THREE PROSE POEMS

RC: What were some of his writing aesthetics & principles that you might have adopted?

CW: We’re very different writers. But when I was young, he drilled into my head, “SHOW! DON’T TELL!” Over and over again; “Show, don’t tell. Show, don't tell.” He would actually say it like that, just repeating the phrase when I finished a story when I first moved in with him, like he could chant the bad writing out of me. I thought it was a simple thing he was saying at first, but it really is the most difficult and the most important thing with fiction. It took me years to get a firm grip on it. He insisted I ground more in physical descriptions. He told me if the scene was set in a living room, that my readers should be able to smell the living room.

Steve was interested in including the grotesque and hyper-realistic aspects of humanity in his writing. In his famously dirty novel Groove, Bang, and Jive Around, there is a scene where a woman reaches into her pants when no one is looking and picks a dirty piece of toilet paper that’s clinging to her asshole, and then flicks it into the air. You read books and see movies that all claim to be realism, but very seldom does anyone take a shit, or masturbate or pick their nose. He notably included all that in his novel. It was a very deliberate choice. He had other mentees, of course, and the writer who was most influenced by that hyper-realistic philosophy was Jade Sharma. He was her mentor for many years as well. She died right after he did. Her book, Problems, which came out from Coffee House Press a few years ago, Steve read that as it was being written over the course of eight years, and you can see his influence on her writing in a big way. You should all read it. It’s a perfect book. She wrote one perfect book and died at 39, and a lot of us are still grieving. She followed Steve.

God, I could write pages and pages about what Steve taught me and what I learned about writing at Tribes, but I’ll just say this, read the authors he mentored, and you’ll see for yourself what he taught us. Above all, he encouraged us to find our own voices, and that really is the most important thing. Not being derivative, not trying to please the audience, or emulate what’s popular, but finding out what your own unique voice actually sounds like and what it needs to say, that is the journey every writer is on whether they know it or not. Steve made that clear to me from the beginning, for which I’m very grateful. I didn’t have to figure out what I was supposed to try to do before I started trying to do it.

RC: Which poets did you have a crush on?

CW: Ha! So you’ve heard about me then? I see. Well, I’m not going to tell you, but they already know who they are because I’ve never been shy about things like that. Poets are truly wonderful lovers! Let’s leave it there.

RC: Can you tell me your personal history of writing prior outside of your experiences with Gathering of the Tribes?

CW: Steve published my first book, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind when I was 27. I worked on the book for about three years with him as the main editor. It is a collection of short stories/a novella about a mother and daughter growing up in rural poverty, tracing both of their lives from childhood to adulthood. That book sold out within a few months. It was then picked up for a second print by The Unbearables imprint of Autonomedia Press.

My second book, a novel, The Albino Album was then picked up by a larger publisher, Seven Stories Press which aslo published my subsequent collections of short fiction Things To Do When You’re Goth in the Country, as well as my most recent memoir, 100 Times (A Memoir of Sexism).

Steve died the day the New York Times reviewed that book and that broke my heart because I didn’t get to tell him about it. In the hospital, he was still selling my books. I came to visit him and he somehow had many copies of my book (which again, was published by a totally different press by that time, Seven Stories Press). He had them on the nightstand by his bed and was strong-arming people who were visiting him in the hospital into buying them. This was just a couple of days before he passed away, so no one told him no. Everyone bought one. I mean, they had to. It was humbling and so sweet and also completely ridiculous.

He was a fierce advocate and mentor. I’ve never seen anything like it before. The things he did for you sometimes you feel like I don’t deserve this. Why are you doing this?

I have a contract with a great press now, and that is because of A Gathering of the Tribes. So, it’s hard to talk about my writing outside of Tribes completely, even though I have my own independent writing career.

Steve gave me a chance by publishing my first book. It was a chance that, as a queer writer coming from rural poverty, I don’t think I would have had access to so easily with any in the other institutions in New York City.

He gave me a chance to prove myself as an author, and when the book sold out, I got picked up by larger presses, and then a larger one.

That is the mission of A Gathering of the Tribes; to support traditionally underrepresented artists and writers.

