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Transcript of "Virtual Studio Salon II: Alumni Artists, it's Political!"
Zoe Messinger: Hi everyone. So excited to have you guys all on today. I think it's going be a really fun event. My name is Zoe, and this is our second installment of the Brandeis studio tours. We started this idea because we wanted to see how artists are being creatively inspired over quarantine and in addition just wanted to explore the many different paths at Brandeis artists can move on. Today we're speaking with three artists about how a Brandeis education has informed where they are and their artistic lives and also how quarantine and today's political environment has affected their creative processes. This event is hosted by the Brandeis Arts Network. This network is a group of Brandeis alumni who work together to encourage art professionals and art enthusiasts alike to experience and work with fellow Brandeisians on campus and beyond. If you want to know more about the Brandeis Arts Network, we'll be posting a Facebook link at the end of the call. In addition, I just wanted to quickly go through all of the artists who we're speaking with today. The first artist, his name is Marlon Forrester and he goes by he/him pronouns. Marlon attended Brandeis from 1999 until 2003. He double-majored in creative writing and studio art. Then he also went on to earn his BFA at Tufts and his MFA at Yale University. While at Brandeis, he was a member of the Myra Kraft Transitional Year Program. He also played on the Brandeis basketball team, go judges! Currently he is a Boston public school art instructor, a grad studio visiting artists in Maine College of Art. He also has several upcoming commissions in the New England area. Our next artist, her name is Naomi Safran-Hon. She goes by she/her pronouns. Naomi attended Brandeis as an undergraduate from 2004 until 2008. She majored in studio art and art history, and she went on to received her MFA from Yale University. While she was at Brandeis, she was a scholar and she worked in the library. Nowadays Naomi teaches painting at both Purchase College and Montclair State University. She recently had a show at the flag gallery that was written up by The New York Times. Last month Naomi received her American citizenship. Yay! The last artist we have is Brontë Velez. Brontë goes by they/them pronouns. Brontë attended Brandeis from 2012 to 2016 and created their own interdisciplinary major: arts identity and community building. While Brontë was at Brandeis, they were our tour guide for admissions, co-directed Hairspray, and they also choreographed the Whiz. They're currently working as the Creative Director for Louis to life. They're also an educator for weeping earth and nature connection in ancestral art skill school. During COVID Brontë's taken up candle making and is also working on a mockumentary called Soma Tomlin. The moderators on this call are Alison Judd, Danielle Friedman and myself, Zoe. Just a little bit about us. Alison graduated from Brandeis in 2004 with a double-major in painting and art history. She continued to earn her postbac certificate at Brandeis also in 2005. While she was an undergrad, she sang in the Brandeis a cappella group Manginah. She also met her husband who neither sing nor studied art. Currently, she's living with a family on Cape Cod, but typically they live in Brookline where she works for her home studio. Alison has spent quarantine teaching her children, her dog and working on her sourdough starter. Danielle is an artist, educator and adviser. She earned her BA from Brandeis in studio art in 2009 and had a postbac certificate in 2012. Her MFA and painting and printmaking from Yale in 2015. She currently lives in Manhattan, but not for long. She's about to fly to Israel for six months to teach in Eilat. Finally, my name is Zoe. I went to Brandeis from 2009 to 2013 and I had a double-major in art history and business. Currently, I work at a hospitality design company, and I just moved to Chicago. They have this thing where everyone discusses the deep dish pizza, but they don't talk about thin crust pizza. I ordered a thin crust pizza to compare it to New York and they cut it into party squares. I don't know what that is, but it's not a slice. Anyway, while we continue to explore pizza options, I figured we could also get started on the event. If you guys have any questions throughout the event, you can definitely write it in the chat, which I think you can find at the bottom of your screen there's a chat button and you can write your question there. I'd also like to mention that today's event is being recorded for future viewings by those who couldn't make it for today's zoom. That's about it. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll have a Q&A session after. If you have questions again, leave them in the chat. Thanks.
Danielle Friedman: Hello everyone. Just to run through a very fast overview of the format, we have our three artists here, Marlon, Brontë and Naomi, and I'll give a wave so we know who you are and we are going to present. We've created three small videos. They are about nine to ten minutes, each of these artists in their spaces with their work, a pretty in-depth view of their lives and their world. We're going to present these videos yo you one after the next so you get to know each of these three artists. Then we're going to have a live Q and A with the artists you to present, and we'll have a discussion. We'll also have time for some questions afterwards for anyone who is engaged in the discussion. I will go ahead and start those videos.
Marlon Forrester: I think of myself as a multi-disciplinary artist, right? Which just as an artist and someone calling in from Boston Mass to maybe make a plan is where my studio was located. I was born in Guyana, South America and I grew up here in Boston, I've lived in Boston majority my life. In terms of thinking about art is a very different experience for me growing up because it's really more about culture. I grew up with people who are doing like, creating mass, creating different images and clothing for festivals and events that are related to like article. I grew up with a culture where there wasn't a separation between art as an institution in terms of the academic aspects around my heart was more about just the self-expression and it came through from a cultural impetus that was definitely based around Africa, right? But also around the guy's culture.
