Scott’s fluid and free-spirited work—which also includes forays into comedy, music, theater, and performance of other kinds—is on full view in “Walk a Mile in My Dreams,” a retrospective currently at the Baltimore Museum of Art through July 14. The 75-year-old artist, who has called Charm City her home since childhood, is showing some 140 works spanning more than 50 years. Below, Scott discusses her hometown history, her capacity for craft, and how she’s navigated an evolving art world over the decades.

How has Baltimore informed and guided who you are as an artist?

My parents were sharecroppers from North and South Carolina who came to the “Up South” during the Great Migration. They got to Baltimore, and it allowed them to have a bit more agency and power in their lives. This city offered them the possibility of giving me the life that I have—the ability to become a MacArthur fellow and have a 50-year retrospective.

When I was growing up, Baltimore was much more prosperous than it is now. Unfortunately, stories these days are always showing boarded houses and Black men standing on the corner, but that’s only a pittance of what the city is really about. Baltimore, for me, is a city of largesse. When you are loved in Baltimore, it’s the best. You’re in a city filled with joy, filthy with artists, and packed with angst.

Your exhibition coincides with a Baltimore Museum show devoted to your mother, the late artist Elizabeth Talford Scott, who is also being celebrated with shows at eight other museums and colleges across the city. What does it mean to you to be showing your art along with hers?

It really speaks to a Baltimore ethos, where I, as a fabulous African American woman at three-quarters of a century old, get to do this. I was like, “What the fuck?!” (I cuss a lot, and I’m trying not to.) These young curators have given such deference to my mother and know things they probably shouldn’t. When you walk through my mother’s exhibition at the Baltimore Museum, it is mounted beautifully, and you are made aware of the consummate dignity and stank—that’s not stink but stank—and regality and oomph that my mother’s work has.

What’s something your mother taught you that has stuck with you?

The voice that I hear from my mother—she talks to me all the time, that rascal—says, “You’re worthy. And if you want it, go get it. Never stop.” We used to talk about having just one life. I, who have had some infractions in this life, probably will be reborn as a bee or as a bodily fluid—as something terrible. But as long as I’m a human being, I’m running it down. She packed me full of self-awareness, self-assuredness, and the ability to know that if this is it, I’m running for it. I’m not going to stop. And that is ever present in my artwork.

Your show opens with a newly commissioned installation titled The Threads That Unite My Seat to Knowledge (2024). Why did you want to begin with that?

This is one of my cockamamie ideas. I decided to make a dwelling that represents not only me and my brain but also the cozy, comfortable environment in which I grew up and became this person. On the outside are quilts made by my mother, grandmother, grandfather, and godmother because they swaddled me in my youth and gave me a lot of love. When I dreamed, I was on a magic carpet under those things.

Inside that installation, I’m showing large beaded pieces that talk about translucency and color—and just ass-kicking. There is a chair where I might sit if I’m in the museum, and tell stories and sing and talk. My mom brought me to the Baltimore Museum when I was a kid, when [Auguste Rodin’s] Thinker was still outside. You could jump all over him and try to find his genitalia and then walk up all those steps through the front door. The museum was one of my seats of knowledge. It was a place where I could perambulate and touch things I’m not supposed to. So it’s proper and apropos—and all those words—that I should be able to sit in this joint and disperse some common knowledge.

The title of the show alludes to a performance piece of yours called Walk a Mile in My Drawers (2006). What is the significance of that work to you?

The first retrospective I did here [at the BMA in 2000] was called “Kickin’ It with the Old Masters.” It was funny because when we were talking about it, people would say, “Do you really want to say masters?” This [new title] is a way to talk about the many facets of what I do as a performer, singer, and theater person, as well as a visual artist and an educator. Walk a Mile in My Drawers was a funny bon mot about fatness, about big girls, sexuality, all that stuff. “Walk a Mile in My Dreams” is about how I shall not be denied.

I’ve been loved. I’ve been given the fodder I need, and the nourishment. Some of that was money and food, but a lot of it was that little extra kick you need to take the next step—someone imparting knowledge to me and not making me feel either stupid or wrong to ask questions. To receive that is a big deal. And I would be remiss if I didn’t include race in this, because that can make it a really arduous task to exhibit work about social and cultural stuff and also use materials that people don’t necessarily understand as art. I’m a craftsperson and an artist all rolled into one. But people bemoan me saying I’m a craftsperson. “What?! Are you going to sing a Negro spiritual?” Well, I just might! I’m overwhelmed by this retrospective because it allows me to look at how I’ve walked so many miles in my dreams—and how I continue to do that.

You’ve made so many different kinds of art over 50 years. Are you surprised by any of your work? Are there things you can barely believe you made?

It’s the amount of work. If I make 10 necklaces a year and 10 sculptures, that’s 20 pieces of art. Multiply that by 50. And that’s a low number! And while I was doing that for a long time I traveled as a performer with Kay Lawal-Muhammad as the [variety act] Thunder Thigh Revue. I look back at that and think, Who the hell is that person?! Isn’t it wonderful that I wasn’t dissuaded and didn’t succumb to my fears—that I just kept walking?

How do you remember the Thunder Thigh Revue?

This was in the mid-’80s into the ’90s, at a time when Whoopi Goldberg was golden, and people like Mort Sahl—monologuists—talked about really heavy subjects in a comedic manner. It was a real adventure. We would do bits. We realized there were things that we needed to say, and we wanted to say them in a way that the audience would actually listen. A lot of our work was about being accepted for who you are. It was about larger women, about large Black women, about immigration; anything we heard, we went after. A lot of it was about who the messenger is and listening to what that messenger has to say. Because incumbent in that was our ethnicity, our weight, our gender, our class: you name it. That was very important for us.

It was also a kind of feminism for us. But we kept our clothes on. It was different than what I see young women doing now, shaking their butts and whatever. We were very aware of who was looking at us, because the majority of the time our audience was not 50 percent Black. We were very aware of the message we were sending out and what we looked like. We were aware that some of the “demons” we were talking about were sitting in the audience and lasciviously wondering what’s under that lace bustier. One of the things we always were tackling was how not to pander to that—to be real and true and honest. That’s very relevant in my artwork as well.

In the past few years there’s been a shift in terms of attention paid to African American art. How different or the same does it feel to you now?

I talk with friends sometimes and we say, “Didn’t this happen in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, when African Americans were everything, and everybody had on kente cloth and big afros? And everybody was an Indigenous person wearing bead work and whatever was the flavor of the month?” For me the real difference is that the folks who are doing it now are not 20th-century people. They’re 21st-century people who are part of a more global society. These kids aren’t who I was. They are very different people. The abundance of knowledge and accessibility that we really had to work for in the past is at their fingertips. And there are many, many more well-educated people of color. There’s still not enough, ever. But we have great examples.