Steve showed me what that really meant, what it looked like in real, human terms, and it changed my life. I know how important it is to continue to do the same for the writers who don’t see themselves represented by mainstream institutions coming up today. RC: What was your wildest Gathering of the Tribes party moment ever? CW: Oh man. So, okay. I’d been living at Tribes about a year. I’d been working very hard on the Charlie Parker Festival. And sometimes Steve would do this thing with the young people at Tribes. As a bonus for hard work, he’d like, give you Tribes for a day, and see what you’d do with it if you were in charge. Like, he gave the Sarah Lawrence interns the gallery for a day and let them curate and install wherever they wanted and host an opening, when their intern semester ended, as thanks for their work.

He gave me Tribes for a day at the end of the Charlie Parker Festival. I was in my early twenties. He told me he’d give me a budget of a few thousand dollars, and that I could have the building, the garden, whatever I wanted, and that I should curate the event that closed out the festival that year.

At that time, I just really wanted a parade. I loved parades. I loved art parades, and New Orleans style second lines. I loved weird, avant-garde art parades. I told Steve I wanted to throw a parade, and he seemed delighted by that, and so I hired the Hungry March Band, and put out a press release about dressing up in costume, and celebrating the legacy of the Lower East Side, and whatnot. We invited some poets to kick things off with a reading outside of Tribes.

Also, there was this club that I went to all the time a few blocks away called The Apocalypse. One of the former owners of the Limelight opened it, and it definitely had that party-kid, punk glam, wild vibe. I told him I was going to be leading an art parade around the Lower East Side and wanted to end it at The Apocalypse and have the festival after party there. I told him I needed to reserve the whole club for the night. He said he would reserve it for me, but I guess he hadn’t actually believed me, because he only reserved a section of it. I showed up at his door around nine pm with about three hundred people, and his jaw literally dropped.

We’d led a parade all around the neighborhood, and the Lower East Side being what it is, half the neighborhood just came out and joined in the fun and followed us to the party. That’s one thing I love about parades, how they expand. People were dancing and the band was playing. Some people from the neighborhood grabbed their instruments and joined in. We took over the streets, an entire block and a half with no permit or anything, in complete ravelry.

One of the strangest parts about it was that somehow the parade ended up being led by a very large, nude man with a tiny penis and enormous testicles. He was some sort of performance artist, I believe. He probably weighed around 400 pounds, and he didn’t wear any clothing, except an arm band. He was very sweet, and he attended and it was sort of a natural progression that he be in the front of the parade, leading, so that’s the first thing people saw, this naked man and all of these costumed freaks and hula hoops flying in the air followed by the band and all.

But the strange part was, and you’re not going to believe this, but I can have it verified by others, when we got to the bar, well, the owner hadn’t reserved it for us, and there was an artist there doing a drink and sketch night, and reclining on a bench in the window was

Chavisa Woods with Steve Cannon, 2013

Girl in the museum, New York, USA © Eric Akoto

a second, very large, totally nude, bald man with a tiny penis and enormous testicles. The nude man from our parade and him immediately locked eyes, and everyone squealed like we were witnessing some long-fated meeting. They did not know one another. It was a total coincidence. They looked like tweedledee and tweedledum.

We all crammed into the club, hundreds of us, and partied all night like heathens. The two nude men became inseparable throughout the party and got a lot of attention, I might add, from the glam rock kids who were there. Someone even ripped their shirt and tied an arm band around the second one, so they matched. I remember, this glittered covered girl was flirting with them and her friend came up to her while she was talking to them and asked, ridiculously, “Oh, my god! Are they actually like totally naked,” and the girl giggled and told him, “No. They’re wearing armbands.”

Steve made me describe them to him over and over again, and it really made him laugh. He loved stuff like that. WHITNEY MUSEUM

RC: How does Gathering of the Tribes connect with The Whitney Biennial? Certainly, Tribes also showcased visual artists as well as writers. Is the connection based upon the artwork as well as the writers who were published by Tribe’s own Fly By Night press?

CW: The exhibition at the Whitney is a sort of meta-re-creation of the 285 East 3rd Street space. It showcases Tribes simultaneously as the artist, Steve Cannon’s life’s work, a collaborative project between hundreds of artists and writers over 30 years’ time, and a collection of archival materials including David Hammons’ red wall, Steve’s personal library, as well as the books and magazines published by Tribe’s Fly by Night Press, which add up to something much greater than the sum of their parts.

