Massive Extra-Lengthy 2025 Wrap Up

Signaling Sigils, work in progress

The blog is back!

This is my end of 2025 wrap up filled with projects I’ve been excited about and notes on what I’ve done in my first whole year ever (in 20+ years of making art) of having a studio where I can close a door, put things up on the walls and leave my work in progress out. But I think—in part because I’m starting to write this on the darkest day of 2025, and I’ve been hearing how disillusioned and overwhelmed so many of my artist-friends are feeling—I’m going to start with acknowledging that I was in a pretty dark place about art making at this time last year. I won’t describe the details here (you can hop over to this blog post to read more about it) but for the sake of those folks reading this who are in a dark place themselves right now, and in the interest of being a living reminder that that the dark and the light times just keep coming in waves, one after the other forever, I am starting this post with the awareness of how hard it is when things are dark.

But I’m finishing this LONG bit of writing as the days are starting to grow ever so slightly lighter, so despite everything I say in the blog post referenced above, I actually went gangbusters making art and making art happen in 2025. I didn’t pause to reflect on it all until now, but I am very grateful to realize that I had the opportunity to make or present or develop at least one small project per month in 2025, so I’m going to go ahead and give you the breakdown month by month, with links and short synopses.

January: Everything is an Archive

This engagement piece involved my making about 6 pounds of sourdough starter and giving it out at an exhibition at Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts along with a brochure outlining the starter’s 30-year history, which I uncovered by tracing the network that brought into my life in 2015 back to the original source. I also toasted, buttered and served bread made with the starter, and had conversations with visitors about the vulnerability of institutional archives and the unexpected reliability of informal archival practices (like the histories stored in the sharing of sourdough starters.) Learn more: https://www.heatherkapplow.com/everything-is-an-archive/

February: SLAY!

I didn’t show any of my own work in February, but in collaboration with Jasper A. Sanchez, I ran an open call for Mobius Artist’s Group’s second-ever all-queer performance art showcase, and curated a program for the Ides of March called SLAY! that featured new works by 6 emerging queer performance artists. Learn more: https://www.mobius.org/events/mobius-live-series-slay

March: Validated

As a part of a one-night art takeover by Mobius Artists Group of the public spaces in Boston’s City Hall building (also curated by Jasper A. Sanchez!) I created a fictional city department set 13 years in the future whose function was to eradicate the cause of tyranny in the USA. It involved my witnessing two strangers acknowledging each other’s validity, and then my certifying it. Learn more: https://www.heatherkapplow.com/validated/

 April: Taking Dictation

In April, tyranny was still weighing heavily on my mind. So, by invitation from Walking as Practice, in a program curated for SUPERMARKET Art Fair by John Schuerman, I led a wild game of Simon Says/Follow The Leader, with constantly changing rules through a shopping mall in Stockholm (Sweden). Learn more: https://www.heatherkapplow.com/taking-dictation/

May: Exit Pathways: The Burning House and Worm Vision

In May, I was awarded a short cultural exchange residency in Yerevan (Armenia). While there, I connected with a curator based in Georgia who is part of an international performance art community that I belong to who had had to relocate a queer performance art festival from Tiblisi to Yerevan at the last minute. She let me know about an opportunity to create work with Berlin-based artist Anguezomo Nzé Mboulou Mba Bikoro, and a small group of us spent two days developing a strange, breathy, hour-long performance for the festival inspired by a radio interview with Black, queer activist Lorraine Hansberry. I also gave a short artist talk at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Yerevan.

Ah, and in May I also made a very quick and dirty video within a collaborative project, Dirty Time, about being a worm, which was screened in an outdoor video installation from May through September at Captive Portal in Copenhagen.  Learn more: https://www.heatherkapplow.com/recent-and-upcoming-events/2025/5/3/performing-in-exit-pathways-the-burning-house-at-the-blue-of-high-zeniths and https://www.heatherkapplow.com/recent-and-upcoming-events/2025/5/13/dirty-time-project-included-in-kiosque-de-lin-visible