You’ve done beaded works, blown glass, and worked with all kinds of different materials. Is there one way of working with which you have a special kinship?

Beadwork. I insinuate beads into anything. If I could make an edible bead and we could sprinkle it on top of ice cream, I would bead in a beautiful design, and then we’d eat it. It is a mesmerizing technique. My mother’s side of the family were craftspeople: basket workers, clay people, weavers, all kinds of things. One of the reasons I chose beads is because I could afford them. I could carry them with me, and they weren’t toxic—unless I ate them. The more I learned about them, the more I realized I had the facility to bend them to my will. And they are my lingua franca as a teacher. They’re one of those things you can teach, and while you’re working with your hands, you can talk to people about history, about power—you can apply it to just about everything.

What made you inclined to work across so many different art forms?

I took advantage of every opportunity. I was so hungry for knowledge. If knowledge is truly cumulative, then being able to relay and pile on from the past and also unite that with what’s happening now … If I live, what the hell will I be doing in 2030? I’ll be in a wheelchair, but I’ll be rocking, baby. 

A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson had garnered attention with a couple small solo shows in New York and a pair of notable group exhibitions that followed. But his status was a matter of perspective. “I felt very emerging at that point,” Gibson recalled. “But because the Native art world and the larger art world were so separate at the time, I think most of my peers who were non-Native were unaware. It was like I was at different stages in different contexts.”

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Video: Venice Biennale Artist Jeffrey Gibson on Painting and Paying Tribute to Indigenous Cultural Legacies

He was reminiscing from a very different vantage this past winter, just six weeks out from unveiling his United States Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the first time an Indigenous artist has represented America with a solo show at the illustrious affair. He was not holed up in a New York City studio but splayed out in an enormous converted schoolhouse in Hudson, an Upstate outpost that has been his home since 2012. His art for the Venice show had already shipped, but his team of some 20 studio assistants was occupied with works in various stages of creation: radiant paintings, dynamic sculptures, glamorous costumes, and dazzling ornamentation based in beads.

However far removed from his early years, it had not been all that long since a younger Gibson wandered around the Biennale wondering what might lie ahead of him. “As a struggling young artist in New York City, you don’t know how to know if anyone even cares. I had been to the Biennale when I was in grad school, but this was my first time there with any access to anything, and it was really important to feel included,” he recalled of that 2007 trip.

Kathleen Ash-Milby, a Navajo curator who was also then on the rise, had invited Gibson to Venice to see an event she organized via the NMAI for Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho), an artist 17 years Gibson’s senior. “I remember Edgar naming the Indigenous people who had died while traveling in Europe on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show,” Gibson said of the cowboys-and-Indians spectacle that toured overseas around the turn of the 20th century. “That was very significant for me.”

He also remembered meeting other Indigenous artists who would become allies and, especially, forging an important bond with Ash-Milby, who would play an important role in his being awarded the US Pavilion close to two decades later. Ash-Milby said she recalled some wild speculative dreaming about such a fate, “which at the time seemed like an insane idea.”

Gibson, for his part, remembered appreciating the provocation inherent in Edgar Heap of Birds’s presentation, and feeling curious about what might happen if even more change ever came: “I think we both kind of felt like, Is this the beginning of something—something that hasn’t happened?”

GIBSON WAS BORN IN 1972 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but grew up as a citizen of the world. With extended family in Mississippi and Oklahoma, he moved around while his father worked different jobs as a civil engineer for the US Department of Defense. He lived in Germany before elementary school and then spent time in New Jersey before relocating in his early teens to South Korea in 1985.

“Korea was impactful for me, partially because I was paying attention more independently to popular culture as it was being funneled abroad,” Gibson said. “This is when MTV was big, and there was street culture and an art scene in New York City that was being shown through music and fashion. There was one hour of MTV at midnight, and we would all talk about it, because we were jonesing.”

Formative discoveries at the time included Culture Club and Wham!, two pop acts that signaled an interest in music and identification with queer culture that figure in his art decades later. Other discoveries helped develop a capacity for cultural versatility, then and now. “When I was a kid, I romantically identified as a nomad,” Gibson said. “Living abroad and being American was an empowered and privileged place to be. But when I would come back to the US, I would be reminded that I was a person of color, and that we didn’t have as much money as it felt like we had when we were abroad. What I would bring back with me was a sense that I had traveled and seen other things. It made me feel like I knew there was a huge world. Being aware of other cultures certainly helped inform my general aesthetic and understanding of difference.”

While living overseas, Gibson returned to the US regularly, around once or twice a year, to visit relatives—and commune with histories and heritages that figured in his Indigenous identity. “My experience is a 20th-century Native American experience, and the idea that there’s any line between what is or isn’t a ‘Native American experience’ is blurry,” he said. “It’s problematic when we think about Native American heritages, especially in the 20th century, because they’re all so unique.”

Poverty and racism were issues for both the Choctaw and Cherokee sides of his family, but their circumstances differed significantly—and developed differently over time. In Mississippi, the longtime chief of the Choctaw tribe during Gibson’s childhood devised an economic plan that brought factory work and financial stability to the area. “By the ’90s, the tribe was one of the largest employers in the state, and it had a surplus of employment beyond our tribal population,” Gibson said. “So that’s the story of the Choctaw people, in addition to what we could talk about in terms of tribal dances, ribbon shirts, basket weaving, and the symbolism that exists there.”

In Oklahoma, where the Cherokee part of his family resided, Christianity played a role in Native American culture that clashed in certain ways with traditions that had been handed down over centuries. “Within both sides of my family—in Oklahoma and Mississippi—there were people who identified as Christian and others who continued traditional spiritual practices. I had uncles who continued doing traditional dancing and a grandmother and grandfather who established Southern Baptist churches.”

During visits to America, Gibson’s relationship with the various facets of his family complicated any easy answer to the question of how closely he identified as Indigenous. “It’s always been difficult for me to distinguish how much I am a part of a community,” he said. “I was always embraced, and because I would leave and go to Korea didn’t make me any less Choctaw. Wherever that line is, comes more from an external perspective. We never stopped being Choctaw or Cherokee. If anything, I think the subject is more how we quantify how those communities were shifting, decade by decade, throughout the entire 20th century. And that’s just for those two tribes—there are other tribes who have different narratives.”