Alison Judd: What are you committed to you as an artist?
Marlon Forrester: It's an interesting question. What do you commit it to? I think I'm committed to trying to be a vehicle and express some of the information and ideas and concepts that come to me. I feel that are important and try to share those with the world.
Alison Judd: How would you say your time in Brandeis impacted the way you see the world as an artist.
Marlon Forrester: I think when my time it dies, really did two things. One is it gave me an understanding around how do you think about the world as a creative and what model you create for yourself? What does that look like? I think Brandeis has it isn't a brand but then it encourages creativity and exploration. By year we cross those late night crew, so always there late night, there's Ari, Tam, we were like that late night crew that came into the studio and just worked. But then I had the sports aspect of it, which is like the whole body kinesthetic, being an athlete implant with judges and having the opportunity to see the breath and kind of expand your thinking around these content areas and subject matters allow you to become a richer person. I think that's the best way of what I think my experience at Brandeis illustrates me and showed me.
Alison Judd: The definitely overlap in some of our classes fun to hear you talking about, definitely the professors who are all still there today teaching new students every day. I think now that we know a little bit more about you and your history, let's move in a little bit to your work. What does a typical day look like for you in your studio or in your life in general as an artist...
Marlon Forrester: I have to first start off that I have two beautiful children, son and daughter, Marley and Bradley. And then I have, I'm married. I have a basic wife. It starts with family for us, for me and our studio isn't secondary. But there's always that. It's a wave, it's going up down. You're going to keep this out the balance. Also I'm an educator, arts educator. So I teach in a Boston schools. I also do some agile work where my day I think it starts with making sure that, some of the benchmarks are steps and processes that I have. One is, what are the overall projects that I have on deck? And what are the deadlines for those projects? Being an artist and an arts educator, I flow in between studio practice and designing programming for large groups. Most of these art-based, but it does have a design element, too as well.
Alison Judd: How would you consider your work political. It seems like a lot of your work has to do with place and being able find your place and how you fit in. I would love to hear like a little bit more about the conceptual parts of your work and how you think about your work, especially with the political background that we're at today.
Marlon Forrester: A lot of the work that I create, it's been about given the issues around the black nobody primarily looking at it from the lens of like sports. And also looking at through the lens of light works well. When I think about politics, the politics of me just being here and having this conversation with you, growing up in Boston and the Dorchester area, being a first-generation immigrant. Also graduating from the undergrad and go and get a masters from Yale and all that stuff there's politics behind that because of the system in which we all live in. An idea that those who have been privileged have more opportunities than others to access. My work is about my path, navigating all of those spaces. And just because of that, there is, going to be a political lambda was even more high end with the areas, situations, like Black Lives Matter around police violence, around institutional racism. These isms are more heightened. It's always in flux because it's about the viewer's interpretation of my body and juxtaposition or of what I produce. I'd love to say that someone says, "Hey, he's just an artist." But in most case they'll look and say he's a black artist. I'd love to say that they just meet me as an artist. But the society we live in has different stereotypes and different ideas of what that body represents in terms of critical thinking and art. There's the politics of the body, the politics of the space that exist in, and also the politics of the conceptual framework of which my ideas exist.
Alison Judd: You're a scientists like exactly how I feel as well about work being political. I appreciate your candidness and your answer and having that conversation I think is really important.
Marlon Forrester: Thank you so much.
Alison Judd: Maybe show us some of the work that you've been up to. And we can hear a little bit more about some of the actual pieces.
Marlon Forrester: Luckily, I have a trustee assistant. Thank you so much. I've been looking at Ethiopian, looking at Early Byzantine Images of saints. I started doing a lot of the smaller studies and replacing the western portrait or the head with that of someone of color who is black and had this fascination with exploring ideas around blackness and how that as a universal space for identity making. Then, thank you so much. Let's just go outside. I've been working on this piece. Once again, using these symbols, I had an opportunity, I received a MFA Fellowship and I went to my country in Guyana. While I was in Guyana, I found that, I've never seen a boss next to christian sharks next to hidden chapel, never seen it. I came back thinking about how I could bring these ideas of that collective experience and being Guyanese, into my work.
Alison Judd: And these are based on those small drawings that you've been working on?
Marlon Forrester: Yes. Yeah. Those are basically small drawings. I talked earlier about using the geometry of the basketball court, and so what you're seeing is that I take the provisional line, I take the outer the three-point line. I take all of that through the geometry from the court and I re-articulate it into my own language if you want to call it that. I also was just in my body as a part of a series of works that I did that was looking at the transform with a feeling or effect of basketball, not only as a sport, but as a transcendent ritualistic experience for black males within the context of America.
Alison Judd: I would be able to see your work on your website and I love that series that you had done with you kind of an obvious different places with the basketball.
Marlon Forrester: Yeah the passing series tests.
Alison Judd: Anything else you want to share before we stop recording?
Marlon Forrester: Super excited to have this opportunity, so I take you guys on a trip to my studio and see some of the things I'm working on.