June: Unnavigable Maps

I almost can’t believe I’m saying this but in June, a small 3D piece of mine called Unnavigable Maps, that I made in collaboration with the sea in 2022, and have been developing a kind of new way for people to engage with (came by and try it!) in my studio this year, got transformed into video and screened on an 80’ wide screen in the oldest theater in Melbourne at the 2025 Rising Festival, with live musical accompaniment by some really amazing musicians: Chris Abrahams, Elisabeth Fuchsia, Joe Talia and Mick Turner. It was mind blowing to see how the context shifted the work and has inspired me to someday (when I can find funding and a place to do it) create a whole new version of this work at a completely different scale than I ever could have imagined beforehand. Learn more: https://www.heatherkapplow.com/recent-and-upcoming-events/2025/6/8/unnavigable-maps-included-in-rising-festival-in-melbourne and https://thickpress.com/product/its-too-late-do-it-anyway-a-book-about-being-a-cultural-worker-in-the-apocalypse-a-hologram-starter-kit/  

July: It’s Too Late, Do it Anyway

I don’t usually talk here about my other life as a freelance language worker, but this year I worked on a project that is as much art as it is language, so I’m popping it in here briefly. Artist Cassie Thornton’s project The Hologram, which is near and dear to my heart—you’ll be hearing more about it in my 2026 annual summary I’m certain—took on a new form this year in a publication called It’s Too Late, Do It Anyway: A Book About Being A Cultural Worker During the Apocalypse/A Hologram Starter Kit, released in July by the fabulous folks over at Thick Press and I was its developmental editor. It will change your life if you let it. Learn more: https://thickpress.com/product/its-too-late-do-it-anyway-a-book-about-being-a-cultural-worker-in-the-apocalypse-a-hologram-starter-kit/  

August: Forgetting the Year calendar included in Squaring the Circle

In 2021 I received a commission to create a project for emerging from pandemic lockdown conditions from some of the dearest curators I have ever encountered, ET4U. ET4U have a unique specialty: they produce and create strange wild artworks in the strange wild landscape of rural Western Denmark. They make contemporary art festivals and installations and participatory events for fishing people and farmers. Working with them has given me some of the greatest moments of joy I’ve had in my whole life as an artist. They celebrated their 25th anniversary of making beautiful things happen in fields and barns this fall and I was thrilled and honored to have an artifact (a strange, collectively designed calendar) from my project Forgetting the Year, included in an exhibition about their work called “Squaring the Circle” that traveled to two sites in Denmark. Learn more: https://www.heatherkapplow.com/recent-and-upcoming-events/2025/8/16/work-included-in-squaring-the-circle-mors

September: Together Elsewhere

A simple thing, but as a representative of Performance Art Bergen, I was paired in a two-person, 30-minute, long-distance, simultaneous, live, improvised performance with Swiss artist Muda Mathis for the Together Elsewhere series, hosted by Performance Art Network Switzerland and streamed through the Mediathek of the Academy of Art and Design in Basel. It was very silly. Learn more: https://mediathek.hgk.fhnw.ch/ink/detail/zotero2-2608904.FSMB6ADZ

October: VIP Table + Research

I was beyond honored to be commissioned to produce a small engagement piece for the 20-year anniversary celebration/mission-deepening gathering of Boston’s most dedicated public art thinkers and doers, Design Studio for Social Intervention. These folks have been transforming Boston (and other places!) in deep deep ways, thread by thread, for two decades now and you should support their work in any way that you can—but at the very least, by answering some of the questions they’re asking in their 20th year for yourself. VIP Table proposed that everyone attending the anniversary events was a VIP in some way and helped document and make visible each person’s relationship to the organization’s history or present through a VIP badge with their summary of their role’s importance.

Also, though it’s not something I want to go into much detail about here, I went on a bit of a pilgrimage to Vilnius in October, as a detour from a trip I was on in support of someone else’s work. I have a project that I’ve put on hold but want to come back to, but am at a little bit of a loss about where to go next with, and I felt pulled to go to Vilnius as research for it. I went to find an artist whose work I’m very interested in, but also unexpectedly wound up at an international festival celebrating the intersection of art and water and had one of my deepest understandings of water to date. I feel certain that the journey held some of the answers for me around where to go next with Seeking the Source, but I haven’t had time to unpack them yet. Learn more: https://www.heatherkapplow.com/recent-and-upcoming-events/2025/9/27/vip-table-at-ds4sis-20-questions-for-20-years

November: Spilling Toxic Tea and 🎐Sit Like a Coil

This tiny, 2-day, no-budget project for the queer eco-festival Something Fierce and Fall of Freedom, ended up being kind of a dark horse favorite of mine because of the weird conversations it provoked, surprise visits from a dear one or two, and the opportunity it ended up giving me to walk through a little snippet of Queens at night looking like a trash version of Big Bird from Sesame Street. The concept was that on the first day, people would write things in invisible ink (made with superfund water) that they struggled with around their eco-intentions, and then the next day these anonymous confessions would be revealed (in scarlet, the color of shame!) for all to see. At the end, I offered to send our collective hopes for meaningful solutions to our planet’s ever-increasing, human-inflicted traumas out into the universe, witchily. Which/witch I did.

