ALLISON BOLAH

What made you devote so much time and attention to this particular subject matter?

Well, I’m a daughter of the [G]reat [M]igration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the [N]orth and [W]est are products of the Great Migration. It’s that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.

In my own family’s case, my mother migrated from Georgia, from Rome, Georgia to Washington, D.C., and my father migrated from southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where they met, married and here I am. Had it not been for the Great Migration I wouldn’t exist, and yet I felt that the story wasn’t really being told from the perspective of the people who had lived this.

We didn’t know why they left or how they made the decision to leave. What were their lives like before they left? How’d they get the courage to leave the only place they’d ever known for a place they’d never seen, for an uncertain future in a place that was often cold and forbidding, anonymous and not welcoming to them, and how did they make it once they got there?
Those were the kind of questions that I had, and those are the questions that really help to give us a sense of how the cities came to be and how so many African Americans ended up in these cities – Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York.

…

I actually refer to them as immigrants. I refer to them as having the same kind of immigrant heart and motivations and desires and goals and dreams for themselves as any immigrant, as any person who might have crossed the Atlantic in steerage.

So what I’m looking at is the fact that what is it that propelled them is a human story, a classic American story, and how tragic is it that they ended up having to go to far reaches of their own country in order to find the freedom that they really would have been born to.

So when I use it, I’m using that, in a way, as a provocative term to get us to think about this migration differently. They were doing what so many other groups of people are often lauded for doing. In other words, they came to these cities without really any backup at all.

They lived in neighborhoods where they were confined to. They doubled up and tripled up in homes or apartments or cold water flats. They took multiple jobs and ended up often making more money in the aggregate than the people who were there already.
In other words, they were working very hard in order to survive, which is the classic American story, a classic immigrant story, and yet they had to do that within their own country, within the borders of our own country, and yet they were not immigrants.

My Vassar College Faculty ID affords me free smoothies, free printing paper, paid leave, and access to one of the most beautiful libraries on Earth. It guarantees that I have really good health care and more disposable income than anyone in my Mississippi family. But way more than I want to admit, I’m wondering what price we pay for these kinds of IDs, and what that price has to do with the extrajudicial disciplining and killing of young cis and trans black human beings.

You have a Michigan State Faculty ID, and seven-year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was killed in a police raid. You have a Wilberforce University Faculty ID and 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by police for holding a BB gun. I have a Vassar College Faculty ID and NYPD suffocated Shereese Francis while she lay face-down on a mattress. You have a University of Missouri Student ID and Mike Brown’s unarmed 18-year-old black body lay dead in the street for four and a half hours.

But.

“We are winning,” my mentor, Adisa Ajamu, often tells me. “Improvisation, transcendence, and resilience—the DNA of the Black experience—are just synonyms for fighting preparedness for the long winter of war.”

Adisa is right. But to keep winning, to keep our soul and sanity in this terror-filled coliseum, at some point we have to say fuck it. We have to say fuck them. And most importantly, we must say to people and communities that love us, “I love you. Will you please love me? I’m listening.”

We say that most profoundly with our work. We say that most profoundly with our lives. The question is, can we mean what we must say with our work and our lives and continue working at institutions like Vassar College.

I’ve really come to believe that, as an artist, the work sort of tells you what you’re doing, you’re not in the drivers seat, the art sort of tells you. My practice is what it is and if I tried to force it to be something else, I think it would not be a good thing, honestly. That realization took a long time to come to, frankly.

The other thing is that I have taught for a very long time. I teach now. I actually really like teaching, weirdly enough, and it gives me enough of an income – it hasn’t always – but, at this point, it gives me enough of an income that I’m not dependent on gallery sales or commissions or honoraria for my income. God knows, I’m always happy to get them. This is not to say I don’t need them or want them. However, I’m not dependent on the solely, and that gives me a lot of freedom.

The third is that, having taught forever, there were times when I felt like, ‘Oh, I should do like some of my artist friends, I shouldn’t have a regular teaching gig.’ I teach part-time in two different places and have done for a long time. And, I thought, ‘I should drop this. I should just try to make a go of it as an artist’ because I see peers careers getting bigger. But the truth is, once the economic crash hit, I was so thankful I kept those jobs because so many people now who have had bigger careers would kill for my teaching gigs these days.

