Material Intimacies

INTIMACIES

MATERIAL INTIMACIES

Support for NXTHVN’s Curatorial Fellowships is provided in part by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Three Studio Fellowships each year are supported by the TOY family in memory of Yves (1988–2011). NXTHVN is supported by significant funding from the RISC Foundation, Inc., Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, and the State of Connecticut. NXTHVN’s programs are made possible by generous support from Burger Collection, the City of New Haven, the Ford Foundation, Gagosian, the J.P. Fletcher Foundation, Stonesthrow Fund, and the generosity of NXTHVN’s Board of Directors.

4

A Note from the Founders Jason Price and Titus Kaphar

6

A Note from the Program Director Terence Washington

8

Introduction Kalia Brooks Nelson

12

Hushed Spectacle: Fasting from the Colonized Body in Pain Michelle Phương Ting

20

Returning to Land Claire Kim

28

Exhibition Checklist

32

Acknowledgments

34

Biographies

A Note from the Founders

Material Intimacies is the culmination of what it means to do “the work.” For someone simply walking through the gallery, it could be difficult to understand the amount of effort and commitment it takes to build a successful public exhibition. Our curators were responsible for every aspect of the exhibition’s management, from conceptual framework and catalogue production to budgeting, loan agreements, and public engagement. These tasks are difficult in ideal conditions, and our Curatorial Fellows set themselves apart in their ability to adapt to the demands and disruptions of a global pandemic. Our curators stepped up to the challenge and told an amazing story.

Each artist selected to participate is outstanding in their own right, but it takes strong curatorial vision and leadership to arrange these works in a way that teaches us something more about ourselves and each other. We remember the NXTHVN building before it became a temporary home for some of the country’s best and most exciting artists and curators. We walked door to door, asking our neighbors how they felt about having a place like NXTHVN so close by.

4

MATERIAL

One of the core tenets of the NXTHVN Fellowship is that a successful arts residency does not retreat from the world but directly engages with it. Every year, our Curatorial Fellows are tasked with the production of a world-class exhibition in the NXTHVN Gallery. The only criterion we insist on is that the curatorial approach speaks to our local community.

We could not be prouder of what Michelle Phương Ting and Claire Kim have achieved with Material Intimacies, an ambitious exhibition that is the direct result of their vision and commitment to their craft.

Everyone was interested in the idea as a concept, but their true enthusiasm for the work shines through when they visit the NXTHVN Gallery.

Material Intimacies is no exception. Since it opened October 2020, this exhibition has garnered attention from notable press outlets and institutions, and—perhaps more importantly—it has been enthusiastically received by the Dixwell community. We take personal pride in the curators’ achievements and look forward to following the careers of these two women, who will undoubtedly continue to distinguish themselves and bring distinction to their profession.

Jason Price Founder and Chairman of the Board Titus Kaphar Founder and President

INTIMACIES

5

A Note from the Program Director

Material Intimacies coalesces around a central idea: an exploration of the ways that colonialism has both foreclosed and allowed various forms of intimacy. Of course, the pandemic has forced us to recalibrate our interactions and has emphasized the potential for harm in every encounter. But while one would think that the absence of touch and proximity from the experience of sociality would doom an exhibition about intimacy, this loss actually compounded the impact of the exhibition. Precluded from convening groups for inperson public programs and inviting more than seven visitors into the gallery at a time, NXTHVN saw Material Intimacies become a space for private and precious encounters during open walk-in hours. Such instances included Michelle and Claire (and even some Studio Fellows) taking close friends and collaborators through the exhibition for tours and deep discussion. Sometimes, I was bounding ridiculously after a group to tag along with them or inviting in passersby who had looked through the gallery’s window just long enough

6

MATERIAL

We’re thrilled to have offered an opportunity for the 2020 Curatorial Fellows, Michelle Phương Ting and Claire Kim, to mount Material Intimacies, a show that enriches everyone who experiences it in the NXTHVN Gallery. Working with Curatorial Advisor Kalia Brooks Nelson, Michelle and Claire have brought together artworks that speak powerfully and tenderly to our current condition. They had been working on the exhibition for months when I arrived at NXTHVN in June 2020—amid extended nationwide protests against white supremacy, labor exploitation, and state violence, all happening during a pandemic. Even before the exhibition opened, its focus on the relation between violence and intimacy felt particularly prescient.

to give away their curiosity. A local artist stopped in several times when the gallery was otherwise empty, alternately watching the entirety of Zina Saro-Wiwa’s short film “How Do Africans Kiss?” and reading Natalie Diaz’s poetry collection Postcolonial Love Poem in the chairs next to the window. The pandemic even inflected visitors’ understanding of the things they were allowed to touch in the exhibition, turning gloves— which would normally be worn to protect Hương Ngô’s books from damage—into protection, for those who wore them, from the potential danger of gentle contact through surfaces.

In a more crowded time, these moments and meanings might have been lost to invisibility—or impossibility. The new understandings enabled by the conditions of the pandemic testify to the exhibition’s premise that, despite oppressive conditions, aspects of being human, such as curiosity and desire for community, find a way.

The NXTHVN Gallery has always been imagined as a place where Fellows and our neighbors would have the opportunity to experience art and life together. In realizing Material Intimacies, Michelle and Claire have materialized for our visitors some of the very intimacies the exhibition hopes to explore. Of this, and of much else they have achieved here at NXTHVN, they should be proud. I am privileged to have worked with them and grateful for the gift of an exhibition that has revealed us and our various histories to ourselves.