I also did my first project where I worked closely with AI, a piece called 🎐Sit Like a Coil, currently on view online at Unrequited Leisure’s pavilion for The Wrong Biennale. Spoiler alert: I might have broken ChatGPT. Learn more: https://www.heatherkapplow.com/spilling-toxic-tea/ and https://www.heatherkapplow.com/recent-and-upcoming-events/2025/10/26/sit-like-a-coil-included-in-wrong-biennale-7

December: Signaling Sigils and #evolutionarypoems

I love working in collaborative teams but in recent years some of my collaborations have organically dissolved or slowed way down. It’s normal, if a little hard on the heartstrings, and it’s been good for me to get to know more about what I can make as an individual artist, but I’ve also been excited these past few months to be working at least tentatively and temporarily in a new collaborative configuration. It’s still a bit amorphous and invisible, but we’ve been making really lovely stuff. I won’t share more than I should, since it’s all in progress and I haven’t asked permission, but it’s thinking a lot about what tricky things language does when it goes around trying to make meaning all solid and definite-seeming when it’s really slippery af. And doing it through a super-queer set of sensibilities, driven by the massively talented but modest as hell Sair Goetz, whose work I got to know via the SLAY! programming mentioned earlier. Not sure where it will go next but I’m looking forward to the ride.

In December I also threw together a very last-minute public event to celebrate the release of a new book of poetry by a friend and multi-talented artist from Dessie, Ethiopia (but currently a political refugee based in Vienna.) Mirhet Kebede, who was passing through the Northeast of the US briefly at the end of the year. She and her collaborator anna moschovakis read from their new book #Evolutionary Poems, which I highly recommend you starting your year off reading, accompanied by the always-fabulous Thalia Zedek. You can hear a snippet here. Learn more: https://circumferencebooks.com/book/evolutionary-poems/

A few quick reflections across the year: One of the things that really gets me through the hard times of being an artist is participating very actively in artist-run collectives. I have not had much luck making sense of the workings of the commercial art market or formal art institutions, but artist-run collectives are the juice of my art life. It’s my membership in three of these (Flux Factory, which I’ve been a part of since 2013; Mobius which I’ve been a part of since 2021; and WAP which I officially joined this year) that have made my months so busy and have made my heart sing through these troubled times.

And speaking of artists and troubled times, I want to note that my travels this year (and many years lately) have brought me into very serious conversation with artists that are in exile from their home countries for political reasons—for the nature of their art, because of their queerness, or for their activism. Most that I’ve spent time with this year are from Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus but in previous years it has been folks from the Middle East, Africa, Asia… I have learned so much from these folks about being true to what you believe, and about finding community in motion. It’s a goal of mine to find ways, outside of institutions, to bring these voices into my local communitiy whenever I can. And, as we move into 2026, I am celebrating the release of Maria Kalesnikava, a musician and poltical activist (and the director of a very small now-defunct residency that I was in 2019,) who has just been released from prison in Belarus after 5 years without contact with her family or lawyers for most of that time.

Ok, finally what’s next? I don’t know all of my plans for 2026 yet, but stay tuned for news about a small performance festival in Boston focused on living with health conditions as a source of creative flourishing called Condition Report; a project that expands on the ideas that I was playing with in Validated; and a sound project that lets young people talk about hard feelings without talking.

And if you’re in Boston on January 10th, come see this!

Wishing you as much fun in 2026 as I had in 2025!
Warmly and gratefully,

H

Darkness

This is a preamble to this post.

