.
LW Or to organize additional exhibitions down the road and so forth. It sounds kind of exciting. What else should they know or need to know about you that you haven’t already told them?
KW I guess that’s what I don’t know. What are the limitations of the archive? Is it for them or is it for us, for something greater than the sum of its parts? I was thinking a lot about darkness. When you asked earlier about Georgia, and what it was about coming up to Rhode Island and then New York that might have affected my work, that changed my relationship to people, I was telling you about the Atlanta Child Murders and this dark sensation, gothic sensation that overtook me. I was thinking last night further along those lines. I was thinking about that walk to the bus stop when we were still on Decatur, and the apartment complex where we were first living. It had the long, hilly driveway going up into the complex. The lights would always be burned out. If I got up early in the morning to catch the bus to Towers High School, I remember Mom walked me, maybe once or twice, just to the edge of that driveway, and then it was pitch black. You saw the end of the street and it was wooded all around. There must have been a creek running around there. It was the creek and the woods and this total pitch blackness and then road kill— always a possum or something and the stink of death. Road kill and death and that feeling of walking through this dark tunnel surrounded by terrifying dead things just to get up this hill that was populated by people who really didn’t want me around. (laughter) That’s a feeling that sticks with me. I think of that feeling in relation to making things—moving through this dark space to an equally dark space that does not look as threatening.
LW That was a long time ago.
KW Yeah, lots of things are a long time ago but they still stick with you.
LW It’s amazing how the things that you experience years and years ago float through your subconscious and show up in your work occasionally. I recall once I had a studio away from home, years and years ago. The studio was on the campus of the university in Stockton, California. It was an old unused building that the university had not decided what to do with, at that point. I had permission to use it as a studio and I was working there one Sunday morning relatively early. At the time I was doing some fairly large abstract paintings. Primarily color field, not much else going in, but every once in a while a figure would show up in the painting. I would think, Why is this figure here? It has nothing to do with this abstracted painting. One Sunday morning I was sitting working on this piece and a little figure emerged. I was sitting there contemplating its presence when like a bolt of lightning it dawned on me that that figure was my father. My father died when I was very, very young. I never knew him. I believe that figure kept showing up in my work as a way of letting me know that it was important to look back in time. Important to know a bit more about my father, what he stood for, what he was like. I couldn’t paint or do anything else, I just sat there in tears contemplating who he was. Finally I pulled myself away from that, went home, and told my wife about it. I don’t think I mentioned it to anyone else for a really long time. Since that time, I never questioned why the figure was part of my work. It was part of me and it was there as a link to something beyond me. It might contribute something to the painting or it could just coexist. Interesting experiences happen and you never know where they are going to show up in the context of the work.
Kara Walker, Fall From Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale, 2011, Video (color, sound), 17 min. Installation view: We at the Camden Arts Centre/MAC are Exceedingly Proud to present an Exhibition of Capable Artworks by the Notable Hand of the Celebrated American, Kara Elizabeth Walker, Negress, Camden Arts Centre, London, 2013. Photo: Angus Mill
You asked me earlier about the relationship of my work to the Black Arts Movement. I said something to the effect that it may be that some of my work might have references to the black experience and some of it doesn’t. I think that is true. Over and above anything, the work has references to human experiences, which go well beyond the context of race. It has feelings and emotions, attitudes that are common to people throughout the world. Sometimes you don’t always know those feelings but sometimes you do. In terms of some of the artists who may have contributed to my thinking along the way are Käthe Kollwitz for her drawing skills and compositional methods, and Mauricio Lasansky for his series The Nazi Drawings, which were beautifully done drawings but depicting horrific scenes from the Holocaust. There were a number