Zoe Messinger: Naomi we're standing in your studio. I'm hoping that we can just have a quick tour. And I'd like you to explain a few things that you're working on and just a little bit about how you found your studio space.
Naomi Safran-Hon: Okay. Let me flip this view and I could take you on a tour, that's enter ends over here to walk in and this' my space. Yeah. Lincoln Heights and Bookend. I've been in the building since 2010.
Zoe Messinger: It's really a nice spot you got nice light.
Naomi Safran-Hon: Yeah. And I have windows maybe I could show you the view. It's really rainy day in New York, but you can see it's really booked in view with the train track. Yeah. We own Bang estate between Franklin and Pasam.
Zoe Messinger: Do you have anything in your studio that you always need with you in order to work effectively?
Naomi Safran-Hon: Yes, my favorite tool, I use cement. This is my favorite tool. It's a palette knife. I think a travel even but I bought it at the paint's store so it is for painting, but I mix my cement with it so yeah, it's my favorite tool. Then I of course have it here let's flip this view I of course have it in very different sizes and shapes.
Zoe Messinger: I would love if you could just explain your process a little bit and I'd love to talk to you about the materials that you're using, they're very cool.
Naomi Safran-Hon: Yeah. Thank you. I start the work using a photograph. So this is the photograph that I glued to canvas. And I take my own photography and you can see it's made out of a stretchable. It's stretched on a stretcher about that I also make and the can is stretched and then the photograph is glued to it. Then I cut holes in the photograph, and then in each hole I stretch lace, and then I have a ton of lace. All these bins are full of lace that I buy and collect by color and by pattern and then each hole it's on lace. So I make the decision of which lays pattern and color according to what's happening in the photographic image. Like this color matches that. Actually, let me take you to a better example here. Once I fill all the holes with lace, you can see that this has pink lace because it's paying or this has telecoys in relationship to this. So once everything is full of lace, I push cement through the back in here. I can show you the back of a painting. You can see that's what I use my trowel or my painting knife to push in the cement on the back and then it comes out this way and you can see the relationship list with the colors that I add. I also use the photograph. Photograph ends here and then this is cement and lace.
Zoe Messinger: One of the things that I was so drawn to on your work is that a lot of it has to do with these empty spaces and the way that you are literally taking away and constructing it after you've taken a photograph makes the photograph into a living sculpture. I was hoping you could explain a little bit about how you came across the lace and cement combination and why it's important to your work?
Naomi Safran-Hon: Yes. I was at Brandeis at the time actually, and I was trying to paint from photographs of my home. So I would try to paint cement and I got really frustrated trying to depict cement with oil paint and the slickness of the material and didn't workout with the kind of toughness or the texture of cement that is not smooth and slick. As somebody who was a post-bac student somebody gave me advice and said, why don't you use the actual material. I was making a project for advanced drawing class as a senior and I wanted the cover of this book of drawings to actually be cement. So the tech at the time in boy said to me," Why don't you use cement?" I was like, wow, and he said, go to Arthur and get some cement from him and he'll let you take some. So I mixed it and everybody at my final review and I was a senior talked about the cover of this book, which I still have and I was like, well, if everybody is talking about this thing, it must be interesting. For me it was interesting too to work with the actual material rather than trying to make a depiction of something. When I got to graduate school that fall, I brought my first bag of cement and I still buy cement, it's here, I keep it in a plastic bag, and in a box, and I use that. It's often cement and then for a long time, I just made gray squares and I was in graduate school and everybody was talking to me about minimalism and I was like, minimalism is, wait, but I wanted to talk about the relationship I had to my home. Maybe this is a good life to one's place, space. Then I also got tired of making these square obstructions so I started looking at the world. What else can cements be in relationship to and I started putting cementum cardboard and on my photographs in a very light is doing was paint and it was compelling and falling apart. So I had to learn about the properties of cement. Then one day I went to the fabric store and I looked at lace and I was like, oh my God, lace has holes and I can push the cement through it. I was at the time pushing cement through window screens and so looking for things that can contain the cement. They laced with an amazing discovery because there's so many different colors and pallet and so I bought a lot of lace and I pushed it all. Then I love the conversation that I had in the studio of my professors at grad school were saying, oh lace, the domestic, the feminine, the home, I was like, yes. It is about intimacy. It's about our livelihood. It's about places, it's about my relationship to this place, it's about my home, or my longing for home, or how it's conflicted and so forth. Yes, that was a good territory to go to.
Zoe Messinger: I work at an art consulting firm that puts artwork into hotels and hospitality spaces. One of the things that we have is an online gallery where people can go on and potentially purchase our work through our website. A lot of start-ups for art have now been focused on creating virtual galleries. I'm curious what your opinion is on how that changes or influences your artwork and if it is something that you're interested in moving forward with in the future.
Naomi Safran-Hon: Although I think like the Internet and online Zoom and online shows are great because they allow this, you don't have to be in New York anymore to see shows. You don't have to come to Brookline to Fahrenheit to do a studio visit, but you miss other elements of being present with the actual painting. So the actual work.