In any case, Gibson said his relationship with Indigeneity owes to what he grew up with and what he has honed on his own over time. “I have never lived among a Native community where everyone around me was Native all the time, seven days a week,” he said. “But I also refuse to let anyone make me feel that my leaving the reservation makes me less Choctaw. It’s just not that simple.”

GIBSON WAS TRAINED AS A PAINTER, but his canvases—vibrant and geometric, with mesmerizingly colored patterns and bits of text he borrows from sources including pop songs, poems, and historical records—have increasingly become just one component of his shows. His work for the US Pavilion in Venice includes 11 paintings, nine sculptures, eight flags, two murals, and one video installation. A key feature of much of his art, including the paintings, is beadwork that glistens and gleams by way of handicraft as fine as that in haute couture.

Gibson’s facility with materials traces back to his university years in Chicago, where he moved in 1992 to study at the Art Institute. The next year, he took a side job at the Field Museum of Natural History as a research assistant working with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which since 1990 has provided for the protection and return of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. His work related to the legislation, which has grown in significance in recent years, involved processing items in the museum’s collection and showing them to tribal delegations that came through.

“Sometimes we had protocols to follow, but we didn’t always even know exactly what an object was, which brought up a lot of questions,” Gibson said. “Even though something may have had a record that said it was voluntarily sold, we would look back and see that it was sold under duress, or that the person who sold it was not necessarily in a position to do so. There were many things that were ‘collected’—or stolen—and there were things that should not be shared about what an object was or what it was used for.”

One such object was a prayer bundle, a parcel filled with spiritually significant contents that had been secreted away and wrapped in cloth or other material. “The only person who knows how to use what’s inside a prayer bundle is someone who’s been raised within ceremony to understand what it is and what to do with it,” Gibson said. “Many prayer bundles had been disassembled, and this was horrific to people who think they are never meant to be seen.” Another example was a stick that had seemed to some museum staffers to be part of a game but turned out to be imbued with other qualities. “Somebody came in and said, ‘No, you must cover that up immediately!’ It literally went from being one thing to another.”

Gibson’s work at the museum taught him about what he did and did not know, and he was energized by both. “NAGPRA is an amazing and hard-won law,” he said, “but what it really taught me was the problems of intercultural translation, language, perception, even entire worldviews. We could look at any object and there are going to be differences in how we view it. That became really interesting to me.”

It also opened his eyes to materials other than paint, and roles for art that ventured beyond simple states of objecthood. He learned to sew in Chicago from a fellow Native American friend who vowed to make her own clothes, and he made a doll that wound up scrambling his value system. “It was a ragdoll figure of a blonde woman wearing a buckskin dress. The fabric I used for her body was a Southwest print,” he said, adding that inspiration had been provided by white-presenting women he’d seen at powwows wearing clothes that had clearly been bought for the occasion.

A professor at the Art Institute liked the doll and “wanted to introduce me to people who could write about it or show it, but I just shut down so quickly,” Gibson said. “For me, at the time, it felt like much less of a responsibility to make an abstract painting about paint and put it out into the world. To make something that was actually a statement with a kind of critical perspective—I wasn’t ready for that.”

He was acquainting himself with different ways to work within and around tradition, however, and ways to question what exactly constitutes tradition in Indigenous cultures that are ever-changing. “I’ve always worked intuitively with different materials, based on my experience of working with historic collections and realizing all the innovations that stepped away from what I had been taught about ‘traditional’ materials,” he said. “Even things we think of as traditional, like beads, replaced other traditions. We are innovators—this is what we do. We look around and try to think about how we can make materials into something that serves our culture or serves our community. I started to see that way of thinking as a tradition in and of itself.”

“JEFFREY SHOWS THAT ONE of the most important things about contemporary Indigenous culture is that it has a specific cultural and material inheritance, but its cultural inheritance is expressed through its materials,” said Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), a curator who first showed Gibson’s work in a show about Indigenous futurism in 2011 and, two years later, in “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada that has been credited with reshaping studies of contemporary Indigenous art. For the latter show, Gibson made two paintings on elk hide that had been treated via a process that has been largely lost to history: brain tanning.

“A lot of commercial hide production is just that—very commercialized,” Gibson said. “The animals aren’t treated with a great life. They’re not killed in a humane way. In the belief system, there are histories that are inherent to hides, and I knew I wanted a hide with a different narrative.”

After some searching, he found a hunter in Montana who still practices the craft, which involves massaging the fatty matter of an animal’s brain into a hide to soften and preserve it. The hunter had killed an elk of the kind that Gibson wanted, but winter set in before he was able to tan it, so he buried the skin in the ground to freeze for the season with a plan to exhume it in the spring. As time ticked on, though, Gibson started to get anxious. “I had a deadline coming up and I was like, ‘I really need this hide!’ I felt like such a consumer,” he remembered. “Consumer thinking trains us that we can have things when we want them. But it was all part of the narrative, and I had to give in to it.”

When he finally received the brain-tanned hides, he painted them with boldly colored diagonals that suggest a sort of abstract topography and titled them This Place I Know and Someone Great Is Gone (both 2013). “That taught me a lot about the material roots of Jeffrey’s practice and the honesty to materials that he brings forward,” Hopkins said. “Everything has a story to tell.” For his part, Gibson remembered discovering a sort of poetry in the process. “The idea behind brain tanning,” he said, “is to take the memory of the animal and put it back into the skin.”

For a 2019 residency at the New Museum in New York, Gibson learned a battery of new skills, and made his education part of the premise of an exhibition that evolved as his knowledge grew. “He talked about this thing that happens when he’s asked to do a project that is supposed to represent Indigeneity, even though it’s super-differentiated, as a generalist idea,” said Johanna Burton, who curated “The Anthropophagic Effect” as part of the New Museum’s department of education and public engagement (she is now director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). “He was excited about the fact that he had to learn some of the skills he wanted to use the same way that anybody else would.”

With the idea of an Indigenous atelier in mind, Gibson brought artist Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe) from Michigan to New York to teach him and his studio staff crafts that had been practiced by Indigenous people long before the arrival of European settlers. One such craft, birchbark biting (what the Northwestern Ontario Ojibwe call mazinashkwemaganjigan), involves making patterns in tree coverings by biting into them and exposing layers and fissures within. “It’s all in the way you fold the bark and then bite it, and birchbark pieces would become patterns for embroidery and, eventually, beadwork,” Gibson said. “That came at a time when I was thinking about how Native people think about abstraction differently. It’s in many ways abstract, but it’s also so specific to the person who did the biting.”