At the end of 2024, I was feeling like it was truly finally time to call it. Time to wind down my practice, pack it up and figure out what could possibly be next. It was a year where I’d submitted over 60 applications to open calls with proposals for projects I feel really strongly about and have been wanting to make for many years now. Projects that speak to critical issues like our acute loneliness, our radical destruction of our planet, and the very deepest inequities we live with every day as if they were normal. Projects that would have let me scale up, stretch my capacity, work with new tools and in new contexts. I had been awarded some really wonderful opportunities through applications I’d submitted in 2023 (like the aforementioned studio that I’m so grateful for!) which I knew would carry me into 2025 and some even into 2026, but almost every single proposal I submitted in 2024 was rejected. And that was tough, though it goes with the territory.

But also…I spent half of November 2024 performing within a friend’s genius project at the Venice Biennale—a context frequently described as “the Olympics of the art world”—and experienced a massive awakening there. The whole time I’ve been making art, I’ve been assuming that the reason it’s so psychologically grueling, crushingly unhealthy and poverty-inducing is because I’m not operating at a very high level of the game so to speak. In November of 2024, I learned incontrovertibly that this is not true. That the exploitation baked into the system at the bottom, carries all the way up to the top. And though having my own work featured in the Venice Biennale had never been something I’ve been consciously aspiring to, my experiences there rattled my entire sense of what there even was to aspire to within this system if it is all oriented towards the ideal of operating at the “Olympic” level.

And then finally, right before the end of 2024, I was informed that I was not chosen for a major grant and honor—the inaugural Wagner Arts Fellowship—that I had been nominated for. (I actually haven’t told anyone about this until right here, right now.) But it was crushing. I was on the edge of feeling like I just couldn’t lie to myself anymore about how little I had to show for the amount of effort and energy and (really unhealthy) sacrifice I’ve made in the past decade or so in order to center art making and art community building in my life, and being nominated for the award felt like the first glimmer of hope I’d experienced in that whole time that what I was doing had meaning to anyone but me and a few (very dear) champion-friends. Waiting for the outcome of the jurying left me feeling like I could hold on for a few more months juggling just enough random freelance work to stay out of deep debt if there was even a chance of finally being seen and cared for by the mystical system of art benefacting. When I was not selected for one of the three awards, it was just too much for me. This was the 5th time I’d been nominated for a Boston-focused award with a small a pool of invited applicants and not been selected, and I was just done. I felt (and still feel,) like these are the worst possible kinds of art awards: being pre-selected and then still not being X enough to become a finalist (and of course never knowing why…) somehow cuts far more deeply than being rejected with dozens or thousands of others in a wide-open call. I still feel like these kinds of awards should just be decided on quietly by a jury and given out without anyone who isn’t chosen for them ever knowing that they were a contender for them at all.

So that’s where I was at the end of last year. I do still feel awakened in some way that I can’t go back to sleep about. I am fully freed from some illusions about what there is to aspire to within the arts that I used to be more hypnotized by. I also took almost all of 2025 off from applying to open calls. With the exception of a few that I have applied to annually for my whole life that are nearly lotteries, and some programs I’ve applied to in order to produce other people’s work as a facilitator or presenter, I have (sometimes easily and sometimes with a lot of difficulty) pulled back from this fairly compulsive habit which was starting to feel a lot like a gambling addiction. I’m starting to apply for things again just now for the first time, but with a lot of new boundaries around how much time and energy I’m willing to expend. I do still feel like there is a strong chance I will have to shift gears professionally soon because the model I’m currently working within is not a sustainable one (please let me know if you have good ideas for what I might be doing that uses all of the skills that art builds, but is a healthier way of being in the world!) But for now, I’m still putting art making ahead of everything else in my life.

Too Lazy to Post Here!

Ya’ll it looks like I am too lazy to post here these days, so for now please enjoy my Instgram feed.

So...there's a piece of public artwork in my neighborhood that has ALWAYS rubbed me the wrong way. Reason #1 is that there was a sizeable-budget open call for original work preferring proposals from the neighborhood for the site that I kept waiting to see the results of and then this work appeared--work by an artist from well outside of Boston, commissioned for elsewhere in the city and then relocated here when the first site was done with it. Reason #2 is that it is banal: it felt like I was being forced to read a Hallmark card that someone had smeared across several city blocks. Every day. Lately though, it's been growing on me. No one official monitors its condition and it's been altered regularly to reflect interesting neighborhood facts, such as how happy and healthy our rat population is getting. Tonight, seeing its newest iteration perfectly placed to be lit up by car headlights all night long, I feel like we finally have the meaningful peice of locally produced artwork we deserved all along...⚡⚡