INTIMACIES

Terence Washington Program Director

7

Introduction

Michelle Phương Ting and Claire Kim, the curators of Material Intimacies, provide an alternative to the outcome of loss by presenting the work of eight artists, who exemplify how a renewed sense of closeness can be generated through distance. Each artist—Wesley Chavis, Natalie Diaz, Candice Lin, Stephanie A. Lindquist, Yvette Mayorga, Hương Ngô, Natani Notah, and Zina Saro-Wiwa—activates a visceral proximity between the work and viewer, foregrounding the bigness of complex histories and unjust systems to contrast with the privacy of individual or interpersonal relationships to family, community, nationality, indigeneity, and the land.

The exhibition includes books, installations, paintings, photography, prints, and videos, with each medium and every material becoming a surrogate for the expression, interiority, and tactility of an intimate encounter. In bringing the artists together in this way, Kim and Ting have performed an act of subversion. As a combined force, they attest to the possibility that society’s prescriptive methods of engendering human connections—namely, its insistence that people seek unity

8

MATERIAL

This exhibition is particularly well timed. In a moment when every aspect of our lives has been reorganized to withstand the global pandemic, distance, as a state of being, has become essential. So, what are the new realities of this new existence?

Unanticipated solitude and unremitting aloneness precipitate a range of other conditions, from productivity to despair and violence, penetrating the fabric of our social, cultural, economic, and political order in ways too vast to address here.

Instead, to understand the meanings of distance presented in this exhibition is to reflect on highly personal experiences and, more importantly, on our perception of what the circumstances of separation have cost each of us.

and togetherness—can be countered by individuals who embody radical affection regardless of physical distance.

INTIMACIES

In each essay that follows, the curator focuses on a specific set of artists and interprets their work relative to the premise of the exhibition. Michelle Phương Ting’s contribution discusses the refusal to exhaust, take, and otherwise use up materials as a means of envisaging new forms of connectivity.

She writes about consumption, rooted in gluttonous European colonialism, as something to be rejected through a kind of “fasting,” which opens up both the artist and viewer’s potential to access rarely tapped emotional, spiritual, and physical depths. Ting first addresses Hương Ngô’s serigraphs and books that reproduce depictions of Indochinese women during the French colonial period. Rather than printing these images and texts in their original exoticized style, Ngô blackens the women’s likenesses to deny access to their bodies and restore humanity to the objectified female body.

Ting then turns to an installation by Wesley Chavis, consisting of a canvas that hangs between two small photographs of the artist. Chavis’s long process of treating the canvas marks a transformation—from experiencing one’s own corporeality to a spiritual euphoria—the latter representing an essential yet overshadowed aspect of Black life. This consideration of “rebirth” leads Ting to interpret Natani Notah’s sculptures as gestures toward a reconstitution of Indigenous sovereignty.

Notah stitches and conjoins fabric, clothing, leather, beads, and seeds to challenge the authority we give to images of cultural identity and mend the bond between self and community. Lastly, Ting’s analysis shifts to the video series of Zina Saro-Wiwa, in which conventional forms of Black spectacle are repeatedly negated. Saro-Wiwa entices viewers with images of Black subjects kissing, breathing, and crying, inviting the audience to commune with those engaged in

9

moments of vulnerability that are often denied to Black people or not represented in the media.

10

MATERIAL

Claire Kim offers a perspective on human intimacies derived from connections to the land. For Kim, the forced isolation of the pandemic, coupled with the artists’ contributions to the exhibition, have offered new insights toward restoring humanity’s care and respect for earth-based materials and resources. Her analysis is grounded in the awareness that colonization has displaced not just native associations with homeland but also horticultural practices that sustained medicine and nutrition. Kim begins with a discussion of Yvette Mayorga’s paintings and installation that critique the U.S. immigration policy with Mexico—in particular, the geopolitical complexity involved in imposing national borders across lands where people have already existed for many generations. Mayorga shows how the enforcement of these arbitrary delineations have impacted the lives of children and families. Kim links this examination of border-crossing to Candace Lin’s analogous assessment of Chinese-European commerce, focused on the commodity of porcelain and its value both as a material and a symbol for white racial superiority. This maneuver to turn the earthly material of clay into a metaphor is at the core of Lin’s criticism and also the basis of her solution to return to the earth for remedying colonial ethnocentrism. In keeping with the healing power of botanicals evoked by the sculptures of Lin, Stephanie A. Lindquist’s prints of plants and mixedmedia installation—and her use of natural materials to which she has personally tended—highlight the Indigenous practice of cultivating native foodways to create linkages to ancient ancestry. Lastly, elucidating another artistic strategy to connect the body to the land, Kim explains Natalie Diaz’s filmic portrayal of a woman rejoicing in the

Colorado River, which serves as a bold assertion of feminine power restoring vitality to the landscape.

As advisor to Ting and Kim, I recognize the accomplishment of their efforts to understand conceptual aspects of the selected artworks that establish bonds among Wesley Chavis, Natalie Diaz, Candice Lin, Stephanie A. Lindquist, Yvette Mayorga, Hương Ngô, Natani Notah, and Zina Saro-Wiwa.

Following the lead of these artists—whose work was viewed, studied, discussed, and debated throughout the exhibition’s development—the curators refined their joint belief in the force of materials to enact intimacy in ways that counteract the desires forged by colonialism and its legacies. The works presented in this exhibition ask viewers to attend closely to the affinities between ourselves and others, but through actions that do not always require physical contact. With the current health crisis inducing solitude for many people, there is no more appropriate time to linger with these ideas, to review thoughtfully how we strengthen and take care of our most valuable relationships.