RC: Steve Cannon’s literary Rolodex (they were a ’90s thing) is impressive. One of the reasons I write poetry is because of an NYU production: for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Steve Cannon knew ntozake shange, Thulani Davis, Robbie McCauley all iconic writers and theater artists who spoke of their gender powers and Black identity. I knew that I could connect my birth as a poet to ntozake shange and Filipino writers Jessica Hagedorn and Cyn. Zarco. Steve Cannon gave me a historical womb to be birthed as a poet. I do think it is this history that made me feel safe and that I would be welcome. Can you tell us a little about where this hospitable and magnanimous space that is Gathering of the Tribes comes from?

CW: Tribes 285 East 3rd Street Salon was always open, literally 24/7, though I’m not sure it was hospitable. It was never a safe space. It was actually a space fertile with provocation, heated debate, potentially offensive statements and material awaiting you at every turn.

Steve was a multiculturalist. In some ways, Tribes was like the opposite of canceled culture. He rarely kicked anyone out for anything, even when I sometimes thought he should have. Even if he did kick someone out, they could still return the next day. I don’t think he ever 86-ed anyone.

This is complicated to talk about. He did something so special with that space. He really believed diversity could change the world. He felt that people who had experiences of oppression in this society were stronger together, and that in order to work together, we really had to deal with each other.

When I first moved in with him, he asked me what I was reading. I gave him the list and he asked me, “Why are you only reading white people?” He said, “You’re only reading white, gay authors, like you.” I was 21, coming from the rural Midwest and South, and hadn’t really thought about it before, but as soon as he said it, I knew it was true. He gave me a list of authors to read, and I did. He expanded me intellectually because of that. He didn’t cancel people for their xenophobia, conscious or unconscious, but he also wouldn’t let it stand. He confronted it. We confronted each other.

I remember, a friend of his was sitting at dinner with us and saying some really homophobic things, specifically about lesbians, and he said, “Why don’t you ask Chavisa how she feels about what you just said.” He made me confront the man. We argued. He bristled and left in a bad mood, but a few days later, when he came back to Tribes, he apologized to me and told me he thought about what I’d said and had never talked to a gay woman about those types of things before. It’s different when you are in a space with a human being, looking right at them, saying “Your bigotry hurts me,” than when you’re calling someone out online, in text, so separately.

That wasn’t the main goal of Tribes. The Tribes Salon was, above all, an intellectual space. It was a creative, experimental space that allowed for some of the most avant garde artists to play however they chose. But I will say, the multiculturalism that was foundational to the mission when it was founded in the ’90s did provide a bit of a different template for dealing with the politics of intersecting marginalized identities than much of what we see today, even though today, it gets more lip survive than it did back then. I personally prefer Steve’s way. There was more of a humanity to it.

AESTHETICS AND FORMS

RC: I’m at the MLK library in Washington, DC, and outside my study room is an anthology published in 1968, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American writing edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal and inside the book are poems by David Henderson who is a Gathering of the Tribes board member with me. I am impressed at the power and legacy of an anthology and its ability to freeze a moment in time.

Describe some of the range of books that Fly by Night has published and what you are looking to publish in the future.

CW: Fly by Night press specifically publishes debut books and emerging diverse authors of diversity. For traditionally under-represented authors, those first and second books are so pivotal in getting their foot in the door of the literary world. About 89% of books published in the U.S. are written by white authors.

That’s unacceptable. All authors of color published only account for about 11% of books that get published each year. Then when you talk about female authors of color, it’s smaller. Queer authors of color, smaller still. And even the white authors who are getting published, the majority of them are straight cis people from affluent backgrounds. Representation matters. It matters for the working writers who deserve to be given a chance to fund their audience. It matters for the readers who have never seen themselves in the pages of a book.

I would like to start up Fly by Night Press again, and I am currently seeking additional funding to do so. But the A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine Online brings in more than 60,000 unique readers each year, and also provides financial incentives to many of the diverse writers published on our site. We have some amazing fiction, features, and poetry up right now. Give it a read at tribes.org.

RC: How can an emerging artist writer find their way to Tribes and say I am part of this. In what ways can we sustain and continue Steve Cannon’s legacy through A Gathering of the Tribes?

CW: A Gathering of the Tribes has many current programs that build on the original mission. Tribes is committed to serving traditionally under-represented artists and writers of diversity, amplifying the emerging and established revolutionary voices of our time.

