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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you start making memory maps?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you tell me about the portraits?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The book part of A View of a Landscape includes essays by writers including Fred Moten, Adrienne Edwards, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Thomas Lax (as well as this author, who first wrote about Beasley in 2015). The sound part of the project includes new recordings created by L’Rain, Moor Mother, Jlin, Jason Moran, and more. To all involved, Beasley granted access to an extensive image bank featuring photographs, videos, and other materials related to his work, with an invitation to draw on them however much or little made sense.

In advance of a release-related event at Performance Space in New York on March 23, Beasley spoke with Art in America about mixing mediums, abstaining from authorship, and finding new forms for work that looks backward and forward at once.

What was the genesis for the new book and LP set? When did you start thinking about adding that to the body of work it surveys?

Around 2017 I applied for a grant for a sort of eight-part project that would incorporate a soundproof chamber with a motor running, a listening room, and sculptures, and then some photographs and a publication that would possibly have a record and some writing in it. The publication was something I conceived as another channel for the work and a way to put out images and ideas I’d been trying to reconcile. This predated the idea for the Whitney show, so it was originally intended as an independent project that could work alongside the other works but channeled through a different medium.

What was the original conception for the “View of a Landscape” group of works as a whole?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the South and a kind of material presence of that channels through it, but not so plainly or very clearly. For me, in the studio, there’s always residue that drives my aesthetic choices. And then there’s this push to understand what a site or specific geography does to the way we process things like music or politics or experience. When I would travel from Virginia to New York, the way I would carry myself in different contexts was very actively different. I remember my mom being really specific about garments and clothes that I could or couldn’t wear. Those little details of geography and the way we navigate and move are really particular, and I want to try to in some way make sense of what that is and how we apply it to broader landscapes [and narrower ones], like how we view the relationship between the South and the Deep South.

There are things I’m trying to uncover in the work and in conversations with people who are also trying to uncover them. In a lot of ways, the publication tracks how I’ve moved throughout the United States. I haven’t lived in so many different places, but there are enough touchpoints to sort of graph what experiences of moving are for Black folks in America. For me, that was being in Virginia, and then in Detroit, and then New Haven. All of these places have some kind of fraught relationship, either with intense conservatism that makes it difficult for Black folks to navigate these spaces equitably, or just systemic racism that is manufactured very deeply. The image bank that I provided everyone with had traces of these things, but then seeing how people put things together was really interesting.

How did your idea for the image bank arise?

It’s strange because, even though the publication was an idea that I imagined would represent my work and be an actual object or thing I made, there was a kind of release of authorship. I gave almost 20 people the keys to do what they will and to bring their thoughts and considerations into the fold, and then I assembled that. It allowed me to continue a more collaborative—dare I say curatorial—direction to things that I’m processing. I said, “Here are some images and some stuff I’m thinking about. They may seem very vague, but what is your response? How do you process this?”

There were maybe 1,000 images: images that I’d taken off my family’s property and some videos, but also images of artworks and examples of projects of mine from over the years. It was like a dossier that I could hand to someone to show what I’ve been up to. It was organized by subject matter, but I didn’t provide descriptions for how to use any of it. It was more like, “Here’s some stuff I would like for you to see. Make time to go through and process what it is, and if you have questions, we can talk.” I feel like every artist has a cache of photographs and references and things they’ve collected throughout the years, and it’s just a matter of in what context they share them. I’ve had videos that I only share during a studio visit—I wouldn’t put them in an exhibition. Some things are reserved, and the image bank had items that were of that nature. But after giving them up and releasing them to people who would enter them with a certain amount of consideration and care, I felt like if somebody could justify pulling an image and using it, then that was enough for me to let go of what that thing is and let it live.

Did you have artists books or publications in mind as a model, however directly or indirectly?

We all have box-set LPs that have liner notes, but those are a different form because they don’t necessarily have extensive catalogues showing other aspects of someone’s practice. I really wanted essays for this as well, and it felt like a space to put all of this stuff into. To me it was important for it to exist in this box-set form, with a record in a slipcase in a tight container alongside a book, so that those things could exist on a shelf together.