Kalia Brooks Nelson, PhD Curatorial Advisor

INTIMACIES

11

Michelle Phương Ting

Hushed Spectacle: Fasting from the Colonized Body in Pain

Colonial consumption is ravenous, extracting endlessly from the land and enlisting ever more bodies to satisfy an insatiable appetite. The white mouth loves “eating the other,” as bell hooks says.1 Material Intimacies gathers artists who recoup materials earmarked for commodification—colonial postcards, sunflower seeds, and vulnerable bodies—to stage slow, sustained consumption. Through restraint, refusal, erasure, and quiet, Wesley Chavis, Hương Ngô, Natani Notah, and Zina Saro-Wiwa evince conditions for intimacy beyond the dehumanizing contact wrought by colonization. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney insist, “Though forced to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed . . . though refused sentiment, history and home, we feel (for) each other.”2 By starving viewers of easily digested forms, these artists propose modes of viewing that retain dignity and restore feeling, sensitizing us to sacred interiorities and ancient desires for touch that communes. / In the realm of shadows, an Indochinese woman stands with hands behind her head, breasts exposed—to be shot, it seems, by the cameraman, whose flashbulb throws into stark relief every crevice of her nudity. Suppose she refuses.

Suppose darkness subsumes her torso, pronouncing her gaze—suspicious, resentful. Such possibilities loom large in her reprinted form, one of four black-on-black serigraphs in Hương Ngô’s series Reap the Whirlwind (2018; fig. 1). Ngô renders portraits of Indochinese women nearly illegible, denying the West’s biting fluorescence, which presumes to know all, see all, and claim all. Originally printed on colonial postcards and disseminated across French Indochina in the twentieth century, the portraits were tokens of submission,

13

1. bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 21–39.

2.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK; New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 98.

4.

Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 127.

Most legible when viewed sidelong, Ngô’s prints assert an imposing presence, pushing viewers to maneuver wide angles in order to see. Proximity permits no access, no plunging into the depths. In the largest portrait, a woman stares headon, deadpan. Is it our shame or an awning of shadows that shields her? Come too close, and a pesky sheen flares up from the high-gloss ink. Her eyes glare, her mouth pixelates, her bosom dissolves. Impenetrable now, the women misbehave, conjuring the “partial presence” Homi Bhabha says exposes the ambivalence of the colonial gaze as much as it unsettles this authority.4 If French rule fed off portrayals of Indochinese women as submissive and readily available, Ngô’s darkness frustrates desire, fending off gawkers who seek entrance, even perceptually, into their bodies and worlds.

Darkness restores privacy, an unknowable realm not entirely pillaged of its secrets. Printed with thermochromic ink, Ngô’s accompanying artist’s books reveal, upon touch, excerpts of colonial-era novels about Indochinese concubines (fig. 2).

The page mimics a surface of skin, briefly retaining ghostly imprints before darkness roils, caresses, and enshrouds.

Ngô’s shifty, inscrutable works enable the women to slip from their static, objectified positions to become haunts and elders, apparitions and all-seers, suspended in the abyss of page or print, who rise from history’s depths to tell of what they have seen, wanted, and refused. Ngô subverts

14

MATERIAL

3. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Reading Images, ed.

Julia Thomas (London: Red Globe Press, 2001), 116.

fondled in pockets, sent as one sends postcards to boast of foreign escapades. By converting exploitative images into obscured, resistant forms, Ngô manifests what bell hooks calls “an oppositional gaze” that releases rebellious longings and situates exotified women as agents who desire—to remain hidden, to determine the terms of visibility.3

associations between darkness and illegibility, dark skin and vacuity, so that negative space—dark space—speaks. /

Wesley Chavis’s Remnants of a Mythical Man (2016; fig. 3) calls for close reading. The canvas immerses viewers in an expanse of muted grays, bleach marks, creases, and tiny wrinkles, which trace a slow, meditative process of grief. In the aftermath of Michael Brown’s murder in 2016, Chavis drew a charcoal-ash outline of himself on the canvas. He then soaked the cloth in bathwater, letting it ferment, grow mold, and dissolve the mythical Black man conjured in white imaginations. Chavis tended to the cloth as if it were his own skin, massaging and lathering it in baby oil. Hung across a corner, the canvas resembles a sackcloth worn from lament, threads dripping from its hemline.

INTIMACIES

Chavis requires viewers to negotiate this sensuous field, this weathered skin and wild interior marked by rage, anguish, tenderness, and surrender, before accessing intensely private moments of him nude: a Kodak snapshot of him as a newborn, cradled by his grandmother, and a printed film still of him grown, dancing freely, worshipping God. In The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Black Resistance, Kevin Quashie says, “[T]he interior is expansive, voluptuous, creative . . . not subject to one’s control . . . [but] more chaotic . . . more akin to hunger, memory, forgetting, the edges of all the humanness one has.”5 Conscious of the quickness with which Black people are read as threats, Chavis enacts pause, a held note that slows seeing.

The canvas acts as a transitional site of non-disclosure where profound humanness, not criminalization, spans birth and transcendence.

15

5.

Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 21.

7.

Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet, 21.