Right now, A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine Online employs many diverse artists and writers, connects our published authors to a wide audience, and provides stipends for creation and publication of new prose. Our reviews specifically focus on increasing visibility of books by traditionally under-represented authors as well. Submission guidelines can be found on our website.

Tribes Spotlight Series is a virtual reading series that occurs five times a year, featuring diverse authors, connecting them to wider audiences and also providing financial stipends to our readers. Our limited, in-person pop-up events, like the Marathon Reading at the Whitney Biennial, function with the same goals.

This summer, we will be publishing the first print issue of Tribes Magazine since Steve left us. Tribes #16: The Black Lives Matter Issue, edited by Ishmael Reed and Danny Simmons, with assistant editor Margaret Porter-Troupe, is coming out very soon, so stay tuned for that!

And recently, Tribes launched a fiscal sponsorship program for individual artists and artist groups. The low-threshold entry design of the application process and qualifications is specifically geared to traditionally under-represented artists and writers of diversity. You can apply at the Tribes website.

We are of course looking to increase our offerings of financial incentives and resource supports. I took over as Executive Director in April of 2020. It has been difficult re-starting our programs during a pandemic, to say the least. I am deeply grateful to all of our major donors, including, of course, David Hammons, the donors who support CoSA, of which Tribes is a member, Poets and Writers, The Amazon Literary Partnership, the Christopher and David Murray Fund of Stonewall Community Foundation, and which just today, awarded us additional funding.

I would be remiss if I didn’t pass the hat. Steve always made sure I passed the hat at the end of everything we did. If you believe in our mission and the artists we serve, of course we would love for you to donate, either directly, via our GoFundMe Campaign, by purchasing an artist-designed T-shirt, and even just sending it via Venmo.

We’re working hard to keep his legacy alive and help ensure a diversity of voices are able to find representation in the arts. ●

Jennifer Scott, Director, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

reative expression through nar-

Crative storytelling is a powerful tool for fighting oppression and breaking through indifference. Few artists are willing to go against the grain and use their compositions to interrogate the darkest parts of human nature. Attempts are made to silence social activism, and only a handful of artists take a stand in verbal and visual commentary.

My artwork embraces empathy and the power of the human spirit to rise above natural disasters, disease, poverty, and wars. My paintings and drawings are a visual language that far too often falls on deaf eyes. I now create with an urgency to awaken minds before it is too late. People always ask me why the majority of my work centers on birth, love, and death. I suppose the answer is that grappling with these themes helps me to understand the impermanence of life on this planet. When an artist paints from the heart they are usually isolated or ostracized because society and the viewer find the work to be too brutally honest and hard to ingest.

The fear of rejection from galleries and collectors is undeniable. I have dealt with it firsthand, and I know artists who fear losing their income if they shock the public or upset the viewer with a composition whose subject matter challenges the norm. Even my fellow educators fear that schools will fire them or create consequences for participating in marches and taking a public stance on issues of social or environmental justice. They make “safer” paintings and sculptures that conform, such as simple portrait or landscape work. While these pieces are valuable and relevant, they fit a genre separate from that of activism artwork, which initiates a dialogue of change. I believe as painters we have moral and ethical obligations to document the truth of our world and our hearts.

I have been showing my work professionally for almost thirty years in galleries and museums. As an illustrator, film concept artist, gallery artist, curator, and art historian I have seen my art featured in over 120 novels, numerous magazines, and movies. I am also a teacher and adjunct

Left: A Painting by Jeremy Caniglia

professor on the high school and collegiate level. I teach drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and filmmaking. I take time to lecture at galleries, universities, and schools, as well as for community outreach programs. My lectures explain how I use painting as a visual language to tell stories. Specifically, I explain how my painting is activism, addressing wars, climate change, and educating the public on the importance preserving our natural world.

It is a mistake, however, to assume that the viewing public is complacent. Caravaggio, Giuseppe de Ribera, Artemisia Gentileschi, Francisco Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, and my teacher Odd Nerdrum among others, were willing to refrain from “prettifying” or embellishing the human condition and instead exposed its darkest realities. The timelessness of their work can be measured in increasing demand for it, both in collections and as seen in viewership numbers at museum shows. That timelessness is anchored by the simple fact that beauty is not the only archetype of relevance to painting, nor even the most important. Others, such as pathos and ethos, imbue art with greater meaning, a fact that the aforementioned artists understood explicitly and that the public does implicitly.