It’s weird, too, because in Los Angeles there’s much more respect for artists who teach than there is here in New York. In New York, I think it’s because the commercial gallery scene is such a driver of the art scene that there’s still that notion that if you’re not making a living on just your art you’re not really an artist. And that’s so not a part of growing up in Los Angeles where everyone assumes of course you’re going to teach if you can.

You obviously take the practice of creating art seriously, and on one level, critique is really important to keep art relevant. But at the same time, your critiques, especially Art Thoughtz, touch upon exactly what seems silly or irrelevant about Modern and Contemporary art. How do you maintain this balance?

Making art/stuff is the only thing I know how to do. So even if I ridicule it, that ridicule comes from a place of deep love and engagement. I think people should understand that if someone spends time engaging in a critical battle with a thing, they are tethered to that thing. What is Batman without Joker? What is Seinfeld without Newman?

What is the role of language in your work, especially the relationship between slang and jargon?

Language is a massive part of my work. Too Black for BET and Black Like Me are bodies of writing. Even my paintings Barack Obama Battles the Pink Robots and other visual works begin with phrases that dictate what the paintings will end up being. The works of Halcyon Days began as a joke I made in a Tumblr post about Coogis that I decided to carry over into the creation of my first fiber work. Everything begins with words for me. Words, phrases, and narratives come before picture and form for me.

What about slang vs. jargon in Hennessy Youngman videos specifically? One thing that strikes me about them is how part of the humor in the videos, unfortunately, is hearing someone decked out in chains and Coogi sweaters explaining Relational Aesthetics.

In terms of the vacillation between slang and jargon, I mean, this isn’t something new to blacks. Black people and other people of color exist within multiple worlds; they’re hybrid cultural citizens who develop methods of speech in order to traverse the white man’s world while still maintaining the voice of their own culture. It’s a survival tactic that precedes me by a vast amount of years.

I only recently realized that it’s been about a year since the last Art Thoughtz was recorded. Was it a conscious choice to stop filming? Do you think Hennessy will be back?

Yes, it was a conscious choice to stop. I honestly get bored pretty quickly, so the Hennessy project became personally unfulfilling after doing it for [two] years. The joy in that project was not knowing what I was doing; once I figured it out I knew I’d stop. And besides, I enjoy making art, not being an art pundit. I’m not cut out for that shit. It would just be pure hell to me to be an art critic. Jerry, Roberta, how the fuck do you do guys do it? Not that one can’t be a critic and an artist, but that split lifestyle isn’t for me. I much prefer the sloppy, dumb, pig-headed, Wile E. Coyote-running-out-over-the-cliff’s-edge, path of being an artist.

The audience of a text, when you are writing from outside—becomes a chorus of damning or fetishizing or supportive or condescending voices.

MJ Yes! Because it’s a series of imagined audiences, as your “chorus” already indicates. And you’re projecting them, but they also have been projected onto you, as you know perfectly well. They are not in concert with one another; many of them are oppositional or suspicious of each other. But you speak in the language, the tongues that can address, maybe placate, and acknowledge all of them. Which can be absolutely overwhelming. Which takes us back to that opening scene—of me in the movie, the sense that everyone is requiring much too much of the performance. The problem is technical, partly. How do you work all that into an essay without seeming to rather desperately be gesturing toward these different constituencies?

What is your work style? Do you tend to tackle one project at a time? Or are you always writing singular poems, working on multiple projects, returning to old work for revision?

I tend to work on many things at once, which used to bother me but now I see as just how I work and even an advantage in some ways. If something’s a dead end, which happens a lot, I can pick up some other poems or what have you. But definitely the poems come first and the books later; I don’t think of them as projects but poems.

