THE
MUSEUM
OF
IDEAS

Part III. Our Conversation.

How much time are you thinking about your work? I'm thinking about it right now. I think all the time about my work. Because if I'm not thinking about something that is in the process of being made, I'm thinking about something that I want to make and how I might make it. And my work literally expands into not just physical work, as it might be understood in the art market as like an object, but it's also like the formation of concepts and ideas—that is, work—how to bring a work into three dimensions, if that's where it's going to go. Ultimately, that is work.

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So where is it before it's in three dimensions?  I think that for me it's in here... it's in my soul, right? And it's in my muscle memory. It's in my fingertips. So I think it's a thought. But it's also a feeling. And so that realm... it's a realm. But I don't think it's a realm that we identify as a place. You can go to a place that can be inhabited, right? I don't think that's what I see. I see more of a point where your heart and your mind and your stimuli connect wherever that is. But that's not a place, is it? Or is it a place? It's not physical, I don't think, and that's something I never really thought about–so I’m kind of formulating... I'm kind of like cooking, as I think, but right now I'm making some—we're making something and it's a thought. That's what's being made, and that thought is kind of changing its shape and form. Maybe not in the way we think of shape and form.

Where do ideas come from….or where do your ideas come from? I think they come from a way of processing an experience. It could be an experience in the past. It could be an experience in the future. It could be an imagined experience. But I think it's a way of interpreting something that I'm feeling or experiencing. As an artist, I have a facility for that. I think we all, as human beings, have a facility in the being and doing what we call an art. And I think, like all our perceptions and abilities, they are muscles. If you use a muscle, it's well trained. If it's not used, then it's not, and so that ability or facility, the process of being able to do it easily or more easily, is from practice and from giving yourself permission to do it in the first place. So when I think of an idea, what is an idea? I'm thinking it's a thought like... I am hungry; I am excited, I'm bored, I'm sleepy. I'm a lot of things. And then I also think that ideas sort of coexist with other ideas, and then they have a party, right? And so they can combine and do things with single ideas and thoughts. And I think that is where art starts to become interesting, at least for me, because of the ideas as they jumble up, and some of them are found. Discovered. Some of them are new. I mean, they happened like in the moment, and they are a discovered memory or idea and then all of a sudden, in its own sort of form. So it's kind of like when we think, to put it sort of scientifically, in superficially scientific terms, like the way an organism is made... cells combine.

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That's an interesting analogy for that... when you have this thing like swimming around in your brain, or when these cells are combining in thought form... When do you actually start to make it? Or what makes it worth actually putting it into a physical form so that it becomes like an object for someone else to view?  Well… I think about that question. There's some assumptions one makes when you ask that... when you put the question in that form, right? I think I spoke about this a little earlier—like some things aren't best realized in a form. Some things aren't ready to be realized in a form. I don't think so. So you are assuming that it is a finished idea that wants to take the shape of a form. All of those things have to be aligned in order for a form... to form, I think. So that means that there is motivation. And maybe that motivation is outside of—and this is going to get really pedantic. In my practice I have a work schedule. I have people that I employ that help me make what I'm making. So at that point, the ideas are in service of product making. That is the industry of art. And so I'm completely taking the romance out of what many people's idea of what art is. But you know, I think, that there are motivating factors that contribute to an idea becoming a form that serves capitalistic endeavors. Okay. That's not a world that I have that I would dream up–but I think art outside of its physical or economical use is not a luxury that I have been able to enjoy for very long. Are we honest with ourselves, and if we want to think of art as being a sustainable endeavor or vocation? Then we also have to think about it, and how do our ideas serve our ability to sustain our careers and do what we want to do? I think at a very high level I'm very lucky that I got to work in an industry where my—and it’s why I've felt lucky, but I also feel like it's what I sought out in the first place, I was very direct, and so I chose to work in a field where my ideas could be turned into things. But that's what I want. 

I'm interested. Is there a difference, then, in what a designer is—and an artist?

I think there's a huge difference. Which difference would you like to make?

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I'm just curious, because thinking back a few moments ago about this idea of capitalism, or there being a purpose for what is produced? Is there, then, a world in which art is produced not for a purpose or not for an end, and would it look different, or would it be different? No. I was just talking about my reality, the specificity of my idea-making. I can remember other points in my life where... and different artists require different motivations…but it would be misleading if I were to tell you that my ideas just get to live in an idea land and that I just... I think that feels like I’m going to say something kind of spicy, but I think that feels really frivolous. And I’m not interested in frivolity. I take my ideas too seriously, and I take what I am wanting to put in this world deadly so.

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Yeah.

So, no, I don't think that the mechanics of the economy in which I work and hopefully thrive is something that deters me from having ideas. As a matter of fact, I like real-world applications. I like the usefulness and purposefulness of art. I think that's another thing. I wish we had more conversations about that, because it doesn't make the art any less sublime for it to be useful. I think that's a regressive way of thinking about art's potential and the arts' beauty.That it's some erudite asset class for extremely wealthy people... That feels banal to me. I think, going back to before art was commodified and the human instinct to produce beauty and produce art and expression—creative expression–going all the way back to our beginnings as humans and our understanding of ourselves as humans. We made things. And I have to say that the things we make as functional art have a function. And I think that when you add elements of design, of course I'm going to say that I was trained as a designer. But, you know, I don't think that these things have to be mutually exclusive. I think that they can exist very happily together if we help ourselves decompartamentalize things and just sort of begin to be a little bit more simple. There's an art industry of criticism and history, and we can look at all of the biased ways that those have promoted our self-fulfilling ways of keeping people separate and gatekeeping. And that's a whole conversation. I think if we focus on what art can be and how it can exist in our lives, then I, for one, have to circle back to that there is an environment in which I'm making where I have found a hopefully influential [medium]. Also, remember, we spoke about power versus influence in a previous conversation. I'm much more interested in my work shaping others ideas of what duty can be… of how we might make, how we might combine materials. New things. And hopefully loosen up some of these structures. In our hierarchy of materials, where we say that painting is more… oil paint is a more valuable expression than a crayon drawing for instance. And we have these material hierarchies that I think are shaped by biases and access to materials. And so I just said when we engage the concept of how an idea can become a thing if it wants to become a thing. You have to necessarily also consider the context in which that idea is even formed and maybe, maybe while we're thinking about it? Who gets to have ideas? Who's lucky enough to make their ideas into things and who isn't? And whose things are held in higher esteem and why? These are interesting questions to me that are related to ideas coming into art. It goes deep.