Archetypes referencing despair, sorrow, and death are more than simply grotesque. Rather, they force a light upon the deep shadows of our complicated world, forcing us to confront fear of and complacency toward unseen tragedies occurring every day. The future depends on our action to right wrongs sprung from apathy and greed. Art can play an essential role in combating those vices, but if it is beautiful without simultaneously being brutal, it furthers the complacency that leads society away from the warnings of scientists and experts and towards vacuous promises of a poorly remembered past.

We must recognize that painting is not all beauty and life is not always beautiful. Having said that, though, we must also recognize that beauty need not be found at some vantage far removed from the harsh realities of life. Rather, seeing the beauty in the struggles we face and looking for light in the darkness that can surround us helps us create an understanding of who we are and what we are about. This exercise gets to the heart of the central questions of the painter’s profession: Why does an artist create? Can we truly create a painting if we have nothing to say with it? Are we capable of giving ourselves to something even if we do not fully understand it?

These are some of the questions that have been the driving force behind my narratives.

As I mentioned, most of my work explores climate change, wars, revolution, poverty, and endangered species. It takes an anti-establishment perspective. I began using my artwork in the late ’80s and early ’90s to confront issues of universal concern. My deep commitment to human rights, social justice, and biodiversity has never swayed. I find strength in civil disobedience.

In 1986, at the age of 16, I went to the Civic Auditorium in Omaha, Nebraska, to see a man who brought a message of peace, atonement, and human dignity for all through his political activism. His name was Elie Wiesel. He had just won the Nobel Peace Prize and was on a small tour. I listened to this man, who was so humble that he didn’t even want his award. I remember how sad his voice was, and yet also how uplifting. His words would inspire me for the rest of my life. He spoke about teen suicide, and against violence, repression, and racism. He said that it was up to us to be the change we want and need in this world, and that no one would help us.

In the early ’90s, I was in a punk industrial band that pushed for social justice in the inner cities. I toured through the Midwest and created visual graphics for each show that brought awareness to issues I did not see anybody talking about. Inspired by Elie Wiesel, I participated in marches for those who were marginalized. I continue to advocate and attend social justice marches, but now with my children. I want them to understand and take a stand on matters that are important to them and our natural world.

In the mid ’90s, I moved to the East Coast and lived in Baltimore, Maryland, during graduate school. My work and activism changed, and I spoke through my paintings about the inequality, racism, and injustice that I witnessed on the streets.

One of my paintings, Welcome to America, made the front page of the Washington Post on July 14, 1994. It was the first time I realized the power of art. My artwork and the issues I addressed reached a wider audience and served a higher purpose by raising awareness.

In 1998, Odd Nerdrum, a fellow painter that I greatly admired, declared that he was no longer an artist, but rather a “kitsch painter.” Disillusioned with modernist ideas that he saw as absurdist and that fostered apathy and ego in artistic expression, Nerdrum embraced his association with the technical skills of the Old Masters and sought to use their trade to render empathy on his canvases. Nerdrum could not have cared less what society thought of him, and he embraced largescale narratives full of timeless archetypes.

I would eventually find my path to Røvik Gård and study with Odd Nerdrum personally. Beyond what he taught me technically, Nerdrum also left me with the lesson that—whether we are called kitsch, grotesque, dark, or low brow—narrative storytellers are painters searching for sentimentality. He showed me that this is an honorable pursuit, and that I should never apologize for being genuine.

In a masterpiece, time and place are captured so vividly that a viewer is moved to the moment, to joy or sorrow more than tears. A masterpiece lifts a veil, exposing the heartstrings of life—it allows those heartstrings to resonate and reverberate in the depths of the human condition.

In our less than picture perfect world, finding an artist who can draw inspiration from life’s oddities, struggles, and melancholy is rare. Painters who can find meaning in this world’s oppression and also have technical training in narrative storytelling is even more uncommon. Even for the few who possess both, issues showing their work arise because few venues exhibit work labeled “kitsch painting,” “imaginative realism,” or “dark art.”