Zoe Messinger: It's so hard to experience in our work online because like you said, you can see it and you can have a very different idea of what it is in your head versus experiencing it in person. You really get the entire feel for the story that the artist is trying to tell.
Naomi Safran-Hon: The physical of the actual object like even painting that are made with old paint have a physical presence.
Zoe Messinger: How did going to Brandeis influence your path as an artist and what did it teach you?
Naomi Safran-Hon: I'm really grateful for my time at Brandeis. I came in wanting to be a photographer and I left being a painter and that had an extreme change the trajectory of what I make and who I am as an artist. I really had excellent teachers who really cared and were passionate way beyond what they were getting compensated. There was really a great sense of community of artist and as I left Brandeis and went to graduate school and then now I'm teaching a different liberal arts colleges and out-of-school, I appreciate even more old out education I got from Brandeis, the kind of care and community that we had there. Most of my best colleagues and friends are still from Brandeis from the art program and some of them are still artists and some of them are not, but we are all close and I cherish these relationships. Thank you so much for joining and I'll give you another swing of the studio space and everything that I am making and exploring a little bit like I made some sculpture that I want to make life-size. I'm thinking about expanding the costes. Thank you so much for coming and I hope to see you in real life.
Zoe Messinger: Thank you so much for speaking with us.
Danielle Friedman: Yeah, we're so excited Brontë if you need to learn more about your work and to get, to know who you are as an artist. Now can you tell us a little bit about yourself.
Brontë Velez: I'm Brontë. I go by they/them pronouns. I am calling in at this moment from unsuited Ohlone territory in Oakland, California. I'm surrounded by oak trees and lots of birds and a lot of modern human lives around me. The work that I feel most committed to is drawn by a quote from a black acupunctures goes, he calls himself a black acupunctures, who was the former health and wellness director for a prison abolition or based out of LA called Dignity and Power Now and he has this beautiful quote where he says, black wellness is the antithesis to state violence. It's an article he wrote called wellness and the black molecular future in Huffington Post and that's been, kind of, my guiding work. What does it mean to consecrate black wellness in public? I identify as a trans disciplinary artist because it really blurs genre. I'm very interested in ritual art ceremony, public prophetic practice, kind of bringing the way of congregating people back in the day through church, or synagogue or do the mass into the public space and to bring everyone's, the communities art practice out. What does it feel like to actually create the experiences that help us feel liberated? So this image is from a ceremony in Oakland. We worked across Atlanta and Oakland, we're about to start working in Puerto Rico on a ceremony where we call ourselves a trio local collective that's hosting these ceremonies across black communities, like dice word communities. This image is of a gun washing with santeros in front of Oakland City Hall at the end of a merge called the reclaimed the radical King march that happens annually on Martin Luther King day and these dancers are ceremonialists at the altar. If you can see behind us is a public space where folks are sitting behind them and they're washing the guns. They are rebuking the spirit of the guns by blowing smoke on them and beating them with plants. This is right before black mothers and families who had been impacted by police brutality and inter communal gun violence, all about to share their stories of a town free of violence and process these guns to the furnace. That's the image of the crucible. That's in front of Open City Hall, where folks brought up the guns to the furnace. The main collaborator we work with, his name is James Brenner. At that bottom half, you can see where there's some molds where when the guns were poured through the crucible or when they were melted into the crucible. The other accompanying metal artists brought the labels to these molds that reflected stars and the constellations that were laid out where the stars that were above a brother named Oscar Grant, who was killed two years prior Africa station Oakland. So there was a kind of invocation of how do we re-imagine that evening? How do we even re-imagined time, perhaps through life, changing time in gathering today? And I'm bringing these guns into the stars and casting our prayers and prophecy. This is an image with one of our shovels we've made from weapons with James Brenner. These are local dancers from a group called Oyaneke. Another image of the crucible. This is one of the shovels close up. In a day where we hosted something with a friends called Permaculture Action Network. We had something called a permaculture action day, with an indigenous woman led land trust in Oakland called Support Family Trust. This is a ceremonial list at another gathering in Oakland holding up a world war two sniper rifle that we were gifted to do a blacksmithing ceremony with two books, Hot Rod stores, this is Oscar Grant's Uncle, Uncle Bobby. Multiple families came up and actually beat the weapon to transform it into a trial, which I can show you those visible objects in a moment in the room. We had another ceremony on reclaimed, a radical King. This past January for the moms for housing movement on the open in honor of housing justice for house-less families. And that's the image of the stars that we made from that ceremony the year prior. This is my colleague, our trauma stewardship coordinator and lead to life, who's thinking about what is our everyday work look like with our families besides just this public work which is very vulnerable.
Danielle Friedman: Earlier that about social practice. And I lead the way to transform into creating spiritual awareness and change. And it's really important to know where they are doing. So focus on specific communities and it also universal at the same time. Let's talk a little bit about Brandeis. What your experience? When did you graduate? What did you study and what was most impactful for you as an artist?