What sort of prompts did you give to the musicians involved?  

I obviously had ideas around what everyone would contribute, but I think I did a decent job of refusing to guide them. I provided all of them with a set of stems—24 tracks from the recording of the motor—and the only stipulation was that they had to use those as a sort of starting point. But they could do anything they wanted with them. I’ve had some kind of relationship or some sort of proximity with all of them. They were all aware of the of the work already, so they weren’t coming in completely cold. But when I got each track back, I had no idea what they would be.

Were you surprised by any of the contributions, or were any of a kind that was unexpected?

There were quite a few. It’s less surprising in retrospect, because he’s been engaging in performance as of late, but when Fred Moten delivered his essay, he also sent me an audio recording of him reading it. It’s altered a little bit from the text, but I felt like he was wanting to bridge both [parts of the project, the book and the LPs]. I used his recording in one of the musical tracks, and he was happy about it. Some of the essays responded to my work, but also to certain aspects of my life and my family’s life as well. I didn’t really have a lot of expectations, but I was really surprised by how strong those things were. I realized I’ve known everyone involved for a long time, and all these things came from conversations that were natural and didn’t feel forced, all from relationships that have been built over a long period of time. It’s powerful to realize that all of these people have experienced the work in person and have been able to account for that through language in a real palpable way. Having people write about you is weird. It’s a strange experience.

What do you feel like the publication adds to the “A view of a landscape” project overall?

It’s very simple: it adds an object in lots of people’s homes. The attention we paid to it as a physical object was important to me, so that when people get it, they can handle the cotton paper, the plastic surfaces, the different kinds of textures and layering. It’s the first time I’ve been able to have so much input into a widely distributed object. And conceptually, materially, it’s interesting because it’s not so common to get a book wrapped in corrugated plastic.

What is the status of the cotton-gin motor now?

It’s in storage. We’re waiting for its next destination. There are some things being worked on to realize it again. We’ll see what happens…

While there can be a certain melancholy among diasporic artists grasping at generalized ideas of a motherland, Nguyen circumvents that disappointment by rooting his work in specific histories that he rigorously researches in order to make room for poetry. In The Specters of Ancestors Becoming (2019), Nguyen worked with members of the Vietnamese community in Senegal, whose origins trace back to West African soldiers sent by French colonizers to fight against the Vietnamese liberation uprisings in the 1940s. Nguyen asked members of the community to devise and enact conversations with their elders, showing how fragmented consciousness of cultural inheritance is communicated between generations.

Such intergenerational transmission recurs frequently in Nguyen’s work. We Were Lost in Our Country (2019) features interviews with members of the Aboriginal Ngurrara community in Western Australia alongside testimony about the Ngurrara Canvas II, an immense painting made by 40 Ngurrara artists that depicts a map of their land created as evidence to reclaim that land from the Australian government. Many of the original artists having died, the painting serves as a complex dialogue between ancestors and descendants. The ways in which land bears witness also figure in The Island (2017) and The Boat People (2020), both of which look at two sites of former Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugee camps. Rather than aligning these sites solely with past traumas, Nguyen presents them as places of generative fantasy, where bodies are empowered by oceans instead of drowning in them and where the fate of being the last humans on Earth affords new communion with objects and the landscape. For refugees past and present, this type of ingenuity is a survival strategy.

Nguyen is never satisfied with research as a static mode of exposition: when archival footage is interwoven into his films, it is in part to question the motives of the camera and the coercive tactics of the moving image, while conjuring distinct power in the refusal to present a single truth. In an interview over Zoom during a family visit in Orange County, California, Nguyen—the subject of a solo show opening at the New Museum in New York this coming June—spoke about his long-term relationships with his collaborators, using a biennial as a civic tool, and the potency of sharing personal histories.

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LUMI TAN For the sake of a shared vocabulary, how would you define “research” as it figures in your practice?

TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN Research involves listening to people’s stories and being attuned to the frequencies of knowledge making its way to you. Many of my projects are based on topics that I learned through stories as a child. The Island, for example, was shot on an island off the coast of Malaysia that was the site of one of the largest refugee camps after the American war in Vietnam. The story of this place came up numerous times at the dinner table, during death anniversaries or family gatherings. It impressed so deeply in my psyche that, when I was in Malaysia for an event, I suddenly remembered those stories and I made an impromptu trip to the coast to find this island, which then became the subject of the film.

Research also involves this strange push and pull between wanting and accepting. When I’m doing research, there’s always something I want from it—I want it to go a certain way to continue the dialogue of the work I’ve made previously and the histories I’m interested in. But I also have to accept where it takes me. I learned that in a really significant way when I was making The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019). I grew up hearing stories about my grandfather’s younger brother, my granduncle, who was a conscript in the French army. He hated the French, but he was forced to fight on their side against the Vietnamese uprising. After that battle, he was sent to Algeria and experienced the Algerian revolution against the French. After that, he was sent to Martinique, another French colony.

As I grew up and began to understand colonial history, I realized he must’ve been a French tirailleur, a colonial soldier. I began finding statistics about the hundreds of thousands of colonial conscripts who were sent to Europe to defend France during World War I and World War II. I was intrigued with the possibilities of finding solidarities and friendships between tirailleurs from different French colonies. Did Senegalese tirailleurs support and defend Indochinese tirailleurs, or vice versa? If so, what did that look like? What kind of relationships were built there? That desire came from my own personal history of hearing his stories and my experiences in the American South and wanting to see more solidarity between people of color. Of course, there was no proof or documentation that any such solidarities happened. Maybe it was purposely erased from the books, or maybe the French didn’t put the tirailleurs together. It wasn’t until I was on the ground in Dakar and started sharing stories with people that a whole other way of understanding the history of French colonial soldiers, beyond the textbook research, made itself visible.

Another way of looking at research is to think about how the research will be shared. Will it be fictionalized? Will information be shared in a way that is generous but not didactic? I’m not an academic researcher. I’m not going to write a book about the history of colonial soldiers. So how do I make it more interesting and accessible to people?

TAN Have there been times when a certain trust was afforded to you because you’re an artist and
not a historian or anthropologist, or because your artistic approach prioritizes building relationships through listening?

NGUYEN Introducing myself as an artist to different communities has not helped me in regard to gaining trust. People are uncertain of what artists do. If I introduce myself as a filmmaker, though, people who don’t have a background in art oftentimes find it easier to imagine what we might produce together. I also find that it helps to share my story first. When I first met the Ngurrara people in Western Australia for We Were Lost in Our Country, the community were wondering, “Why is a Vietnamese-American filmmaker interested in working with us?” For me, their story is very much a story of forced migration—they were forced to migrate off their native desert land and work on cattle stations. I can understand that, I can empathize with that. We found ties between our similar stories, and that allowed the conversation to become more open and trusting. Trust is crucial. It’s easy to go into a community, make an artwork, and then leave. But that’s really problematic because people’s stories then just become commodities used to promote certain political agendas or make profit. That’s what advertising and propaganda do, and that’s exactly what I’m working against.

TAN How much responsibility do you feel toward locality in your work, and/or within the biennial circuit? For some projects, such as Crimes of Solidarity (2020), made for Manifesta 13 in Marseille, the labor you put into that to engage locally is extremely apparent.

NGUYEN Manifesta 13 was a special situation. I really enjoy having the support to be able to address a local situation; on the other hand, when a project like The Specter of Ancestors Becoming gets to travel from Dakar around the world and garners a lot of positive response, that is deeply encouraging. Stories that are little-known to the rest of the world get to be shared. That gets back to the community, and they are happy. They feel empowered and proud that their film gets to travel and be seen by so many people.

[In Marseille] not only was there a large community of people having to deal with an urgent housing situation, but also the pandemic forced us to work remotely. We collaboratively made a 71-minute film and performance through online chat applications like WhatsApp, Skype, and Zoom. The project began at a squat called Squat Saint-Just that came to house more than 250 or so inhabitants, mostly asylum seekers from places like Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The squat was under threat of being torn down by the city, and tenants and volunteers were fighting to keep it from closing. It was a place of care and solidarity, a place that needed solidarity in order to continue.