They also evolve out of each other: I was writing the Basquiat book and it was mostly done, and had become this massive long poem, and no one wanted it. Or they liked it but balked. Because it was also a “public” book, one purposefully without an “I” in it at all, I started writing the more “personal” poems that became Jelly Roll. At first it was just a clutch of 15 or so heartbreaking poems, with all this weird syntax—though I always knew it would be subtitled “a blues,” I didn’t know if it was a series or a section of a book or what. Only when I set it free, and really started thinking about the form, did it become a book. It too grew a bit long before I cut a lot of the poems—some even good poems that didn’t fit, or were redundant, or didn’t move the whole in the way that even some of the smaller poems did.

That’s the hard but important thing: if you seed enough you have to be willing to yank the weeds. And even a plant that’s too close to the house or whatever. Sometimes these stray things have later lives, but not always. One day some may see the light.

I’d like to work slow and sure, and it takes a long time, it takes a couple years to get an exhibition together. So, they don’t leave without me really considering that it’s done. And, also because I’ve been doing it for forty years or so, it’s like okay, you know. The pieces that are important to me are personal pieces, pieces that are about my family. Like the one that’s called Legacy about my grandchildren, I don’t particularly want to sell that, but I don’t mind sharing it with people, I don’t mind having it in an exhibition.

When my great aunt passed, my mother’s father’s sister, she left A whole truck full of things, you know, scarves and handkerchiefs and gloves and boxes and jewelry, and that was like in 1975, and I just started a whole new series of work about her, The Aunt Hattie Series, collages and boxes and things like that. So, some of them I keep, and some of them I don’t.

Speak of Me as I Am (Venice, 2003), Black Like Me (The Aldrich Museum, 2005-06) and My Echo, My Shadow, and Me (Pace Gallery, 2006) are titles borrowed from other sources and yet they intimate a relation to the self—what it means to be “me”—a concept both internal and external to the self.

You’ve picked up on something very true: that it all comes back to me in the end. Because it is my studio work, it is my world, and I own up to it. Those who are outsiders are involved in explaining themselves while those who are or think they are in the mainstream do not feel this compulsion.

Who are we? How are we perceived? What are the preconceived notions? What is the reality of who we are? I have had to deal with this all my life. It comes into the work in many ways.

Your intervention work addresses relations in the external world…

…and there is a certain amount of collaboration involved… and a lot of listening and trying to be a sponge, then limiting what I do so that those who see it can absorb it rather than shut down. In my studio practice, I don’t have those limitations – I have to deal with myself. That can be frightening…

But the telling of these stories, which came from my mother’s lips as naturally as breathing, was not the only way my mother showed herself as an artist. For stories, too, were subject to being distracted, to dying without conclusion. Dinners must be started, and cotton must be gathered before the big rains. The artist that was and is my mother showed itself to me only after many years. This is what I finally noticed:

Like Mem, a character in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in. And not just your typical straggly country stand of zinnias, either. She planted ambitious gardens-and still does-with over 50 different varieties of plants that bloom profusely from early March until late November. Before she left home for the fields, she watered her flowers, chopped up the grass, and laid out new beds. When she returned from the fields she might divide clumps of bulbs, dig a cold pit, uproot and replant roses, or prune branches from her taller bushes or trees-until it was too dark to see.

Whatever she planted grew as if by magic, and her fame as a grower of flowers spread over three counties. Because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms – sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena . . . and on and on.

And I remember people coming to my mother’s yard to be given cuttings from her flowers; I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity, that to this day people drive by our house in Georgia-perfect strangers and imperfect strangers-and ask to stand or walk among my mother’s art.

I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty.

Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she leaves to me, for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She had handed down respect for the possibilities-and the will to grasp them.

For her, so hindered and intruded upon in so many ways, being an artist has still been a daily part of her life. This ability to hold on, even in very simple ways, is work Black women have done for a very long time.

The loser edit, with all its savage cuts, is confirmation that you exist. The winner edit, even in its artifice, is a gesture toward optimism, the expectation of rewards waiting for that better self. Whenever he or she shows up.

Take the footage you need. Burn the rest.

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Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

I don’t know the name of my favorite novelist of all time, because they never wrote anything. They had no inkling they had a knack for writing, so instead channeled that talent into being really nice to family, friends and strangers. It seems like a better way to spend one’s time, and a higher art.