Other newly acquired skills included porcupine quillwork and river cane basket weaving, which were useful in creating garments that voguing dancers wore in performances that activated the artworks. Gibson also made helmets with the basket weaving process, transforming it to his own ends. “It’s not Choctaw tradition to make helmets, but it is Choctaw tradition to make river cane baskets,” he said. “My goal was never to recreate what was made previously. I didn’t want to learn how to make baskets—I wanted to learn the technology of making a basket, so that I could then make sculpture.”

GIBSON’S RESOURCEFUL, RESILIENT WORK for the US Pavilion in Venice draws on his many modes of art-making that commune with traditions while also revising and redefining them in his own terms. Color is in high supply, as are allusions to struggle and perseverance. “He has been addressing the same kind of problems in different ways while looking at, respecting, and honoring the Native experience,” said Ash-Milby, the curator who has worked with Gibson from the start of his career. “Part of that is acknowledging that there have been challenges and pain. That’s part of what we carry and who we are today.”

When the idea arose to submit a proposal for the Venice Biennale, Gibson turned to a trio of supporters for help: Ash-Milby, currently the curator of Native American art at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Louis Grachos, who presented a wide-ranging survey titled “The Body Electric” at SITE Sante Fe in 2022; and Abigail Winograd, an independent curator who worked with Gibson on a 2021 exhibition related to the MacArthur Fellowship Program (Gibson won a prestigious “genius grant” in 2019).

For the show with Winograd, titled “Sweet Bitter Love,” Gibson made paintings in response to stereotypical late 19th- and early 20th-century portraits of Indigenous people in the collection of Chicago’s Newberry Library, and exhibited accession cards from the Field Museum, where he had worked while a student. In his paintings, Gibson aimed to open up the historical portraits by riffing and remixing them in a manner that made them personal to him and his place in time. Part of that included attaching vintage objects—beaded barrettes, found pins, decorated belts—that he collects in part as a tribute to unnamed artists who contribute to culture in a multitude of ways.

“We know the names of the sitters in paintings, but with vintage objects, oftentimes we don’t know the names of the people who made them,” Gibson said. “Those objects are also not valued, and we don’t know how they were acquired. The collective Native American experience in the US is shaped by the unnamed and the unknown, by all of these gaps and exclusions and erasures. That’s what I wanted those pieces to speak to.”

Such vintage finds figure in many of his Venice works. A sculptural bust titled Be Some Body (2024) is affixed with a button that bears the message IF WE SETTLE FOR WHAT THEY’RE GIVING US, WE DESERVE WHAT WE GET. A painting in which diamond-shaped patterns seem to recede and pulse out into open space, WE WILL BE KNOWN FOREVER BY THE TRACKS WE LEAVE (2024) flaunts a belt buckle and bolo tie, as well as a bag embellished with lane-stitch beadwork.

Some of the work winds back to familiar forms. The hanging sculpture WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT (2024)—elaborately beaded and adorned with fringe that spills onto the floor in the black, white, yellow, and red colors of the medicine wheel—revisits a series of punching bag pieces that Gibson started working on in 2010, when he found a form that evoked the anger he felt around matters of race, class, and bodily disconnection. An interactive sculpture that shares its title with that of Gibson’s pavilion as a whole—the space in which to place me (2024)—echoes a 2022 project for which he invited Indigenous people to populate empty monument pedestals in front of the Portland Art Museum.

Activation is a key component of Gibson’s practice, in which performance and pedagogy play pivotal roles. In June the Pavilion will host the Venice Indigenous Arts School, a series of public programs focused on key terminology and concepts in Indigenous arts, arranged by the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. “An example would be various terms for weather that take into consideration how weather affects the whole process of making art and putting it out there,” said Mario A. Caro, director of the Institute’s studio arts MFA program, who organized the event. “Weather informs the ways in which traditional materials would be gathered and processed. And by ‘weather,’ we don’t just mean ecology or environmental issues—weather really talks about a relation between the people and the land.” Another part of the program, in October, will explore connections between Indigenous cultures in North America and around the world, in partnership with Bard College, where Gibson teaches.

With a global audience set to engage his work at the Venice Biennale, Gibson said he had charged himself with continuing to position his own past, present, and future in relation to a prism of Indigenous histories and ideas. The task has been daunting, he said. But it is also catalyzing in ways he hopes will carry over. “I don’t identify as a frontline activist,” Gibson said. “But we are all politicized for how we are seen. We are also advocating for our political selves, and those political selves are rooted in our ancestry and our heritages.”

When looking over images of his Venice works in his schoolhouse studio a few months back, Gibson paused at a large bird sculpture with rainbow-colored plumage rendered in a riotous mix of materials including glass beads, rose quartz, and metallic sequins. Its title is if there is no struggle there is no progress (2024), a quotation from a speech by Frederick Douglass, and it is one of two such birds in the Pavilion.

“They’re based in the Tuscarora tradition of beaded whimsies,” Gibson said. “The bird was one of the primary forms they used to try to appeal to Victorian tastes, but they were seen as neither Native enough nor not-Native enough. I encountered them at the Field Museum and felt very much akin to them because they’re somewhere in between all these different kinds of cultural traditions. That’s how the birds work.”  

This article appears under the title “Hide and Seek” in the Summer 2024 “Icons” issue, pp. 56–63.

As told to A.i.A. I was listening to music hunting for words to use in my work and came across this disco song, “Born to Be Alive,” by Patrick Hernandez from 1978. As a mix of different kinds of musics—and a place for LGBTQIA2S+ histories—disco was so divisive at the time. People were burning disco records with the same kind of agenda behind books being banned now. The lyrics to this song are explicitly about not only demanding to be able to be alive but also total self-affirmation that says, “I am supposed to exist.” This was a time when Latino, Black, and white people, primarily, were coming together to make a new sound and a new environment that allowed LGBTQIA2S+ communities to come together. This one-hit wonder that some people might dismiss was actually politically provocative in a way that things from a queer aesthetic—like kitsch or camp—are sometimes criticized or invalidated for having too much color.

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Beaded faces in my work started a while ago. I was thinking about when we look at prehistoric drawings, like petroglyphs, and how, when we see faces, we try to understand what they were drawing. Some people think they are gods, or spirits. Some think they are aliens. We don’t always entirely know what the images are. I was thinking about that and wondered, What does this offer me?

When I started making garments of my own, I was looking at ceremonial garments, and oftentimes there would be paintings of faces or different kinds of iconography on them. I started wondering, How do I create my own personal iconography, or my own personal symbolism? That’s when I realized it would be my own work. Us not knowing specifically what these faces were gave me license to invent a face that I didn’t really know.