Brontë Velez: Thank you so much. I graduated in 2016. So four years ago, it's been a journey since that graduation. I designed a major arts identity in community building. Brandeis was so impactful for me. Even just being invited, allowed me to be in gratitude or reflection about the way that my time there served as a rite of passage into my work. I am so grateful to know black studies, department in Brandeis and so many professors, who I just feel so much kinship for previously Jasmine Johnson, Brake Charles, allele Abdul in black studies and permanent were so influential to my work. In the arts department, I actually applied to Brandeis because I got a pamphlet in my senior year of high school that listed a department called peace-building and the arts under Sandy Colon. That is actually why I applied because it was the first time I saw the language of what would become thinking about art and social practice. Sandy Colon was so influential to me, Danielle Friedman, a piece department at Brandeis, Cameron Anderson in the theater department. She had like a multimedia class my senior year where you work across mediums. And it brought me into finding my language beyond just the medium of performance. So I'm so grateful because it was her work that, I ended up changing my thesis into a physical medium into a plan table book with seeds and the pages. And it started to make me think about sculpture and function. It definitely influenced the work that I'm doing now getting to bridge all of those worlds together. So, and theater department I had a great time at Brandeis.
Danielle Friedman: We'd love to see some of these objects that you are processing around. Can you show what you think might be relevant, we'd like to see.
Brontë Velez: Okay, yes. So this is one of the trials. Was crafted in the image with the blacksmithing ceremony, these were crafted by an arts collective call of schools. And this is one of my favorite ones because they look so nice. We received some wood from fell trees. Re post Sacramento tree foundation in the Swedish are so beautiful. You can see that it says, as we decomposed, violence may again be free. Here's a handle. They're very heavy shovels, because this is actually the part that is made from a gun. This is the mold. Yeah, you can see up close with a little logo with the gun shooting out the queries and the shovel does lead to life on it. This is one of the stars. They're so heavy I wish you could feel it, the weight is so big. I've actually done a performance recently at really moving with this as a kind of like just finding where it led me.
Danielle Friedman: How do you think about your work in terms of it being political work?
Brontë Velez: What brought me to this work was that my friend at 21, who was a young black artists was killed by a 14-year-old, who was a young black teenager, who was tried as an adult for the murder of my friend. I remember my friend, another friend sent me an image of a bike path that these folks called Studio Rosa guard made in the Netherlands where is a glow in the dark, bike path that's alluding to Van Gogh's Starry Night. And I was thinking about, it's so beautiful and it immediately made me think of my friend Xavier because he was riding on a bike path, and I was thinking about this kind of tumbling of the monument. Instead of a monument to Van Gogh, they actually made it real. They made it something useful they made it something beautiful that people could interact with. And I remember thinking if the bike path had been learned art, could that child has killed Xavier? And not just like is it just a glow in the dark bike patterns that exist, changes us but whether they're things does that mean if a city cares about just the aesthetic and beauty way of a bike path that your attention changes. Everything becomes political, in my identity, Like in the identities that I hold in trying red in the world that what it means to work with a gun. But it's really not about resistance. It's really about what do I want for me and my community and my people? And how do we do that together?
Danielle Friedman: Thank you so much Brontë on so looking forward to. I like your name.
Danielle Friedman: Marlon Forrester and Naomi saffron Han. Sorry. My YouTube wanted to join us. We're going to get into conversation. I hope that those videos gave you a small window into the work in the world of these artists. We had much lengthier discussions with each of these artists. You can imagine that mount of thought and work that they're up to. We are going to start with a few questions. Let's see. Whoever feels most moved; Marlon, Brontë, Naomi, you can unmute yourselves right now. The words ritual and prayer space came up in our conversations with each of us a lot. How would you define ritual and how does ritual connect to your creative process?
Marlon Forrester: I want to allow someone else to go first. So I want to be a gentleman here, please, you guys. Anyone else would determine. Naomi? Brontë? I'm sorry. I'll jump in. Okay. Great.
Danielle Friedman: Actually, I saw it in the chat box Brontë had mentioned her interest in you speaking about those performances. We saw some images of you laying on the floor outside with the basketball and she said, hey, let us know about that. So that's also in the realm of ritual, if you wanted to touch on that.
Marlon Forrester: Okay. I'll move very quickly. For me, ritual is a ceremony based on a series of actions. And ritual is the reconstruction and deconstruction of a concept or idea for the fulfillment or the enlightenment of others. I think a ritual specifically in that series of passing about celebrating an ancestor, that series where you saw me laying down prone on the ground, my father passed away while I was in graduate school at Yale. When he passed away, one of the things that I wanted to do is celebrate our connection, son to father. One of the things he did for me was he would pass the ball to me and it was very painful, but I knew that this series was a way of healing. It was guarded. I throw the ball up in the air and I catch it in public spaces, but it's also about my body in the public space as a place of not only changing identity, but also thinking about power. During that time, I thought about this idea of planking and of how slaves were transported from Africa to America and all over the West Indies, throughout the Diaspora. I thought about my family, how they came to Guyana. They probably came through that same process, being loaded in these boats, laying down prone. So in that way, there is a component really to ancestor worship and transformation. So I think it's important ritual itself is not only identifier, but it's a way to communicate love and to communicate our common humanity as well.