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​​​​​​​​​It does. One of your pieces, and this caught my attention, and I'm trying at the moment to think of the name...is a piece in which you recreated the past from the vantage point of the future. You changed what the past is, so you reimagined it differently than it was... Is the piece coming to mind for you? That was about a period in history when a famous black writer couldn't buy a house and…

This is it! This is exactly the piece. Yes. And so there's four works from that body of work that all reimagine—that form an alternate narrative. It was at the time that they were denied the opportunity to own a house and to go a little bit deeper on that… I'm really bad with social media. I'm not necessarily interested in sharing my work that way. But I promised that I would, and I hadn't. I haven't yet shared how that story intersects with my personal story. So I live in the community where Ralph and Fanny Ellison tried to purchase a house in the early sixties, and I found out about their story. On the day we closed on our home, where in 2016, I was only the 3rd black person to own a home in this community. So fast forward—60 years—55 years. And nothing much has changed, really. So I found that to be really interesting, and I also thought that it would be cool—and this was the idea... Let me right the wrong. And let me create an artifact of what should've happened as opposed to a disturbing history of denial and what didn't happen. So you know, it's like replacing something. And it's not... I'm not trying to erase history. I am trying to engage economies and offer the potential of what could happen without race-related bias and discrimination.

​​​​I think that's what was so intriguing to me when I looked at that, because this project I have—The Museum of Ideas; is about... “Let's imagine what's possible!” But that was an imagination of what's possible... looking backward.​ Looking backward, right.

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Which was so... I was really, I think, just intrigued by that, and what you're saying, not in a way to erase, but to help an imagination that didn't somehow happen in the past, but could have been right. It's like non-linear time...in some way. It's like another time (that didn’t exist, but could have if we had been willing to look at things differently).​ Also, we have to think about sort of what I did as being a kind of... I saw it as a corrective narrative. And maybe that is because time goes beyond us and so saying that the point was for me to create an artifact that would... that would be an artifact in the future where at some point we could look back at my intervention and what actually happened, and then process those two things together... right? And my personal story. If you want to go a layer or two even deeper because it is in our popular imagination, we still have this notion of black familial life as being of broken families, of maybe more urban, less rural. Black people all don't swim at this rate that white people do, because black people weren't taught to swim, and it becomes an issue of class and socioeconomic status and who gets to enjoy leisure and whose labor historically paid for the privilege of leisure time. All of these things come together in the work that I made. The four works that I have in the show, Ralph and Fanny Ellison relaxing. It doesn't show them working. They're not working, they are in repose. They're enjoying themselves… thinking we don't know? And there's if you go to my website you'll see the other three images are part series and I think that it's important for me and my work to sort of expand everyone's understanding of what is possible. And to question the understanding. What are you looking at? What do you see when you see this? And that's what you get to do as the viewer, and my work is to set the question and to prompt you to think.

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I may have mentioned the other day, when we talked briefly about that conversation I had about the alien that was with a team of philosophers. They were talking about social constructs, and what would happen if an alien visited us who had never been or had an experience with a social group. And we had to explain to them [the alien] what a social construct was, and what the purpose for it was. And I'm thinking of the same situation in which this alien arrives and views your painting and what that would mean to this alien who's never known anything about the way we’ve operated, and how they might view what our lives were like. Right, and when I think about what an alien is or an alternate life form..we already have artificial intelligence (AI). We have AI that's with us right now. That [we have little] or no thoughts or judgments about these constructs that we form for ourselves. But they do have what AI has that I think aliens would also have: a plethora of data to pull from. So when you look at the way that I have intentionally provided clues for the era that they're living in. There's a clue they're not in the present. They're not in 2023 (when that work was made,) they're in America. And so when you look at that image of the woman emerging from the pool, and her husband looking at her kind of lovingly. And the dog... I think that, depending on what your lived experience is, and certainly for an alien life form if they put it in context with other things from that period they might notice that..well, black people from the 1960s weren't in front, didn't have colonial country houses... And all the images that we have are of black people laboring, and so are they black people, or are they just very tan white people, and then all sorts of interesting things. You know, like we have, you have to make my images make sense but also have to be elastic. And you're thinking about social constructs because I'm hoping that you do ask yourself if you are white. Why does this image feel unusual, it feels familiar, but it feels unusual? This is not how people are depicted typically in art. And if art is to represent our culture something that we can look to to represent, why don't we have more images like that? I have a bunch of reasons why we don't. But you know, like it starts to get really nuanced. How we start to—- and you also have to be willing to admit— we have to be honest with ourselves and say that not everyone is going to engage with my images the same way. They're not going to come with I think it's a— I think it's pretentious to say that everyone's going to come with an art historical or an anthropological analysis of my work. Because I am me, you might be able to do that because you are you. But what about your average person [who may not have had those opportunities]? What about my parents? Right. That's not what they're gonna like…. They may see it differently. 

[See: Is the data accurate? Bias in LLMs. Northworthy’s painting is an interesting analogy for how a corrected data set might read for a LLM.]