By the time I came to Born to Be Alive, I got over thinking I had to work with any one particular kind of bead. The blue bead in the pupils of the eyes is a Czech bead. Those are freshwater pearls around the outside of the eyes. The teeth are all amethyst, and the nose is an arrowhead. And then the frame is made with crow beads from India. Everything else is glass beads: seed beads and pony beads. They all carry their own kind of indulgences.

The language that Native people have worked with has always been anything that is available to us. I can access that now from anywhere. 

Barney was talking about a new series of artworks related to Secondary (2023), a video installation he premiered last summer in dramatic fashion and is revisiting in a new array of exhibitions that opened Thursday night at Gladstone Gallery in New York. The show last year served as a sort of send-off for a storied destination, his massive studio on the East River—just across from the United Nations and all the rest of Manhattan—where Barney staged outlandish happenings and filmed scenes for Secondary and other works. (Barney also used the studio to film sections of River of Fundament , his six-hour 2014 film derived from a Norman Mailer novel about ancient Egypt.)

The inspiration for Secondary is football, the cultural juggernaut known as “America’s game” and a subject familiar to Barney as a sport he once played. But as with all things related to Barney, an artist who makes work in grand cycles, the premise is just one small part of a much more expansive whole.

“It’s usually true that I make a film first and then step back from it a bit and develop work out of the narrative,” he said of a process that he also enlisted for his most renowned work, The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002), and the more recent Redoubt (2019). In the wake of Secondary, an abstract tone poem of a film about a tragic professional football accident from decades ago, he made a new series of works that include surreal reimaginings of sewage pipes, brittlely transfigured weightlifting equipment, and cryptic forms wearing NFL jerseys, as well as drawings and paintings focused on the impact of a fabled play that left Darryl Stingily—a wide-receiver for the New England Patriots—paralyzed after a violent hit by Oakland Raiders safety Jack Tatum in 1978.

The Gladstone exhibition in New York features sculptures, drawings, and a painting, whereas four other shows opening over the next several weeks—at Sadie Coles HQ in London, Regen Projects in Los Angeles, and, in Paris, Galerie Max Hetzler and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain—will include the film along with other new related works. Many of those works involve ceramic, a material that Barney was surprised to find when he dug a hole in the floor of his old studio and reached a pipe buried below the concrete. In Secondary, that organic piece of city infrastructure appears as a sort of living/breathing entity whose rupture allows water from the nearby river to fill the hole as it rises and falls with the tides.

“I didn’t know this, but New York is a ceramic city,” Barney said of clay pipes he was surprised to learn still figure in Gotham’s drainage and sewage system. “We learned more about ceramic sewer pipes than we certainly knew.”

Barney had worked with clay in the past while constructing molds but never as an artistic material, and he was intrigued by its mix of earthiness and ethereality. “I like the liquid state of it, a sort of soft, formless state along the lines of materials I’ve used over the years—things like petroleum jelly that can be cast under certain conditions but won’t hold up to other conditions,” he said. “Ceramic is mysterious in that way. It has its own set of rules.”

Barney was attracted to ceramic’s resonances with certain scenes and themes in Secondary, and used it in works like Supine Axis (2024), a large floor sculpture that takes the form of the original pipe he found—but covered with dumbbells and supports rendered in a mix of other materials including steel, epoxy resin, and high-density polyethylene. A number of other new works are fashioned after the kind of weightlifting power racks used by football players to build strength, with ceramic, metal, and plastic trading places in remixed arrangements.

“This group of pieces is an iterative project,” the artist said. “I’m making the same parts again and again, and each piece has potential for different use and then different ways that the material is failing. That’s true throughout this body of work—ceramic is being used to exhibit stress, in much the same way that, in the casting choices for Secondary, I was interested in working with older performers, to think about the different kinds of positions that athletes put their bodies in. Ceramic, plastic, metal—each material shows stress in different ways. These pieces have a lot to do with vulnerability.”

Another new large floor sculpture is impact BOLUS (2024), an abstract rendering of the moment of football-frenzied impact that inspired Secondary and remains a sort of macabre milestone in American mythology. Anyone of a certain age who grew up with even a little bit of sports fandom in their surroundings knows the story: during a pre-season game, in a play not dissimilar to any number of others that are routine in football to this day, Darryl Stingily jumps to catch a pass and is instead blindsided in a savage tackle by Jack Tatum. The instantly paralyzed receiver slumps to the ground and lies motionless as the players all around him slowly begin to realize the gravity of the situation.

“I saw the replay, over and over again,” Barney said of his experience of the tragedy as a kid in the ’70s. “I wasn’t tuned into that game and didn’t see it happen—it was more the replay of it, which was relentless. It went on and on, both in terms of its currency as an image but also in terms of a drama that played out between two men.”

Recalling the cinematic way the tragedy was presented on TV, he added, “It was also around the same time that the broadcasting of sports was changing, depending more on close-ups that were able to bring the players closer to you as emotional characters. In my teens, I would always watch footage made by this company called NFL Films. It was great, and important in filmmaking history, even beyond sports broadcasting. Sam Peckinpah cited NFL Films as a major influence. There was something about the long lens and the use of slow motion, to gain access to something that was so emotional and so vast.”

The force of the Stingily-Tatum play and the fragility it exposed figure in Barney’s interest in clay, which he and workers at his studio twisted into unorthodox shapes that had to dry over time without breaking. In his studio, different clay forms were airing out, supported by foam blocks and other arrangements. “A really interesting part of this work for me is the way an object like this is made, with probably six people holding it,” he said while looking at twisty extensions of elastic cords and wavy gym towels rendered in hardening clay. “We rehearsed it with a rope, so we knew which loop had to be done first and which had to be done second. It’s quite choreographed in that way. That is also true of the towels—they’re rolled out flat and have to be supported by a bunch of hands. Then we lay it down and perform different moves with it in unison, rehearsing it in real time. With clay, if you if you bend it back and forth more than once, it’ll start to fall apart. It’s really an interesting extension of the choreographic nature of the project.”

By “choreographic nature of the project” he meant the ways in which Secondary is as much a dance piece as a film, with its story told less by way of words and more by way of movement that extrapolated football’s gestures and feats of footwork into an abstract form of modern dance. Describing the hand movements of a referee in a scene meant to mimic the confusion on the field right after the Stingily-Tatum play, he said, “In the film, the back judge does this choreography where she’s trying to signal an incomplete pass but also a personal foul. She can’t decide which one to land on. She’s kind of stuck.”