Brontë Velez: That was deep, Marlon. That was deep. Thank you for sharing more about what that work meant for you and what ritual means to you. I think similarly for me, I think a ritual as ceremony and also as an agreement that you're making, that the power comes through the agreement of what the practice is and what it means to you and what it can do for you. Because I think about having spiritual practices of chanting and chanting could not mean anything to me if I don't have the agreement that it changes my body and it changes my spirit. I also think of ritual as changing our relationship to time because there's these portals that I think ceremony can open that yeah, brings you into more significance and more recognition. There's ways that I think we practice ritual all of the time, but they're not considered rituals. I think a lot about a friend talking about how white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy all have traditions that they uphold and we uphold and we embody, and to actually think of them as ritual, to think of them as having ceremonial aspects, and how does performing our own rituals or ceremony change our relationship to systems of power. I'll pass it over to Naomi.
Naomi Safran-Hon: I think you guys spoke beautifully about it and I don't actually think ritual is a main theme in my, in my practice, there are rituals and I'm very process-based, so that ritual of making the work, but I actually don't think it's the central theme. Similarly, that it comes up in your work and you spoke about it beautifully. I'm going to give it back to the moderator. I love this, the power comes from the agreement. I think it's beautiful.
Zoe Messinger: Our next question is, what is the most important lesson you've learned during your career that you wish you'd known as a younger member of the art world?
Naomi Safran-Hon: I can jump in because I thought about this. We got a heads up on the questions. Something that I still need to practice is patience. I think it's also maybe a generational thing where we are very impatient. I think that this is a very long game and having patience for the work and for what you want to achieve with it is really important to let things happen in the time they need, both in the studio but also in terms of getting to an audience. So cultivating a space in the art world and so forth.
Marlon Forrester: Great. Excellent, Naomi. For me, just to follow up, I think that the art that you make will never be about you. The art that you make has to and will be about a spiritual journey in this life. For me, it's about the message you leave to the next generation to guide them to reflect on their own humanity. I say that is a message or gift that we have as artists to leave how we have experienced this life for others to correct on, to critique, to do whatever with, but that's our message for them.
Brontë Velez: Thank you, Marlon. Yeah, I really would just emphasize that art is so essential. I feel there are so many voices that name art with a hobby or something you did on the side, and you couldn't make money and you can't be well and you can't provide for your family or whatever. I would say art is so essential to our environment's health, to people's health, to imagining the future. I just feel like y eah, I would say it's so critical and that to trust in abundance and to work in community, and that you'll be provided for to make what you are imagining.
Marlon Forrester: Also, just to piggyback on that, I think the other phrase, art world, is really about a construct. The world we live in is around us. It surrounds us and it envelops us. As we speak, our own voices aren't. How we speak and how we emote and connect with each other. I think that's something that we have to think about, is what is the construct in which people are placing on themselves? Whether that's a power that we want to relinquish or we want to own or we want to push against.
Alison Judd: The next question I have for you guys, which touches on some of that is, do you make your art with an audience in mind? If so, can you share who that would be?
Naomi Safran-Hon: I can jump in, what I think does a few different audiences. When I go to the studio, I have nobody in mind except myself and my vision or my process. But then when completing the work and sending it out to the world, I do think about an audience because the work only comes full second when there's a viewer, I think of my work as a vessels. I'm Kate, the vessel imbedded with meaning and send it off to the world, the vessel only completes its journey when somebody else embed their meaning within it. But I do think about an audience in the sense, and if the video, I wanted to make two disclaimer for the video. One is I'm old school and my studio has no internet. So the zoom video was for my iPhone. So apology for the bad quality and also the hand holding close ups. I grew up in Haifa in Israel and my parents are here, so I'm very excited to have you join the zoom with like Covid, distance has collapsed and it's really great. I make work about being Israeli, and so I think about a viewer that recognizes the titles of my paintings, like organizes the place, the architecture has a relationship with this same place that I grew up in. It doesn't mean that it's a better audience, it just means that it might have a more easier or faster or a different appreciation, than a viewer who's not immersed in that culture or those like visual cues. But and then that's one audience, and I would say another audience is the outward audience, there is it different than the general public. So people who already have some appreciation for out and out making. But I think all of these audience are important and I'm interested in engaging with all of them.
Marlon Forrester: I think about the audience of the experience, and I think that the viewer comes to any work of art with a different set of experiences. So when I create my work, although I do work that is multimedia, so I do some performance, I do painting. I also do large installations, and so these large installation pieces are interactive where 200, 300 people who work with me to help create a peace together. So sometimes it's about also a teaching experience, art is about an ever-evolving moment that can continue depending on the construct in which it's done and that's usually temporal. So my work encourages others to think critically and not just about the game of basketball, but around how we make and how we move and how we shake together and talk together. So there's the aspects of play come into my work, and so the audience has to be ready to engage with that, whether through the symbols that I create, our iconography or the requests that I asked for them to uphold certain values and to move within that space as a collective.
