〰️〰️ IN 〰️

These are things I read, saw, ingested, ate, listened to, or just generally thought about in the last month that I want to share with you. It's an incomplete list (obviously) but it's the stuff I'm still thinking about.

In my quest to become a better fiction writer, I've been taking a bunch of little classes. Recently I enrolled in the One Story Lecture series and their class on Beginnings. I've also started reading a book recommended by Madeline Ashby during the last Flash Forward Book Club meeting (where she so generously came to talk about her book, Glass Houses) called Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith.

I was in DC for 24 hours, and to kill time between things I went to the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (two museums in one building). I'll confess I don't generally care that much about portraiture — I am more of an abstract art kind of guy (which isn't to say those things are mutually exclusive). But it was fund to wander around and see what I was drawn to.

And then at the very end of one of the hallways I spotted a piece that I had no idea was at this museum, and that I was SO excited to see: Edmonia Lewis's 'The Death of Cleopatra.'

I highly recommend this lecture about Lewis and this sculpture in particular. Seriously, watch it. I'm going to summarize some of it below here, but I really, really recommend you watch.

Lewis was an absolute badass: a tiny (reportedly only about four feet tall) Black women making huge, beautiful, marble sculptures in the late 1800's. In 1862 Lewis had to flee Oberlin college after being falsely accused of poisoning two fellow students. She went to Boston where she became a successful artist, and then eventually made her way to Rome. When she displayed this particular sculpture of Cleopatra at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia it was met with revulsion. Critics called it "ghastly" and "absolutely repellent."

This particular scene — Cleopatra's death — was a common motif in art at the time. There are loads of statues of the Egyptian ruler dying from this time period. But what makes Lewis's unique is that the iconic queen looks genuinely dead. Rather than giving Cleopatra a beautiful, sensual, or heroic form she sculpts her as heavy — a weight still weighing down the throne. This choice isn't just about realism. It's a statement. To Lewis, Cleopatra doesn't represent beauty or heroism but rather oppression — she is, as Dr. Lev puts it in the lecture, "the most famous slaveholder of the most famous slave holding nation in history." Lewis's depiction of Cleopatra is far less sympathetic than other artists at the time, because to Lewis Cleopatra is a villain.

This is what critics were reacting to when they called the piece "ghastly." Seeing the sculpture in person was really amazing.

Plus, they had a pot by Dave the Potter! I wrote about his pots, and why I get emotional about clay, here.

Corita Kent

My friend Suzanne Fischer introduced me to the work of Corita Kent and I'm SO into it. Here's a bio of Kent from her institute's website:

Corita Kent (1918–1986) was an artist, educator, and advocate for social justice. At age 18 she entered the religious order Immaculate Heart of Mary, eventually teaching and then heading the art department at Immaculate Heart College. During the course of her career, her artwork evolved from using figurative and religious imagery to incorporating advertising images and slogans, popular song lyrics, biblical verses, and literature. Throughout the ‘60s, her work became increasingly political, urging viewers to consider poverty, racism, and social injustice. In 1968, she left the order and moved to Boston. After 1970, her work evolved into a sparser, introspective style, influenced by living in a new environment, a secular life, and her battles with cancer. She remained active in social causes until her death in 1986. At the time of her death, she had created almost 800 serigraph editions, thousands of watercolors, and innumerable public and private commissions.

Her work is full of such life and curiosity and a sense of justice on the page. I'd love to capture a fraction of this in my printmaking work! Here are some upcoming exhibitions.

I also enjoyed:

• They Might Be Giants at the The Fillmore
• A lasercutting class at my studio.
• Attending some Oakland Soul games.
• "I mostly keep track of it on my phone, a device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now." This piece by Jia Tolentino really captured how I'm feeling a lot of the time right now.
• "The leisure that forms the basis of culture is a directed and intentional curiosity — it is the practice of formulating questions and seeking answers with a disposition towards wonder, not rigid certainty. Where free time is not used for research — for developing questions, and investigating the answers with an explorer’s spirit — cultural coherence crumbles." More writing on research as a leisure activity.
• This song.

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

Secret Upcoming Thing

I can't say a ton about this yet but I am working an amazing team on a project that is going to launch soon! You can sign up here to find out more and get the inside scoop before everybody else.