I wanted to utilize Manifesta’s relationship and bargaining power with Marseille, and I wanted to contribute to the squat in some way. So I proposed to the volunteers and tenants that we make a film about the squat that could speak about the housing situation in Marseille and asylum seekers there in general. Then we would show it in the squat so that it would become a venue of the Biennial—the logic being that, if it’s an official exhibition venue of the biennial, then the city can’t tear it down. And also, if my collaborators were listed as official artists/collaborators in an artwork for Manifesta, they couldn’t be deported.

TAN How did the process of making the film work?

NGUYEN A lot of the scenes were shot as testimonial clips on smartphones and shared back and forth between Marseille and Saigon, where I was locked down. It was important that the writers/actors not only [contribute] to the film but that they have a role every time the film was shown. We removed the [recordings of] dialogue, so they would enact their own dialogue live on stage. Their presence was necessary for the artwork to exist; in order for the work to be realized, it was a requirement that they were physically present in Marseille, in the squat. The idea was to have another level of protection for the participants from deportation and/or being thrown out into the streets.

The squat mysteriously burned down midway through the project. Luckily, with the help of the Manifesta team, we were able to switch up the plans and managed to perform the work during a lull in the pandemic in November 2020. We got one chance, one day, to perform the piece at the music conservatory of Marseille.

TAN How has the collaborative process you employed for Crimes of Solidarity worked with other communities you have engaged?

NGUYEN For most of the projects, I’ll ask people from the communities to participate by writing, and I’ll assist in the writing process. It’s really important for certain topics to have their voices present, and to have their voices be the lead. For The Boat People, shot in Bataan in the Philippines, I invited children from a nearby fishing village to participate as actors. Their understanding of the histories of that place wasn’t fully formed. But it was OK. The film, on one hand, was very much about the history of the site of Bataan as a place where Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees had landed. But it’s also about the traumas of that particular geography during WWII and the multiple migrations in that archipelago. It was also very much about thinking about the future of a space like that, as the narrative was set in a dystopic future where these children roam the world searching for lost histories.

That project was a little bit different than The Specter of Ancestors Becoming and We Were Lost in Our Country. Those projects, in Senegal and Western Australia respectively, were informed by the people in the communities who were dealing with their specific histories and the erasures associated. For most projects, it’s really important that people from the community actually participate not only as actors but as speakers and writers. And in the process of writing and making, everybody involved learns a lot. The research doesn’t end when you press “record” on the video camera: it continues when the camera is rolling and after it’s stopped. That’s when a lot of the research unfolds itself.

TAN Does it also continue after it’s shared with the public? There’s so much that is learned after it’s opened up to different audiences.

NGUYEN Totally. Earlier this year, we were able to finally show The Specter of Ancestors Becoming in Dakar, where it was shot. It was shown at Raw Material Company, which played a major role in the research on the ground. Members of the community who didn’t take part in the film attended the opening celebrations, and so many more stories came out. People volunteered images from their personal family photo archives that ended up in the installation.

TAN You often exhibit objects that are related to your films. How do you understand those forms in terms of communicating with audiences? Your objects are typically presented within institutional walls, whereas film and performance can be circulated much more broadly.

NGUYEN I’m fascinated with the relationship between the intangible narrative and the very tangible object. I think it comes from not having many things when we arrived in the US. Everything we managed to bring had a story—a story of how it survived the journey, a story of its origin, a story that connected that particular object to other objects and with other stories. So I often exhibit objects along with moving-image works. The objects and the narrative are intertwined.

The narrative element gives life to the objects, helping them move beyond commodity. It’s very animist at its core. I don’t share my video work widely on the internet because I think it’s important to experience it in the space where sound can be spatialized, and where the film is in proximity to the objects that appear in it. Sound and space are important. Moving images and sound allow me to do things that wall text alone does not. I am able to layer narrative and meaning, and present questions in more complex and entangled ways. The challenge is how to captivate viewers for an extended period of time long enough for them to have a visceral response or embodied understanding of the stories.  