Processing, Flying Sparks and Byproducts

I’m starting off this post where I am at the moment, thinking about art studio spaces and what happens in them. This is my third studio space I’ve worked in this year, and I’m feeling a little bit today what they all have in common as ecosystems of activity. Everyone in shared or adjacent spaces does different things with their space and art making time, but we also all do the same things, and there is this small ongoing ebb and flow of information exchange that keeps everything in fluid operation. We check on each other’s stages: “I am figuring out what I want to make next.” “I am testing different materials.” “I have a show in two months.” ““I have a show in two weeks!!!!” “I didn’t do anything. I was too tired. I just drank coffee and started out the window for two hours.” “I don’t know what I’m doing, I just needed to get some kind of mess happening.” “I’m just organizing to be able to focus.” “I’m updating my website.”

We peek at each other’s stuff and approve. We tell each other where to get the good things: trash, plaster, paint, plastic sheeting, hardware.

So today I’m giving you a version of this.

I’ve been in Bilbao exactly 2 weeks, at my studio here exactly 10 days, 11am-9pm more or less, usually with a break from 2pm-4pm, as is the way here. I’ve made 8 test objects; filled 8 pages of a note/sketchbook; made a 3-page typewritten project to do list; read and taken notes on a book about the luxury good marketplace; applied for a local grant; transcribed 7 audio interviews; and looked at about 3000 web pages researching things like the melting point of different kinds of steel, the firing temperature of different porcelain formulas, the weight of various thicknesses of milky plexiglass, highest printable resolution of my camera’s CMOS, the tensile strength of different materials that can be cut on a particular CNC router, and the availability of a vintage American toy on Ebay in the EU.

Until I made this list just now, I was feeling like I haven’t really been doing anything. I was really only counting the time I was in the metal workshop as getting anything done, but I see now that I was wrong.

One of the most satisfying things has been learning welding and grinding steel with an angle grinder for a few hours most days—the flying sparks make me feel very productive, as does the pile of iron-dust on the floor (but unfortunately also in my hair, and nostrils…) afterwards. (I’ve got a small, elegant jar now and as of tomorrow will start saving this dust. Not sure why yet…) The only other downside besides iron dust snot (just got a mask so now this is over,) is that I packed so light (1 carry on for 6 months) that all 3 of the T-shirts I brought are already full of tiny holes.

The processing of my audio interviews from Zürich has also been satisfying in a more sitting down kind of way, and maybe slightly emotional too. People opened up to me with so much sincerity and hearing their voices in my earbuds brings back a lot of feeling that I’m not sure yet how I’ll capture in the final project. But I’m capturing the words for sure, and the ones that recur tell an interesting story. With this too, I’m not 100% sure what I’ll do with it, but it seems important to soak in this material that I’ve set aside since February and why not transcribe as much as possible while doing so? It feels like these voices are getting at the root of something key to the project. I’m hearing these nuances about the significance of certain objects in the formation of a sense of an identity that feels really critical, as well as stories about people using self-care to create strong senses of differentiation between self and other. It’s much more psychological material (a field I have very little knowledge of…) than I expected to be working with. I am planning on processing everything I collected in Zürich in January/February during this month, but when I put that on my to do list/timeline, I was only thinking of the most literal sense of the word: that I would be processing the data in different ways—editing it, organizing it etc. There’s no way on to make note on a to do list of how much of the other kind of processing (absorbing, feeling, making emotional sense of content) I’m doing too.

Finally, I’ll explain the badly white-balanced photo above. Like the iron dust and possibly much of the transcription I’m doing, being in the studio and/or making things produces a lot of byproduct that is not simply noise or junk. Sometimes, for a moment, you think it is, but then you realize it’s got some aura of the creative process still emanating from it. The image above is a byproduct I left behind in my studio space in Zürich. One of the other artists in the space had hung the plate there for me before I arrived as a kind of campy welcome to Switzerland. The plate, purchased at a nearby junk shop for 3 francs, is a fairly classic symbolic representation of the founding of Switzerland, each character representing one of the country’s original cantons (self-governed regions) taking council together.