Unbreaking

One of the big challenges right now, I think, in trying to work against the current administration is the chaos of it all. This is part of the strategy — or at the very least a happy side effect of the "move fast and break things" ethos that has infected the White House. It means that it's hard to figure out what is actually happening to federal organizations and services. And I believe that it's much harder to meaningfully organize against something when you're not completely sure of what is going on. If we are reacting based on rumors, fear, incomplete information, or assumptions about what is going on we're going to waste a lot of time and energy chasing ghosts, when there are demons rampaging just off screen (okay that metaphor doesn't really make sense, forgive me).

The project of actually documenting what we know about what is going on is difficult and unglamorous. But it's essential. And it's what Unbreaking is trying to do.

In our work at Unbreaking, we’ll help orient and ground our communities in clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters. To that end, we’re building a set of pages that will serve as a backgrounders for the issues we cover. Each page is written by and for ordinary people, and conveys essential context, a sense of what’s happened so far, and what countermoves are in play. Our pages will be updated once or twice a week as needed.

I joined Unbreaking this past month to help write, research, and edit pages. I'm mostly focused on the attacks on trans healthcare but am helping out wherever I can. If this work speaks to you and you're interested in helping we now have a little online form for volunteers.

Studio Struggles

My semester at Laney ended this month which meant that I got all my sculptures out of the kiln. I wrote to you all last month about my struggles to figure out what the hell to do with these now that I'm no longer weaving. I'm still figuring that out. Here's what I wrote in my final project about this:

I think the biggest thing I learned this semester is that I'm really a sculptor, not a ceramicist. It was amazing to watch everybody else in the class work on refining their understanding of clay, glaze, throwing and more, while also realizing that I'm much more interested in mixing media and using shape and form as a springboard rather than interested in clay itself.

I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I want to do with these forms so that they feel complete to me. In trying to answer that question I've been doing some thinking and writing about what it is that I'm actually interested in as a sculptor. What ties these pieces together thematically and conceptually?

Artist statement: I'm interested in abstract, organic, playful forms that embody concepts of extrusion and escape. Clay offers a hard, solid body that other material can press out from, melt out of, hang over, balance above. Ultimately, the rigidity of ceramic is something for other elements to push against and ultimately escape. Each piece tells a small story of pressure and containment, and what happens when elements break free from those walls.

I tried some nylons stuffed with stuffing.

These are... okay? But I'm not loving them. I think the proportions are wrong — the stuffed bits are too similar in size and shape to the clay bits.

I also tried to work with spray foam, and that has had some interesting results. I tried spraying foam into a balloon, and then peeling the latex off. This actually worked way better than I expected.

So then I tried it again, but with a longer balloon. The problem is that this time I sealed the balloon, which was a mistake. The pressurized spray foam puts out a ton of air, and the foam itself reacts with the air to expand. Which leads to a balloon that can pop. And when that happens, spray foam gets all over your hands. This is bad! It's ... very hard to get off.

But I did actually like the texture of the mistake quite a lot. And then something surprising happened!

Wet spray foam is a nightmare to deal with — it's sticky and slimy and impossible to clean or handle. But once it's dry and cured you can pop it off a surface like a sealed table no problem. So I left this mess on the table at the studio for it to set, along with a note that said I'd be back the next day. And when I returned the next day I found a whole new little foam formation had formed!

Cool right? I am now thinking about playing with this somehow, trying to figure out how to make this kind of growth happen on purpose.

I also did have one balloon that survived, unpopped. Which I left in the studio with a totally not-ominous note.

So I'm to going to keep chipping away at this idea in the coming weeks, to figure out what is viable and what isn't. And! Burying the lead here I guess a little, but next month I'm actually going to be in an art show! My first ever show! If you're in the Bay Area please come :)

In May I also:

• Gave a talk about Tested for the Center for Gender and Sex in Health at the University of Illinois. I focused the talk on what sex testing can teach us about the nature of evidence, something that I think about a lot these days.
• Was on a panel for the New America fellows to talk about the realities of podcasting.
• Got a small model working, trained on a corpus of religious texts for PROJECT TEONANACTL. Vitorio Miliano did the heavy lifting on this, I just compiled the source material. I'm going to write more about this process and project in a future newsletter!
• Filed a story about volleyball to Defector.
• Moved to a new place! (Oh my god this is so much work.)
• Came up with a game plan for revisions on PROJECT CUBENSIS.
• Shared a first draft of PROJECT TEONANACTL with some friends and my agent.
• Got my voice acting profile setup to hopefully do more audiobooks.