/

Shown swaddled in a patchwork of leather and denim scraps and curled into the fetal position, Natani Notah’s Inner Child (2019; fig. 4) embodies the interiority of not just a single being but a collective “inner child,” whose earliest wounds ripple throughout Indigenous communities and the organisms, insects, plants, animals, lands, and waters who abide with them in deeply intimate, mutual relationships. With all sides exposed and wisps of faux fur tied into pigtails, Inner Child appears defenseless, seemingly asleep. It elicits quiet, evoking the inner life that Quashie says has an “ineffable integrity” and maintains its sovereignty amidst ongoing settler colonialism.7 Stuffed with plastic corn pellets, the sculpture feels malleable—still soft, still breathing. Its restfulness unnerves the consumptive machinery that hinges on expendable bodies. Though severed and violated

by European contact, the Indigenous interior is protected, fluid, not at all extinct.

16

MATERIAL

By diffusing the “text” of his body on canvas, Chavis enforces a visual fast that deprives us of spectacle and opens up dimensions of Black humanity beyond loud performativity and overt resistance. Evoking scholar Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson’s conception of quietude, Chavis “hushes a spectacle to make room for Black folks’ subtle being.”6 Just as charcoal-ash traces refuse to coalesce, Chavis’s photographed figure—wild and lithe, wet and adored—cannot be pinned down. This openness extends to the liminal space between the hole in the canvas’s upper right and his baby photo, where his oiled skin recalls his wetness first exiting the womb. If fasting sensitizes the body to its deeper hungers, Chavis energizes empty space to stoke longings for kinship, communion, and new life. The canvas materializes the threshold between fetus and child, between fleshly birth and spiritual rebirth. Is it awe or terror that hangs between?

Notah, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, insists that contemporary Indigenous identity and art regenerates from whatever detritus remains. Stitches of fake sinew, alongside intricate Diné beadwork, serve as metaphors for healing and repair, binding together a sundered world. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, calls such creative acts the material basis for “remaking the world” into one hospitable to Indigenous futures.8 Encoded in Notah’s work are processes for sustaining Indigeneity: gather the discarded, suture open wounds, and make for a world being reborn.

INTIMACIES

And if no body remains, Notah’s Sister, Sister (2018; fig. 5) suspends two skirts with rope—one from the ceiling and another draped over a stool—to invoke the ghostly presence of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Metal mixing bowls, filled with sunflower seeds and pinto beans, occupy their midsections, as if stomachs or wombs pillaged as land is pillaged. Within the seated skirt, Notah nests a smaller bowl, scarcely filled. The ropes’ tension pulls at the ascending skirt, so that beans edge over its waistline, aimed to provide for the hollow below—an empty stomach, a barren womb.

The rope clinging to its hemline threatens to slip, mimicking arms in desperation or prayer, as if to say stay. These sisters will not let go. Dismembered from an integrated whole, they resist an annihilating cohesion, suspending assimilation into a nation that obliterates Indigenous lives and that would prefer its ghosts to disappear. /

Zina Saro-Wiwa’s documentary series Eaten by the Heart (2012–13) similarly resists disintegration of Black people into the white body politic. “Damien” (fig. 6) features a

17

8.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 24.

10.

Rizvana Bradley, “Zina Saro-Wiwa: Performing Table Manners in 21st Century Nigeria,” Art Basel, 2018, https:// www.artbasel.com/ news/zina-saro-wiwatable-manners-tiwanicontemporary-artbasel-miami-beach.

Consuming an image of a body means eating the body. In Saro-Wiwa’s “How Do Africans Kiss?” (fig. 7), one interviewee admits, “Have a tongue in my mouth is like meat in my mouth. . . . You want to throw up, but today it’s a pleasure.”

Absorbing the European “tongue,” or language, for intimacy morphs desire itself. If, as scholar Rizvana Bradley contends, the mouth is a “site of introjection,” the orifice through which the self is swallowed by the other, Saro-Wiwa guards Black subjectivities from dissolution by focusing on the Black mouth—a woman’s glossy, plum-colored mouth, which pouts in rejection of the normalization of kissing among Nigerians.10 In the face of white supremacy’s all-consuming hunger, the Black mouth craves, laughs, pleasures, and eats.

Saro-Wiwa’s “Breathing Orchestra” (fig. 8) makes room for Black desires. Portraits of Black folks, all closing their eyes,

18

MATERIAL

9.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 8.

stoic Black man, left eyelid heavy. Over the course of two minutes and fifteen seconds, his eyes redden and blink rapidly before shedding a single tear. The absence of a dramatic arc magnifies the film’s length and the impatience we might feel while nothing, apparently, is happening. Such viewing conditions disrupt the “flow of white desire and entitlement” so that, as scholar Kyla Wazana Tompkins puts it, “the consumable Black body will not go down easily.”9 Saro-Wiwa addresses the inherent asymmetry in consuming footage of Black suffering, typically viewed through cell phone screens, by filling the frame with a Black man’s face. His gaze holds ours so that we endure an act of looking analogous to his arduous expression of pain. The film’s shift from grayscale to a pink tint cues our own shift from mindless spectatorship to empathic witness. Yet he cannot see us; the screen negates intimacy. We sit in tension, prompted to imagine contexts of mutual vulnerability that dignify both seer and seen.

form a collective interiority, while a soundscape of breath sends us inward into a refuge for introspection where fears and longings surface. One says, “I’m not alone, but I am lonely.” Another notes, “What it takes to be a dancer may also be what it takes to be a lover.” The film begins and ends in a sonic collage of breath—deep, meditative, soothing. Breath enables dancers to sense each other and move in rhythm.