Zoe Messinger: Guys, thank you so much for that feedback and I feel like that actually leads us to our next question. Each of your works relate in some way to this idea of transformation. Whether it's physical, spiritual, or both,2020, as we all know, has been literally a transformative year. It's flipped normalcy on a TED. Has this year had any major effect on your artwork or art process? What challenges have you come across and what successes have you found from epiphany?
Brontë Velez: I can share that, it's been a time of grief. I definitely don't want to dismiss the grief of this year and its impact on all of us. Being disconnected, especially for my work that's around congregation, and I think also I'm sure for the art work I have just experiencing work in public is a powerful to be impacted and to be in front of the body of work. Yes, I am thinking about the importance of gathering and especially this summer of black unrest in this country. It was really hard to feel like how do we show up with this work that is so needed of ceremony, of changing our relationship to time of healing. When it's also just not safe. But I've excitedly also been thinking about this year made me really go deeper into the histories of fugitivity, of like black folks in maroon communities living enslavement, living the public's and hiding away or stealing away. The intersection of Sabbath, my partner's Jewish, Mexican, and we've been thinking about this. Tradition of crypto Judaism and Jewish folks, even in hiding or fleeing, also holding Sabbath at the center. We've been hosting a fellowship of 15 sanctuary makers, people who do sanctuary across medium housing, justice, re-imagining convent spaces across the US, etc. Musicians and sending them these parcels in the mail, where we're not speaking together, but they're in this ritual crafting fellowship, and they're crafting materials for to honors Sabbath. We would have never imagined that work of sending audio and sending these parcels, which one will go out today, I don't think if covid had it happened and it's been a really special quiet way to offer ritual across distance without being able to gather.
Naomi Safran-Hon: Anyone else. Marlon do want something? I just think that one can find a silver lining in a lot of things. I think zoom coming together this way and reimagining different ways to connect because we can't be in person also allowed for. It was really exciting at the beginning of the call Danielle had everybody a vote in the chat where they're from, and so I think the fact that we're all staying home allowed us to reimagine a different way to come together, which then allows for different distances to be bridged and make smaller. I experienced both in a professional way with these events and other artist's talks, and then also with my family, which were always far away, but it allowed for more family to come together on the Zoom, which was very exciting. So it's a difficult time, but I think there's always some small choice.
Marlon Forrester: So Naomi, it took a moment for me to speak because, 2020, it's just been definitely a psychological and physiological traumatic state. Specifically thinking about George Floyd but then also thinking about my son, who's six years old are now seven. What is the future that America will represent for him? Whether or not the values that we hold up either through the Constitution or what have you, is represented in how we communicate with the police, how we communicate with each other, how we communicate just as a society and culture. I think the window and framework of Zoom has become a form of language, that we've had to reconstructing and understand the code of it. It has allowed us to visit and to be able to move through spaces that frequently people do not come in to without having permission or physically entering. So I've definitely been humbled, and I learned to respect the fact that humans will adapt to crisis through pandemic, we were going to adapt. We're going to continue to evolve. So that's, that's what I take from 2020.
Danielle Friedman: It's been such a gift to be able to see what you're up to and to hear your thoughts and your personal experiences. Thank you so much for sharing these thoughts and experiences with us. I would love to hear from the audience. We can open it up, we're getting close to time. So if you have to leave us, we totally understand if you want to stick around for five or eight more minutes. We have some really thoughtful people here from the Brandeis community and beyond. So if you have any thoughts, questions, please pop them in the box or raise your hand. For Brontë, for Marlon or for Naomi, was it Alley or Ali?
Ali Santana: It's Ali.
Danielle Friedman: Ali.
Ali Santana: All right I have random weird question for you. This one is directed at Marlon and Brontë actually specifically because I stopped capitalizing my name like years ago, as long as I can remember, I've never capitalize that. I noticed Marlon and Brontë also don't capitalize their name, and I'm wondering if that's just like an accident, just typing, or if it's on purpose. Thank you also for sharing your work.
Marlon Forrester: Brontë, you can go first, but I can just quickly say it was a mistake.
Brontë Velez: Mine is definitely on purpose. I'm definitely following a black feminist tradition of decapitalizing all things and including my name. There's something about the name I was just like how does it, I don't know. Something like decapitalizing feels like it changes me as the capital thing. Aesthetically, I have done this in sixth grade. I just like the little b and a little d.
Danielle Friedman: Thanks so much for that question. Two things, one, yes, names hold so much power and purpose, and they are a lineage and the shapes of shapes. This is a whole other conversation. So I'm so glad you brought it into this sphere and I also want to say you gave attention to the subline of our event, which it's political because we chose these three artists because they each deal with a lot of political content and thought. I wanted to actually do have one big question and I was hesitant because I want to be really conscious of everyone's time. But if you'd like to stick around, I think this is a really significant way to close this conversation. So we have one more question for each of you and it is;so we spoke about your work being inherently political because of your layered identity. So as complex beings what is one part of your identity that you found most challenging to address through your work and why?