The moment of impact and its aftereffects also figure in a series of large paintings Barney made, with an eye toward analyzing the whole of the action as a sort of spectral happening. “These I started as a kind of color field study of the field itself, and thinking about the way the field creates a kind of narrative of its own,” he said. “In this one, yellow light on the left passes through what would be a prism, between yellow and orange, and then hits an object—a red object in the center—and then casts a shadow onto the space where the impact happens on the field. These panels are a reiteration, in different colors and different opacities, of the same structure again and again.”

Another form of looping manifests in the ways that Barney’s newest body of work calls back—in some cases very directly—to the earliest work with which he made his name, in 1991. Looking at Raider Nation (2024), an assemblage of hand weights rendered in metal and clay, he compared it to earlier weight sculptures in petroleum jelly and said, “There are a number of dumbbell pieces from 1991 that were the starting points for this project. I’ve been thinking about that era of works and then trying to approach it in a different way, using some of the same characters even. How this body of work functions compared to that work has been on my mind.”

He continued: “The way that violence lived in the work from the ’90s was kind of sublimated into a structure that was very much about interiority. Over time, I did that in different ways, in different projects, with violence—and I carried it forward as a material, in a way. As the world shifted in my perception and became more explicitly violent, I wanted to think about taking it on more directly rather than sublimating it.”

While his early work from the ’90s took historic figures and forms and ground them up into an abstract logic, he said, Secondary is different in that it looks at a specific event—an accident, a moment of trauma in a person’s life—and doesn’t abstract it in the same way. “It allows for that story to be told, and it doesn’t go through that same kind of grinder, where differences are eliminated. I was obsessed in the ’90s with dissolving and getting rid of difference, so that there wasn’t any kind of binary left in relationships that appeared very black and white. I wanted to approach some of the same subject matter with Secondary and allow it to be more in the world—for power relationships and the role that violence plays to be more legible.”

Anyone who has been affected by the protests roiling college campuses in recent weeks—which is to say everyone, given the range of emotions they elicit and their magnitude in terms of reverberation and reach—would be advised to visit David Huffman’s current show at Casey Kaplan gallery in New York. A short walk away from the Fashion Institute of Technology, where a student encampment was broken up by the NYPD just last week, a selection of paintings that the artist calls “social abstractions” affirms the ways that protests from decades ago can resonate today.

Deeply personal but powerful beyond the bounds of his own experience, Huffman’s densely layered paintings draw on aspects of his childhood during the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and ’70s. Growing up in Berkeley, California, he was steeped in the activism of the Black Panthers; his mother, Dolores Davis, marched with the group and designed a slinking panther logo and a “Free Huey [Newton]” flag for them in 1968.

Allusions to those early years abound in paintings that can be read as diaristic. Eucalyptus (2024) includes part of a photograph (cut out and affixed to the canvas) of a very young Huffman and his brother standing alongside Black Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale. Other paintings are marked with stenciled repetitions of words like “mental health,” “homeless,” and “payday loans”—socioeconomic causes relevant both then and now. In its upper right corner, amid swirls and scrapings of paint, Mintaka (2023) features 13 iterations of the black panther logo that the artist’s mother designed.

Other references are just as personal but more open-ended. Many of the works include collaged swaths of African fabric that Huffman has collected over the years, with a mix of amorphous and geometric patterns that he sometimes adorns with additional squiggles and lines from his own hand. An especially dynamic part of Tasmanian Ghetto (2023), with electric orange set against a deep blue, was created by spray-painting a basketball net set against the canvas. A flurry of stenciled sphinx heads in Calypso (2023) signals the ancient Egyptian origins of so much culture. And then there are several Afrofuturist allusions to outer space: cut-outs of planets float within a few of the works, and part of Eucalyptus (the painting with the photo of Bobby Seale) is marked with the letters “ZR,” a reference to the Zeta Reticuli star system that figures in numerous tales of UFOs and alien abduction.

Familiarity with Huffman’s biography and personal inclinations helps bear out the activist allegiances in his work, but the paintings themselves communicate it in no uncertain terms too. All of them roil and teem, created in what seem to have been thrilling bursts of energy and animated by a frenetic spirit that informs a mix of determination and purpose, messiness and garishness. The look of them evokes the mind-expanding legacies of both the psychedelic counterculture and the activist uprisings that marked Huffman’s youth. The paintings’ backstories resonate with the unrest of the present, but their lingering effects make the current political climate feel less fleeting and more like an ever-present condition always in need of attention.

Born under the name Robert Clark to a mother who waited tables at a roadside diner and a father who worked for the energy company Phillips 66, the artist grew up in the American Midwest during the Great Depression and reinvented himself as a searching young man in post-war New York. In the latter half of the 1950s he moved to Coenties Slip—the storied Lower Manhattan loft land prospected by a group of artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman—and changed his name in tribute to his home state. It was an act of reinvention, of a sort, and in line with the kind of shapeshifting that Indiana made part of his legacy before his death in 2018, at the age of 89.

That shapeshifting serves as a throughline in “The Sweet Mystery,” which was curated by Matthew Lyons (a longtime curator at the Kitchen in New York) and focuses on Indiana’s spiritual proclivities and poetic soul. The “LOVE” works for which he is best known—paintings and sculptures as ubiquitous as any artwork ever produced—figure in the show, but less as totems and more through their valence as a kind of collective one-word “concrete poem.” That’s a term that Indiana himself used to describe them and that Lyons evokes by emphasizing the artist’s interest and identification with the writerly likes of Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane. A quotation from Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge” (about the Brooklyn Bridge, which Indiana could see through his window in Coenties Slip) is displayed in the exhibition’s first room and, in reference to the iconic structure’s literary magnetism, a bit of wall text reads: “From the shared sense of spiritual possibility and significance about this site with its potent metaphors for the new age of American industry and infrastructure, Indiana wove these intersections into his own concatenation of artistic influence that remained with him throughout his career.”

The next room includes a standing sculpture titled Ahab (made with wood in 1962, and cast in bronze in 1991) and three canvases conjoined under the title The Melville Triptych (1962), both in reference to another writer who loomed large in Lower Manhattan lore. The paintings’ use of stenciled text—all of it sourced from phrases in Moby-Dick, such as “there is your insular city”—signals a sense of interconnectedness that was more prevalent in Indiana’s decades’ worth of work than cursory knowledge of his “LOVE” series might suggest. Indiana was a Pop artist, in a sense, but in a dark and multifaceted mode of Pop that accounted for his interests in different kinds of coding as well as esoteric pursuits like numerology. (For an example of his darkness, see a pair of canvases from 1962, one bearing the word “EAT” and the other “DIE”; as for numerology, see a quote from the artist himself printed on a wall in the exhibition: “Numbers fill my life. They fill my life even more than love.”)