Over the past decade, Simpson has produced a veritable pantheon of clay beings that honor Pueblo traditions while anticipating an upcoming apocalypse. Bearing such hallmark signifiers as slit eyes, absent limbs, and desert tones, these figures serve as characters in a quiet but profound epic that begins in the Southwest—in northern New Mexico, to be exact—but whose relevance extends into the beyond.

Check out a recent Art in America feature about Simpson by Lou Cornum from our November 2022 issue.

Watch the full video above or on the official Art in America YouTube channel.

Video Transcript

My name is Rose B. Simpson. The exhibition is called “Road Less Traveled,” and it’s at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. “Road Less Traveled” is me challenging the very things that I took for granted or the processes that seemed easy and often are unhealthy. And if I take some time and witness what’s possible, I can transform my own reality and hopefully, by default, help other people, too.

The work represents my own journey, whether it’s psychological investigation, a new spiritual awareness, or it’s a very practical emotional or psychological space that I need to inhabit in order to transform my reality. The work offers me a reflection of what’s possible and I make it and I visualize it, and then it becomes… a thing. And then I get to witness this thing, and from it, I get to grow. Every single mark on the surface of these pieces means something. Either they’re stars, they’re X’s, which represent protection, or they represent tracks or days or the marking of time or the process around journey. When I use things like beads in a line or I put a line of markings in a row, it’s a specific number, like seven generations, or it’s seven directions, or it represents the months of the year. To me, it represents the process of going somewhere. So, the journey that we’re on.

Video Credits

Featuring: Rose B. Simpson
Producer and Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Music: Jakariwing
Copy Edits: Emily Watlington
Additional Edits: Jacob Amorelli

Nick Lutsko I got into meteorology and atmospheric science because I’m interested in climate change. People often think about climate change in terms of increases in mean climates, but most of the damage is done by extreme events. These events tend to be rare and often unique, so they can be tricky to understand. Lately, I’ve been studying weather on exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system. The awesome James Webb telescope that was launched in 2021 is going to give us completely new insights into exoplanets, where people are searching for evidence of life in other solar systems. For me, it’s also a new opportunity to study weather under weird conditions. I’ve been looking at tidal-locked planets, which are planets that always show the same face to their host star. These planets always have one warm side and one cold side, the same way the moon has a dark side.

Aki Sasamoto I started working with the weather a few years ago, when I made a series of kinetic sculptures powered by the wind. I’m primarily a performance artist, but at the time, I was pregnant, and I couldn’t perform. So I wanted to make objects that perform. I used phase transition [the process of changing from one physical state to another] to get objects to perform for me. Kinetic sculptures are often something that you just plug in, but I wanted to harness the environment rather than use a motor. That’s when I started to get interested in weather patterns, because as you circulate air or heat, the patterns can be unpredictable, yet are still the product of a system. My background is in structured improv, and I thought, weather patterns are basically structured improv, since it is difficult to predict the near future even with a certain understanding of patterns.

Lutsko Weather is all about this combination of chaos and predictability. You can count on it being warmer during the day than at night; or warmer in summer than it is in winter. And yet, there are often unexpected events. I wonder how you think about balancing structure against disorder.

Sasamoto I’ve always been interested in that dichotomy of chaos and control. It’s a big part of choreography: when you choreograph, you have to understand the macro view, or the structure of the piece, as well as the performers’ bodily experiences. It’s impossible to perfectly regulate even the best dancers: your body can be different depending on the day. The weather is like that too.

Lutsko When you perform, does it feel chaotic for you? Or are you trying to create chaos for the audience?

Sasamoto I’m not trying to create chaos, but I do like to perform the same piece in iterations. If two weeks pass between performances, my body might change—as a woman, my body can feel very different depending on where the moon is. I don’t write down my concepts and I don’t have scripts, but I do repeat performances. It’s like the difference between storytelling and story writing: in the storytelling, things change, although the story is the same. If I perform the same piece when I’m 20, and then 30, and then 40, it should be different each time, like when you read a book again 10 years later, and different things stand out to you. That’s what fascinates me about repetition.

Lutsko I’m the complete opposite. I’m often looking for patterns, so when things are changing a lot, it makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes, I’m worried it means I don’t understand very well whatever system I’m studying.