Breath grounds us in our bodies while offering release, a lifeline, and song, the “skin talk, tongue touch, and breath speech” that Moten and Harney insist are available to the colonized as languages of intimacy.11 With each inhale and exhale, a cloud of witnesses fill the final grid: Black breathers whose portraits touch, who testify to a life force that joins solitudes and sustains a gentle being. /

INTIMACIES

These works obscure, elude, and withhold, prompting nearness without claim. By establishing slower modes of seeing, the materials deny the voracious want of the consumptive gaze. Mended fabric shelters the interiority of Indigenous life. Darkness hides the inmost being within Indochinese women once subject to intrusion. Weathered canvas displays a vast, ineffable Black humanity. Breath slows us, sending us into the inscrutable dark where desires lie dormant and the eyes of our mouths ache for remnants, sisters, ghosts, and seeds. Here, we are touched. Neither phallic nor extractive, this touch awakens us to the quiet horror of eating objectified bodies as routine. Deprived of spectacle, emptied of lesser longings, we begin to feel—a suturing force, a subtle breathing. A knowing arises, and the unspeakable resounds—both beauty and grief, loss and dignity—and my skin dissolves its partition.

19

11.

Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 98.

Claire Kim

Returning to Land

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I walked the long route to my grocery store, hoping to take a few extra minutes outdoors to offset my newly sedentary lifestyle.

Meandering between the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Bedstuy, I noted my neighbor’s sunflowers that had grown to nearly six feet and a garden that had cropped up in a formerly empty lot. Passing an apartment building, I saw a planter with a sign that read “FREE HERBS AND VEGGIES, TAKE WHAT YOU NEED.” That day, I bought two new plants, read an article about South Korea’s quarantine policy, and received a refund for the Airbnb I had rented in Mexico City. Such renewed responsiveness to one’s environment resonates with Guy Debord’s notion of the dérive, where “one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”1 I found characteristics of dérive not only in my neighborhood jaunts but also my personal sphere. Many of my pandemicinduced rituals—tending to plants, Googling prices for farmland, and checking the case counts and travel restrictions—have corresponded to aspects of my own consciousness: a desire for control, a changing relationship to giving and receiving care, and an obsession with understanding boundaries, limits, and borders. Similar emotional responses to a transformed sense of place manifest as themes in the artistic practices of Natalie Diaz, Candice Lin, Stephanie A. Lindquist, and Yvette Mayorga. This essay explores the ways in which the four artists use and reference materials that have been fractured and commodified for the colonial project—such as bodies, porcelain, plants, and

21

1.

Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Internationale Situationniste, no. 2 (December 1958): 1, trans. Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, http://www. bopsecrets.org/SI/2. derive.htm.

sugar—which are transformed through radical softness and bold revision into tangible offerings toward healing and centering relationships to the land.

22

MATERIAL

Through balancing fantasy and violence in her paintings, sculptures, and installations, Yvettte Mayorga speaks to the experiences of first-generation Mexican Americans— poignantly baring personal details that connect to the trauma of colonized people. When viewing Mayorga’s work, one experiences the sense of falling into an alternate world.

Filled with fantastical colors and alluring textures, this world creates a sensorial overload with grim undertones, which are suggested by the illusion of oozing paint. In some cases, paint is applied so thickly that it resembles icing on a cake, but icing that appears on the verge of melting. Mayorga’s Homeland Promised Land (2019; fig. 9) includes familiar motifs—Fanta bottles, acrylic nails, and pink flip phones— painted with impasto and placed in a circular frame made to mimic a Homeland Security badge. At first, the painting engulfs viewers in a false saccharinity; as one leans closer and begins to recognize certain icons of American violence, it then becomes an honest confrontation with the artist’s childhood memories of assimilation into U.S. culture. This duality relates to the experiences faced by those who migrate to the United States, many of whom arrive with assumptions of the American Dream but are soon confronted by xenophobia, consumerism, and racism. Mayorga’s painting I Remember Eating Hot Chips when my Dad got Deported, After J.H. Fragonard, “The Swing” (2017; fig. 10) lures viewers into the scene with imagery associated with the Rococo style, such as a golden frame, an ornate water fountain, and a lush garden. Mayorga reclaims the language of art history to present a painful story of deportation. These lavish Rococo elements not only hold the viewer’s

attention but also highlight the linkages between luxury and European imperialism, a system that imposes borders through violent pillaging and manipulative treaties, allowing colonizers to enforce their authority.

INTIMACIES

These references to borders are found throughout Mayorga’s work, perhaps most clearly when citing the experiences of migrants who cross from Mexico to the U.S. In her article “Rooted: Black Women, Southern Memory, and Womanist Cartographies,” Michelle Lanier writes, “If cartography is the art of creating maps, of revealing the imagined borders and renaming practices by those arrogant enough to claim dominion over water and land, countercartographies . . . are powerful tools for centering the marginalized and for repairing the fissures between one’s ancestral landscapes and ancestral memories.”2 Mayorga achieves a kind of “counter-cartography” by revealing the stories of migrants and their children in Monuments of the Forgotten (2020; fig. 11), an installation consisting of fiftyone individual shoes—some in pairs, others not. These shoes, painted by Mayorga and community members in Austin, Texas, pay tribute at once to those fleeing violence and poverty in their homelands and to their experiences of undergoing this hostile journey. Echoing the time, effort, and precarity involved in their border-crossings, the shoes present both evidence of the care involved in individually painting each one and the fragile nature of their painted surfaces, some of which are cracked.