A roomful of related works that resonate especially in Venice focuses on sculptures that Indiana made from wooden columns that once served as ship masts and then, after a fire laid waste to part of Lower Manhattan, were enlisted as structural supports in buildings in Coenties Slip. With stenciled text and segments given to gold paint, the works conceived in 1964 conjure romantic notions of nautical life as well as harsh realities of the land. Neither is harsher or more romantic than the other, but the way that they play both with and against type speaks to the ways that Indiana’s art can be apprehended and appreciated from different perspectives. The perspective favored by “The Sweet Mystery” offers an invitation to secret readings ready to be shared with anyone who might be interested in delving deeper, and for that it counts as a worthwhile addition to a current Venice Biennale–related circuit that has made a virtue of reevaluation across the board.

Thirteen works inspired by midcentury American fashion designer Claire McCardell channel the colorful figurative style for which Katz is best-known, but nine paintings of rippling ocean surfaces and four of grass are landscapes of a sort that is far less familiar.

Before the opening of his show—which was curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of Art History of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and runs through September 29—ARTnews spoke with Katz about his latest developments.

What made you want to come here to Venice? Of all the places you’ve been…

I came to Venice for five minutes because I want to see the show. There are all kinds of problematics. The paintings are new to the audience, and I don’t know whether I’m ahead of the audience or not. I don’t know whether they’ll look good either. I have one room with paintings of water. That looks great, and I didn’t worry about that. The next room is grass. I wouldn’t mind it being dramatized with just one 10-by-20-foot painting. But [curator Luca Massimo Barbero] hung it with four paintings. There are three 10-by-20s and one 10-by-10. There is a terracotta floor I had a lot of anxiety about. The Claire McCardell paintings I knew would look good. I wouldn’t have come over if it was just those.

What concerned you about the terracotta floor?

The color. The color fought a little bit with a big yellow painting. They lit it low because of the floor. I wanted it to be more like sunlight, so I said, “Put a little more light on it.” I haven’t seen it yet. But, basically, I’m very pleased with the show. And the couple of people who have seen it seem to get it. So I think it’ll be successful for me.

The biggest paintings are among the biggest you’ve ever made. What made you want to work at that scale?

The idea of the landscape paintings was to make paintings that wrap around you like you are in the landscape, rather than looking at a landscape from a distance through holes in the wall. I felt I had to have that much size to get the effect I wanted. And they really worked out.

Are there landscape painters that achieve the effect you had in mind?

Bonnard did one that’s in the Phillips Collection. It really opens up. The idea was that landscape was going away from Picasso and Matisse, into an area where they didn’t work. They both worked with solid forms in the middle of the canvas—it’s sculptural. Mine are not like sculpture. They relate a little bit to Monet.

Your water paintings were based on photographs you took in Coney Island.

Yeah, I went to Coney Island in the winter and took pictures for the water paintings. Water has weight, motion, and transparency. When you try to paint all of those, you’re in open area. Winslow Homer painted water, but it was all surface—it never got to those qualities.

Does the water in Venice look different than the water in Coney Island to you?

I’m working with a very generalized effect. But the water here in the Mediterranean is different than New York. They have a blue here that isn’t anywhere else. But I’m not involved with that at all—mine are all black and white.

In an interview in the catalog for your show you called Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Moonlight Marine (1870–1890) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as “one of the best that America every produced.” What do you like about it?

I think Albert Pinkham Ryder is one of the best American painters ever, very high-class. The way he consolidates form reminds me of Giotto. Of the American painters, I think Pollock and Ryder are two who were really extraordinary. Moonlight Marine has the mood of Romanticism and a generalization of form. It has motion and romance, which I’m not interested in, particularly, but they’re there. The forms are so concrete, without being stiff.

You said you already knew the Claire McCardell paintings would look good here…

Claire McCardell was an extraordinary person who trained herself as a high-end designer of clothes. When the war came, French designers couldn’t get clothes [to America] and she stepped into the vacuum. She had the brilliant idea of doing high fashion for everybody. She made clothing that a woman could wear at a welding job and then come home to cook pancakes, in the same outfit. She was rolling around in my subconscious all these years, and then somehow the time was right and it occurred to me to try [to make paintings related to her].

Those works are quite different than the grass and water paintings. What connects them for you?

I don’t paint in a style. I don’t make parameters, so I can move anywhere I want. In modern art there are rules about what you can and can’t do. That seems very restrictive to me. Anything’s open, and you can just follow it. You might be looking at the Egyptian sculpture one day as an influence and a comic book or TV ads the next day.

What are you painting now? Are you working on anything new?

I had this idea, after the landscapes, that I wanted to paint an afterimage. It started with Matisse’s Red Studio (1911), which is an afterimage—it’s like when you’re in the summer and it’s green outside, and you walk through the door and get a flash of red. It’s a visual phenomenon that is not often repeated, but most people should have had it once in their life. I had the idea that I wanted to paint it more concrete than Matisse, so I did this big painting and it was a success. It looks like a hokey 1914 semi-abstract thing. American, a little stiff—but the effect was successful. I wanted to do a series so I made four or five medium-size ones and then I did a 9-by-12. They were very successful, so that’s it. And right now I’m lost. I don’t know what I’m going to do next.

That seems like a good place to be.

I don’t know, I haven’t been there. I’ve always had something else come up.

Herding cats is notoriously difficult, but how about making them harmonize? That is a hypothetical taken up long ago in a curious 17th-century musical text—and again more recently by the British sound artist Oliver Beer. His latest gallery show in New York, “Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra” at Almine Rech, involves a probably apocryphal contraption (one hopes!) called the Cat Piano devised by Athanasius Kircher. In Musurgia Universalis, a book published in 1650, Kircher described the instrument as a collection of cats in cages that would shriek, in different voices, each time one of its tails was struck by a spike triggered by fingers playing a keyboard.

Beer brought Kircher’s vision to life—albeit in a much gentler version. The centerpiece of his show is an arrangement of 37 cat-shaped vessels and figurines, including a feline absinthe pitcher from early 20th-century France, a 19th-century ceramic cat “pillow” used as a headrest by opium smokers in China, and a recent replica of a fierce guardian lion from Thailand. All of the found objects are connected to microphones situated to pick up different frequencies that resonate inside of each hollow form. A custom keyboard sits in front of the orchestra, as it were, and conducts it in an automated fashion, with sliders moving up and down to show which cats’ voices are “singing” at any given moment. (Gallery-goers can sit at the keyboard and play it by hand too, but during all my visits everyone kept a curious distance.)