It was around 2000–2005 that my artwork started to shift again. At that time, I would often take my children to the botanical gardens, and I was studying the diversity of plants and insects. On one visit, I was in a huge pollinator section with a variety of butterflies and, all of sudden, they began landing on only my son and daughter. It was a magical moment because I noticed that they were not landing on the adults. I had an idea for a painting that I called Birth of Spring, with butterflies kissing the innocence of youth. The glow depicted in the painting was the love and empathy that came from our natural world.

Around this same time, my art started to bring awareness to the monarch popu-

lation that was (and still is) in an historic decline. I decided that I would paint a new series of butterfly pieces. One of the paintings was of a butterfly that was tied to a brick. I called the piece A luminous, fluttering melody tethered to a dystopian dream. The idea was that no matter how bad the apathy in our world becomes, dreamers are still willing to fight and overcome obstacles no matter how daunting they may seem. The monarch represents the mysteries of the soul: love, death, and rebirth. It is a symbol of transition and hope. In my work, I portrayed the monarch as having the ability to lead us out of the darkness, confinement, and restraints of oppression and into the light. From 1996 to 2010, my art and activism started to get more organized. I realized that I was getting better at portraying and talking about the issues that I was passionate about. I began to put all my efforts into my narrative storytelling. In 2022, I have found that our world is at a tipping point with climate change. Our natural world has been compromised by politicians and corporate greed. The mechanics of destruction and the gears of war are now a felt reality and have devasted families in the Middles East, Africa, and now in the Ukraine. Everything has been affected. The planet is still warming at an alarming rate, wiping out important pollinator populations and causing massive biodiversity loss. With so much at risk and on the verge of extinction, we need to come together as good citizens, environmentalists, and art activists to make the change we seek.

The fact is, if we are going to save the world we love, protect its biodiversity, and humankind, we need to come together in solidarity and fight for a better tomorrow. There is no longer room for indifference and standing on the sidelines. Even though our society will deny the reality of climate change, I have found common ground in our communities’ efforts to initiate change—especially those concerning pollinators. It seems everyone is willing to rally around bees and butterflies, which are a universal symbol in art and the cycle of life.

My narrative paintings are created from the mud of my palette with muted, earthen, neutral colors depicting a blend of detailed realism and emotional distance filled with pathos. My work strives to grant agency to the poor and downtrodden. I give strength to those who have no voice and hope my work becomes a call to action to the contemporary public and those willing to listen.

We do not live in a vacuum . . . in lightness of emptiness, mindless men rattle words and sabers frantically bumping into one another seeking some way to exist together on earth. They do not know what they are looking for since they are blind to one another. Most think they have the answers and definition of what this world is about, but they are clueless to the multiple truths that exist. As Odd Nerdrum told me, “If you think you have the definition right then you are part of the stupidity.” The people on top and in control realize that the human mind . . . the storytellers are the most dangerous enemy, and it is these minds that they must oppress and destroy before they shine light on the truth and lies that wait for us in the shadows. The governments, corporations, and art critics wait in the wings like wolves watching for our one misstep so they can pounce on us and take us.

Art activism can come in many forms. Ask yourself what role you could play. Maybe you are a writer and could send an editorial to your local newspaper discussing climate change, poverty, or global wars; or maybe you are a photographer and could take photos of biodiversity and animal struggles with climate change. Perhaps, you are an art activist like me that could use visual narratives for change. We are the light for the human condition and need to fight for a better and brighter tomorrow. ●

Litro: Can you tell us about what you’re currently working on?

Erica Keck: I’m currently in between bodies of work right now. For the past year I was primarily focused on a series of flower and vase drawings. These are slowly evolving into a new body of paintings and other objects that will be part of a bigger exhibition being planned for the near future. These recent drawings had more of a representational image within them that had been missing from some of my previous work. I’m excited to see how I can pull that forward.

Litro: Although many of the materials you use are traditional, their employment in your work is often not. Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process, namely how tradition and experimentation affect your work? EK: I like to think of tradition as the karmic circumstances and parameters we inherit in any situation, form, or practice. To be merely traditional is to just blindly subscribe and stay within the borders someone else decided was historically the right way to approach or do something. Being locked in tradition is stagnant and oppressive. To just rail against tradition is reactionary and blindly nihilistic. Both approaches are overly moralizing and yield lousy results. Between

Above left: EK_DRAWING_2022_044, Ink & oil pastel on construction paper (unframed), 2022, 9 x 12 in. Above right: EK_DRAWING_2022_017, Ink on Japanese paper (unframed), 2022, 9 x 12 in.

those two binaries lies a sweet spot where I’m forced to engage with the past but also expected to look forward to the future. That continuity is always full of possibilities and joy where fresh and unpredictable things are created. Even if those experiments fail in some way, the process of staying curious and engaged gives us the tools and inspiration to create a world we want to be in rather than a world where we're subject to oppressive and exploitative forces.