Through reclaiming resources drawn from the earth, Candace Lin’s work also comments on lesser-known histories of people whose lands were colonized. Based in Los Angeles, Lin centers her research-oriented practice specifically on the “politics of power and representation” embodied in materials

23

2.

Michelle Lanier, “Rooted: Black Women, Southern Memory, and Womanist Cartographies,” with photographs by Allison Janae Hamilton, Southern Cultures 26, no. 3 (Summer 2020), https://www. southerncultures.org/ article/rooted/.

3.

Candice Lin, “Candice Lin” interview by Mark Daybell, Unequal Measure, June 13, 2019, https://www. unequalmeasure.org/ candice-lin-interview/.

Stephanie A. Lindquist’s research into indigenous food plants explores their historical and botanical context, manifesting in her prints, collages, and object-based works. To make her collographic prints Bi-Color Sorghum (2018; fig. 15) and Winter Rye (2018; fig. 16), Lindquist inked plants that she had grown, attached them to a hard surface, and then transferred the ink to a new page, creating images that

24

MATERIAL

4.

Candice Lin, “Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, A Porous Slip // Logan Center for the Arts,” interview

by Jameson Paige, THE SEEN no. 7 (Fall/Winter 2018), September 26, 2018, https:// theseenjournal.org/ candice-lin/.

historically valued or rejected by Western commerce and medicine.3 Her porcelain sculptures, formed into fiveinch-tall bottles, are each filled with an herbal remedy: Hierarchical Potion of Power (2016; fig. 12) with a tincture that contains anti-androgen (testosterone-suppressing) properties; Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Renowned Corpse Poison (2016; fig. 13) with a tincture made from plants high in estrogen; and Clairvoyant Testosterone (2016; fig. 14) with plant and gem essences high in testosterone, which are thought to clarify the mind. Porcelain, with its long history as a valuable commodity for trade (particularly between China and Europe), symbolizes repeated exploitation and appropriation of Asian cultures by the West and its racist and patriarchal norms that, according to Lin, have “lauded [porcelain] for being ‘pure white,’ ‘superior,’ and ‘impervious to staining by foreign products such as coffee or tea.’”4 Lin liberates porcelain from its colonial symbolism by emphasizing that it originates from the same natural source as the plants and herbs in her remedies, which serve as a kind of “transformative balm” (to quote Lanier once again) for healing the colonized body’s wounds. Especially in the context of the current pandemic, which has been marked by increased mutual aid, foraging, and plant-based antiviral care, Lin’s works offer powerful possibilities to restore the connection of materials to the land from which they were derived.

closely resemble their source material. Both prints show only the portions of the plants that grew above ground and would have been touched by a human care-taker, whereas the roots are cut out of the frame. These formal decisions stem from Lindquist’s focus on plant-human interactions in her research on plants’ migratory patterns, their assimilations to non-native soils, and their loss of biodiversity with the rise of modern agriculture—all elements directly related to European colonialism.5 In the zine An Herbal Medicine-Making Primer, the anonymous author named “Simon the Simpler” observes, “These days we are dependent on the power structure of industrial health care and medical specialization. . . . That dependence is one more thing keeping us tied down to the State and unable to . . . envision a world without such oppression. With a new system of healing, based on selfknowledge and community herbal wisdom, we will be that much more free.”6 Lindquist’s work (see also fig. 17) presents a path to this liberation by way of suggesting what we gain through intimately knowing, handling, examining, tending to, and consuming local and indigenous food plants.

INTIMACIES

Born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River, Natalie Diaz is a Mojave and Latinx poet. Diaz’s work prompts her readers to unpack their own preconceptions of borders while reacquainting themselves with them. When asked about what borders mean to her, Diaz responded, “Many of us are born toward or against a border. Our own bodies have become both borders and bordered. . . . Our land and our bodies were redrawn as physical borders designated and imposed by the United States—not to mention the myriad of affective borders resulting from my existence as a Native in this country.”7 The video piece River Lines (2020; fig. 18) shows Diaz’s wife, Saretta Morgan, standing in, floating

25

5.

Stephanie A. Lindquist, “An Interview with Stephanie A. Lindquist,” interview

by Eva Mayhabal Davis, Culturework, August 20, 2018, https:// cultureworkmagazine. org/2018/08/20/ an-interviewwith-stephanie-alindquist/.

6.

Simon the Simpler, An Herbal MedicineMaking Primer ([Oregon]: Yggdrasil Distro, 2010), 6, https://queer. archive.work/library/ download/herbal/ herbal.pdf.

7.

Natalie Diaz and Nathalie Handal, “Natalie Diaz and Nathalie Handal: Map of the Next World,” joint interview, Guernica, October 19, 2020, https://www. guernicamag.com/ natalie-diaz-andnathalie-handal-mapof-the-next-world/.

9.

Debord, “Theory of the Dérive.”

After spending the first six months of the pandemic in Brooklyn, I moved to a new city in a new state, initially underestimating the difficulties of relocation during a time of global turmoil, but gradually taking comfort in the fluidity of my transience. Anxiously clutching my large Bankers Box full of plants in the passenger seat of my U-Haul, I reflected again on my changing relationship to place, both physically and psychologically. Once more, Debord’s words rang true in the moment: “The most general change that dérive experience leads to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.”9 For Natalie Diaz, Candice Lin, Stephanie A. Lindquist, and Yvette Mayorga, the dissolution of borders is enacted through their sometimes subtle or otherwise potent work, which utilize thoughtfully chosen and culturally meaningful materials to challenge the bounding constraints of settler colonialism. By reorienting power

26

MATERIAL

8.

Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2020), 46.

on, and moving through the Aha Haviily (Colorado) River.

Morgan wears a large white shirt and looks off camera, sweeping her hands up and down and, at one point, producing a dramatic splash that the viewer cannot hear.

Laid over slowly panning shots of blue-green waters under a clear sky, Diaz’s voice recites excerpts from her 2020 book Postcolonial Love Poem: “[T]he river runs through the / middle of my body the same way it runs through the middle of our land.”8 Her words celebrate unbounded movement and connect waterways to the very existence of humankind, reminding viewers that the river is a kind of body, not a metaphor. Diaz’s choice to communicate with her Nation and birthplace through her wife reminds viewers of the power of intimacy in contending against the control of colonizing borders.

dynamics and centering notions of intimacy, they are able to achieve various versions of what Lanier calls “restorative cartography,” a personal investigation of ancestral lands that engenders constant questioning and eventual empowerment.10 In exploring communal care through the healing properties of plants, these artists speak for colonized people and allow their work to confront traumatic histories from a place of poignant autonomy.

INTIMACIES

27

10.

Lanier, “Rooted: Black Women, Southern Memory, and Womanist Cartographies.”

Exhibition Checklist

Natalie Diaz River Lines, 2018 HD video 4 mins., 7 secs.

Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist

28

Candice Lin Clairvoyant Testosterone, 2016 Porcelain with blue overglaze, cork, and herbal tincture 5 × 3 × 2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Ghebaly Gallery

Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber’s Renowned Corpse Poison, 2016 Porcelain with blue overglaze, cork, and herbal tincture 5 × 4 × 2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Ghebaly Gallery

MATERIAL

Wesley Chavis Remnants of a Mythical Man, 2016 Fermenting water, baby oil, cocoa butter, bleach, and charcoal on canvas, with a color photograph from Mom’s archive and a printed film still 78 × 66 inches (canvas), 4 × 6 inches (photo), 3 × 3 inches (film still) Courtesy of the artist

Hierarchical Potion of Power, 2016 Porcelain with blue overglaze, cork, and herbal tincture 5 × 3 × 2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Ghebaly Gallery

Union, 2017 Jacaranda, basswood, ebony, costume jewelry, rice, latex, and coin 29 × 28 × 25 inches Courtesy of the artist

INTIMACIES Stephanie A. Lindquist Bi-Color Sorghum, 2018 Collograph, Edition of 5 22 × 30 inches Collection of Eve Biddle

29

Winter Rye, 2018 Collograph, Edition of 5 30 × 22 inches Collection of Eve Biddle

MATERIAL

Yvette Mayorga Homeland Promised Land, 2019 Acrylic piping on canvas 24 inches (diam.)

Courtesy of the artist

Monuments of the Forgotten, 2020 Acrylic piping on shoes Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist

Hương Ngô Reap the Whirlwind, 2018 Four serigraphs printed with high gloss on black paper Each 58 × 43 inches Courtesy of the artist

I Remember Eating Hot Chips when my Dad got Deported, After J.H. Fragonard, “The Swing,” 2017 Acrylic piping on canvas 20 × 24 inches Courtesy of the artist

30

Reap the Whirlwind, 2018 Five handbound books printed and silkscreened with thermochromic ink Each 8 1/2 × 9 × 3 inches Courtesy of the artist

Zina Saro-Wiwa Eaten by the Heart (documentary series), 2012–13

Natani Notah Inner Child, 2019 Leather scraps, jean fabric, seed beads, thread, acrylic paint, faux fur, artificial sinew, and plastic corn pellets 16 × 6 × 4 inches Courtesy of the artist

“Breathing Orchestra” Digital video 5 mins., 26 secs.

INTIMACIES

“Damien” Digital video 2 mins., 31 secs.

Sister, Sister, 2018 Used cotton skirts, mixing bowls, shower stool, rope, acrylic paint, dried pinto beans, and sunflower seeds 54 × 20 × 78 inches Courtesy of the artist

“How Do Africans Kiss?”

Digital video 11 mins.

Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Gallery

31

Acknowledgments

As the 2020 NXTHVN Curatorial Fellows—and as people who have thus been empowered to imagine a more equitable, liberated world—we want to thank, first and foremost, our leaders at NXTHVN: cofounders Titus Kaphar and Jason Price, who made their vision of this fellowship program a reality and provided us with the resources, space, and agency to create. We thank former Executive Director Nico Wheadon, who modeled radically tender leadership, encouraged an artistcentered curatorial practice rooted in

32

community, and nourished a culture of mutuality and abundance.

We also offer our deepest gratitude to each of the artists featured in Material Intimacies: Wesley Chavis, Natalie Diaz, Candice Lin, Stephanie A. Lindquist, Yvette Mayorga, Hương Ngô, Natani Notah, and Zina SaroWiwa. Thank you for your generosity and time through virtual studio visits and countless conversations. It has been a privilege to learn from each of you and engage with your practices, as well as provide the New Haven community with the opportunity to encounter your incredible work. We send our gratitude to the lenders: Adelaide Bannerman at Tiwani Gallery, Eve Biddle, and Gan Uyeda at Ghebaly Gallery. We would also like to thank all the gallery directors and staff for their immense helpfulness and assistance with these loans.