The mood of the music the orchestra plays is transporting, ambient in a manner similar to latter-day Brian Eno compositions for his 77 Million Paintings installation project started in 2006. And the variety of the vessels and figurines enlisted—ranging from campy tchotchkes to elegant historical finery—helps direct attention away from the technological makeup of the work to its more playful, experiential effects. This is not severe, austere sound art by any stretch.

The show also includes Reanimation (Everybody Wants to Be a Cat), a 2024 film made with school kids’ drawings of a scene in the movie The Aristocats (1970), and a pair of “Recomposition” wall works (both 2024) that feature broken bits of cat sculptures and other objects (feathers, guitar strings, parts of an old clock) preserved in resin. But most notable visually is a series of nine “Resonance Paintings” (2024) that Beer made by casting powdered pigment on canvases laid over amplifiers playing sounds from the cats in the orchestra. The results are all abstract modulations of blue on white, and knowing that they were made in part by sound gives them a sort of synesthetic presence. They’re silent, of course, but also audible in their way.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022 and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2023. His current exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, touted as his first major institutional solo show, features 11 works dating back to 1999 and is accompanied by companion show sharing the same title—“A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak”—at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, Norway. (The New York exhibition is on view through April 14; the Norwegian show continues through September 1.)

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Below, Chacon talks about four works that counted as highlights during a walkthrough of his Swiss Institute show.

American Ledger No. 1 (Army Blanket), 2020

This is part of a series of scores that take on the form of a flag. You read it like a score—from left to right, top to bottom—and inside of it is a chronology of what I call the creation story of the land that the United States is on. At the top is a blank area: there weren’t even humans yet. As you go on, you come to a landscape, with stars and mountains—part of a world view that’s emerging as people live on the land for the first time. Anytime you see a cross in one of my scores, it’s a kind of notation for percussion.

Then you move down a line and this wavy tone gets played, as a continuation of this world view that’s maybe oscillating and changing. These waves can be interpreted as sounds going up and down. Every time you see an X, it’s a chopping of wood, like with an axe. Then it moves to building ships and coming over the ocean to the Americas, and to building a new colonies. And on the next line, you have a police whistle that gets blown and starts a rhythm—with three notes and two rests—that is the Three-Fifths Compromise, which [in 1787] introduced slavery to the economy.

Then there’s a point in the score when coins are thrown, with cities being built in the Industrial Revolution. That gets interpreted through a line that is not necessarily for pitch; it could be a change in tone, a change of volume, a change of tempo. Then you have an acceleration, a kind of crashing that is also becoming unified. I like to call it a corralling of the sound, where you have all this activity that becomes motor-rhythmic.

Then it stops with the lighting of a match and a symbol, a “D.C. al coda” with crosshairs. In musical terms that means go back and play the whole thing again, but it is also a reference to Washington, D.C. Then you come to the end and see a star again, a Christian cross, one more chopping of wood—and whatever happens next, in which every sound that has existed in the composition gets played together all at once.

Report (2001/2015)

This is an infamous piece I wrote 23 years ago when I was thinking through some compositional frustrations. I was wanting to find an instrument I couldn’t control, [for which] I didn’t have the agency to control the volume, the pitch, the timbre, or any of the musical parameters I had been working with. I was trying to think: what can I use that would be just the most blunt, limiting instrument? I thought about drums, but you can play those very quietly, and you can change the pitch.

Around that time I was doing a lot of hunting and practicing shooting with friends out in the desert, and I thought, I can just write it for guns. I didn’t think of it as some kind of pro-gun or anti-gun statement. But because the people I could find who could read music and shoot guns to perform it were a bunch of drummers and percussionist guys, it looked like I was trying to form a militia. So it kind of just sat around as a conceptual piece.

About 10 years later I started finding different people who wanted to do it. I found more women who had guns in New Mexico, and I started to wonder what it would mean if we made a video of it being performed. The video was filmed in 2015 with women, people of color, some Indigenous folks. A lot of my work is about histories of places and certain landscapes, and this piece raises lots of questions: Where is this place? What are they shooting at? Are they training for something? That music could raise those kinds of questions was interesting to me.

Field Recordings (1999)

This is the first piece I ever made. The idea was to go to different places I’m very familiar with, two of them on Navajo Nation land, to find locations that would be very quiet. I took a recorder and put it there for an hour on a very quiet day: no cars, no people, no airplanes. I ended up with three very quiet recordings of these places and went back to the studio and turned them all the way up to the maximum, as a way to magnify and amplify them. I didn’t treat the sounds at all.

I didn’t know what sound art was when I made this. I was like, What do I do with this—put it out on CD? It wasn’t until later that I realized it was the kind of thing that could be exhibited. Then I started making these postcards that are also flexi-discs you can play on a turntable. The idea was to make something like tourist mementos. I have a few pieces like this that critique people’s thinking of ”deep listening,” or going to places in the Southwest and meditating and having profound experiences in silence—the tourist nature of going to places like Monument Valley or places in the Navajo Nation and sending postcards to friends.

For Four (Caldera), 2024

This piece can be performed in any valley that was created by some kind of disruption. This valley is a volcanic crater, from an eruption millions of years ago. Over one of the hills is Los Alamos National Laboratory, where they developed the atomic bomb. Within the piece there are four singers who sing the contour of the landscape as a melody. They start in different cardinal directions offset by 90 degrees. As one of the singers pivots, the next one begins, so it becomes a kind of musical round, with all of them singing the same landscape with a delay. After we shot this, I asked the singers and some of them were interpreting things like densities of trees with a little trill or some vibrato. They have the freedom to interpret the landscape as they will. The only thing we set up was to have a starting pitch for the first one, so there would be some kind of locking in, harmonically.

These are mostly classical singers I collaborated with in New Mexico. In fact, one of them is one of the shooters in Report. But another version of this piece in Norway has a much different sound. That one has joikers, who practice a tradition of Sámi singing that already is influenced by the landscape, whether literally by the contours of the horizon or something more about stories within a place. There are songs about mountains or rivers that joiks come from. Putting four joikers together is a kind contradiction, because they’re so personal, but it creates very dynamic contours as well. Putting them somewhere with a prompt to sing the landscape in addition to joiks that already exist was quite different than the original idea. It was nice for me to learn about joiking. It’s very, very old tradition.