Marlon Forrester: As complex, I'm going to jump in and say that for me, being multicultural, being guynees and being American, and existing in the body that I exist in, I think how you move through that space of culture is important, but it also forces you to think about what are your limitations, what will society accepts as your truth? Then also within that is that we're all made of flesh and our spirit is truly the representation of our consciousness. How can you take what you see within society in the world and allow your spirit and your truth to exist in relationship to that? In that way your identity is consistent and it's liberating.
Danielle Friedman: I see you moving forward, Naomi and I just wanted to say, we're in the Brandeis community. Naomi and I went to Brandeis around the same time and I have always been super fascinated with your work because we're both really interested in the idea of home, and I think I just want to bring that word in. Home is a political contract also, and definitely is engaged with work around the home and Marlon as well on a more abstract way. So I just want to call her attention because we didn't really go deep into what your photographs are about, Naomi, and what kind of spaces you're depicting and how that is also a huge part. So kind of calling on you.
Naomi Safran-Hon: Okay. Thank you.Yeah. I see I have to give a short out to Jenna, who's also here and was part of our like trio fields at Brandeis. We've had such good...
Danielle Friedman: I have to say Joe also...
Naomi Safran-Hon: And Alfredo too.
Marlon Forrester: Is Joe here?
Danielle Friedman: Alfredo, our most brilliant professor at Brandeis.
Marlon Forrester: Is Joe here? Historian Joe, okay. Susan Lichtman. Is Susan out there?
Naomi Safran-Hon: I was gonna give Brontë the space to speak.But since you called on me, I try to be very short I mean, I think Covid and the coronavirus made all of us even in the most comfortable homes, feel uncomfortable. And I think it brought forth the idea of what is home and what is a sanctuary and what is our lives. When we can't go outside, what happens to a place we took for granted, right? What is become, maybe the comfort became uncomfortable, right? It's a very complex kind of conversation. But I just thought about your questions because I thought about being a woman. I think it's something that as a female artists in 2020, I sometimes feel that we forget how difficult it is.With everything that the feminist movement has done in the last 30,40 years, we just forget that it's still a spiral and that there is still expectations and there is still gaps.I'm not saying I'm just saying as also how you talk about it and do you talk about it.So I found that kind of what I thought is more bleeding in the wealth that it's there, especially in the dichotomy between license cement, but I don't necessarily speak about it. I don't necessarily want to heighten the fact that I feel sometimes discriminated against in the out world because I'm a woman, right? Anyway, so just maybe less an optimistic view of things, but, you know, I give it to you Brontë.
Brontë Velez: Thank you both for your answers. Mine kind of is between those two shares as well. I have been thinking about some language I read recently on de-indigenization and the de-indigenization of folks from the island of Borikén, or what is now called Puerto Rico. My family is also my father's family is Puerto Rican and my mother's family is black. Puerto Rican also means black, but also means Spanish and Portuguese, and also means Taíno and I haven't really brought that, I haven't so much brought myself into. I grew up around black people and I grew up being read as, as black and I haven't found not having grown up on the island. I haven't yet found what my relationship to that land is. So it brings up some complicated relationships around home and process and symbolism.Next year feels like a dance towards like leaning back into that source in heritage work and going to sit with my grandparents. Yeah.
Danielle Friedman: And I remember really wise people advice that Naomi brought into this conversation is patients, is it?If we allow the work to come to be so definitely important to spend time with our elders, with our family in the lands that were connected to and with that, we will thank everyone so much for being here and sharing your time with us tuning in. We would really like to thank the artists Brontë Velez, Naomi Saffron Han, Marlon Forrester, and most importantly, my teammates in putting this together as part of the Brandeis Arts Alumni Network, Zoe Messenger, Allison Judd, thank you to Courtney Suncar, who is the mastermind technical head of organizing this and as well, Amy Merrill who's here and is also a member of the Brandeis Arts Alumni Network. We are going to put some links in the chat for you and Allison is going to close our conversation with some really important information.
Alison Judd: Yeah.I just want to say it was such an incredible conversation. Thank you all. On behalf of the Brandeis Alumni Arts Network, we want to thank all of the artists for participating in our second virtual studio visit. Thank you to Brandeis University for hosting this event on zoom. This entire event is entirely volunteer run. So I want to give a special thanks to Danielle Friedman for editing the video that you saw today. As we come to the end of 2020, we want to emphasize the importance of supporting the arts and artists. This year has been one full of hardship for many and we encourage you to support your local artists, alum artists, and the artists we have highlighted today. In the chat, we have included links to the artist's website as well as some links about special projects that they are working on. We hope to continue this series of virtual studio visits and we welcome the feedback that you are willing to share. Please e-mail us at artsalumni@lists.brandeis.edu. Courtney will include that link as well. We look forward to sharing more artists with you in the new year, wishing everyone a happy and healthy holiday season. Thank you all again for participating.