At my studio there, I was often cutting up and making collages (another byproduct, as I’ve done nothing with them yet…) out of catalogs for luxury goods. The guy with the briefcase came from an architectural rendering of an impending luxury housing complex. My matte knife was a little dull and he was cut a little too messy, so I scrapped him, but then retrieved him from the trash and taped him to the plate as a joke to see if anyone would notice. It took a long time, but when they did, he was greatly appreciated as a creative response to the gift-plate. He worked well enough to function symbolically as conceptual art (rich guy with a briefcase full of money ignoring the country’s historical, rurally-originated values in favor of his own desires for all of the mod cons and a need to present as super professional.) But not well enough to be one of my official, final, art products because the relationship between the parts was not smooth/seamless enough to meet my esthetic standards. It was just art enough to warrant a space on the wall in a space of art development: studio spaces need less finished art than other places do, and in fact maybe needs it more than it needs finished art.

Pure Luxury Part II

Greetings from my studio for the next six months at Bilbao Arte where my name is a little different, but my project is the same.

It’s the end of my first day here and I just wrote a thoughtful blog post refreshing your memory about what I’m working on and telling you about some of the new things I’ve tried even today (for example learning a little welding from an outgoing artist in residence named Javier Arbizu; and drinking Mate from a bombilla shared with me by my very sweet, also-incoming Argentinian studiomates, Los Picoletos,) but I must be jetlagging because I accidentally deleted it instead of publishing it.

I’ll come back here soon and say it all again and more…

Index Residency Instagram Feed

I’ve embedded the Instagram feed for the residency at Index, where I am for January-February 2019, because I’m guest-hosting it as a special celebration of being their 50th artist-in-residence. The feed will continue on here after my residency ends, and hopefully inspire me (and anyone else who reads this) in an ongoing way.

If you ever want to go back in time after February 2019 and see all of my guest-host posts, you can always search their feed for #HeatherKapplow.

Danke danke danke an indexfreiraum für die allerschönste Weise, das Jahr zu beginnen an la_cápsula für Ort, Gehör und Mezcal an Zürich und seine Menschen, Möwen, Berge, Buchhandlungen, ...

New Year, New Blogging Plan!

A community conversation at Sweat it Out (photo by Lani Asuncion.)

Folks, I’ve been incredibly lazy about blogging. I have a pile of draft blog posts I’ve started in the last year or so, one focused on each of the small and large projects I did in 2017-2018, but I never finished/published any of them. It looks like they were each waiting for links or images (or in one case that I feel especially guilty about, an entire PDF catalog for a great project that I still haven’t made, but which it is now my New Year’s resolution to make before the year is through.)

So here’s the new plan:

At the end or beginning of each year, I’ll do the obligatory annual lookback or lookforward or both (spoiler alert: this is that) if appropriate. I’ll try to give you a snapshot of where I am, what I’m thinking about or working on on that date, tell you what I’m reading, post some links to art I’ve seen/written about recently, and catch you up on any news of importance about my art career. I’ll try to do a mid-year (Summer) check in as well that’s pretty similar, but no promises.

Also, whenever I’m in a residency (which I am right now,) I’ll keep some kind of residency diary. In this case, I’m about to take over the residency’s Instagram account, so I’ll probably just feed that through here, but maybe there will be a little more than that. We’ll see.

So, late-2017 through 2018 had a bunch of small projects (PDF catalog of one of them coming really, really soon, I promise!) and one larger scale, collaborative public art project. Other highlights include working with the amazing amorphous, shamanistic, border-erasers and culture hackers, La Pocha Nostra, twice—in the US and in Mexico City. I’ve learned so much from being absorbed into this collective, and can’t wait to learn more. I also got to work closely with the New England Foundation for the Arts for the first time, after receiving funding from their Creative City program. Their staff are incredibly thoughtful and hardworking, and the community building they do is not just “out in the community” but cohort-wise: I’ve already started plotting new art with people I met through NEFA’s gatherings…

The beginning of 2019 finds me in Zürich, at Index's Freiraum, one of two (!!!) international residencies I’ve been awarded this year, studying one of the things the city is most known for: LUXURY. It will be awhile before there is a hard outcome from this work, but the project I’m developing is called “Pure Luxury”, and I’ll keep this blog populated with snippets of work in progress, as it progresses during this residency. I’m loving this city in Winter and the Index community is great—very supportive as I bumble through the trial and error of my process.

Other (good) news is that I am here with the help of a grant from the Boston Cultural Council’s Opportunity Fund, and that when I return to Boston in March, I’ll be working with MASS MOCA’s Assets for Artists professional development team to build some (much needed) better business skills and resources for getting higher quality documentation of my projects: I’m (gratefully) one of their 2019 Matched Savings Program awardees.