Sasamoto Weather predictions are based on understandings of the past data, but that data is always growing, right?

Lutsko Totally. But if I’m trying to understand a weather event and I don’t have many previous examples, then I get worried. This happens often with extreme events, and these are what do the most damage. If I have, say, 20 events, and they’re all a little different, but they also have a lot of similarities, then I might have enough data to feel comfortable making predictions or saying something general about these types of events. If I study some extreme event and I only have one example, then I may very well predict the next one incorrectly. Here in California, we just had a huge bomb cyclone and an atmospheric river. There’s a lot of work to do to understand the system and to make better predictions next time.

Sasamoto A lot of commentary around these extreme events seems to center on how human activity creates the conditions for these kinds of disastrous weather, that maybe if we had remained nomadic and didn’t rely on electricity or something like that, the weather would be less disastrous.

Lutsko There’s a lot of interest these days in what we call attribution. Some people want to say that human activities made the storm, say, 15 percent worse. But I always feel nervous about those claims. People often do this with hurricanes, but we have only a few strong hurricanes each year, so I feel worried we don’t have enough data.

Sasamoto Japan has had earthquakes and typhoons for a long time. Making my piece Weather Bar [2021], I got really interested in the wind and how finicky it can be. I wanted to make a whiskey glass spin forever on a table, but it was difficult to create the tornado: I contained it in a vessel that had to be a certain shape, and then pumped in wind, which had to be very precise. I experimented a lot with making various weather phenomena in my studio. I tried making a cloud in a jar by changing the internal pressure.

I was pregnant at the time, and so was dealing with climate change in my body: I was changing in shape, in feel, in temperature. Everything was fluctuating and unpredictable. Having kids and becoming middle-aged was a big new chapter in my life, so it dawned on me to make a piece about phase transition, which both clouds and wind undergo.

At the time, I couldn’t drink, even before I became pregnant, because of my kidneys. And I loved drinking, so I was longing for a bar. Sometimes, I’d go to happy hour at a sports bar and watch the big screens. I thought I’d sum up these ideas in a weather forecast video that also talked about aging, and screen it at the bar I re-created for the installation, where a whiskey glass spins and spins.

Lutsko I was recently reading about the history of weather, and found out that in the 1600s, people were doing experiments with things like glass bowls: they’d heat up the air inside, then measure pressure, which is how they established there was some kind of relationship between temperature and pressure. They thought, maybe that’s what’s going on in our atmosphere. Or they’d add water, then change the temperature and watch as it condensed; then they thought, maybe that’s what clouds are. I wonder if you’ve read about that, because your experiments seem so similar to theirs.

Sasamoto No, I haven’t read about that! But I was watching public lectures with various scientists, and I was fascinated by their laboratories. When I saw some of the devices they use to visualize weather patterns, I got inspired, because they can be so sculptural.

I used to hang out at Yale’s School of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, and there, I became interested in how scientists create conditions for their experiments, especially in engineering.

Lutsko That’s like what Bruno Latour wrote about: that the instruments we use to conduct experiments are also participants. When modeling weather, one of the biggest uncertainties is phase transitions and clouds. So there’s a kind of give-and-take between picking answers that make realistic-looking models and simulations, and giving the system the freedom to evolve on its own and give interesting answers.

Sasamoto I was thinking about the laboratory, and also wind, with Sink or Float [2022], which I showed at the most recent Venice Biennale. I made an airflow table that enabled things to move in a chaotic manner that depended on the geometry of the object: I would float snail shells, which have clockwise spirals, and they’d always spin counterclockwise. Then I put a feather in, and it would spin the opposite way. Each object performed the same wind differently.

Lutsko That piece makes me think of dust, which, if you zoom out far enough, gives a kind of materiality to airflows. There are these incredible satellite photos taken off the coast of West Africa, where you see the dust flying off the Sahara. You can use that to track the air masses. Similarly, your piece allows us to see the airflow as we watch how these objects are being carried by it.

Sasamoto I wonder about your relationship to metaphor. In literature or film or art, weather events are often associated with particular emotions.