We are deeply grateful to our Curatorial Advisor, Kalia Brooks Nelson, whose expertise, insight, and counsel every step of the way fostered growth and critical thought on all aspects of our work—from research and presentation pitches

MATERIAL

Material Intimacies was made possible by the generosity, labor, and care of numerous individuals within and beyond NXTHVN. The organization’s building, in which the exhibition is presented, occupies Quinnipiac land, stolen by Dutch and English colonizers who forcibly removed approximately four-thousand Indigenous people from their lands in the 1630s and whose contact initiated two smallpox epidemics that decimated the Quinnipiac population.

Beyond acknowledging the land, we acknowledge the ruptures wrought by present-day settler colonialism.

INTIMACIES

to artist relations and exhibition production. We could not imagine this project having come to fruition without her invaluable curatorial knowledge and sage wisdom. She has equipped and strengthened us for our future work. We also want to thank Keely Orgeman for bestowing confidence in us with care-filled edits and with gracious and attentive editorial advising.

Finally, we thank NXTHVN Program Director Terence Washington, whose unwavering support and thoughtfulness was a backbone throughout the exhibition’s development, opening, and public engagement.

Countless individuals labored behind the scenes to help us design, produce, publicize, and bring to life Material Intimacies. We specifically want to thank Colin Burke, DJ Dana, John Dennis, Matt Hargraves, Jonathan Knox, Ken Lovell, Jo Nelson, Nicholas Pfaff, Mia Rotondi, Matt Solomon, and Cheri Walsh. We are also grateful to our NXTHVN cohort, 2020 Studio Fellows Allana Clarke, Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, Esteban Ramón Pérez, Jeffrey Meris, Ilana

33

Savdie, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, and Vincent Valdez for their support and camaraderie. We thank our apprentice, Justin Threet, for being a force of inspiration, as well as Tranece Streater and Noah Delorme for holding down the fort at the gallery— during a pandemic!

Lastly, we want to thank our village, the network of care that enabled us to labor with care throughout the development of Material Intimacies: Zalika Azim, Sarah Branch, Brandon Brooks, Antonius Bui, Kristiana Chan, Stanley Gambucci, Merik Goma, Shirley Kuang, Koritha and David de Leon, Danilo Machado, Eleana Molise, Kristina Newman-Scott, Nicholas Oh, Maria Pleshkevich, Chloe Potsklan, Manjari Randeria, Alexandria Ryahl, Jason Ting, Deniqua Washington, Isha Vela, Tina and Josh Williams, and Ayoung Yu. Michelle Phương Ting Claire Kim

Biographies

34

Claire Kim is a New Haven-based independent curator and arts administrator. She currently serves as the Special Assistant to the President at BRIC, in Brooklyn, as well as a 2020 Curatorial Fellow at NXTHVN. Previously, Kim worked in museum education and programming with numerous arts institutions and organizations, including the Asian American Arts Alliance, the Mark Morris Dance Group, the New Museum, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She has consulted on and organized exhibitions at The Border Project Space, BRIC, Gymnasium, Mom’s Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art. Kim received her BA in English and Art History from Fordham University in 2016 and graduated from the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Management Fellowship in 2018.

MATERIAL

Michelle Phương Ting is a curator and poet based in New Haven. Her writing most recently appeared in Apogee, Tupelo Quarterly, and wildness. She was awarded the 2020 Frontier Poetry Industry Prize and nominated for “Best American Essays” and “Best of the Net.” A Tin House alum and a graduate of Yale University, she has received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Fine Arts Work Center, Kenyon Writers Workshop, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and Omnidawn.

In 2019, she cocurated Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture festival, featuring emerging Asian American and Pacific Islander artists. A former Frank Goodyear Head Guide at the Yale University Art Gallery, programs coordinator at the Cantor Arts Center, and educator at various community-based organizations, she is currently a curator with the Racial Imaginary Institute and an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University.

INTIMACIES

Kalia Brooks Nelson, PhD, advises the Curatorial Fellows at NXTHVN on organizing their exhibition projects.

She is an arts administrator, curator, and educator, focusing on exhibitions, programming, strategic planning, and curriculum development for organizations that work at the intersection of art and education.

She is currently the Mellon Project Director in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department (AAADS) at Columbia University. Her academic research covers art from the nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on emergent technologies and African American, trans-Atlantic, and diasporic cultures of the Americas. Brooks Nelson holds a PhD in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). She is coeditor of Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, 2019). She has served as a consulting curator with the City of New York through the Department of Cultural Affairs and is currently an ex-officio trustee on the Board of the Museum of the City of New York.

35

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Material Intimacies October 18, 2020–January 18, 2021 NXTHVN Gallery, New Haven, CT Copyright © 2021 NXTHVN, Inc. nxthvn.com Curators: Michelle Phương Ting Claire Kim Artists: Wesley Chavis Natalie Diaz Candice Lin Stephanie A. Lindquist Yvette Mayorga Hương Ngô Natani Notah Zina Saro-Wiwa Design by Christopher Sleboda and Kathleen Sleboda Edited by Keely Orgeman and Kalia Brooks Nelson Photo credits: Chris Gardner and Tom Van Eynde Published by NXTHVN ISBN: 978-1-7923-5999-6 NXTHVN 169 Henry Street New Haven, CT 06511 hello@nxthvn.com www.nxthvn.com

36

MATERIAL

NXTHVN 38