At this very moment I’m working (almost done!) on an inventory of my own personal luxuries, modeled on what I imagine the 4th step in 12-step programs is like: I’m taking an honest look at my varied indulgences, how I developed them, and why I “need” them. Then I’ll be making and circulating 3 surveys about luxury to Index’s network and other Zürich-ers (Zürich-ians?) and doing some audio recording in luxury boutiques/interviewing people. Oh, I’m also writing a letter to Oprah Winfrey.

I’ll link to some of these things here when they’re ready/and or post them in the blog via Instagram. I’m also working on some grant applications so that I can afford to attend the next residency, but that’s boring.

Currently I’m reading:

• Tom Stoppard’s 1974 play Travesties (because it’s set in Zürich when Stalin, James Joyce and all of the Dadaists were here.)

• Mark Manson’s self-help book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (because it was one of very few English language books in my room here when I arrived.)

• Jean-Noël Kapferer’s On Luxury (for obvious reasons.)

• Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class.

• The (as yet unpublished) dissertation of one of several amazing advisors to my luxury research, Nabanita Talukdar, “Tweets, Retweets and Luxury Connoisseurs: An Empirical Study of the Relationship Between Tweet Volume and Stock Prices for Luxury Brands."

• And I’m re-reading Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave. Bought it in a train station for a long train ride, and then realized immediately how much I needed to keep a vivid image of slave labor in mind while otherwise lost in the textures and heady commerce of high lux…

And here are the last few things I wrote (about art) though I have several articles in progress right now too, so it doesn’t represent exactly what I’ve seen most recently. But I’m still absorbing this stuff too:

https://hyperallergic.com/477454/introducing-tony-conrad-a-retrospective/

https://hyperallergic.com/476284/sweet-little-cunt-the-graphic-work-of-julie-doucet/

https://digboston.com/now-now-now-now-now-now-now-now-now/

http://bostonartreview.com/reviews/dismal-boston-skyline-boston-university-art-gallery/

https://digboston.com/imagining-an-after/

Nature and Nurture II

Going (detail)

I spent the month of June at the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale NY, as their Public Artist-in-Residence, working on a project called Going.

It was a first for me in a couple of ways: My first time living outside of a city for any significant length of time and my first time making a large scale, semi-permanent public art project.

I've done large scale and temporary, and small scale and semi-permanent, but this combination was new for me.

The scale, to be more precise, was 22 miles. The duration was to be 4-5 months.

Going was billed as a 22-mile long meditation on the paths we make through nature and life, occurring along the Walkill Valley Rail Trail in the Hudson Valley in New York State.

When I arrived at WSW, I wasn't positive that I would be able to work along the entire trail. It was important to me that I try, because I saw that most previous rail trail public art projects had occurred right around the WSW campus and I felt it was my duty as a public artist to try to connect with wider a public if possible. But I was without a car, and had to work part-time remotely while in residence, so I was very nervous about over-committing.

After spending my first weekend riding the entire trail by bike I decided I would do it. I fell in love with all of the ways that the trail's environment shifted over its many miles, and loved the conversations I was having with people along the trail and when I got off the trail to explore each town it passed through.

My strategy was to divide the month into thirds: The first 3rd would be research and writing. I would ride and hike the trail, pausing and writing site-specific texts for my project as different parts of the trail inspired me. The texts were to go on signs, meant to look as much like the existing signage as possible, so that people were unsure of whether their source was official or not. So this research period also involved reaching out to the two organizations that manage the trail, and to the sign maker who made the official signs so that I could mimic the fonts and colors correctly, as well pricing and testing fabrication materials and methods. The second 3rd of my residency was the fabrication. I still visited the trail most days, but for this phase I was mostly working incredibly hard in the studios. My goal was to put up 1-3 signs per trail mile, so with the help of custom jig designed by WSW's woodshop magician, Woody,  I cut 40 1/2" luan boards into the dimensions and shapes of the official signs; gave each sign multiple coats of primer and paint; created 40 different silkscreens; printed a different text on each board; and then gave them each a few coats of shellac so that they would be both watersafe and look a bit aged. In the final 3rd of my residency, I would install the signs along the trail on steel poles matching the existing poles, and then document and celebrate the project.

