Conversation: In Conversation:
Tavarus Blackmon Manuel Fernando Rios
Tavarus
First, let’s talk about making right now, during this unprecedented time of COVID-19. What has it been like making art during the last year and getting into 2021?
Manuel
I think as an instructor it’s been somewhat problematic—it’s not like the work isn’t in my mind. I don’t have any ideas to put down on canvas, or paper, or whatever the medium is. It’s because as a teacher, I had to learn how to teach online. Most of the people I knew, and me specifically, I just taught in the studio all the time. So in order to teach online, you had to basically write everything out, you had to make sure that everything was accessible to students. And even making a video, you would think that you can just make a video and then just post it up. No, you have to make sure that there’s captioning. You have to make sure that everything is really clear, have this
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stuff written now, along with showing the video. If you’re gonna be doing a PowerPoint, you have to make sure that the PowerPoint is accessible, and all that stuff. All that stuff’s really good, but it’s stuff that I wasn’t prepared for. So you have to learn as you go. You have to take a condensed class to learn how to teach online. But just that alone, converting your classes to be online, was enough to where it just took so much energy out of you, or me at least, that it was just hard to even get into the studio to work on the ideas that I wanted to do. I mean, I had to basically either backlog ideas that I had, or just kind of scrap them completely because sometimes as an artist if you backlog these ideas, you can’t really work into it like that. The idea is gone, and you’re really thinking about other things. So, I’m sure there’s probably five paintings that got lost within this past year, because of the job. I was never able to get to it. And then, also the fact that going to normal things—like going to an art store, especially when the pandemic just happened—it was kind of scary. People weren’t wearing masks. Some people still don’t wear masks—it gets me upset. I used to hate going to the store.
Tavarus
So, speaking of the students, there’s been a lot of events happening in our American culture: the election, the reassertion of extremism in our country, the riot on the Capitol, the lynching of George Floyd. How does this enter your practice of making art? And then how does it affect how you engage with your students with these difficult topics?
Manuel
Well, as an artist, and somebody who identifies as Chicano, when I was in grad school, it was almost like the professors tried to