Litro: Despite largely not using overt figuration, your paintings still manage to evoke a sense of place or the body. Are these evocations always planned or do they sometimes happen by chance? EK: These evocations are distantly conscious at this point in my work. While I’ve pushed more towards a materialist approach rather than an imagist approach in creating paintings the human body has always been my primary object. At some point I did consciously start thinking about paintings as a surrogate body. This allowed for a more playful approach in creating abstract art while also not becoming locked into traditional ways of representing the human form or the trappings of identity politics.

Litro: Your oeuvre, on the whole, plays with the real and/ or perceived distinctions between painting and sculpture. Are these experiments in genre conscious interrogations or more intuitively based?

EK: I wasn’t consciously trying to make a painting that jumped genre simply for the sake of doing so. That said, genre-nonconforming artworks or paintings behaving badly resonates deeply with me. For a long time, I was very interested in creating situations with paint and paintings that pushed all the materials and boundaries to a point where everything oozed, spilled over, and fell apart under its own weight. Maybe that makes me a painter trapped in a sculptor’s body, or would it be the other way around? Either way, it’s all just formalism that's probably gone too far.

Litro: What role, if any, does narrative play in your paintings?

EK: I’m not sure it plays an obvious role to the viewer. However, it probably plays a prominent role in my inner voice while creating. As I mentioned before I see painting as a surrogate form of my body/physical form. I’m not so interested in sharing my personal stories with people, largely because they’re probably boring to other people. I do aspire though to touch into the texture of those stories and share that with the viewer which I see as being more relatable.

Litro: Your artistic style has drawn many comparisons with the work of painters like Francis Bacon and Chaïm Soutine. Are there any specific artists or movements that you can cite as influences? Have they changed over the course of your career?

EK: My influences have absolutely changed over the course of my artistic practice. And there're countless amazing artists who have influenced me in different ways, including Bacon & Soutine. Currently I’ve been thinking a lot about holes. Holes, voids, portals, and passageways. Donald Moffett and Lee Bontecu are masters of this. In particular, I've been interested a lot in the relationship between Bontecu's sculptures and drawings.

Litro: Do you have any advice for new artists today?

EK: I think we exist in a moment where there’s an overabundance of certainty and small mindedness which is breeding unnecessary hostility. I think artists have a responsibility to overcome those impulses. Stay curious, sensitive, and engaged with the world by trying to listen a little more and talk a little less. ● EK_DRAWING_2022_017, Ink on Japanese paper (unframed), 2022, 9 x 12 in.

15/06/2022, 16:32 QR Code Generator - New Manage

t is apropos that Litro’s Inaugural Emerging Art Section is featured

Iin the experimental edition of the magazine. All of the arts share in the pursuit of discovery—finding new ways to represent, view, and understand reality. With this inherently comes experimentation and the ongoing process of forming and implementing new ideas and methods. Experimental art is a purposefully broad category, meant to give artists free reign to imagine and create work that is unbounded by Who is your favorite emerging any preconceived notion of what artist in this section? art, experimental or Vote by scanning the QR code. otherwise, should be. The artists and work featured in this section are on the cutting edge of art being made today, and all engage with the breadth of meaning contained in the word “experimental.” Though the mediums or ideas presented may reference traditional modes of art making, they are still boundary pushing in the ideas and methods they employ. Experiments often fail, which is why it is so compelling—both in literature and visual art—when an experiment works. It is then a call to action for the viewer to feel, think, or consider the world from a different perspective. ●

Diana Buitrago is originally from Colombia, and lives and works in New York City and Jersey City. They were trained in the classical Atelier Method, and their work falls largely under the tradition of Classical Realism. Their aim is to bring the tradition of the Old Masters to a contemporary reality.

Reclining Pose, Oil on Linen (Framed) 2018

William, Oil on Linen, 16x20 inch, 2018 Back Pose, Oil on Linen, 2017