All of this happened, more or less on schedule, but there was a tremendous hitch.

In the first day of installation, with sweaty, all-day, hands-on assistance from WSW's staff and interns, I hit both ends of the trail and planted 5 or 6 signs in between. I didn't want them clumped together or too near to any entrance to the trail that had parking because I wanted them to appear to have arrived mysteriously. It took a good contingent of human support to make this happen: Installing involved one person holding a 6-foot pole in place while another person pounded it a foot+ into the ground. The signs, poles, and 16-pound pole driver had to be hiked in on foot.

Going (detail)

On the second day of installation, we got 10 signs into the ground, plus great photographs of the work in progress. At the end of that day, one of WSW's staff mentioned to me that someone had complained about one of the signs in a community Facebook group. The sign (above) was on a part of the path that crossed through someone's (very beautiful) orchard and they felt it was a provocation for people to steal fruit from their trees. Or so I was told. I wasn't able to see the Facebook post. I thought this was strange, and asked to join the Facebook group in the hopes of communicating directly with the person who raised the concern. My hope was that I could figure out a way to make them happier with the sign where it was, or else to have them suggest a better place for it that posed less of a threat to the fruit. But I had to complete an application to join the group and by the time it was approved, I had been asked by one of the trail organizations to go and take the sign down. I did, and then put another 12 signs up, but at the end of that third day of installing, and two days before the opening, it was determined that the signs all had to come down. The permissions that I thought had been in place for the project were not in place properly, and though there was willingness to negotiate permissions for part of the trail, there just wasn't time for me to take all of the signs that were already up down and move them to new locations. Besides, many, like the one below, meant to occur near a bridge known to have a slight electrical charge, were too site-specific to move to elsewhere.

Going (detail)

Instead of living along the trail, which I'm told is used by 7-10,000 people annually, the signs (minus some that disappeared during their brief tenure on the trail) are now installed in front of WSW. I went with an esthetic that I think of as 'half-graveyard, half-front yard of someone with very strong religious convictions and a lot of signboard.' It's not at all the impact or intention I had proposed or aimed for, but it's what can be. My hope is that those signs, clumped together in that location, along with this blog post, for those who read it, can nurture some kind of conversation about who public art is for and/or what it needs to be like to meet the needs and desires of 'the public'.

Going

I was making something that I thought of as a gift for the trail-using public, but it was a gift that actually wasn't necessarily wanted, and so the big question then becomes, who is public art for if the public doesn't want it? It's like the life-lesson one gets from throwing a surprise party for someone that hates being surprised: I imagined myself enhancing the experience of being on the trail, but a) there was no one out there calling for enhancements to the trail experience, and b) the trail has aspects of its existence that have nothing to do with its use as a public resource. The trail crosses people's private land through a series of easement agreements, and it's completely valid to ask whether anything installed on the trail in these areas should be there if it interferes with someone's enjoyment of their private land beyond what has already been agreed to via the easement. If I had understood this before I started, I probably would have reached out individually to folks with easement agreements and tried to work out whether I was capable of making something that they would enjoy having in place. But it's too late for that now.

I got a lot out of the residency despite not being able to realize the project I came to make: I worked harder than I've ever worked and learned a lot about my capacity; I got real intimate with some tools (most notably a middle-aged bandsaw and several well-loved scoop coaters,) that I barely knew beforehand; I actually liked the quality of my work on this project, which is rare; and most importantly, I built what can only be described as a visceral connection with the trail itself. The trail changed and sharpened my senses, and I miss it. I can see its mists in my mind's eye and feel its temperature changes with my mind's body and am left with an uncanny sense that it collaborated with me on my project. The idea of collaborating with a place is a fabulous one for me to walk away with. Even if this idea is pure fantasy and fades, at the very least, my time on/with the trail nurtured something previously unknown in me—a sort of primal, bodily logic that is new to me, but which feels installed permanently now in my consciousness.

Going (detail)

When I left WSW, I joked that my best avenue for feeling that the project was a successful one after all was to imagine that it was an endurance performance art piece rather than a public art installation. Now I'm less prone to seeing that idea as a joke. Assessed as an endurance piece, it would most definitely qualify as a meaningful and accomplished work, and then it becomes far less important who the audience is. Or rather, the audience for an endurance piece is always the highest, most questioning part of oneself that tries to answer the query

Going (detail)