Lutsko I think of what I do as a set of boxes nested within each other, because the climate system and the atmosphere are so complicated that we can’t study them in totality. We can’t examine every molecule in the atmosphere, so we have to simplifythings to get to the essence of the phenomena that we’re interested in. Distilling these complex systems into a few simple principles or a couple equations is so fun. Then, once you feel like you understand something through the most basic metaphor, or at the simplest level, from there, you can start to work back up to other levels of complexity. And you try to see if what you thought you understood about the system still works.

Sasamoto And do you have emotions you associate with particular weather phenomena?

Lutsko I guess I would say the strongest emotional connection I have comes from finding that feeling of elegance when, say, you have this elaborate set of boxes, and you manage to figure out the physics in a way that works really well. It’s so satisfying.

Sasamoto I think I’ve met your kind before, in the laboratory…

Lutsko I’d like to ask about the title Phase Transition. I wonder what connection you make between phase transition and weather: do you think about passing weather and daily life, like how it can be stormy one day, and calm the next?

Sasamoto I’m more focused on age: teenage versus middle age versus old age. It’s amazing how the same bodily material can behave so differently. As my body changes, I feel like I’ve started to really understand scientific ideas that I only knew in theory before, since they are actually happening to me.

I’ve also become really interested in supercritical fluids, which can be liquid and gas at the same time. I wonder, what does that feel like? My work is often about thresholds, not dichotomies. So I wanted to create an environment based around that critical point. Entering middle age was really confusing: when I moved to the United States, I was gay, but then later in life, I found myself with a straight dude, having a kid. I came out of the closet as a teenager, and then I found myself going back in, and
I didn’t understand. It felt like a phase transition for real.  

—Moderated by Emily Watlington

How long have you been at Tate?
I was hired as an assistant conservator in 1997, before Tate Modern opened. After its inauguration, I became a paintings conservator. I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years. The Tate collection occupies four different venues. Tate Britain’s remit is historical art from roughly the 15th century to the present. Tate Modern houses international works dating from 1900 to the present. And there are branches in Liverpool and St. Ives as well. When I started, everything was in Millbank, central London, but it’s great to see the collection on view in all those new locations.

What does your role as a paintings conservator entail?
Since the collection is so large and diverse, we have different conservation departments—painting, sculpture, paper, time-based media, frames—divided among the venues. My role is to support Tate’s programs. That includes preparing paintings for exhibitions and loans; checking the condition of works as they come in for shows and maintaining them for the duration of the event; and even doing full restoration of collection works. Restoration can involve structural repair, cleaning, or various other treatments. I also research works in the collection. We have wonderful science and imaging departments. Working with scientists, curators, and the research team sometimes leads to important findings, which are then disseminated through teaching, talks, and publications. For example, we did extensive research for the exhibition “Modigliani Up Close” that was recently at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

There have been a few recent exhibitions driven by conservation research.
Yes, and part of the drive behind that is advancements in technical imaging. Plus, you can share results more easily in digital form. Conservators were previously in the background, but now there is growing public interest in learning how artists made their works. One has to strike a balance between getting as much information out there as possible and making it accessible. Collaboration among historians, curators, researchers, and conservators is important to understanding the full scope of artists and their work. I hope this is only the beginning of a more inclusive way for art professionals to interact.

Are there any key take-aways from those collaborative experiences?
One example is Amedeo Modigliani’s Portrait of a Girl [ca. 1917] in the Tate collection. The surface is very thickly painted, but when we X-rayed the piece, we found the image of another woman underneath. Curators immediately recognized the figure from another painting, now in Russia, as the artist’s former lover Beatrice Hastings. Without one another, conservators and curators each know only half the story. Working together, they can fill in the gaps and give these works new life.

What are you working on next?
I’m going to start on Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, which was painted in 1962 and acquired by Tate in 1981. Since it’s so popular, the work has traveled all over the world. It’s almost always on display, but it’s more fragile than one might think. Everyone sees it as a printed image, but it’s actually one of Warhol’s early screen prints with a hand-painted face. Now that they are 60 years old, those images need a sensitive cleaning to even out the surfaces.